“I can arrange that,” said John Williams. “And I shall be happy to show him what I can of Aldermaston, within the bounds of security,” said Sheppard. “I can quickly adapt the tour we give to first year university students.”
“Let’s all be as nice as we can to the guy, and make him feel at home,” said Cooper. “I’ll organise a full debrief as soon as they’ve gone back to Korea.”
***
Jang Nam, the other scientist in the party, returned to his room totally bemused. He had to admit that he had actually enjoyed his evening, although he had not in the least been expecting to.
Quite the contrary.
Before they went to the dining room, he had been talking with Moon Pak, mostly about ideology, but also agreeing about the need to be exceptionally cautious at the event which was to follow. It was absolutely essential, Moon had reminded Jang, to say as little as possible about his own work, but to learn as much as possible about the work of their hosts. That was why they were here, and it was the least their Great Leader expected. He and Choi should ask as many technical questions as they could and be wary of being drawn into any conversations which might betray their own wonderful country.
“Where was Choi, by the way?”
“Walking in the extensive hotel gardens,” replied Jang, “preparing himself to meet our foes at dinner.”
That was all right then. Pak reminded his colleague that their hosts were really nothing better than spies, and that their intention would be to ply the visitors with quantities of alcohol in an effort to learn all they could about the pioneering and world leading work they were engaged in on behalf of the fatherland.
“And another thing,” Pak frowned. “Remember not to touch any food which is not served to them as well. If you do, you could well find it laced with drugs designed to loosen your tongue. I must remember to remind Choi.”
So Jang Nam had not really been looking forward to his dinner. He was unused to being surrounded by foreign spies, and his colleague Pak had successfully put him off his food.
He was, however, much looking forward to his visit to the Culham laboratory, where he would see work akin to his own, designed to harness nuclear fusion as a source of great power. It was not quite Choi Shin’s field of work, but he was generally acknowledged to be a brilliant scientist, and was bound to learn a great deal which would be of use to his country on their return. Choi’s brilliance had been demonstrated when he asked to be allowed to visit the Atomic Weapons facilities. It looked as if he might just be allowed to make such a visit, as well. Certainly the British had not rejected his request out of hand. If Choi could bring that off, then they would all be hailed as national heroes on their return. Choi himself was leading a major research project with colleagues from China into the future development of nuclear weapons, and he was bound to learn a great deal that would be of immense value to their glorious country. Perhaps they would learn over dinner whether or not Choi’s bold initiative had been successful.
Cooper, the man who had met them on arrival, was ready to greet them when they went to the small private room downstairs for dinner. Cooper quickly introduced them to the others present. They were all said to be scientists, but the foreign delegation from North Korea all new that they were British spies, sent specially to learn as much as possible from them. One of them was said to be from the Aldermaston weapons facility, and immediately fell into conversation with Choi Shin. ‘Be very careful, dear friend,’ thought Nam.
A tall man introduced himself to Jang Nam as Professor John Williams, Director of the Culham laboratory where the UK’s research into nuclear fusion was being conducted. ‘Now I must be careful’, thought Nam. They were to sit together at dinner.
“We are very much looking forward to seeing you at our Culham research laboratory tomorrow,” said Cooper, by way of briefing. “We shall be able to show you our work, and hopefully give you a demonstration of our fusion experiment in operation. If not tomorrow, then certainly the day after. I am also pleased to say that we have been able to arrange, through the good offices of Paul Sheppard here, for Dr. Choi Shin to visit our facilities at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston.”
“I shall accompany him there,” announced Moon Pak.
“I am afraid that will not be possible, Mr. Moon, for security reasons.”
“But I insist,” protested Moon. “It is my job to guide my colleagues during this visit.”
“I really am sorry,” said Sheppard, “but I have only been able to obtain a limited security clearance for Dr. Choi. I am sure you will understand that this is a top secret installation where it is difficult to arrange for visitors other than scientists known to us.”
“I must protest most strongly,” blustered Moon.
“And you must understand our position,” countered Sheppard. “Dr Choi is welcome to make the visit, but he will do so on his own, or not at all.”
“Very well then,” said Moon, “but I shall protest most strongly to my Government.”
“You may be better advised not to,” said Choi bravely. “What will they think if you protest that I have been denied this chance because of your own stubbornness?”
Choi took Moon by the arm.
“Trust me,” he said. “This is an opportunity which will not be available to any of us again. If I must go alone, then I shall go alone.”
Martin Davis turned to Paul Sheppard.
“That was close,” he muttered, with his back to the others. “You nearly didn’t get him to yourself.”
Jang Nam turned to Moon.
“You cannot be in two places at once, and I shall explain on our return, if anyone should query your behaviour, that you had no option. Our dear leader would not have wished you to deny our country this unique opportunity.”
“Very well, then,” said Moon again. “I am sure that we are most grateful to you for allowing one of our top scientists to visit your establishment at such short notice,” he said to Sheppard. “We shall probably learn a great deal that will be of value to our country”.
“It’s our pleasure.”
The humour was lost on him.
As they took their places for dinner, Choi and Sheppard were soon in earnest conversation, as were Williams and Nam. Moon Pak heard virtually nothing of either conversation, not least because of the non-stop chatter from Lee Cooper who was sitting next to him.
From Cooper’s point of view it was all working out rather well after a shaky start.
Moon Pak had given up.
Dr.Choi Shin was like a dog with two tails; a visit to Aldermaston agreed, and sitting next to one of its head scientists at dinner.
Paul Sheppard from Aldermaston was also delighted to be next to the one man they all really wanted, either as a defector or as an informer.
Jang Nam was seated next to the Director of the Culham Nuclear Research Laboratory, which he was to visit in the next two days.
Martin Davis was fast learning about the Chinese involvement in the North Korean nuclear development programme, and could see promotion looming once his Ministry of Defence superiors heard what he had to tell them.
Len Ellis was busy in the car park, but looking forward to his doggy bag.
***
As the party left, Cooper made his way across to the camper van.
Ellis was waiting for him.
“I heard all that, as you would expect,” he announced, “and I’ve already put in hand the verbatim transcripts you want. You shall have them in the morning.”
“Brilliant – thanks.”
“Don’t mention it! And while you were enjoying yourself at Her Majesty’s expense, I’ve run taps into their Hotel rooms as well. They’re live feeds into the Ops Room at HQ.”
“I should have thought of that,” admitted Cooper.
“You didn’t need to. James Piper asked me to fix it.”
“I suppose that’s why he’s in charge and I’m not!”
“Probably. And I suppose you forgot
my doggy bag, too.”
There was no doubt about it; the dinner had gone well.
***
There were people who needed to know what had happened at the dinner.
James Piper, for one, was under orders to de-brief his boss, ‘C’, as soon as possible. He had listened to the conversations as they took place during the meal, and briefly visited the Ops Room to hear some of the after-dinner chat between the Koreans, before contacting Sir Geoffrey Sefton.
Jack Salisbury, Head of the Joint intelligence Organisation thought he should know what had happened, and looked to General Sir Pearson-Jones, Chief of Defence Intelligence, to tell him.
So Martin Davis didn’t get much sleep that night, either. Salisbury was adamant that Ministers should not be briefed at this stage, so went out of his way to tell the Permanent Secretaries of both the Foreign Office and the Home Office to mind their own business for the time being. That meant that the Government’s Chief Scientist was also not told what was going on.
Lower down the pecking order, though, it was different. Those people who needed to know because they needed to do something, were briefed immediately.
James Piper got on to his opposite number in charge of Section 11. It was their job to keep tabs on important people, and make sure they came to no harm. Retired Colonel Bill Clayton ran that operation, and it was his two men on a motorbike who had been keeping a close eye on Dr.Choi Shin during his stroll round Oxford that afternoon. Actually, it was yesterday afternoon now, but they were all still ‘on the case’ in spite of the late hour.
Clayton reported that Choi had seemed relaxed as he strolled down the High Street. He had looked in to a couple of book shops, browsed the newspaper stand, and actually been in to the Bodleian Library, although not for long. He had returned to the news stand to buy a copy of The Times, and then sat outside Jane’s’ Team Rooms for a cuppa while he read it. He left the paper behind when he returned to the Old Bank Hotel. Section 11 had retrieved it, and so far as they could tell from a quick examination, he had not written in it or left any messages inside. Neither did they think that he had been followed, either – except by them, of course. They were keeping watch outside the Hotel, but agreed it was not necessary to follow him on his official visits.
And so the jig-saw was being put together, and the impression gained that Dr.Choi Shin was a probable target who might talk, even if he did not defect.
They were all encouraged.
But there was also a consensus developing that Dr. Choi could be of more value to the UK if he returned to Korea, rather than stay in this country. If a means could be established to keep in touch with the man, he would be able to keep us informed of developments, both there and in China, whereas if he defected and stayed in the UK, his information would soon become dated and of increasingly reduced value.
So it was agreed, subject to further analysis based on what was said during the rest of his visit, that if Dr. Choi did decide to co-operate with us, he should return home and keep in touch from there, rather than stay in this country. The option could always be left open for him to return here ‘on asylum’ at a later date.
Agreed, that is, apart from a few within the defence industry. They, after all, were in charge of our nuclear deterrent, and that meant that for it to remain viable, they needed to know what it was that it had to deter. So they were desperate to know what the Chinese were doing which might in some way prejudice the effectiveness of our Trident submarines and their missiles. The Americans, for the same reasons, were also desperate to know, but had seemingly let the man slip though their fingers during his visit to the States.
The Defence Intelligence organisation had, almost within their grasp, the one man who could brief them in detail about what was happening in China, and yet those buffoons in Whitehall were intending to send him home. It beggared belief, in their mind.
Martin Davis was firmly of the view that the man should be kept here if that was an option. He discussed his views briefly over the secure phone link with his Director, General Pearson-Jones, and agreed to meet him, also secretly, later that night, with a few others from within the armed services. Paul Sheppard, the MOD man on secondment to Aldermaston, was among them.
There was a long discussion of all the pros and cons. On the one hand, if he could be persuaded to stay in this country, Choi could be offered work, a new identity and a safe haven from his fellow countrymen. On the other hand, he would be an on-going security liability, and, as someone pointed out, could well be a ‘plant’, sent to infiltrate our nuclear defence organisation to pass intelligence back to North Korea and China. Whatever happened, he would need to be closely monitored.
At the end of a long night, it was agreed that he should be invited to defect and stay here in relative safety to work alongside our own nuclear physicists, providing he agreed willingly to pass on what information he had about the Chinese work in which he was involved.
In spite of all the late night deliberations and discussion, one thing remained plain.
Nothing could be done without Choi’s agreement.
Except that, if he did return home in a couple of days, as arranged, the Defence Ministry people thought it might be worth going after him, in a final attempt to persuade him to defect.
The Special Services were to be briefed, secretly and in secret.
3.
THE VISITORS
The visit to Culham was scheduled to be over three days, except that now, Dr. Choi Shin would only be there for two. His second day would be spent at the MOD Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, leaving his colleague Jang Nam to continue the visit with their escort and minder Moon Pak.
The visit to Culham proved interesting and informative for both the Korean scientists, and their English hosts. Jang was the nuclear fusion expert rather than Choi, but neither of them had realised just how far ahead British scientists were in the research field.
Fusion power offered an almost limitless source of energy for the future once the formidable scientific and engineering problems surrounding its development were overcome. Because of this potential, every major nation in the world was pursuing its own research programme to some extent, in a commercially competitive effort to achieve the Holy Grail of meeting the fast-growing world-wide demand for energy. And energy was particularly at a premium in North Korea, where erratic supplies of electricity and frequent power cuts as well as imposed rationing hindered the country’s already slow development. That’s why Choi and Jang were at Culham.
In spite of the commercial imperatives of the research, there was a great deal of international co-operation, particularly among scientists, even if this was not shared between politicians. Harnessing nuclear fusion would answer the world’s insatiable demand for energy without contributing to global warming, and without producing massive amounts of radioactive waste. What waste there was, quickly decayed. Hydrogen was its main fuel – the most commonly available natural gas in the universe.
To make this dream of endless power a commercial reality meant engineering the fusion together of such nuclei as hydrogen isotopes so as to release energy, which was Jang’s area of expertise. Choi’s speciality was the rather easier technique of splitting atoms in nuclear fission, the process used for weapons.
The fusion process was similar to that which takes place in the sun and other stars, and requires similar exceptionally high temperatures. Energy-producing fusions need gas from a combination of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium to be heated to some one hundred million degrees centigrade and to be confined for about a second. During this time, the plasma of electrons and hydrogen interact to fuse into helium, and some of their mass is destroyed, releasing huge amounts of energy in the form of heat, light and radiation. Such fusions had been carried out in laboratories around the world for many years, but only for very short durations. Confinement for longer periods would result in a controllable, continuous reaction, which generated more energy than it used.
> That was the goal of the scientists at Culham.
Earlier work had suggested that the use of magnetic confinement of the gas was the most promising way to achieve a continuous ‘burn’, and even now a top secret research project being carried out in Nevada, at the Skunk Works of Lockheed Martin, was proceeding on that basis.
However, thanks largely to Culham’s work, research to achieve the same objective using lasers was now well advanced in the UK.
This was of immediate interest to Choi, who was himself working with lasers in an attempt to develop a quicker and more productive means of enriching uranium, rather than use the present expensive and slow system of centrifuges.
The scientists at Culham told their Korean guests of their reasoning that using lasers would provide the ability to maintain a steady flow of fusion blasts, taking research closer to the continuous system needed for commercial power generation. This work had led to the formation of the High Power Laser Programme at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Harwell, but this aspect of their research was considered so important that very little of it was made public knowledge, even within the scientific communities of co-operating countries.
“No wonder we had never heard of this ground-breaking work,” said Jang.
“Is there no more you can tell us or show us?” asked Choi. “Although fusion is not my particular field, I too am experimenting with the use of lasers to develop a uranium enrichment process that could replace the wretched centrifuges.”
Jang frowned, and Choi immediately realised that he had said too much. Fortunately, their minder Moon Pak was in conversation with another scientist across the room, otherwise there would have been real trouble for Choi.
“I promise I will say nothing,” whispered Jang in their native Chosŏnŏ, as one of the team escorting them on their visit moved across to Choi, and introduced himself as Professor Newman.
“As it happens,” he said, “I am from Harwell, which as you know is the centre of the UK’s nuclear research activity. It also happens, Dr. Choi that I have heard of your work in this field in collaboration with the Chinese.”
“How could you possibly know?” demanded Choi. “It is a very closely guarded secret, and I should not even have mentioned it at all, but I was so excited to discover about your work with lasers. How did you know?” he repeated.