CHAPTER TWO
SECTION ELEVEN
Many people who were involved in the security and intelligence business had often thought that there were too many different organisations involved, in one way or another. For instance, one organisation looked after overseas threats, while another gathered intelligence about threats on the mainland, and yet a third was responsible for organised crime. These responsibilities frequently overlapped, which was why there were the ‘joint’ organisations. Bits and pieces of the other three, put together in an effort to avoid duplication and to ‘co-ordinate’. The Government appeared to think that the answer to every new threat was to add a bit more bureaucracy to the system. But inevitably, they all tended to trip over one another from time to time, while the constituent parts owed allegiance to their own parent body, so rivalry was never completely eliminated, and individuals were always looking over their shoulder to make sure that nothing was done to prejudice their future career prospects. Reporting chains became a nightmare, and budgets were a permanent source of conflict.
The tasks of these various bodies became increasingly complex as time went on. The Chinese clans for example, operated both abroad and in UK. At the same time, the clans were organised crime (Special Branch), a threat to mainland UK (MI5) and were often based overseas (MI6). There were others, too, like the Mafia, both the Italian and the Russian versions, and the drug barons of Columbia and Afghanistan. Add a dash of international terrorism, and management became virtually impossible, not least because the Military inevitably became involved on top of everyone else. Look at the al-Qa’Aeda situation, for instance, and the Taliban, with its international drugs trade. So other countries were added to the pot, to represent their national interests as a threat developed. The reporting chain upwards was complex, too. Some organisations reported to the Home Office, others to the Foreign Office, and yet more to the Ministry of Defence. A few, rather special agencies, reported direct to the Prime Minister’s office.
The United States played a trump card, or so it thought, in safeguarding its national interests, when it formed the new, huge and vastly expensive organisation that it called the Homeland Security Department. The outcome, in reality, was to slam the door on the outside world, friends and foes alike, making life difficult if not impossible for visitors to the US, whether they were business or pleasure travellers. But the Americans felt more secure because of it, so that was all right.
Then the UK Government created yet another ‘secret’ organisation, which immediately received widespread publicity, especially in the tabloids. It was grandly called The Fixated Threat Assessment Centre, run by a mixture of the police, doctors and health officials, whose remit it was to identify and target individuals whose obsessive behaviour could pose a threat to people in public life. Those individuals posing the threat could be ‘sectioned’ under mental health legislation, and locked up, without trial, on medical grounds. And it was a real enough threat. BBC personality Gill Dando had been murdered by a stalker, and so, overseas, had the Swedish Foreign Minister, Anna Lindh. But the human rights lobby immediately saw this as a draconian measure for dealing with terror suspects without putting the accused before a judge and jury.
It was just as well they didn’t know about Section 11.
Run jointly by MI5 and MI6, Section 11 (5+6) was a small, very top-secret unit, which had so far managed to remain top secret. It was one of those organisations that reported direct to Downing Street, through the Cabinet Secretary, who was also Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). S.11 had a worldwide remit to guard high value UK citizens when they were at maximum risk, and, if necessary, to ‘eliminate’ any serious threat to their safety. It wasn’t concerned with royalty or senior ministers or foreign dignitaries – there was already a separate organisation to look after them, in the form of the Royalty and Diplomatic Protection Unit, run by the Metropolitan Police from Scotland Yard. Section 11 looked after other, less obvious but none the less high value targets, some of whom never realised they were the objects of special attention. But they were all individuals who, because of their exceptional value to the country, were naturally also of interest to the country’s enemies.
Section 11 had managed to remain undetected by the media and others simply by virtue of the way it was organised and operated. It had a discrete budget provided by its parent organisations, which each made a contribution towards the cost of its operations. Although S.11 did not have its own budget voted by Parliament, it was understood that whatever it wanted, it got. Not for them, however, a smart Headquarters building in Whitehall, or fast cars, or odd-looking uniforms, or any of the trappings which the public, and the media, come to expect of Government Quangos of this sort. They went out of their way to remain – well, out of the way.
Their HQ was in a rather down-at-heel terrace of offices over an also rather down-at-heel row of commercial properties - shops, cafés, pizza bars, solicitor’s offices, a laundrette, a travel agent, fish and chip shop, and so on. It was in Clerkenwell, not far from the Mount Pleasant Post Office sorting office and Saddlers Wells opera house. The street was so ordinary that nobody took any real notice of it, and certainly never went there unless they lived or worked nearby and wanted a newspaper, or a quick coffee, or a sandwich for lunch. The frontage of the terrace had been turned into a pedestrian precinct, which kept it quiet, but there was road access from the back, and the 19 and 38 busses stopped nearby on their way to Victoria and Battersea, from Hackney Marshes and Islington and other places out that way.
Being close to the Mount Pleasant sorting office had presented Section 11 with a unique advantage, since, until 2003, the Post Office used to run its own automatic underground railway to speed the mail across London. Mount Pleasant was in the middle of it, and part of the old station and tunnel now provided the Clerkenwell office with a cavernous garage beneath the building, with easy access from the street.
Easy, that is, apart from the security system.
One of the businesses on this Clerkenwell back street was a newsagent-cum-tobacconist, which had a gent’s hairdressers at the back. That’s how you got to S.11. Through the hairdressers, which was run by a certain Mr. Lawrence. Nobody knew his first name. In fact, he didn’t often do much hairdressing, either. He was ‘by appointment only’, and most casual customers soon got to learn how difficult it was to get an appointment. What he did best was to check and monitor everyone who went into the S.11 offices. At the back of his salon was an elaborate, gated security system. You needed a special pass, and the system had to recognise your thumbprint and iris pattern before it would even think of letting you go upstairs. Once you got upstairs, either from Mr. Lawrence’s salon or from the underground garage, there were more checks – a second tier security system, with more biometric tests, TV monitors and coded keypads. Only then did you get through the chipped brown-painted door marked ‘Ajax Recruitment – office staff and call centre operators always wanted.’ Pinned to the door though, at a rakish angle, was a hand written sign saying ‘No Vacancies.’ There never were. You only ever got through that door if you worked there – or if you had been invited.
Nothing changed a great deal to the appearance of the place when you were inside, either, but you would never know that the old triple-glazed window frames had bullet-proof glass in them. They were dingy corridors with Magnolia emulsion on the grubby walls, and old brown painted Victorian doors leading to offices which all looked much the same. One or two had plaques on the door, meaningless acronyms to everyone except those to whom they meant something. Things like, ‘SO to G3(M)’; ‘OIC T.12a’; ‘PA to S’, and so on. As a matter of fact, the Personal Assistant to the Head of Section (PA to S) was quite an important lady. She wasn’t just his Secretary. She actually did things on her own initiative if she thought it would save her boss a bit of time. She fixed meetings, made sure the notes, if there were any, were properly encrypted and stored securely, and, according to those who knew, made excellent coffee. She also made it her business to keep up to speed with everything that was going on, including a few things Head of Section didn’t know about, because he didn’t need to, yet. Like everyone else in S.11, she had been specially selected, and had a very high security clearance.
The people who worked in that rather gloomy Headquarters did all the things that get done in any other head office, as well as quite a few things that don’t. But it was a small and tightly knit community, which had at its disposal all the most modern electronic, computing and communications equipment available. The people who planned the various operations going on at any one time also monitored their progress and kept in touch with the operatives in the field. They, in turn had been trained to be largely self supporting, so when they did get on to HQ, it was usually important enough for people to take notice and do something – in a hurry. There were always people there. At night and at weekends, there would be a duty officer, a couple of people looking after communications in what was jokingly called the ‘wireless room’, and probably one or two others monitoring the progress of their particular operation. Any one of them could summon help from on-call staff at home, who reacted immediately when called upon, whatever they were doing. The newsagent was always open, too, either waiting delivery of the first editions or catching a few of the late-night visitors to Saddlers Wells. The Pakistani family who ran it didn’t mind the hours. Section 11 paid them well.
The sharp end of Section 11 was a flexible force of specially trained field officers, mostly drawn from military special forces and police special branch, but with a few from the security services. There was no telling how many might be needed at any one time, or where they might be deployed, so there was an ‘on call’ reserve pool available at ‘no notice’ if required. Reserves or not, they were very highly trained. Although when out in the field they normally worked in pairs, they were otherwise on their own with little or no immediate back up or support. They had received special training in how to blend in anonymously with the community in which they worked, wherever they were. Their first priority was to remain invisible, un-noticed. They wore casual civilian clothing, appropriate to their location, although they could dress the part of a busy stockbroker in the City if they had to. They used ordinary vehicles for getting about, although many of these had been specially modified in S.11’s own garage, conveniently housed under the Clerkenwell offices. If they needed to use public transport, they, or head office, used High Street travel agents, bought rail tickets from the station booking office, and flew tourist class. Just like anyone else. But there the similarity ended. These were very special men and women. They were fluent in at least two languages other than their native tongue. They were parachute trained, survival specialists and sniper marksmen. And they were mostly armed. They were also experts in pursuit driving, a skill often put to the test either when following a high-speed car, or when trying to shake off one behind them. The Met. Police provided that training at their Hendon driving school.
S.11 had quite an extensive fleet of vehicles. Ordinary vehicles, not polished staff cars. Apart from a few old saloon cars, as well as more modern vehicles like the Vauxhall Vector and Honda Jazz, there were a few vans, even a milk float, bicycles and a range of motorbikes from 50cc Vesper scooters to BMW R1159s and Honda CBR 900s. Some of the old Post Office vans had been fitted out with extensive satellite communications equipment or surveillance gear, including listening devices and video monitors. Most of the vehicles had been modified in some way, and the mechanics that worked in the garage were particularly proud of an old Morris Minor, which sounded as if it needed a new exhaust, but which could actually do nearly a ton and had been known to get up to 60mph in just under ten seconds. But the motorbikes were the most popular. Easy to use in traffic, not normally out of place anywhere, and ideal for two people; the Section 11 agents who operated in the field usually worked in pairs. When they weren’t out on ops., the field officers spent a good deal of their spare time training, or in the HQ at Clerkenwell. At the back of the underground garage was an armoury and a rifle range, run by a retired Royal Navy Petty Officer gunner, Phil Langdon, who had introduced himself on arrival as their new ‘top gun’. Immediately, one of the comedians in the team had christened him ‘bottom gun,’ and from thenceforward he had been known as ‘Bottom’ for short. He hated that. But he knew about weapons, and was a crack short.
There were other rather odd bits of Section 11, too, which you wouldn’t expect to find in any normal organisation, even if it was, strictly speaking, a part of the civil service. ‘Aunty’ for instance, ran the clothing store. He was a rather precious retired actor – nobody could remember his real name – but he was able to provide appropriate kit for you wherever in the world you were going. He had wigs and dark glasses and false moustaches too, if it was felt that you needed to change your appearance from time to time, rather than become too familiar and run the risk of being recognised.
The admin section was run by an elderly civil servant called Gladys Something-or-other, who smoked like a chimney in spite of the law about smoking at work. She maintained that there was so little work done in Clerkenwell that the law didn’t apply, and she was too valuable to get rid of, so people put up with it. She had a form for you to fill in for your every need, and made sure you did it properly and got it counter-signed, and all that. It was a waste of time going to Bottom or Aunty for anything unless you’d been to Gladys first for the right bit of paper. She didn’t have an acronym on her door – it simply said ‘Admin’, and that was that. Aunty had two – ‘Stage Door’ and ‘Props’, neither of which was official, and both of which were therefore frowned upon by Gladys. The rifle range and armoury, from which one drew weapons and ammunition if you had the necessary forms from Gladys, was labelled ‘Arms.’ on the armour-plated door. Underneath, in indelible ink, someone had scribbled ‘Legs and Bottom’.
At the top of this rather shabby looking but extremely efficient organisation, was the Head of Section. He was known simply as ‘S’, in the same way that the Director General of the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6 as most people called it, was known as ‘C’, and the head of MI5 was known as ‘M’. ‘S’ had a deputy, and one or other of them was always available – and that meant ‘always’ – 24/7, as the idiom had it. The hierarchy was really quite small for an organisation that had a worldwide remit, and they were all widely experienced members of the intelligence community. Their job now was not so much to gather intelligence, or even interpret it, but rather to act upon it. The Head of Section 11 reported direct to the Cabinet Secretary, and thus to the JIC from whom the Section got most of its work. Any of the constituent members of the committee could put forward suitable targets for S.11 to look after, but the final tasking decision was always taken by the JIC or by its chairman.
Except, that is, in the recent unlikely case of the captain of the England football squad.
***
It was at about the quarterfinal stage of the world cup when the Football Association first got wind of a possible plot to kidnap the team captain, and perhaps also his family, in some sort of effort to fix a few results. At the time, England were favourites to win the cup, much to annoyance of the Germans, whose supporters were reported to be developing the plot. This is not the sort of thing that the intelligence community would normally take much notice of, although the press were having a field day. Excellent footballer though the man was, he did not begin to take on the national importance of, say, some of the country’s leading industrialists, and therefore nobody in Clerkenwell was taking the slightest professional interest in the story.
Until, that is, ‘S’ thought it might make quite a good training exercise for a few of the newer members of the operational field force, especially as life had been a bit on the quiet side recently.
“How many of our people speak German?” he asked at ‘prayers’ one morning.
One of the Ops people thought about a dozen.
“Right,” said ‘S’. “Three teams of two will do,” he pronounced. “The most inexperienced you can find.”
“INexperienced?”
“That’s right – this will be good training for them, and it won’t be a national disaster if they fail. Except for them, of course.”
The Head of Section at that time was Alan Jarvis, himself not a great football enthusiast, although he could understand that national pride would take a bit of a bashing if the England XI lost after all the build-up and high expectations.
“Are you looking for any other particular qualities, apart from lack of experience?” enquired one of his team sarcastically.
“Football supporters would help,” replied ‘S’, “and an ability to hold a few litres of lager without falling over might also be an advantage. Perhaps I’d better explain.”
When he had done so, the Section’s Head of Finance looked distinctly uneasy.
“How do you propose justifying the expenditure of taxpayers' money to look after a footballer?” he asked.
“Training,” came the reply. “Put it down to ‘training’. Although if we are lucky, it won’t cost us a bean. I’ll talk to the Chairman of the Football Association, and see what he can offer.”
In the end, he offered quite a lot, including installing one of the S.11 team in the official party as a member of the press office. The others were out on their own. Aunty managed to find them, from somewhere in the theatrical underworld of wardrobe mistresses, official German football shirts, together with woolly hats and scarves which they would need, as Munich in the winter can be a bit cold.
They had three weeks to establish themselves in Germany. Two of them quickly managed to infiltrate the supporters’ club, and were soon involved, with the handful of yobs that thought it would be a good idea, in helping to plan the kidnap of the England Captain. Others were liaising closely with the Scotland Yard officers who had gone to Munich to work with the local Polizei to keep hooligans and lager louts under control. It was not a difficult exercise, in all honesty. They knew where the threat was coming from, so concentrated on them rather than on the target of the threat.
On the big day, the S.11 team had managed to persuade the local constabulary to provide them with a police van and driver, thanks largely to the Scotland Yard liaison officers. By the time the kidnappers set off to hijack the England team bus, they had all taken on board copious quantities of local lager, so offered no real resistance when four of their number turned out to be quite good English speakers. There was not much of a struggle to get them into the polizei van, which set off on its journey into the Bavarian Alps, where the miscreants were eventually left to find their own way home.
The Clerkenwell team had quite enjoyed their little training exercise, not least because one of their number produced half a dozen tickets for the game, which, he assured his chums, the Germans would no longer be needing.
Their biggest problem was remembering to cheer for the opposition, in German.
***
In Downing Street, the Cabinet Secretary was coming to the end of a meeting with colleagues in the JIC. It was their job to review the strategic planning assumptions of the intelligence agencies, to set priorities for the collection and assessment of intelligence material, and generally to keep an eye on their programmes and expenditure.
In conclusion, Sir Robin Algar summed up the present operations being undertaken by Section 11, including Operation Cashback, which was nearing its end. (read ‘Cashback’, by Duncan James)
“Operation Cashback only worked because of the efforts of our Defence Attaché in Harare, Group Captain Bowman,” Forsyth reminded them.
Watkins nodded. “Good man, Bowman,” he said. “Held the whole thing together. Are all the Section 11 team back now, by the way?”
“The last two will be home any time,” replied Algar.
“Remind me how we ever got involved in that,” asked the Home Office man. “Not another hare set up by the Head of Section, Jarvis, I hope?”
“No, not at all,” replied Algar. “It was you who thought it would be a good idea, Wilfred,” he said, turning to the Foreign Office man, “although I must say that, from the start, this has been an unusual operation. At first, Section 11 wasn’t actually involved at all, as it had been rather more of a criminal investigation, except that nobody knew for sure that any crime had been committed or by whom,” he reminded them.
“The banking community picked up the first sign of anything being wrong. It was the London Office of a Dutch Bank, as a matter of fact. One of their customers, a wealthy but elderly lady, suddenly had two million pounds credited to her account, and the bank could not discover its source. It had appeared via the computer system which banks use to move money around, but nobody could discover where it came from, which was not just puzzling, but worrying. But what really stirred things up was when a million pounds of the original two million was withdrawn again very soon after it had been deposited. The bank was quite unable to find out who had withdrawn it or where it had gone. This sort of thing was just not supposed to happen – it should have been impossible.”
“Absolutely impossible,” agreed Hooper from the Treasury. “The international banking security system was reckoned to be totally foolproof, and certainly had been until this happened.”
“Apparently, other banks were having similar problems, although we didn’t know it at the time,” continued Algar. “Whoever was behind the Dutch bank’s difficulties was also playing ducks and drakes with cash deposited in banks in Switzerland, in the Cayman Islands, in Singapore, Bermuda, and the United States, and so on. Naturally, the banks concerned were not about to broadcast the fact that they appeared to be having severe problems with their security systems, and that very large sums of money were appearing and disappearing as if by magic.”
“I could never understand why their customers didn’t kick up about it,” remarked Watkins. “I certainly would have.”
“Probably because in some, if not all cases, the cash they were now short of was ill gotten in the first place,” suggested Hooper.
“It was the corrupt regime in Zimbabwe that reacted first,” said Algar. “From the President downwards, they were all being milked dry. Equally mysteriously, white farmers who had been evicted from their land started receiving quite large sums of cash, apparently accompanied by the promise of a pension. It was as if someone had decided, rather late in the day, to pay them compensation. But it certainly wasn’t the Government.”
“And then that fool of a President raided Zimbabwe’s Central Bank to replace his lost personal funds. That’s what really started trouble in the country, and we saw the first signs of a possible coup or an uprising or some such event designed to get rid of the man,” said the Foreign Office man.
“It was about that time, too, that we got our first clue as to who was behind it,” said Burgess.
“Ah, yes. I remember now,” said the Home Office man. “And the PM was quite adamant that we should let him and his team run with whatever he was doing, rather than pull him in, just in case he and his fellow operatives became the catalyst which rid Zimbabwe of the President and his rotten regime.”
“And Section 11 was tasked to keep an eye on them,” concluded Algar. “The UK side of the operation was quite straightforward, really. We were looking after the interests of a brilliant young mathematician who had studied computer science at Oxford, and his partner. They travelled a bit – Switzerland and Kenya mostly, but we had plenty of notice through the phone-taps we were using. His two associates in Africa were a bit more difficult, though. They were Zimbabweans, one black, one white, and they dodged about all over the place – Nairobi, Harare, Bulawayo, Lusaka, even Livingstone, as well as their home village of Chasimu. Our teams out there had the devil’s own job keeping in contact with them, but the two of them were at the greatest risk as they were at the sharp end, so to speak. In the end, it was their plan to hijack illicit diamonds belonging to the President and his ministers that finally brought the Government down.”
“How did they ever think they could hijack a load of diamonds?” asked Hooper.
“The President had planned to move them by light aircraft to the Botswana border, and then by road to South Africa. The two Zimbabweans contacted our Defence Attaché in Harare, who was already monitoring things for us, to see if he could organise a team of SAS to do it for them.”
“And of course, we obliged, through Section 11,” said Watkins, proudly.
“So it was our chaps who actually carried out the hijack, was it?” queried Hooper.
“Everybody thinks it was a bunch of mercenaries who happened to be around at the time, but it was a very successful, if top secret little operation,” said Algar.
“Did you say we still had a small team over there?” enquired Watkins.
“A team of two,” replied Sir Robin Algar. “As a matter of fact, they’re in South Africa, but returning to the UK in a few days. The two Zimbabwean chaps eventually went there to join the father of one of them, an evicted white farmer who has set up a new business running a vineyard. Current assessment is that they are now at no further risk, so as soon as our chaps have returned their hired motorbike and paid a few bills, they can book a flight home.”
“While we’re on the subject of Section 11,” said Sir Wilfred Forsyth, “I heard a rather worrying piece of gossip the other day from the Ambassador in Berlin about a team of people, apparently from Section 11, running a bit loose in Germany, and wondered if anyone else had heard anything.”
Given that both ‘C’ and the Director of GCHQ reported to Forsyth, it was a pretty fair bet that he knew what he was talking about.
“I knew there was a team in Germany for a short while,” replied Sir Robin Algar, “but I would hardly describe them as having ‘run a bit loose’, as you put it. What have you heard?”
“According to my sources,” replied Forsyth, “the team virtually kidnapped a handful of German football supporters, robbed them of their world cup tickets, and then dumped them in the Bavarian Alps to find their own way home. Fortunately, there’s been no official complaint from the German Government yet, but it could be highly embarrassing if there was.”
“What makes you think they were from S.11?”
“Off the record briefings by the FA press office, as a matter of fact, although fortunately nothing seems to have appeared in print – yet.”
Sir Robin Algar grinned, and briefed his colleagues on the background to the operation. “It seems to me that it went rather well, and certainly succeeded in foiling a rather stupid plot.”
“How did the Head of Section 11 – Jarvis is his name, isn’t it? – how did Jarvis justify using taxpayers’ money to look after a footballer?” asked the man from the Treasury. “Surely the FA could have found a couple of nightclub bouncers to do the job?”
“He thought it would be a good training exercise, apparently,” replied Algar. “And in the end, the FA agreed to meet all the costs, so there was no great call on public funds.”
“I wonder if he ever stopped to consider the consequences of failure,” pondered James Burgess of the Home Office.
“I agree that it was a rather stupid operation to mount,” said Algar, anticipating a growing hostility. “We spend more than enough training his people as it is, and we hold regular exercises to make sure his teams are up to the job without this sort of stunt being in the least bit necessary.”
“I have to say,” ventured Forsyth, “that I sometimes ask myself if Jarvis is altogether suitable for that job. He seems to me to be a bit of a wild card – a cowboy.”
“Oddly enough,” replied Sir Robin, “I have had the same sneaking doubts myself from time to time. He has come forward with some pretty hare-brained schemes in the past, and yet at other times has done a very professional job. As you know, he reports directly to me, so I see both sides of the man.”
“How long has he been there?” asked Sir Len Watkins from the Defence Ministry.
“Nearly five years now, I think.”
“Time for a change then, perhaps,” suggested Watkins.
“We could certainly move him back into SIS if you’d be happy to have him, Wilfred,” replied Algar.
“I suppose so. We could find something useful for him to do, I’m sure.”
“And he’s by no means been a failure at Section 11,” Algar reminded his colleagues. “He made a good job of the Northern Ireland operation, with all its twists and turns, and was very successful in the recent African job, which we’ve just been talking about.”
“Our man in Harare, Group Captain Bowman, did more than Jarvis ever did, as I’ve said before,” grumbled Watkins.
“I tend to agree,” said the Foreign Office man. “If we are going to move Jarvis, it might be a good idea to do it sooner rather than later, in case that nuclear job suddenly needs their attention.”
“Yes, that would certainly be a major operation, and could be tricky, as we discussed earlier,” said Algar.
“Is this the nuclear physicist?” queried Burgess of the Home Office.
“That’s the cas