Table Of ContentTo Edith
Her love, patience, and understanding
reminded me each day that
writing this book was
all that much easier
Table of Contents
Title Page
1 - Her Majesty’s Secret Agent
2 - The Flight of the Falcon
3 - The Fairy Godmother’s Spies
4 - The Enemy Within the Gate
5 - Ciphers and Bugs
6 - The Atom Spies
7 - Moles Between Friends
8 - The Winds of Hate
9 - Partition to Perdu
10 - Out of the Shadows
11 - High Expectations
12 - New Targets
13 - Glasnost in the Snow
14 - The Bamboo Curtain Spies
15 - A New World: Adjust or Die
16 - Tango in the Basement
17 - Route Nine Eleven
18 - The Day Their Lives Changed
19 - Back to the Future
20 - For the Moment
PRIME SOURCES
ACRONYMS AND AGENCY NAMES
DIRECTORS OF INTELLIGENCE SERVICES
Also by Gordon Thomas
A PERSONAL NOTE
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Copyright Page
1
Her Majesty’s Secret Agent
On a morning in mid-March 2007, a dark blue car with a Scotland Yard Special
Branch driver at the wheel made its way through the west suburbs of London
toward the city center. The single passenger in the backseat, Sir John McLeod
Scarlett, looked intimidating, the embodiment of the British establishment, a
banker, perhaps, or the chairman of a large company. His customized suit,
tailored by Gieves & Hawkes, a handsewn shirt with double cuffs and his
Travellers Club tie enhanced the impression.
Scarlett was Her Majesty’s Secret Agent, a spymaster who had long
understood that the chessboard of intelligence gathering has no rules. Now fifty-
nine years old, he still had the cultivated drawl from a prep school education
(Epsom College) and three years at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied
history before joining MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, entering a world
where deception and betrayal would remain the cornerstone of his work. For
thirty-two years his talents at spying and counterespionage steadily brought him
promotion until finally he became its chief, the fourteenth to hold the post, and
early in the year he had been knighted by the queen. Married with four adult
children, three boys and a girl, he enjoyed collecting history books, visiting
medieval churches, and fine dining.
Those pleasant pastimes fitted in with the massive mahogany desk in his
office, which once graced the cabin of Admiral Lord Nelson on Victory and
behind which Scarlett’s predecessors had sat. On the desk was a Victorian
inkwell, its pot filled with green ink, and beside it the Parker fountain pen
Scarlett used to sign all his correspondence. A desk communications console had
direct links to the prime minister, the head of MI5, the director of the CIA, and
the chiefs of Europe’s intelligence services. There was also a button that
activated a phone three thousand miles away on the desk of the director-general
of Mossad.
The office furnishings were completed by a grandfather clock constructed
down to the last flywheel by the first chief, Sir Mansfield Smith Cumming;
almost a century later, it still kept perfect time. Cumming’s order that all
communications emanating from him were to be known as “intelligence
product” and marked with the prefix “CX,” an abbreviation for “Cumming
Exclusive,” remained in force. In his will he had bequeathed the agency a large
oil painting of a group of French villagers facing a Prussian firing squad during
the war of 1870, and as MI6 had moved from one headquarters to another
around London, the picture followed. With it went the custom that Cumming
was only addressed as Chief.
When Scarlett had been appointed on May 6, 2004 as director-general of MI6,
the queen had addressed him as such. He called her the first time “Your
Majesty” and thereafter “ma’am.” Protocol with both was inbred.
Attached to Scarlett’s console was a tamper-proof computer that contained the
current state of MI6 missions across the world: in Moscow, Beijing, Baghdad,
and Tehran; in the depths of Amazonia and the jungles of Central Africa; in the
mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan: in all those places where Scarlett and his
senior staff detected terrorist threats to the United Kingdom. It was hugely
expensive to maintain the field operations, often requiring a score of people to
service a single field agent “down the pipe.”
MI6 is Britain’s external Secret Intelligence Service and has a worldwide
mandate. MI5, the Security Service, is responsible for internal security. MI6 is
answerable to Britain’s foreign secretary; MI5, to the home secretary. Both
service heads are appointed by the incumbent prime minister and are represented
on the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), the link with the government.
However, both the chief of MI6 and the director-general of MI5 also have
immediate access to the prime minister of the day. The services work closely
together in the current threat from global terrorism.
Since the al-Qaeda attack on the United States, September 11, 2001, however,
budget considerations were no longer the main concern; MI6 was flush with
money to conduct espionage, counterespionage, and electronic surveillance,
whose gadgetry in 2007 remained the growth industry of the secret world.
Scarlett’s computer had a map listing the current state of the terrorist threat to
the United Kingdom; on that March morning it was “severe,” one level below
“critical.”
Superimposed over London on the map was the figure 35, representing the
number of Islamic networks MI6 believed were in the capital. Eighty were
identified as operating within the Muslim communities in the Midlands, in
Leicester, Birmingham, Derby, and Nottingham. Further north in the
conurbation of Leeds, Bradford, and Manchester, there were another sixty
networks. West, in the port city of Liverpool, twenty networks had been
uncovered. Across the border into Wales, ten were pinpointed not only in the
cities of Cardiff and Swansea but in the Brecon Beacon mountains, where
suspected terrorists had been spotted training before the London bombings in
July 2005. Twelve other networks were in Scotland, and across the Irish Sea
were two more.
Most of the networks consisted of two or three members; a few comprised up
to a dozen men and women. After becoming radicalized, they had melted into
their community as sleeper agents maintaining contact with each other at Friday
mosque prayers and biding their time for instructions to carry out an attack.
Their deep cover was protected through their daily jobs as schoolteachers,
college professors, doctors and nurses, shopkeepers and salespeople. The
popular image of the uneducated terrorist of the IRA had long gone. Al-Qaeda
sought to recruit university graduates rather than the street-corner dropouts.
While the jihadists waited to be activated, they observed any procedural, legal,
or cultural weaknesses in their society that could be exploited.
The networks had produced Richard Reid, a British-born convert to Islamism
who, in December 2001, tried to blow up a U.S. airliner bound from Paris to
Miami with a bomb in his shoe. The July 2005 London bombers all belonged to
a network; two, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, had trained as
terrorists in Pakistan before returning to England to become sleeper agents. Four
others had set up a poison factory in a peaceful suburb of north London, using
techniques they had been taught by a chemist at an al-Qaeda training camp in
Afghanistan before coming to Britain.
Even knowing the jihadists were there, taking action against them before they
were about to strike was not easy. Neither MI5 nor MI6 had the power of arrest,
and Britain’s human rights lawyers made full use of the country’s laws to
challenge arrests made by the police.
In a briefing to his senior managers on the day he became director-general,
Scarlett reminded them, “As we are in a global and totalitarian war against
terrorism, we must continue to fully engage it on those terms.”
In January 2007, a team of MI5 officers had flown to the war-torn African
state of Somalia to try to obtain DNA samples from four British-born terrorists,
who had been among a hundred jihadists killed in a U.S. bombing raid on an al-
Qaeda training camp on the remote island of Lamu in the Indian Ocean. The
men had been born and raised in Leeds and had told their families they were
going to visit relatives in Islamabad. Instead they traveled to Somalia, joining
other jihadists from France, Spain, Italy, and Germany. The passport details of
the four Britons had provided an electronic footprint for their journey to Lamu,
tracking them through Athens airport on to Mogadishu in the Horn of Africa.
From there they had traveled to Lamu, arriving only days before the U.S. fighter-
bombers struck. Immediately after the bombing their bodies were buried along
with the other dead by their instructors, who then fled back to Mogadishu.
The MI5 officers had flown from London to Kuwait and then to an American
carrier on patrol in the Arabian Sea, from which U.S. Navy helicopters took
them to Lamu. For three dangerous days, guarded by a combined force of SAS
and Delta Force commandos, the officers had helped to dig up bodies buried in
shallow graves. On the fourth day they unearthed the four Britons. Each still
carried his passport.
Their DNA samples were flown out to the carrier and processed on board
before being flown to London so forensic pathologists could match them against
other DNA obtained from the unsuspecting families of the dead men. Experts
from MI5’s technical support department, using the passport information, had
located addresses for members of the dead men’s families. An officer posing as a
local health employee checking on contamination of the local water supply due
to broken pipes after unseasonable flooding, had called on each address and
taken swabs. These had been driven to London, where a Home Office scientist
conducted comparison tests on the DNA recovered from the Lamu bodies. In
each case there was a perfect match.
MI6 calculated there were still some 1,600 potential terrorists spread across
Britain. It had been one of the first points Scarlett made to Gordon Brown, the
prime-minister-in-waiting, during his initial intelligence briefing.
TONY BLAIR, IN THE SUNSET of his ten-year premiership, had been
Scarlett’s political mentor and protector in the jungle of Whitehall. Yet against
Scarlett’s advice, Blair had made an extraordinary choice and announced his
early retirement from politics with two years of his term remaining. It left him a
lame-duck leader, the object of media ridicule and fierce internal sniping within
his own cabinet. Within MI6 there was speculation that when Blair left office,
Scarlett would soon follow. Critics had not forgotten the damage he had brought
upon MI6 following those halcyon days when the Blair Crisis Cabinet had met
in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003 and Scarlett had read aloud, from his buff-
colored file with the red cross of St. George on its cover, the latest intelligence
from Baghdad. Blair had given him a place at the cabinet table, as chairman of
the Joint Intelligence Committee, and had seized upon every word of Scarlett’s
to support his own belief that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass
destruction, or WMD. The claim was enshrined in a document signed by Blair
and presented to Parliament, one to which Scarlett had made a major
contribution.
By the time the Crisis Cabinet became the War Cabinet after the invasion of
Iraq, Scarlett surely knew Saddam had no warheads filled with smallpox to rain
down plague on his enemies, no mobile chemical weapons laboratories roaming
the Iraqi deserts at night to launch mass death, no nuclear rockets capable of
being fired in forty-five minutes against the coalition forces mustering in
Kuwait. There were no WMD of any kind to be found.
When it emerged that it had been Scarlett who pressed for the inclusion of
what became known as “the golden nuggets”—the very reason Bush and Blair
had gone to war with Iraq—and that those “nuggets” turned out to be fantasies
based on highly dubious intelligence sources, Scarlett became the object of
intense public criticism calling for his resignation.
Instead Tony Blair had appointed him as the director-general of MI6. Within
the Secret Intelligence Service there was stunned disbelief. The appointment was
seen by many officers as no more than repayment by Blair for Scarlett’s support
over WMD. That view was shared in the corridors of the Ministry of Defense
and at Langley. One CIA officer who had been directly involved in the search
for WMD told the author, “Until the golden nuggets, Scarlett had a good
reputation. Not anymore. If Blair was Bush’s poodle, Scarlett was Blair’s
donkey.”
In Washington the issue of WMD had ensured Scarlett’s footprint would be
clear in all subsequent assessments of the Iraq War; he was the intelligence chief
who had made a disastrous error.
John Scarlett now had an opportunity to show his peers that MI6, under his
command, could carry out an operation that would become a hallmark of careful
planning and derring-do and would restore his reputation in the secret world of
intelligence and with the new government of Gordon Brown. For the rest—the
media commentators on the Sunday morning talk shows, the retired analysts
turned pundits—he would continue to dismiss them as “legless men trying to
teach running.” The operation would be a fitting climax to his long career.
ONE OF HIS OXFORD INSTRUCTORS was a talent spotter for MI6. After
Scarlett had passed through its training school at Fort Monkton near Gosport in
Hampshire, he was posted to Nairobi. Among his first calls was to the Oasis
Club near the city’s venerable Norfolk Hotel. The club had long been a favorite
among Kenya’s business and political communities and the city’s foreign spies.
Patrons could drink from dusk to dawn in its gloomy interior and risk taking a
bar girl to one of the rooms out back after checking that her latest medical
certificate promised she was free from AIDS.
Moshe Goldberg, a Mossad katsa, a field officer, had met Scarlett when he
was familiarizing himself with the city and had invited Scarlett to have a drink in
the club. Late in the evening they had been joined by a South African
intelligence officer: Sober, the man was an amusing raconteur; drunk, he could
become boorish and violent. When a barman brought them a new round of
drinks, he accidentally spilled a glass over the South African’s safari suit.
“The man lunged at him. Scarlett stood up and restrained him. The whole club
fell silent. Scarlett quietly told the waiter to bring fresh drinks and turned to the
South African and said this wasn’t Cape Town. It was an object lesson in the use
of confidence coupled to certainty,” recalled Goldberg.
In Kenya, Scarlett used his social skills to good advantage; he was well read
and enjoyed watching polo and partying. His reports to London were regarded as
some of the best informed on the impact that the Russians and Chinese were
having on Kenya. His time there was followed by a posting to Moscow, the most
dangerous place for a spy.
Scarlett was completing his second tour in the Russian capital when, in
January 1994, the KGB caught him meeting one of his contacts, Vladimir
Sinstov, whom Scarlett had recruited the year before at an arms fair in London.
Sinstov was the export manager for a Moscow weapons company. Russian
intelligence officers had pounced on the two men in a café near the Kremlin.
Scarlett had just paid Sinstov for the most recent details of arms sales to Syria
and Iraq and the names of Sinstov’s contacts in Budapest, Paris, and Damascus.
Scarlett was expelled and Sinstov sentenced to ten years’ hard labor in a Siberian
gulag. He would die there. In all, Scarlett had paid him eight thousand pounds in
the ten months they knew each other.
Scarlett was given a desk job at MI6 as director of security and public affairs.
The post required him to act as the service’s internal watchdog; his only role in
“public affairs” was to ensure that as little as possible about MI6 appeared in the
media. He imbued both jobs with what one former officer, Richard Tomlinson,
described as “cold efficiency. A number of officers who did not measure up to
Scarlett’s yardstick suddenly found themselves out of a job.”
IN 2001, PRIME MINISTER TONY BLAIR had appointed Scarlett as chairman
of the Joint Intelligence Committee, the invisible bridge over which all important
intelligence went to Downing Street. The appointment caused raised eyebrows
within MI6. The incumbent head of the JIC, Peter Ricketts, was not only popular
within the Secret Intelligence Service but also understood how to define the
correct distance between intelligence and politics. Now, after only seven months
