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.”