Who is the spy at the Ambassador’s reception? That
is the question. Is it the junior diplomat drinking Scotch at the bar, or the worn-out, platinum blonde wife of that know-it-all Counsellor
in the Political Section? Perhaps the Third Secretary in Economic/Development,
the one who drinks shandy and watches Sex
and the City. There are a lot of unsavoury characters in the ranks of the
intelligence community, and he’s a bit of a “red flag,” isn’t he? I heard that
he’s got a first in gay from Cambridge. For all we know, he could be
Moscow’s man at the UK Mission. Let’s face it: any one of these characters at
the Ambassador’s reception could be the man, or woman, on the spying trapeze.
The identity of a member of the British Secret
Service (MI5) or the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) is top secret, need to
know, bricked and mortared by the Official Secrets Act and a Public Interest Immunity Certificate. Squeal and you get done (but it’s OK for your employers
to leak the odd name). Don’t write memoirs or talk to Press. Betray the Service
and the Service will betray you. They will make an example out of you and
discredit you to deter others from pursuing the path you chose to pursue. Your
life will become a bad dream in HMP Belmarsh. Just follow orders and keep your
trap shut. It’s bad for Britain to do otherwise. Besides, nobody will believe you.
Spying is lying and spies are liars.
Because of the influence of popular culture,
books, films and TV shows, we tend to have a James Bond image of the modern
British spy. But it is usually someone from Oxford or Cambridge University,
scholastic, slightly patriotic, with a few languages into the bargain. Like all
operations officers, they go through the Civil Service Selection Board, sit the
Foreign Office entry examination and get schooled in tradecraft; ciphers and
communications, recruiting and running agents, organizing and servicing dead
letter drops, small arms and foreign weapons recognition. Despite the Bond
myth, and all the rigorous training, the reality of operations is writing up
reports and getting your head round the ever changing IT. Spying is open-plan,
office bound and dead boring.
Intelligence work is routine for embassies
throughout the world. But what is the purpose? To collect, analyse and evaluate
information and transmit it back to an organization or government. Sometimes
this is obtained clandestinely or under false pretences. But a lot of espionage is done openly with
diplomacy. Diplomats are an expert body, covering military, commercial, legal
and technical affairs, with an open duty to gather information from a wide
range of sources on their area of expertise within the country to which they
are posted.
Every Embassy has a “station”. The set up is
simple. Depending on the size or classification (A-D) there will be one head of
station, one deputy, 1-3 officers as well as a back up staff of secretaries,
clerks and IT engineers. Just like diplomats (and journalists!) intelligence
officers get lazy in the field. They have no choice about the location. And
often have a dilettante’s knowledge of the posting, cadged from back issues of The Economist. They don’t know the
language, the principal players or its political, social and historical
narrative. So they rely on friendly journalists as sources of help and
information on gaps and trouble spots for CX reports to London. A great deal of
time is spent grooming hacks at social events and official functions, targeting
ones who are not a potential security breach by appealing to their patriotism
(and not paying them for leg work or information received).
New to post as a male trailing spouse, I was
wary of diplomats and intelligence officers. Bangkok was full of shady people –
officials, criminals and illegals (undercover intelligence officers). In a
lead-lined, thick door world everyone was a suspect. Whenever I met DFID and UN
colleagues of the wife, the alert status was Bikini Black Special. If they
asked questions, I’d return fire: who are you, what are you doing here, where
did you go to University, do you speak Thai, who were your mother and father’s
friends at Oxford? And so on. I suspected everybody. And everybody suspected
me.
I wasn’t the only paranoid. There was another
DFID spouse, a fan of the BBC series Spooks
(MI5 in the USA), who was always on the
lookout for “field officers attached to the Embassy.” She told me that Bangkok was a “low risk
category posting,” and that she had been “targeting diplomats, gathering
intelligence and listening to misinformation” at cocktail parties. The bored housewife had drawn up a list of
suspects.
Tinker was “obviously a spy” because his Dad was
Tailor. Soldier was a spy because she worked for Sailor in the secure wing of
the Embassy. Then there was Beggar Man, a First Secretary in Political, who had
fluent take away Thai (despite immersion language training, the majority of
British diplomats are too thick to accommodate a second language).
But chaps from the FCO Co-Ordinating Staff were attached to the Embassy and around my circle. It was only a matter of time
until we’d meet. It came at an Embassy party in December 2005 when I was
introduced to a pair of diplomatic valets from the FCO. One of them, a “press
officer,” immediately said to me, “X doesn’t have a good word to say about
you.”
This fella was trying, rather bluntly, to set me
up against X, a correspondent for a UK newspaper with whom the Embassy had a
beef. X had written some tough stories about the Embassy and allegedly gatecrashed
a memorial service for a DFID staffer who had perished in the 2004 tsunami. I
told him that I did not know X. Which was the truth.
“Even still,” he said, “X doesn’t have a good
word to say about you.”
This is an old trick of the trade. Using
cocktail parties and diplomatic functions to spread gossip, disinformation and play
divide and rule. This guy had taken me for a mug. I looked him over. He was
short, mousey and lean (not for long in Thailand, the “10 kilo posting”). And bourgeois
scruffy: in a pale blue shirt and old khaki trousers. There was no Pentel pen in the shirt pocket
and one of his blue socks had a hole in the toe. The “press officer” had an air
of arrogance and assurance beyond his rank and physical stature. It was bit of
a giveaway. All the same, who was he? An
upper-middle class lad of sound background who went to Oxford, landed gentry,
a public school educated Marxist who had read PPE at LSE? He had sized me up quick. I wouldn't do the same back.
“So,” he asked, “how does it work between you
and X?”
I told him that X was the SEA correspondent of a
newspaper that I occasionally contributed to.
“I don’t understand,” he asked, “so how does it
work between you and X?”
I snapped.
“It does not
work between me and X. I do not know this person. You are a press officer, and
you don’t know how the Press works? That alarms me. Allow me to explain to you how
it works. X is the SEA correspondent. I-am-freelance-scum. And a trailing
spouse. You see that pretty little lady over there? Well, that’s my wife, and I
came here with her because, like you, she got posted here by HMG.”
He asked whom I had worked for as a hack. I
mentioned Index on Censorship.
“I’ve heard of Index,” he said.
“Good,” I replied. “So have others.”
The “press officer” went off for a refill and a
slice of Hawaiian pizza in the kitchen. I was left with “Rich Man”. He had come
to Bangkok to “work with local charities” post tsunami. Rich Man began to complain,
in what sounded like a faux posh accent, about journalists and journalism.
Broadsheet, tabloid, radio or television, we were “all the same” to him. One columnist who had raised his hackles was Cristina Odone. She had mentioned the Ferrero
Roche ad in an article about the Embassy and the tsunami.
“Bloody stupid reference to that ad in her
article. The FCO isn’t like that, not in this day and age…”
(Nah, ya don’t say!)
“Embassy
life is nothing like that commercial on the television. Articles, like that one
by Cristina Odone, give the FCO a bad name. It’s not good for our image. Every
time they (the UK Press) write about us, the FCO launches an internal
investigation. And we get the brunt of it.”
“But the Ferrero Roche ad conjures an image,” I
said. “The world of diplomats is exotic and glamorous and baffling to the
outsider. And when we think of that hidden world, people of a certain age tend to
think of that silly old commercial.”
“Huh,” he guffawed, “it’s all wrong. Sends out
the wrong message. Makes people think we are partying when we are not. These
journalists writing about the Embassy and the FCO don’t know how much damage
they are doing." He went wild, like a bulldog with eyes up its
own arse, “They are not being very patriotic and they are damaging the country!”
“Miss Odone is Italian,” I said. “And, like
Italy, we still have a free press in the UK.”
(Not if this lot had their way, I thought to
myself, they would line us up against a wall and shoot us in the national
interest).
A few days later, at the house party of a UN
colleague of my wife, another errand boy from the FCO did the very same thing
shortly after being introduced.
“According to X from REDACTED, you are not a
proper journalist.”
You don’t have to be Philip Marlowe to know that
twice isn’t coincidence. The Embassy must have hated X. And hoped, because I am
a drug-crazed nak muay (kickboxer),
that I would beat him up after hearing this gossip. The late spymistress, Baroness Park, summed up the ploy best, “Set people up against each other. They
destroy each other. You don’t destroy them.”
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