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CHAPTER 4

INDOCTRINATION

Monday 9 December 1991 Portsmouth, England
There was tense silence in the Bedford minibus as it hurtled through the darkness and driving rain, carrying the IONEC class towards the centre of Portsmouth. It was 8.30 p.m. and the streets were almost empty, only a few stragglers, huddled under umbrellas, were scurrying to the pubs. Ball drove, with Long silently alongside. One by one, they wordlessly dropped us off in dark side streets or deserted parking lots to merge into the night. Castle went first, striding confidently towards his target, dressed in a loud suit covered with a Barbour jacket to protect him against the elements. Spencer followed, sheepishly scuttling into the darkness under a Burberry umbrella. My turn was next and Markham wished me luck as I slipped out of the back door of the minibus and orientated myself towards my target.

The IONEC was designed to train a recruit to a level of proficiency sufficient to step into a junior desk job in MI6. Approximately half of the course was spent in the classroom, learning the administration of the service, the theory of how to cultivate, recruit, handle and debrief agents, listening to case histories, and receiving presentations from the different sections of the service. The remainder was spent in exercises like PERFECT STRANGER, the first of many increasingly complicated tests that formed the backbone of the course.

Our brief was simple but nerve-racking for novice spies. We were each assigned a pub in downtown Portsmouth in which we had to approach a member of the public and, using whatever ruse we could invent, extract their name, address, date of birth, occupation and passport number. We were given an alias, but had to use our initiative to invent the rest of our fictional personality.

Ball explained that the purpose of the exercise was three-fold. First, it was a gentle introduction to using and maintaining an alias identity in a live situation, an essential skill for an intelligence officer. Second, it would test our initiative and cunning in devising and executing a credible plan to achieve the objective. Third, it would illustrate the workings and immense size of MI6s central computer index, or CCI, a mammoth computerised databank containing records of everybody any member of MI6 has come into contact with operationally since the start of record-keeping in 1945. The biographical details of our randomly selected victims were to be fed into the computer to see what, if anything, would be unearthed. The size of the database was such, Ball explained, that it was rare for an IONEC not to chance upon at least one individual with a mention in the CCI on a trawl of Portsmouth pubs.

Pushing open the heavy mock-Victorian door of my designated pub, the Hole In The Wall on Great Southsea Street, I felt apprehensive. Although a simple exercise, it was our first test and I wanted to get off to a good start. We d been given an 8.50 advance to buy ourselves and targets a couple of drinks. Scanning the room on the way to the bar, I was alarmed to find the pub empty. Ordering a pint of Guinness, I dismissed the barman as a potential prey. Old, fat and surly, there was little chance of getting him to talk. I sat down in a red-velvet alcove with a view of the entrance and waited for better prospects.

Time slipped by with the Guinness and the second pint was half gone before the first customers, a smooching couple, straggled in. They would not welcome the approach of a stranger. Then a rowdy bunch of youths marched in to play pool. It would be difficult to mix with them and single one out for inquisition. It was only twenty minutes before the minibus would return and with nothing to show for my time beyond three empty glasses, the exercise was getting awkward.

At last my luck changed and two girls wandered in, bought drinks and settled into an alcove. In their twenties, they were casually dressed, one pretty, the other less so and a bit overweight. Probably flatmates out for a quiet drink. I had to act quickly, not only because time was running out, but also because the pool players had noticed the girls and were egging each other on to make a move.

Swearing I would never do it again, I picked up my Guinness, walked over and asked if I could join them. To my relief they agreed. Youre not from round here, are you? the big one asked as soon as I was seated. What makes you think that? I asked. Your accent, youre from up north, she volunteered. What are you doing here? Her curiosity was encouraging and an opportunity to implement my plan. Im a yacht skipper and Im delivering a Contessa down from Scotland to Cherbourg. The girls listened with interest to my brazen lying. But my mate just got ill and went home. Ive called in to Portsmouth to find a new hand and restock.

We chatted about the boat, the voyage, my apocryphal crewman, how I had got into the job. I fabricated everything on the spot, drawing on my limited sailing experience. Just like talking to the soldiers in the bar in Belgium, it was alarming that the art of deception came so easily, and surprising how gullible strangers could be. They told me they were nurses and had only recently moved to Portsmouth. Encouragingly, they had done some sailing and were keen to continue now that they were living on the coast. Do you know anybody who might be interested in helping this weekend? I asked. The girls glanced at each other, checking whether the other was thinking the same. Perhaps yourselves? I pressed home. Sure, the pretty one replied hesitantly, then turning to her flatmate as if to speak for her, Sure, we re free this weekend.

It was easy once they were baited. In order to get in touch again, I asked for their names, addresses and telephone numbers, which they neatly printed in my notebook. On the pretext that I needed to clear them with Customs in advance of our departure, I asked if they had their passport numbers handy. That too was no problem. The pretty one phoned home to another flatmate and asked her to read the numbers. With only a few minutes to go, all the details required by Ball and Long were in the notebook. My mission accomplished, I bade the unfortunate pair goodbye, promising to call soon.

The minibus was bursting with animated chatter as the others, some a bit tipsy, were elatedly describing how they conned innocent pub-goers into providing personal details. Markham had effected a silly French accent, pretended to be a student from Paris, and claimed that his mother, who worked in the French passport agency, had told him that all British passport numbers ended with the numbers 666. The incredulous victim rubbished the boast, so Markham bet him five pounds that it was true. The target hurried home to collect his passport, chuffed to be making some easy money out of a stupid Frenchman. Markham noted down the number, equally chuffed.

Castle, reflective of his background in the City, posed as a marketing consultant and distributed to each drinker a questionnaire that he had prepared in advance. The form enquired about the clients drinking habits, purportedly on behalf of a major brewing company, and at the bottom were spaces to fill in name, address and passport number. Castle sipped orange juice on his own for an hour, satisfied when he collected the forms to find that about half included passport numbers and that he could pocket the cash advance.

Hare found an old man drinking on his own, wearing the wartime maroon beret of the Parachute regiment. The lonely veteran was happy to talk to somebody interested in his military career, and he readily volunteered his Army number, as good as a passport number for the CCI.

Is everyone accounted for? called Ball from the driving seat, turning to check the rabble behind him. Long read out the roll call, with difficulty against the chatter. Bart, much the worse for drink, replied with a loud belch. All were present except Spencer. We waited a few more minutes before Ball decided to drive round to the Coach & Horses on the London Road, a notably boisterous pub. Spencer was not waiting outside, so Long went to look for him. The MI6 trainee was found, pissed, in the midst of a lively party. He had not devised a plan, and unsure what to do, had started playing the fruit machine. On the third pull, accompanied by the clanging of bells, the machine disgorged its contents. A crowd gathered round to witness this good fortune, and the easygoing Spencer bought everybody a round. They returned the compliment, one thing lead to another, and a party ensued. Spencer became hopelessly drunk and forgot about the boring task of extracting personal details, until Long turned up to drag him back to the minibus.

All were in high spirits as we returned to our training base. A strong sense of camaraderie was already developing amongst us, a feeling of being up against a common foe. For a moment, sitting quietly at the back of the bus, I pondered the morality of my actions. The girls might spend the whole week looking forward to a sailing trip that would never happen. Was it right to dupe members of the public so casually? As we drove through the portcullis entry to the Fort, MI6s discrete training establishment in Portsmouth, and our main base for the IONEC, I dismissed such concerns. We were lying for Britain, and that was sufficient justification. Unwittingly, I took the first step down the long path of indoctrination towards becoming n MI6 officer.

[ ... ]

*****
Officially, the drab, nondescript yellow-brick building just opposite the police station on Borough High Street, in Southwark, London, was a government stationary store. In reality, until recently it housed another MI6 training school. During the IONEC, we spent alternate weeks at Boro and at the Fort. Training at Boro was oriented towards the administrative and theoretical aspects of the work, and it was here that Ball and Long initiated us into the services history, purpose, and modus operandi.

MI6s roots were in the Bureau of Secret Service, founded partly in response to the Boer War, which took Britain by surprise, and partly in response to an increasingly belligerent Germany. On 30 March 1909, a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence met in a closed session in Whitehall. Colonel James Edmonds was the first speaker. He was head of MO5, the forerunner of todays MI5, whose job was to uncover foreign spies in Britain with a two-person staff and a budget of 200 per year. Edmonds had ambitious plans, including expanding his services resources so it could spy abroad, primarily in Russia and Germany. But Lord Esher, the chairman of the committee, disbelieved Edmondss tales of German spying successes in England and insisted that he prepare a detailed list of cases to back his arguments.

Rather than back down, Edmonds resorted to a tactic which was used successfully by many of his successors in MI6. He fabricated evidence to support his case, providing Esher with a fictional list of spies drawn from a contemporary best-selling novel, Spies of the Kaiser by William Le Queux. When Esher asked for corroboration of his evidence, Edmonds claimed that such revelations would compromise the security of his informants, a time-honoured lie that was used frequently by his successors to extricate themselves from awkward government inquiries. Edmonds won his argument, and with it the budget to expand MO5 to form the Secret Service Bureau. In 1911, Parliament passed the Official Secrets Act, giving Edmonds sweeping and draconian powers to imprison anybody suspected of helping the enemy, which at the time was Germany. That same primitive act is still on the statute books in Britain, and even today there are people serving lengthy jail sentences under its auspices. Through both world wars, the Secret Service Bureau survived and thrived, eventually being named MI6 in 1948.

In the company of Americas CIA and Russias newly revamped intelligence service, MI6 has one of the few genuinely global intelligence networks, but with a staff of approximately 2,300 it is the smallest of the three by a long way. About 350 of the staff are intelligence branch or IB officers, the fast stream which we were being trained to join. About 800 are general service or GS officers, who mostly do technical and administrative work. The remainder of MI6 employees are secretaries, clerks, guards, cooks, drivers, cleaners and mechanics.

About half of the IB and most of the support staff are based in London. Their main task is to support those in the field, plan operations, liaise with foreign intelligence services, and distribute intelligence to decision-makers in Whitehall. MI6s intelligence product is known as CX, an anachronism from the earliest days of MI6 when the Chief, C in popular fiction, was Mansfield Cummings. Then the service was so secret that intelligence reports were not distributed outside MI6 and so were marked Cummings Exclusively, abbreviated to CX. Intelligence is worthless if it is not passed on to decision-makers, and nowadays CX reports are disseminated far more widely. The FCO and the MOD are the most important customers, but any government department can receive CX if the material is relevant to it. Even some large British companies, such as British Aerospace, Shell, BP and British Airways, have MI6 liaison officers who receive CX.

IB officers working in British embassies overseas under cover as diplomats gather the majority of CX. These officers normally work in a small, discrete cell within the embassy, known as the station. The station has its own highly secure communications with Head Office, and only MI6 staff is allowed access to its rooms. These rooms are frequently swept for listening devices and in many stations there is a special safe-speech room where important meetings are held.

There are about fifty stations around the world. The size of the station reflects the importance of the host country to Britains interests. Those in the spy capitals of the world, Geneva, Moscow, Vienna, New York and Hong Kong, may contain up to five IB, three or four GS and perhaps half a dozen secretaries. Most stations in Western Europe are two- or three-man stations, while Third World stations usually consist of only one officer and a secretary, though there are exceptions. Jakarta, for example, has a three-man station because Indonesia is a good customer for Britains weapons industry, and Lagos is a three-man station by virtue of British interests in Nigerias oil industry. The head of station, usually a senior officer in his forties working under cover as an FCO Counsellor, is normally declared to the secret service of the host country, and much of his work is in liaison. The other officers are mostly undeclared and may spend part of their time spying against the host country.

Certain stations, Moscow and Beijing for example, exist primarily to spy against the host country. Others do not spy against the host at all. Austria has no secrets of interest to Britain, but MI6 maintains a large Vienna station to spy on the Iranian and Russian communities, the arms trade, and the International Atomic Energy Agency that is based in the outskirts of the city. Likewise, the New York station exists entirely to run agents in the United Nations.

The stations are administered and serviced from Head Office in London. Each has its own production, or P officer, who determines the stations strategy and targets, oversees and plans operations, and administers the budget. Requirements, or R officers, distribute the intelligence production to customers. These P and R officers are organised in pyramidal structures into controllerates, which have either a regional or functional focus.

When I joined, there were seven controllerates, the largest and most powerful of them the East European and Western Europe controllerates. The Middle East and Far East controllerates were assuming more prominence, while the African and Western Hemisphere (Latin America and the Caribbean) controllerates were shrinking. The Global controllerate was responsible for issues such as weapons counter-proliferation, large-scale drugs trafficking, and international money laundering.

The controllerates form the teeth of the service, grouped in the Directorate of Requirements and Production. Alongside this directorate are two additional large and unwieldy directorates responsible for administering the service and providing technical back up. Four directors form the Board and control the overall strategy and administration of the directorates; they are presided over by the Chief. [ ... ]

*****
The bread and butter of the work of an intelligence officer is targeting, cultivating, recruiting, and then running informants who are prepared to give or sell secrets about their country to MI6. During the first weeks of the IONEC we practised these skills in a series of brief exercises. Experienced officers would come down from Century House to role play the agent, pretending to be Brazilian generals, Russian scientists, Iranian revolutionaries, or whatever the exercise required. We would play the case officer and practise the art of getting alongside, cultivating and recruiting them, and extracting intelligence. We practiced writing contact reports recording the circumstances of the meetings, and issued mock CX reports containing the intelligence. Afterwards the role-player debriefed us and Ball and Long graded our performance. Some of the exercises were done in public, so to a casual eavesdropper, the conversations must have appeared odd, particularly as the more colourful role players adopted the accents and dress of their role.

PERFECT PASSENGER was a typical exercise. It was intended to take the lessons learnt in PERFECT STRANGER a step further and test our ability to cultivate a target. Often MI6 use the confines of public transport, especially aeroplanes, to cultivate a target, because he or she cannot escape. In this exercise we were told that MI6 had intelligence that a South African diplomat, who was vulnerable because of financial problems, was returning from Portsmouth to London one Friday evening by train. Our assignment was to take the same train, find him amongst the other passengers, engage him in a conversation, and cultivate him so that he would agree to have a drink on arrival at Waterloo station. Ball showed us a surveillance shot of our target, but the only other information provided was that he had radical pro-apartheid views and he always carried the Economist, a habit that would help identify him in the crowded train.

I was lucky and found my target alone in a compartment. The South African diplomat was easy-going and affable, and I arranged a follow up drink at Waterloo without problem. For Barking the exercise was less straightforward. He also found his target without much difficulty and engaged him in conversation. Talk soon turned to apartheid politics when Barking, posing as a politics student, discovered that the role player was a South African diplomat. Barking decided that the best way to persuade the target to come for a drink was to appear amenable and politically like-minded, so he pretended to be a racist apartheid apologist. Soon the two were enthusiastically discussing the merits of racially segregated education, the unacceptability of mixed marriages, and the impossibility of allowing non-whites to vote.

Concentrating on the assignment and enjoying the sympathetic response his extremist views elicited from the play-acting South African, Barking paid little attention when two men sporting beards and tweed jackets entered the compartment, and didnt notice that his conversation agitated them. Eventually the left-wing politics lecturers at Portsmouth Polytechnic could no longer stomach Barkings racist bluster, and they furiously joined in the argument. Barking, mindful of the party a few weeks earlier, presumed that they were MI5 role-players, sent to see how he would handle the situation and grade his performance. He refused to back down and the exercise degenerated from a quiet attempt to gain the diplomats confidence into a four-way shouting match that ended only when the train arrived at Waterloo.
[ ... ]

*****
Secret Writing (SW), the grown-ups term for schoolboys Invisible ink, still plays a role in spying, but modern techniques are more sophisticated than the lemon-juice-in-a-fountain pen familiar from Boys Own magazine. There is a three-man joint MI5/MI6 section known as TS/SW which is responsible for research and training in the latest SW techniques. TS/SW has several different SW techniques, but the method we were taught on the IONEC and which is used ubiquitously by MI6 officers in the field is the miraculously simple offset technique. Like many great inventions, it was discovered by accident.

The problem with early invisible inks was that the writer could not see what he had just written. A visible ink which faded shortly after it dried was developed, but that was not perfect because the indentation made by the pen could be detected, and the possession of the peculiar ink itself could be compromising.

The solution came one day in the mid 1980s, when a TS/SW technician was developing a conventional SW message sent by an agent in Russia. The secret message had been written on the back of an envelope with an innocuous cover letter inside, and posted from Moscow. As the technician swabbed the back of the envelope with developing fluid, the secret message began to emerge. But to his surprise, other writing, in a different hand and mirror-written in Cyrillic, also started to develop. Close inspection showed that it was an address in Kiev. But who was the addressee, and how had it appeared over the top of the message?

There was only one logical explanation for the mysterious writing. When the agent posted his letter, the back of the envelope must have fallen to rest in the post box on top of another envelope. That envelope was addressed with an ink which possessed the property of transferring an invisible chemical to paper in contact with it. The technician realised that the Kiev address must have been written with a commercially available pen. If that pen could be identified, it would be a superbly elegant, simple and deniable SW implement. MI6 mounted a systematic worldwide search for the pen. Every MI6 station was asked to send a secretary to the local stationery store and buy every make available. TS/SW were soon at work testing them. Each was used to write a few characters, a piece of paper was pressed over the top, then swabbed with developer. It took many weeks to identify the magic pen: the Pentel rollerball.

The offset technique has the dual advantages that the agent or officer can see what he is writing before taking the offset copy, and because the pen is commercially available, it is deniable and uncompromising. Offset is now used routinely by MI6 officers in the field for writing up intelligence notes after debriefing agents, and it is also issued to a few highly trusted agents, but is considered too secret to be shared even with liaison services such as the CIA.

Many other technical means are used for clandestine communication between agents, officers and Head Office. Development and issue of these systems was the responsibility of the section known as TOS/AC (Technical and Operations Support, Agent Comms). One morning they brought along their latest gadgets to demonstrate to the IONEC students.

The essential feature of these gadgets is that they are non-compromising, i.e., they are identical or virtually indistinguishable from commercially available equipment. PETTLE recorders were particularly ingenious. Any normal audiocassette has two tracks running parallel to each other, one for each side of the cassette. PETTLE recorders exploit the unused part of the magnetic tape which lies between the two strips. TOS/AC demonstrated an ordinary personal stereo which played and recorded on both sides of the tape like a standard machine. But turning it upside down tripped a microswitch so that pressing the stop and record buttons together made the machine record over the central track, while pressing stop and play together made it playback the recording. They also demonstrated modified laptop computers. The removable floppy discs used in ordinary computers have a hidden space which is just big enough to hide a simple word processing system and file retrieval system. Typing in a short command at the DOS prompt started up the word processor, allowing notes to be secretly recorded. Upon exiting the software, the computer reverted to normal mode, leaving the secret files invisible even to an accomplished computer specialist.

We also learnt how to use SRAC (Short Range Agent Communication). This system is only issued to long-established and highly trusted agents in countries such as Russia and South Africa. The agent writes a message on a laptop computer, then downloads it into the SRAC transmitter, a small box the size of a cigarette packet. The receiver is usually mounted in the British embassy and continually sends out a low-power interrogation signal. When the agent is close enough, in his car or on foot, his transmitter is triggered and sends the message in a high-speed burst of VHF. The transmitter is disguised as an innocuous object. For many years Garfield Cat stuffed animals were popular, as their sucker feet allowed the agent to stick the transmitter on the side window of his car, giving an extra clear signal as he drove past the embassy.
[ ... ]

*****
Training at the Fort started at 9 a.m. and a typical day involved several lectures, small-arms drill or self-defence classes, an exercise in the afternoon, more lectures, then dinner, perhaps another evening exercise, and work into the night writing up exercise reports. Socialising in the bar afterwards was obligatory, so often we would not get to bed until the early hours. To compensate for the long weekday hours, we finished just after lunch on Friday afternoons and were not expected back at the Fort until mid-morning the following Monday. For the first few weeks of the IONEC I rented a room in London from an old Cambridge friend, but realising early in the course that MI6 would be a lifetime career, getting on the property ladder became imperative. I found a one-bedroom garden flat on Richborne Terrace in the pleasant, but slightly dilapidated Victorian suburb of Kennington. It was in poor decorative order and the garden was sorely neglected, but it was as much as I could afford and I was very proud of it. Every weekend was spent digging, planting, painting and sawing.

I was enjoying the social life in London, too. One day Julian, an English friend I met in Argentina, invited me to an evening of go-kart racing at an indoor track in London to celebrate his birthday. Having spent so many hours tearing up my mothers garden in my home-made go-kart, I fancied my chances in a race and so was looking forward to the event.

The track was built in an old bus depot in Clapham. Julian had invited thirty or so other friends, and amongst them were some very pretty girls. One in particular immediately caught my eye. As we milled around sorting out helmets and awaiting our heats, I could hardly keep my eyes off her. Tall, almost 510, she had long shiny dark hair which she caressed and pushed back from her face, exposing bright blue eyes, whenever she laughed. She had cinched in the waist of the baggy racing overalls with an old school tie, accentuating a slender waist. I watched her race in one of the heats, driving like an old granny popping down to the supermarket for a tin of Whiskas. Soon the leaders were bearing down to lap her and the race marshals pulled out the blue flag to show that she should give way. But it was to no avail. Lap after lap, the leaders sat on her bumper, trying to get past. Being lighter than the men behind her, she could accelerate more quickly on the straights, then tiptoe around the corners. The marshals waived their flags more vigorously, but it was in vain. She just took one hand off the steering wheel and waved back at them. I found out from Julian that she was called Sarah.

After the karting we went for dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant. In the melée as we waited to be seated, to my surprise I found that she seemed to be trying to get a seat near me. We chatted all evening and ended up going out to dinner again two days later.

*****
Although the core activity of MI6 is agent-running, its charter, known as the Order Book, requires it to maintain a capability to plan and mount Special Operations of a quasi-military nature. MI6 officers do not have the necessary military skills to carry out such operations themselves. Their role is to set the objectives of the operation and obtain political clearance for it from the Foreign Secretary. Thereafter, the operation is executed by specially trained officers and men from the three branches of the armed forces.

The Royal Air Force provides a small detachment of around ten pilots known as the S&D flight. They are selected by the RAF for their outstanding skills, and most arrive with prior experience in the special forces flights which service the SAS and SBS. They operate a Hercules C-130 transport aircraft and a Puma helicopter, are trained on many other military aircraft, and because they may be required to fly commercial aircraft, they also obtain civilian commercial pilots licences. The C-130 is mostly used for delivering or recovering equipment to overseas stations that is too big or dangerous to travel in a diplomatic bag. The Puma is used for ferrying MI6 personnel and VIPs around the UK, particularly on the shuttle run between Head Office and the Fort. It can frequently be seen at Battersea Heliport or over London on such journeys, distinguishable from normal RAF Pumas by the large undercarriage fairings containing long-range fuel tanks.

The Army provides a detachment from the SAS regiment, called Revolutionary Warfare Wing and based in Hereford, and the Navy provides a small detachment from their Special Boat Service in Poole. Both have similar roles as far as MI6 is concerned and are known collectively within the service as the Increment. To qualify for the Increment, SAS and SBS personnel must have served for at least five years and have reached the rank of sergeant. They are security vetted by MI6 and given a short induction course into the function and objectives of the service. If the Increment candidates have not already learnt surveillance skills, they take a three week course at the Fort. Back in Hereford and Poole, their already substantial military skills are fine-tuned through courses in the use of improvised explosives and sabotage techniques, advanced VIP protection skills and guerilla warfare organisation. Advanced insertion techniques are practised, for example high altitude parachuting from commercial aircraft, or covert landings from submarines. The SBS Increment acquires advanced civilian qualifications in their alias names, such as commercial ship skippers tickets, enabling them to legally hire, say, a fishing trawler.

Military week, dedicated to familiarisation with the Increment and the S&D flight, was eagerly anticipated by most of the IONEC students. After being issued with a set of military fatigues and boots so outdated they looked like they were SOE relics, we set off from the Fort helipad in the S&D Puma. It was just after nightfall and the cabin was lit by the dim red emergency exit lights. Using infrared night sights, the two pilots showed off their impressive low-altitude skills by flying at high speed over the rolling west country farmland, often below the military legal limit of fifty feet, a privilege given only to the S&D flight. Every few minutes, one of the pilots cheerfully called out over the intercom Everyone OK back there? Just sing if you feel sick. Nobody replied, though Bart was looking pale. Half an hour later, the Puma hovered to a standstill a couple of feet off the ground in the corner of a dark field. Jump, screamed the loadie, pushing us out into the darkness, and the Puma roared off into the night. As my eyes adjusted, I realised that we were in the SASs Pontrilas training area in Wales. What are we supposed to do now asked Hare to nobody in particular, pretend to be sheep?. Bart groaned and threw up, splashing Castles boots, but before we had time to laugh, an authoritative voice rang out from behind a nearby hedge Over here, lads.

We shuffled over to where two shadowy figures waited. One was no more than five foot six inches tall, and of slight build. The other sported the sort of moustache favoured by soldiers. He spoke first, in a strong Brummie accent. Im Barry, the 2IC of RWW. The purpose of tonights exercise is to give you a little insight into some of our work, so that when youre back at your comfortable desks, youll have an idea what it is like for us out in the field. With that, he turned away, expecting us to follow. Barrys smaller companion was more amiable and trotting alongside us, introduced himself as Tiny.

Tiny was also a sergeant in the RWW, one if its longest serving members. It was easy to see why he would be useful; his diminutive frame and modesty were advantages in undercover work. As Tiny explained, I once spent a whole evening trying to convince my Mum I was in the SAS, but even she wouldnt believe me. It was difficult to imagine how he could have passed SAS selection, but all members of RWW must do so. The only exemptions are the few female officers who are occasionally seconded to RWW from the Army intelligence corps.

We trudged in silence in the drizzle for ten minutes or so until Barry called a halt. Tiny pulled out a folding spade from his small backpack and started digging. In a minute or so, he uncovered a plastic screw-top container, about the size of a beer keg. It was a cache, just like the ones I had dug up in Belgium, containing survival rations, water, maps, compass, and money. We often bury several of these overseas to support emergency exfiltration contingency plans for you guys, Tiny explained. He then showed us how to bury it, leaving no sign of disturbance, and gave us tips on how to succinctly and unambiguously record its location. Tiny finished his demonstration and led us back to the field we had come from. From his backpack he fished out eight NATO issue torches complete with infrared filters, handed them out and arranged us in a T shape, the standard pattern used in NATO for guiding down helicopters. We pointed our torches skyward and in seconds the Puma roared into view out of the darkness. We piled into the back, keeping well clear of Bart.
[ ... ]

We spent the night at Stirling Lines, the SAS headquarters in Hereford, dining in the officers mess. It was an honour because normally only SAS personnel are allowed to set foot in the building. After dinner, Barry stood up and spoke. Ive arranged an interesting talk. Im sure it will be a humbling experience for all of you. He glowered at Forton and led us into a meeting room by the mess. A stocky, dark-haired soldier was waiting, standing by an overhead projector. As we settled into our seats he stared blankly at the wall behind us, waited until there was silence. Quietly he introduced himself and for the next hour told how in the Gulf War his eight-man Scud-hunting patrol, Bravo Two Zero, was compromised and ambushed, and how he was captured and tortured by the Iraqis for several months. He spoke with no trace of boastfulness, emotion or humour, as if he was talking about a trip to buy a bit of wood from B&Q. When he finished, he thanked us for our attention and left. We trooped back to the bar in silence. It was some minutes before Spencer spoke up. It would make a cracking book, that would. For once, Spencer was right. When Andy McNab published his story a year later it became a worldwide best seller.

The next morning, the Puma picked us up and took us down to the Special Boat Services base in Poole, Dorset. The SBS contribution to the Increment is much smaller than RWW, only about fifteen men. As one would expect given its naval roots, the SBS Increment is oriented towards marine operations and its men are expert frogmen and underwater demolitions experts. Many have served in Commachio troop, the Royal Marines maritime counter-terrorist unit, or in their Mountain and Arctic Warfare cadre. The SBS Increment is primarily employed by MI6 to place tracking beacons on ships whilst they are anchored in harbour. The beacons are about the size of house bricks, and to work effectively they must be placed high up on the ships superstructure. We were given a demonstration in the Increments indoor pool by an SBS of the lightweight dry suit, recycling breathing apparatus, and compact collapsible ladder used to covertly approach and board a ship in harbour.

The SBS Increment also operates MI6s mini-submarine. About the length of two cars, the pilot and navigator sit astride the cylindrical forward hull dressed in dry suits and breathing apparatus. The rear half of the craft flattens into a passenger compartment which is just large enough to carry four persons, packed together like sardines. The compartment is flooded during a dive and the dry-suited passengers breathe from air piped from the crafts on-board supply. The mini-sub is used for infiltrating specialist agents into hostile countries and for exfiltrating compromised agents.

The SAS and SBS Increments are complemented by another specialist cadre that occasionally participates in Increment operations, and we were also introduced to their skills during military week. These twenty or so men and women, known collectively as UKN, encompass a diverse range of specialist skills. Only the small core who are on-call full-time draw a modest salary from MI6. The rest work unpaid and take time off from their real jobs to partake in MI6 operations. Their core skill is surveillance and counter-surveillance. To blend into foreign streets, some are drawn from ethnic minorities and many have a good command of foreign languages. Other skills are diverse. One is a pilot who, though working full-time for an air-taxi company, is prepared to drop everything to help out in an MI6 operation when required. Another is a yacht master who provides his boat when required. UKN have an odd status in MI6. Because they are regarded as agents rather than staff, we dealt with them under alias. They are also deniable assets. If an Increment soldier was captured in an operation, MI6 would initiate diplomatic efforts to secure his or her release, but UKN have no such reassurance. They would be denied and their only hope of securing release would be through private legal action. As they clearly cannot get insurance on the commercial market, they take enormous personal risks every time they go abroad.

*****
Although Ball and Long kept us under continuous assessment on the IONEC, most emphasis was placed on our performance in the final exercise, known as EXERCISE SOLO. Traditionally, SOLO took place in Norway with the cooperation of its secret service. But our SOLO was to be hosted for the first time by SISMI (Servizio per linformazione e la Sicurezza Militari), the Italian secret service.
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