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MONDAY, 6 JUNE 1994
85 ALBERT EMBANKMENT, LONDON

On my return the office had moved from the dim and anonymous Century House to spectacular new premises on the Albert Embankment. The state-of-the-art Terry Farrell-designed office block occupied a prime site in central London on the south bank of the Thames, facing Westminster Palace and Whitehall, and its siting and architecture presented a radically revamped image for the service. Gigantic shoulders towering over a glowering head in the form of its central gazebo, it was like a Terminator, belligerently daring anybody to challenge its authority. It was supposedly built to an official budget of œ85 million, but everybody in the office knew that in reality it had cost nearly three times as much. We were warned in the weekly newsletter that discussion of the cost over-run would be considered a serious breach of the OSA and would be dealt with accordingly.

The aggressive facade was appropriate, for MI6 was facing the most serious threats to its hitherto unchallenged autonomy since its inception. It had recently been `avowed', or publicly acknowledged to exist, by the Queen at her speech opening the new session of Parliament in October 1993. New legislation came into effect in December 1994 bringing a modicum of accountability to the service. A select group of MPs won limited powers to scrutinise the budget and objectives of the service, but were not allowed to investigate MI6 operations, examine paperwork or cross-examine officers. The changes yielded a token of public accountability to the reluctant service, but nothing like the oversight exercised by the US Congress over American intelligence agenices, or even by the Russian parliament over their services. The Treasury was also for the first time allowed to make basic investigations into the service's efficiency and had wielded its knife, forcing the service to make hitherto unheard-of redundancies.

Many familiar faces departed the service during my absence. Even the Chief, Sir Colin McColl was ejected, along with the clubbable but lethargic old-guard directors. They had been jostling for the top job and the office rumour was that one had burst into tears when he learned that he would not inherit the post. Instead, a new, younger breed of managers was appointed, headed by David Spedding as Chief. A pushy Middle East specialist, at 49 he was the youngest-ever officer to reach the top. He forged his reputation during the Gulf War which broke out when he was deputy head of the Middle East controllerate. The controller refused to return from holiday when the war started, and Spedding siezed the opportunity to grab the reins of power, leaving an indelible impression on Whitehall. He promoted an equally thrusting bunch to senior management positions.

The new leadership reflected the new building - younger, meaner, more aggressive. Perhaps it was a necessary change to combat the financial challenges and intensified public scrutiny of the new service, but would it be wise in the people-business of spying? It was with a mixture of curiosity and trepidation that I walked the mile from my home to Vauxhall Cross to start my first day in the new building on a drizzly June morning.

Personnel department gave me ten days off after returning from Bosnia, happily spent sorting out my garden which had fallen into bedraggled despair during my absence. The experience in Bosnia left me feeling remote from the egotistical and brazen hurly-burly of London and I had not felt inclined to socialise much except with Sarah. My solitude was disturbed only by a brief visit from Fowlecrooke to inform me of my next job. He offered me an undercover slot with the UN weapon inspection teams in Iraq, but I wanted my next overseas post to be a normal one, so until something came up he offered me a Head Office slot in the PTCP (Production-Targeting Counter-Proliferation) department. The section gathered intelligence on and disrupted the attempts of pariah nations - mainly Iran, Iraq, Libya and Pakistan - to obtain biological, chemical and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. I wanted to go to the department immediately after the IONEC, but the job had gone to Bart. It was pleasing to now get an opportunity there, and to get out of the East European controllerate.

There was no friendly guard waiting in the entry lobby to greet staff and check photo IDs as in Century House. Security checking was done electronically and to enter the main building, we had to pass through a row of six perspex, time-locked security doors, stacked like the eggs of a giant insect. A small queue stretched behind them. When my turn came, a swipe of my card through the slot and the entry of my personal code, six-nine-two-one, illuminated a small green light by the slot, and the perspex door slid open with a Star Trek - like swish. I stepped into the narrow capsule, my shoulders brushing the sides. A pressure pad on the floor established that there was only one occupant, the door swished shut behind me, then the door in front opened, releasing me into the inner lobby.

Like Century House, the interior of the new building felt like a hotel but the shabby Intourist style had been discarded in favour of flashy American Marriott decor. Soft fluorescent light from recessed port-holes in the high ceiling illuminated a hard-wearing ivory marble floor, set off by the matt grey slate of the walls. Two giant columns dominated the hall, containing banks of rapid modern lifts. There would be no more impatient, muttering queues waiting for under-sized lifts in this building. Around the edge of the columns were inset comfortable black leather bench seats. To the right, natural light filtered from a small atrium that opened, by a tall light well, to the sky above. It was filled with large and garish plastic imitations of sub-tropical trees. Several marbled hallways led off from the sides of the central atrium. I was 20 minutes early for the appointment with my new line manager, so I set off to explore.

A few steps down the first hallway revealed the new library. The Century House library was a dismal affair, consisting of metal racks filled with ancient books and ragged filing boxes full of magazines. The new version was much smarter and brighter, with expensive-looking reading tables and swish sliding book racks. Jenny, the cheerful librarian, smiled a welcome from behind her desk. `How are you?' she greeted me enthusiastically. `How was Bosnia?' She explained that she had been promoted to chief librarian at the time of the move but Sandra, her older and therefore more expensive superior, was made redundant. `I felt so sorry for her,' murmured Jenny. `Twenty years in Century House, and personnel department wouldn't even give her a visitor's pass so that she could see inside the new building. She was dreadfully upset.'

Jenny stamped the distribution list on the morning's newspapers. `And have you seen what they did to the cleaners?' Jenny asked. She showed me a recent article in the Mirror. In a cynical attempt to save money, personnel sacked the 47 cleaning staff employed in Century House, then re-employed them on a lower-paid contract basis at Vauxhall Cross. In an unprecedented move, the justifiably furious cleaners took MI6 to an employment tribunal with the help of their local MP, Labour back-bencher Kate Hoey. MI6 used every trick in the book to deny them this basic human right, claiming that even the identities of cleaning staff were too secret to be made public in a court hearing. Eventually, after a long and expensive legal battle, they were granted access to a tribunal, and the Mirror showed a comical photograph of the cleaning ladies taking their stand, only a row of sensible shoes visible beneath the screen which they were forced to stand behind. They quickly won the case, compensation and their jobs back. It was an embarrassing setback for the new directors of MI6, not only publicly but also in terms of their standing within the service. They embarked on a damage-limitation exercise, complaining in the internal weekly newsletter and in public comments that the Treasury had forced the cuts `upon them'. It never crossed their minds to admit that they had simply ignored basic employment law and used the OSA to cover up their mismanagement.

Walking back across the lobby to the lifts, I spied my old IONEC colleague Bart entering the building, carrying a squash racket in one hand and using the other to push the remnants of a bun into his mouth. `'Allo, mate,' he grinned, flicking away with the back of his hand a currant which had adhered to the side of his mouth. `You've been in Bosnia,' he continued, unabashed.

I pointed to his squash racket. `This exercise business, is this some cover job?'

`Nah, I've really taken up some sport - have you seen the squash court?' Bart showed me through a steel door next to the library exit and through to a small grey-carpeted gymnasium with rowing machines and weights. A portable CD player was thumping out dance music and a large, plump-thighed woman dressed in a too-small, polka-dot leotard was sweating away in time to it on an exercise bike, the seat of which was set several notches too low. `Phwoar,' murmured Bart, without a trace of sarcasm, `not bad eh?'

Bart showed me around the rest of the sports complex. The building's architect originally envisaged using the space for a swimming pool, but the directors decided that the extravagance would attract adverse publicity. Some ex-military officers lobbied hard for an indoor pistol range, but eventually commonsense prevailed and the space was used for an indoor five-a-side soccer and badminton sports hall.

I had already spent too long looking around the new facilities and it was time to be getting upstairs to meet my new section. `So what's PTCP like?' I asked Bart, knowing that he had just departed the section to start pre-posting training for an assignment to Hungary.

`You'll be working for Badger. He likes a few beers.' Bart patted his stomach knowledgeably, his erudite praise reassuring me that I would be joining a happy section. I left Bart to get on with his squash match and made my way over to the lifts.

The refreshingly fast lift sped me up to the fourth floor and the doors opened on to a small lobby with corporate grey carpet tiles and bare white walls, like a 1980s merchant bank. For a second or two I studied the small coloured floor plan conveniently placed by the lift exit, then set off down the labyrinth of corridors to my designated room.

The open-plan PTCP office overlooked the building's spacious open-air terrace and the Thames, and accommodated half a dozen officers and secretaries. A few looked up inquisitively at the newcomer, while others kept their heads down in their files or computer screens. The officer nearest the door stood up and stretched out his hand. `Hello, you must be Richard Tomlinson,' he said. His tightly curling grey-blond hair was thinning savagely at the temples but still grew thickly on the forehead and at the sides, creating three broad stripes of fur-like hair. I presumed that he must be Badger. `Sit yourself down. I'll explain what you'll be doing.'

Badger had entered the service later in his career than usual. He obtained a PhD in genetics at Imperial College, worked as a research scientist, then as a management consultant, before joining the service in his mid-30s. He was posted first to to Nigeria, then Costa Rica. Badger's enthusiasm and well-rounded work experience made him an effective officer but he was not destined to be a high-flyer in the office - he was not enough of a back-stabber. `I want you to take over the running of BELLHOP, the biggest operation in the section,' Badger told me enthusiastically.

After the 1985-89 Iran-Iraq war when Iraqi chemical weapons killed many thousands of Iranian soldiers, the Iranians wanted to build their own arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, but did not have the indigenous capability. They needed to acquire the technology, equipment and precursor chemicals from technically more advanced countries. Prohibitions on the export of such materials under international convention did not deter the Iranians from attempting to acquire the equipment clandestinely. Any Iranian national blatantly attempting to buy banned equipment would instantly attract attention from western intelligence agencies, so they ruled out that option. Instead, they set about recruiting a network of western traders and engineers who would do their dirty work for them, either unaware of what they were getting themselves into or turning a blind eye to its illegality. `Your task,' Badger explained, `is to inveigle your way into this network under cover then meet and cultivate the Iranian ringmasters.' From then on, I could take the operation where opportunity led. Badger's hope was to use the infiltration to gather intelligence, perhaps recruiting one of the Iranians if the opportunity arose, then disrupt and delay their programme. He tossed me a hefty pink dossier, labelled P/54248. `Read that and come back to me when you've got a plan.'

This was going to be fun, I thought to myself. Loads of freedom to design my own operation, a really worthwhile objective and a good boss to work under. I set about reading the file on BELLHOP enthusiastically.

Reading an MI6 file can be a slow and laborious job. The papers are arranged in chronological order but that is the extent of their organisation. They contain a vast jumble of information from many sources. Telegrams, letters, police SB reports, copies of military and DSS records of individuals mentioned in the file, titbits from GCHQ, contact reports, surveillance photographs. Many papers cross-reference to other files, so making sense of them means a trog down to the central registry to pull the file. One document in the file might be only peripherally relevant to the case, the next might be crucially important. It is easy to miss a vital titbit and so lose track of the big picture if not concentrating hard. It took me a week before I had ploughed through the six volumes of files and felt confident to design a plan.

The file opened with the detention at Heathrow airport in the late 1980s of Nahoum Manbar, a Nice-based Israeli businessman whom MI6 suspected had close but thorny links with Mossad. Customs and Excise, in a routine search of his briefcase, found papers and plans that appeared to describe a process to produce mustard gas. Manbar was handed over to police custody,. He claimed in his interview that he was an agricultural engineer and that the formulas related to the production of a new insecticide. Although these protestations of innocence were scarcely credible, there was not enough evidence of wrong-doing to charge him with any crime. He was denied entry to Britain, put on the first plane back to Nice and MI6 asked the DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, the French internal intelligence service) to keep an eye on him.

Through telephone intercepts on Manbar's home and information from other sources, the DST established that in 1988 Manbar obtained the plans for a mustard gas plant which he sold at handsome profit to Dr Tehrani Fahd, a Vienna-based Iranian diplomat, who was in reality a senior Iranian intelligence officer and the ringmaster entrusted with the task of building up Iran's chemical weapons programme. These plans, however, were just the start. Fahd now wanted the bits of specialist equipment and chemicals needed actually to build the plant. He tasked Manbar to help.

Although Manbar was eager for the millions of dollars that completion of the deal would bring, he was initially reluctant to get further involved as he knew that he was getting into murkier and deeper legal waters. While he was considering his options, Mossad discovered Manbar's contacts with Fahd and, according to the DST's telephone transcripts, ordered him to a meeting at the Israeli embassy in Paris. There was no intelligence on what was said at the meeting but the upshot of it was that Manbar embarked on the project with Fahd with mysteriously renewed enthusiasm. He set about finding a cut-out, somebody he could rely upon to carry out unwittingly the possibly illegal work necessary to acquire the equipment requested by the Iranians.

Through one of his business contacts Manbar met Mrs Joyce Kiddie, a British businesswoman who lived in the village of Girton, just outside Cambridge. Kiddie had worked for most of her life as a secretary at a local stationery and office supplies company; but when the managing director, by coincidence a former MI6 agent, retired, he put the small company up for sale. Kiddie, by then in her 40s, twice married with a couple of daughters, daringly used her life savings and a bank loan to buy the company. She proved a natural businesswoman and within a few years started diversifying the business. Kiddie developed contacts in China, initially in the stationery business, but then in chemicals and pharmaceuticals.

Manbar was impressed by her versatility and diligence, and set about cultivating her to become his cut-out. The DST picked up Manbar's increasingly frequent telephone conversations with Kiddie and tipped off MI6. PTCP obtained a FLORIDA warrant to intercept her telephone and an ACANTHA warrant to intercept her mail, and the Cambridgeshire SB were asked to keep an eye on her. Manbar started trusting her with increasingly bizarre jobs. Once he asked her to find and buy a suitable American-Jewish NBA basketball player who would be prepared to emigrate to Israel to bolster the Israeli national team. She passed this and other tests with flying colours. By the middle of 1993 Manbar was confident that she was reliable and trustworthy and was the right person to introduce to Fahd.

Kiddie was delighted with the introduction to a new and lucrative trading partner and flew to meet Fahd in Austria. In the Vienna Hilton, Fahd asked her to buy a couple of tonnes of thionyl chloride, a `building-block' chemical used in the manufacture of many legitimate products but also an essential basic ingredient for the manufacture of mustard gas and nerve agents such as sarin. There was nothing illegal about the purchase - as long as it did not end up in the wrong hands it was not breaking any international laws.

After six months of research, phone calls and two trips to remote parts of China, Kiddie completed the thionyl chloride shipment to Iran. Fahd was delighted and decided to trust her with a bit more responsibility. Now that he had the plans and a proven source of the main ingredients, he asked her to procure some of the equipment for the plant. This, however, was not as easy as the relatively straightforward acquisition of the chemicals.

Chemical weapons plants are not complicated and need not be particularly large. A nerve gas plant can be built into a space the size of a living-room, or even into the back of a truck. A mustard gas plant requires a bit more space, but a facility the size of a small house could provide a militarily significant production capability. The liquid chemicals used in the recipe are very corrosive and must be contained entirely in glass-lined apparatus - similar to larger versions of the equipment used in school chemistry lessons. Just like in school chemistry apparatus, the glass components - stopcocks, tubes and flasks - clip together, then are physically supported by a scaffold framework. Because of the danger of leaks, the building in which the apparatus is contained must be sealed and force-ventilated with high-volume extractor fans. The extracted air is driven up scrubbers - basically polypropylene chimneys filled with glass marbles down which sodium hydroxide trickles. The gases are absorbed by the sodium hydroxide on the surface of the marbles and form a harmless liquid that can be disposed of safely. The sale of all equipment of this sort is subject to international controls and it is difficult for certain countries, especially Iran, Iraq and Libya, to openly purchase any of it, even if destined for entirely innocent purposes. Fahd gave Kiddie the blueprints for some of the simpler pieces of equipment and asked her to see what she could do.

Kiddie accepted the new assignment with relish but found that she was out of her depth. She had no technical training and was unable to understand the specifications and drawings of the equipment. She needed help from somebody with an engineering background, so she recruited Albert Constantine, a 60-year-old former merchant seaman and engineer and an old friend of her first husband. Constantine was one of life's unfortunate souls whose career seemed to disintegrate around him whichever way he turned. He had started work in the Durham coalmines at 16 but was made redundant when the mining industry started to falter. He obtained an apprenticeship in the Tyneside shipyards, but he'd picked another doomed industry and shortly after he was qualified he was made redundant again. He went to sea with the merchant navy and had just qualified as a First Mate when he was seriously injured in a car crash. As a result of his injuries, Constantine lost his merchant navy medical certificate and that career too. He drifted around doing simple engineering work for many years and then, in his late 50s, washed up as a commodity trader with a import-export trading company in London.

When Kiddie asked Constantine to help, he was delighted. He was struggling to make ends meet from his low-paid job, and the extra cash would come in handy. A few months later, in April 1994, Kiddie and Constantine met up in South Mimms motorway service station, just north of London. Unbeknown to them, their meeting was under surveillance. Two PTCP officers, posing as travelling salesmen, sat at an adjacent table, recording their conversation with a sophisticated directional microphone mounted in a briefcase. From that surveillance and the telephone intercepts of Constantine, it became apparent that he too was unable to understand the technical specifications provided by Fahd. But there was no way that he was going to let on to Kiddie just yet - he badly wanted to be in on the deal.

Normally if MI6 wanted to worm its way into a piece of quasi-criminal activity such as Kiddie's dealings with Fahd, they would try to cultivate and then recruit one of the key individuals, such as Constantine or Kiddie. But Badger was adamant that Kiddie would panic if approached by MI6 and pull out of the deal, denying us the opportunity of disrupting the Iranian operation. He ruled out cultivating Constantine, too. He was more level-headed, but was loyal to his friends and he would probably tell Kiddie. Badger was adamant that the only means to get into the operation was for me to approach Kiddie or Constantine under cover, win their confidence and trust, and hope that they would recommend me to Manbar and Fahd.

It would be difficult to get alongside Kiddie directly. First, she worked alone at home, so was not easily accessible via intermediaries. Secondly, telephone intercepts showed that she was wary of strangers and only trusted them if strongly recommended by somebody she knew. I would have to get alongside Constantine first, then hope that he would introduce me to Kiddie.

Delving into the files turned up Constantine's home address in Southampton on the south coast of England. A quick recce trip on my motorbike revealed that the house next door to his terraced cottage was vacant. `Why don't you rent it and get to know him as a neighbour?' Badger suggested. Returning to Southampton to visit the estate agent the next week, I found it was already too late; a young couple had just moved in. I had to find another plan.

Tracing Constantine's employer through the CCI computer fortunately threw up a positive lead - there was already a file on Bari Trading, a trading company in the posh London area of Mayfair. The managing director was being run by H/UKP, the head of the Iranian natural cover section. A quick call on the PAX and at their next debrief the managing director agreed to take me on temporarily in Bari Trading. He would be the only person in the company conscious to the operation, so I would have to get together a cover story which would deceive the other employees.

SBO5, the operational security officer for the PTCP section, agreed to let me use the Huntley alias that was developed for my trip to Russia. Strictly, a fresh alias should be used for every operation but this rule was relaxed to save time and money. SBO5 thought the Huntley alias was unlikely to have been compromised in Russia and the operations were geographically unrelated. Besides, Huntley already had a national insurance card, simplifying the paperwork for Bari Trading. SBO5 insisted that I put up a submission to the new Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, as the operation could be embarrassing if uncovered. Submissions were supposed to ensure that potentially sensitive operations were legally accountable, but there was no independent scrutiny and so the only check on the judgement and honesty of the drafting officer was the diligence of the Foreign Secretary. Writing submissions for Douglas Hurd was a time-consuming task, requiring flawless reasoning and perfect prose, but Rifkind was already renowned for looking favourably on whatever MI6 put in front of him.

Even back in my familiar Huntley skin, there was still a lot of preparatory work needed. From study of the telephone transcripts, we knew that Kiddie and Constantine needed a qualified chemical engineer, somebody who could easily interpret the technical drawings they had in their possession, and who would know where to source the components. Two weeks later, after a lot of study in Imperial University's chemical engineering library, I was working alongside Constantine in Bari Trading, just a stone's throw from the Hyde Park Hilton Hotel, with the cover that I was an Anglo-Argentine chemical engineer who wished to start a new career in chemical commodity dealing. My fictional father was allegedly the manager of a Bauer plant in Buenos Aires and friend of the Bari managing director, who had agreed to give me a six-week secondment so that I could learn the business of import-export trading. The story seemed to satisfy Constantine and the other occupants of the dingy, cluttered second-floor office: Patricia, a pretty young Guyanese-born Anglo-Indian and Fazad, a chain-smoking Iranian in his 60s. Constantine, a friendly and helpful character, loaded me down with books and papers on `Bills of Lading' and `Import Export Duties'. The work was tedious but I was not there for fun. My objective was to befriend Constantine and so, without going suspiciously over the top, whenever an opportunity arose for a chat, a tea break or an evening pint of beer with him, I would take it up.

Meanwhile Badger and his crew were continuing to work on other aspects of the case. One morning Debbie, a buxom transcriber, rushed into the office carrying a pink FLORIDA report. Normally she would put transcripts into the internal mail system so they would arrive on our desks a day or so later. But this transcript needed Badger's urgent attention. It was Kiddie ringing from her home in Girton to Fahd in Vienna to arrange an urgent meeting to discuss details of the contract. They arranged to meet two days later in the lobby of the Hilton in central Amsterdam. The transcript showed that Fahd intended to give her some more documentation concerning the components for the plant.

Badger leaped at the opportunity. If we could eavesdrop on the conversation, we could learn about Fahd's intentions and the state of the Iranian chemical weapons programme. More important, though, were the documents. A detailed look at the plans for the plant would be invaluable. Badger ordered the whole PTCP section to drop whatever else they were doing and get cracking on this urgent task.

Kiddie planned to fly in and out of Stansted airport, near her home in Cambridgeshire, to Schipol airport. Badger got on to Customs and Excise at Stansted and arranged for her to be searched on her return to the UK. To avoid arousing her suspicion, Customs suggested searching all the other passengers and placing an undercover officer in the queue to plant a rumour that they were looking for drugs.

Listening into the meeting in the hotel lobby would be more difficult and would require the cooperation of the Dutch secret service. Fortunately, the BVD (Binnenlands Villigheidsdienst) is one of MI6's closest allies overseas. They are regarded as reliable and efficient, and will usually drop everything to help MI6 on an urgent job. MI6 is still a powerful player in the hierarchy of world intelligence services, so smaller services scurry to help out where they can, knowing that it will give them leverage to request a returned favour at a later date. Badger sent a FLASH high-priority telegram to the MI6 station in The Hague and got the wheels turning immediately.

The junior MI6 officer in The Hague station, HAG/2, drove over to Amsterdam with the BVD liaison officer to check out the possibilities of bugging the meeting. Walking into the Hilton lobby, they found a large fountain in the centre of a number of tables, chairs and sofas and HAG/2 realised that it would be difficult to get a good-quality audible `take' of the meeting. There was no way to predict which table Kiddie and Fahd would sit at, bugging every table would be expensive and time-consuming, and the sound from the fountain was just the sort of gentle white noise which is excellent for swamping microphones tuned to pick up distant conversations. These problems did not daunt the energetic BVD, however. They pulled out all the stops to put into place a complicated and labour-intensive operational plan.

Any guest of the Amsterdam Hilton hoping to enjoy a nice lunch in the lobby on Tuesday, 7 February 1995 was in for a disappointment. The attractive fountain was turned off, a prominent sign announcing that it was shut down `for maintenance', and most of the lobby was closed down with rope barriers for `essential cleaning'. As with most Hiltons worldwide, the hotel security manager was an agent of the local secret service. The BVD asked him to temporarily rearrange the lobby, where a single vacant table was wired for sound. A couple of `businessmen' occupied it to stop it being taken by incidental passers-by and all the remaining tables were filled with other businessmen, all BVD and MI6 officers, amongst them Badger, HAG/2 and a couple of other members of the PTCP section. Everything was in place as Kiddie touched down. She was tailed as she took the shuttle bus into central Amsterdam.

The meticulously orchestrated plan started to go wrong as soon as Kiddie arrived at the hotel. She failed to notice the two businessmen finish their meeting and leave, vacating the wired table. Instead, Kiddie took one look at the busy coffee-room, decided that she didn't like what she saw and, calm as you like, walked over to the roped off area, unclipped the rope and sat down in the area which had been `closed for cleaning'. There must have been a lot of Dutch expletives discreetly spat into a large number of coffee cups that morning. It was an embarassing cock-up for them in front of their MI6 guests. The BVD did their best to remedy the situation. An officer with a briefcase fitted with a directional microphone made his way to a table not too far from Kiddie in the roped-off area. When Fahd arrived and joined her ten minutes later, he managed to get some take, but despite computer enhancement the tape proved inaudible. All we got from the meeting was a couple of surveillance photographs, taken by the briefcase camera of one of the businessmen, of Fahd handing over a thick sheaf of papers.

Fortunately, Badger's frantic couple of days of planning were not entirely unrewarded as the other part of the plan worked far more smoothly. As planned, all the disembarking passengers at Stansted were held up and searched. Kiddie was near the back of the queue, so all the preceding passengers were inconvenienced. Eventually, it was her turn. While one officer diligently searched her carry-on luggage, distracting her by paying particular attention to personal and intimate items, another went through her briefcase. As soon as the officer found Fahd's documents, he slipped them through a photocopier discreetly mounted under the search bench, then quickly replaced the originals in her briefcase. As we'd hoped, they were excellent intelligence and an aid to my efforts to bait Constantine into introducing me directly to Kiddie.

I was at my desk at Vauxhall Cross a couple of days later, studying the documents and trying to understand the technical specifications of the equipment, when my personal line rang. It was Sarah. `Hello darling, how's Moneypenny?' she laughed. But I knew straightaway that something was wrong. Her voice was weak and strained and she was putting up a brave front.

`Something's the matter, isn't it?' I asked quietly.

`Yes . . .' she replied. `It's back.'

Sarah had been in for a further check-up that morning. The doctors had found that the cancer had spread into her lymph system and she had been readmitted to hospital immediately for an urgent course of chemotherapy. She didn't say so, but I knew from her voice that the prognosis was very poor. She died two months later.

I put the phone down and held my head in my hands. I felt a numbing sickness and wanted to cry. My work seemed irrelevant and I discarded the papers on my desk with contempt. I needed to get out into some fresh air. It was nearly 12.30 and the office bar would be open any moment. I never normally drank at lunchtime but today would be an exception.

I took a pint of Fosters on to the terrace outside the bar and sat down in the corner on one of the wooden benches overlooking the Thames and the Houses of Parliament. It was a spring day, the sun was out and a freshening breeze was coming in off the river. But thinking of Sarah in hospital, then about the girl blown to bits in Bosnia, it was difficult to stop myself crying and I had to put my head in my hands before I could compose myself. I knew there was no point in staying at my desk that afternoon. Badger was on the balcony with some colleagues and I made my way over to ask permission for the afternoon off. `Is it anything you can tell me about?' he asked.

`Not at the moment' I replied.

Back at my desk the following morning, I was doing my best to concentrate on the job and was making headway with understanding the plans of the chemical plant. The phone rang. It was personnel department wanting to see me as soon as possible. With a heavy heart, I arranged an appointment for the next day. I didn't know what they wanted but it was never a pleasure seeing them.

Ostensibly, personnel department were responsible for staffing decisions in MI6 and it was they who took the decision to post me to Bosnia. But their manoeuvres, reasons for decisions and policies were always shrouded in intrigue and secrecy, buried in a network of unofficial soundings from line-managers and secret deals over boozy lunches. Because they were career spies with no training in personnel management they operated like a mini secret service within the secret service and could not resist applying their tradecraft to do their temporary job. They treated us like agents, subjecting us to the shallow bluff and false flattery which they were accustomed to use with Nigerian generals and Brazilian governors. Personnel did not even allow us to read or countersign the minutes of our own interviews with them, yet these notes formed an important part of our personal records, upon which key posting decisions were taken. This secrecy gave carte blanche for a personnel officer to make or break a fellow officer's career as there was no check against glaring personality clashes, favouritism or cronyism. The general mistrust of personnel department was exacerbated by the rapid turnover of staff in the job; they could post themselves to the best overseas jobs as soon as they became available.

It was therefore with trepidation that I took the lift up to the eighth floor to meet my new personnel officer. Because of his small stature and aggressive self-promotion, his previous department had nicknamed him `Poison Dwarf', after a character in a popular computer game.

`What were you doing out on the terrace the other day?' PD/2's voice was accusatory, belligerent. He skipped through the normal pleasantries without any conviction and obviously he had carefully planned the ambush. `You were seen out there, drinking a beer on your own, ignoring everybody. Are you interested in your job? Do you want to work here?' After such a gratuitously unpleasant attack, I could not bring myself to talk to Poison Dwarf about Sarah. Even if he did feign sympathy and understanding, it would not be welcome. `Is there anything you wish to discuss with me?'

`No, not at all,' I replied disinterestedly.

`Well, I've just got your SAF covering your time in Bosnia. P4 has given you a Box 4, and frankly I am not surprised. Your performance was dismal.' Poison Dwarf tossed the brown manilla staff appraisal form down on to the coffee-table between us. `Read it, and explain yourself,' he ordered.

Reading the report left me sickened and let down by String Vest. When he visited me in Bosnia, he made no adverse comment about my performance, and his report reeked of a set-up. He went out of his way to find criticisms of my performance and ignored all the good work that I had done, making a great issue about my failure to wear a necktie during the VIP meeting with Karadzic.

`I find it incredible that you didn't wear a tie,' grumbled Poison Dwarf in the background.

I chose to ignore him and pressed on with String Vest's vitriol. He heavily criticised me for failing to visit and debrief DONNE in Sarajevo after a crucial meeting of the Bosnian-Muslim leadership. Undoubtedly DONNE would probably have provided some useful CX on the meeting, but String Vest conveniently ignored the closure of Sarajevo airport and the impossibility of reaching the city overland. I'd had a rough deal by comparison with my IONEC colleagues who were still preparing for their first posts. Spencer was on German language training for assignment to a four-man station in Vienna. Castle, as ever with an eye on his bank balance and living standards, was lined up for a posting to Geneva where even the junior officer received a substantial house with swimming pool and a generous living allowance, and was on a year-long French course. Barking had elected to become an Arab specialist and was on a two-year Arabic course in Cairo. Forton was also learning French in preparation for a post to Brussels, Bart was learning Hungarian and Hare was learning Spanish in preparation for the number two job in Chile. None of them were yet in post, and even when they arrived, they would not be expected to do much more during their first six months than learn the ropes of the local community. The contrast with my own posting was stark but String Vest had not made the slightest concession.

The report reeked of a stitch-up by personnel and had probably been orchestrated by the devious Fowlecrooke, but I could never prove anything. My best response was just to put the incident behind me and work hard in my new job in PTCP section. Badger was an honest and ethical boss and Fowlecrooke would never dare pressure him to mark me down.

I got up and left Poison Dwarf's office, hoping that he would soon thrust his way into a good overseas posting so that I wouldn't have to deal with him again.

On joining PTCP section, I found the number of telephone intercepts they ran eye-opening. Usually there would be two or three FLORIDA reports landing in my in-tray every day and that was just for the projects I worked on. Other officers in the section, working on different projects, received many reports which I did not see. The number of telephone warrants MI6 had could be gauged from the size of UKZ, the section responsible for transcribing the intercepts. Based in an office at 60 Vauxhall Bridge Road, abbreviated to VBR in the service, UKZ numbered around 20 officers in total, of which the buxom Debbie was one. They worked closely with OND, a detachment of vetted British Telecom engineers seconded to MI6 to set up the intercepts. Each UKZ officer was a talented linguist, often the master of five or six difficult languages, and worked at state-of-the-art computers much admired by visiting liaison services. On a good day, they could process 20 or so conversations, though less if the language was difficult or the take quality poor.

Under the terms of the 1975 IOCA (Interception of Communications Act) a warrant should be given only if the target is breaking UK law or if the interception yields intelligence. Under these terms, I felt no compunction about reading the transcripts of an Iranian terrorist or a Russian intelligence officer. But we had many intercepts running which did not fall into either category. Even our intercepts on Kiddie and Constantine were not within its spirit - they would break UK law only if they exported proliferation material from the country, and never once did we issue a CX report as a result of one of their telephone transcriptions. Perhaps what they were doing was slightly amoral but it was not our job to pass judgement on that. Unlike every other country in the western world, warrants for telephone intercepts in Britain are signed not by a judge but by the Home Secretary or Foreign Secretary, explaining why the intelligence services could obtain so many warrants.

MI6 abused the privilege of the IOCA in other ways too. The transcribers in VBR were supposed to ignore personal chit-chat and condense only relevant operational intelligence into the pink FLORIDA reports for distribution to Vauxhall Cross. This obligation enabled MI6 successfully to persuade the Treasury that it was necessary to keep the transcribers isolated in VBR, rather than incorporating them into the new building. Nevertheless, one day a colleague threw a pink FLORIDA report on my desk, chuckling, `Have a good laugh at this!' The target was a transvestite in his spare time and the FLORIDA reported his intimate conversation, line by line, with his boyfriend. Admittedly, it was an amusing document but it added nothing to our understanding of the operation and was a clear breach of the act.

Meanwhile BELLHOP had just taken a new and interesting twist. Badger, as overall head of the operation, was responsible for its coordination with foreign liaison services. The extent to which information on the operation was shared depended on the perceived trustworthiness of the other intelligence service and the extent to which they could bring to the table useful intelligence of their own. MI6 were always warm and cordial with CIA liaison because the Americans had such fabulous resources. Badger's relationship with the DST on BELLHOP was also good and they cooperated energetically if they were asked to help out. But Badger could never establish the same level of easy cooperation with Mossad. It was always a puzzle why they were so uncooperative, for we expected them to be keenly interested in penetrating the attempts of Iran, their most feared enemy, to obtain chemical weapons. But meetings with them were tense affairs, with little given away by either side. The section suspected that Mossad had another hidden agenda that we were not privy to. This suspicion was reinforced when Badger showed them copies of the weapons plant that we had obtained from the search of Kiddie at Stansted. They feigned interest, but it was not convincing and Badger came away suspicious that the Israelis already had their own copies.

Further clues came from the Warsaw station. Examination of the plans by MOD experts established that the plant was an old Polish design, a relic from their Cold War chemical weapons programme. Badger asked H/WAR to find out how the plans could have fallen into Manbar's hands. The Polish intelligence service was restructuring from a KGB-like secret police into a western-leaning European-style intelligence service, but the rebuilding was not complete. Many old-guard officers were too steeped in the Cold War to trust western intelligence officers and H/WAR had a rocky relationship with them at best. They would not even admit that the plans were of Polish origin, despite H/WAR's assurances that acknowledgement of a defunct chemical weapons programme would not be used as political ammunition by the West.

Polish intelligence did, however, provide an important clue. They made available their surveillance reports on a Polish-Jewish businessman, known to have Mossad links, who had cultivated a close relationship with the senior civil servant in charge of Poland's `chemical defence programme', double-speak for their chemical weapons programme. Reading between the lines, the implication was that the plans for the plant had been passed from the official to the Jewish businessman, and then to Mossad, with the tacit compliance of Polish intelligence. Now the reason for Mossad's less-than-enthusiastic reception of our copies of the plans was clear. As Badger had suspected, they already had them.

Other interesting parts of a giant jigsaw puzzle were starting to fall into place. We had never been sure where Manbar had obtained the equipment list for the plant - it might have come from Fahd, but transcripts of Manbar's conversations with Fahd suggested that Manbar had them before Fahd. As they used veiled conversation, codewords, and spoke in Farsi, we couldn't be completely sure. At around the same time, Manbar had several discreet meetings with Mossad officers in the Israeli embassy in Paris. The only theory that stitched all the pieces together was that Mossad were, for motives not yet clear to us, using Manbar to deal indirectly with the Iranians. The key to pinning down what was going on was Manbar and we needed to find out a lot more about his movements and activities than we could get from the transcripts provided by the DST.

Badger decided to target Andrea, Manbar's personal secretary. She was an attractive 40-year-old German divorcee who had worked for Manbar for four or five years, and Badger asked the DST to try to recruit her. She was on their territory, so it would be rude not to let them have first crack. MI6 avoids honey-trap approaches, recognising that sexual attraction is too complex to predict or control, but the DST were not so subtle. Andrea had lunch every day in the same bistro, so they sent down a male officer to try to pick her up. That night's telephone transcripts were of her complaining to her mother in Germany about an over-perfumed Frenchman who seemed to think that he was god's gift to women pestering her over lunch. The embarrassed DST gigolo claimed lamely in his contact report that she must be a lesbian.

Meanwhile, I was labouring in my cover job as a clerical worker in the offices of Bari Trading. The work was stifling but my cultivation of Constantine was progressing. Over cups of tea in the office, a lunch or two at the nearby Hilton and the occasional pint, he accepted and trusted me. Nibbling at the bait, at each meeting he asked more and more questions about the extent of my knowledge of chemicals equipment.

We knew from telephone transcripts that Constantine kept a copy of the plans in the locked top drawer of his desk. Once I saw him take them out and refer to them in a conversation with Kiddie. Later that evening, back in the office, I read the transcript and learned that they were trying to figure out the specifications of a glass valve, whose number was obscured on the plans. MOD experts in chemical weapons helped me work out the exact specifications of the part and tracked down the companies - one in Germany and two in Switzerland - that could supply it.

A few days later, doing my best to appear interested in a thick sheaf of bills of lading, I was straining to listen in to a Constantine phone conversation with Kiddie. She was doing most of the talking and when Constantine could get in a word edgeways it was to apologise for the slow progress. Eventually, Constantine blurted out `Listen Joyce, I've really done my best on the project but I'm stuck. I know somebody who can help us though, and he's sitting right here in this office.' They conferred for a while longer and after he hung up Constantine called me across. `Hey, Alex, I've a problem you could perhaps help me with.'

`Really?' I replied, trying to sound laconic, and ambled over to his desk where he had laid out the plans.

`What do you make of this?' Constantine asked, eying me hopefully.

They were intimately familiar to me, so I had to feign puzzlement, studying them for a few minutes. `Seems like they're the plans for some kind of chemicals plant. Something corrosive, because of all the glassware. I'd guess it's for something like an aspirin plant,' I proferred.

Constantine looked delighted. `Spot on, but do you know what that part is?' he asked, pointing to the mystery valve. I rattled back its specifications and where it could be sourcd. `You really do know your stuff, don't you?' replied Constantine. `Listen, I've got a friend who needs some help with this project. Would you like to give her a hand?'

`Sure,' I replied, trying my best to hide my glee.

Within minutes Constantine had rung Kiddie back and introduced me over the phone. After a brief chat she invited me to go up to visit her in Girton.

Walking back into the office later that evening, Badger gave me the thumbs up, having already seen the transcript. `Good stuff,' he grinned. `We need to plan the next phase - let's pop out for a breath of fresh air.' This was Badger's euphemism for a cigarette. Smoking was banned in the new office, so smokers were limited to the bar or the fire stairwells.

`If you must,' I sighed with mock exasperation, contemplating the cold, drafty stairwell.

As Badger lit up, we went over the progress made so far. We already had a good idea of what to expect in meeting Kiddie, as we'd been reading her telephone conversations for the past three months and Cambridgeshire SB, one of whose officers was a close friend of her second husband Len Ingles, had provided a helpful report. `Kiddie really depends on Len,' Badger said. `She never does anything without first discussing it with him. If you want to win her trust, you'll also have to win his. Build something into your cover story that will pull him in.'

`I'll go up on a motorbike then,' I suggested. `Len's passionate about bikes: if I turn up on one he'll immediately take an interest.'

My own motorbike: a battered high-mileage Honda Africa Twin, was ruled out by SBO5 as it was registered in my own name, so a few days later I hired a powerful Honda Fireblade from Metropolitan Motorcycles, a dealer opposite Vauxhall Cross in one of the railway viaduct arches that lie under the main south-west line. It was a clear, brisk but sunny February day, and perfect for motorcycling. Speeding up the M11 to Girton, I thought to myself how lucky I was to have such a great job. BELLHOP was going well, Badger was a good boss and the atmosphere in the section was cheerful and friendly, unlike the mistrusting environment of the secretive East European controllerate. The problems in Bosnia were forgotten and I was enjoying socialising more.

Kiddie's personal file was stuffed with SB photographs of her house, so it was easy to find in the pretty village of Girton. She heard my powerful motorbike pull up on her gravel drive and came out of the house to greet me with a friendly handshake. A slightly plump, middle-aged woman, dressed in tight leggings that did not do much for her, she was not a likely person to be the centre of a complicated secret service operation. `I am so glad you've come up, Alex,' she exhorted jollily, `Albert has told me all about you! We've been struggling for months on this project.' Her appearance and voice were so familiar from the file and telephone intercepts that it felt strange to meet her personally, like meeting a famous film star. She ushered me into her study and, over a mug of Nesquick, explained her project. The details were intimately familiar, so I had to fake curiosity and surprise as the story unfolded.

Kiddie moved on to her meeting earlier in the year with Fahd in Amsterdam. `It was so funny, I arrived at the hotel and it was all closed down for cleaning!' she giggled. `I had to go into the closed off area to wait for Mr Fahd!' She even remembered the inconvenient hold up at Stansted airport on her return. `They went through all my knickers, the little perverts. But apparently they were only looking for drugs,' she added obliviously. She was completely unsuspicious of me; as we had hoped, Constantine's recommendation was sufficient for her to trust me. And as we suspected from the telephone transcripts, she was unaware that she was being manipulated by Fahd and Manbar into illegal dealings.

Only half an hour or so into the meeting, Kiddie suggested that I should meet Fahd. `I've been struggling for months with this project, getting nowhere,' she continued. `I'm also really busy with my charity work and I've had enough of travelling. It would be great if you could help out.'

`Sure,' I replied, trying to sound cautiously enthusiastic. `How should we proceed?'

`If you like,' Kiddie replied, `I'll ring him right now and you can talk to him - he told me he would be in Tehran this week.' She reached up to a bookshelf above her desk, pulled out the project file, found Fahd's Tehran number and dialled him up. Unbeknown to her, she was dialling not into Fahd's purported company in Tehran but straight into the headquarters of the Iranian intelligence service, and I couldn't wait to get on the line. Disappointingly, he was not at the office and she just got his ansaphone. `Never mind, we'll call him next time you're up.'

Kiddie talked enthusiastically about her charitable work. She ran a thrift shop in Cambridge and some of the proceeds went to a project to provide schoolbooks to impoverished children in a favela in Rio de Janeiro. I had been planning a trip to Brazil for some time because PTCP section had an Argentine nuclear scientist on the books, codenamed GELATO, who was overdue for his annual debriefing. Her charity work there presented an opportunity to ingratiate myself further with Kiddie: `I'm going out to Rio in a couple weeks on business. Is there anything I could do for your project while I am out there?'

`Sure,' she replied, `there are always things to do.' She described the project enthusiastically and detailed how I could be of assistance. The conversation was interrupted by a popping splutter as an old motorbike pull up outside. `Ah, that must be my husband, Len. Would you like to meet him?'

We went outside to find Len parking up his leaky Triumph and looking admiringly at my Fireblade. `They're fearsome machines,' he grinned, holding out his gloved hand in greeting. `Careful you don't kill yourself.' We chatted for a few minutes about motorcycles while Kiddie busied herself in the kitchen getting a snack together.

We spoke for several more hours in the study over tea and sandwiches, about Fahd, the charity project and motorcycles. By mid-afternoon, Badger's objectives for the first meeting had been met and exceeded. Kiddie and Ingles were taken in by my cover and were keen for me to meet Fahd as soon as possible. We were winding up the meeting when the doorbell rang. Len went out to the hall to answer it and by the hearty greetings the visitors were male. Len poked his head around the door of the living-room where Kiddie and I were sitting. `It's Paul and Roger,' he hissed.

Kiddie stood up urgently. `Quick, follow me,' she whispered conspiratorially, ushering me into the kitchen to leave the sitting-room free for Ingles and his guests. `They're business friends of Len - best you avoid them,' she explained as we bade goodbye at the back door. Unbeknown to her, I knew more about Paul and Roger than she did. They were the SB officers who had been tasked to keep an eye on the family.

Back in London, Badger was delighted that the meeting had gone so well. `Excellent work. I heard Kiddie trying to ring Fahd, shame she couldn't get hold of him,' Badger chuckled. A few days later he chucked another report on my desk. Paul and Roger described me as a `suspicious visitor on a motorbike who Kiddie was obviously keen to hide'.

Because the objective of meeting Kiddie had been accomplished, there was no further need for me to cultivate Constantine. One last visit to Bari Trading was enough to say goodbye to Constantine, Patricia and Fazad, with the excuse that for family reasons I had to return urgently to South America.

GELATO was a nuclear scientist who had worked during the 1970s and '80s on Argentina's nascent nuclear weapon's programme. He was recruited in the mid-'80s by one of the station officers in Buenos Aires and was subsequently run by VCOs. Argentina was regarded as having fairly efficient counter-espionage capabilities, so the debriefing meetings took place in Rio de Janeiro and GELATO was paid a couple of thousand pounds per meeting into a secret account in Luxembourg. He provided some good CX over the years but his usefulness dwindled after Argentina abandoned its nuclear weapons programme at the end of the '80s. My task would be to see him one more time and, assuming he had nothing more useful to offer us, discontinue him. I sent a telegram to Buenos Aires asking the station to notify him via the agreed method - a note slipped into his locker at his country club - that he should ring `David Lindsey', an alias of my predecessor. A couple of days later he rang, the number was patched through to me by the MI6 switchboard and we arranged to meet on the evening of the 12 April 1995 at the Hotel President on Copacabana beach.

The second objective of the trip was to build my credential with Kiddie by visiting the small orphan school in a Rio favela that her charity supported. After several phone calls to Kiddie and to Brazil, I had an appointment for Friday, 21 April, nine days after my meeting with GELATO. `It's hardly worth coming back, between the meetings, is it?' I asked Badger, hopefully.

He laughed, `All right, you can stay out there - just don't get yourself into any trouble. You deserve a break as you've done some good work in the section. Here's your SAF.' Badger tossed over the staff appraisal form that he had just completed for submission to personnel department. I read it with satisfaction. It was glowing with praise for the success of BELLHOP and would be a solid basis to request an overseas posting, though this time a normal posting like the rest of my IONEC colleagues.

The meeting with GELATO in Brazil went smoothly. He wasn't upset to be discontinued, and telephone intercepts showed that the head of the favela orphanage reported my visit positively to Kiddie. The time between the meetings provided an opportunity to explore Rio de Janeiro and the surrounding hills, and to lunch with H/RIO, who told me that there was a vacancy in the station. The job sounded interesting, the location agreeable, so I decided to put in a request on my return to Vauxhall Cross.

Monday, 24 April dawned with spring rain. Waiting their turn at the security doors, there was already an impatient and bedraggled queue of people, folding away umbrellas and overcoats. When my turn came, I slipped my swipe-card down the groove, typed in my PIN code, six-nine-two-one, and awaited the familiar green light. But it flashed an angry red. Presuming that I'd mistyped the PIN, I tried again. Same result. The third attempt, and the intruder alarm went off, lights and sirens bleeping in the guards' watch-room. A couple of guards hurried over, glaring at me suspiciously. I showed my pass through the perspex and they manually unlocked the VIP's side-entrance. A queue of muttering colleagues had built up behind me, awaiting their turn to enter the building, and it was a relief to be admitted. `Are you a member of staff, sir?' asked one of the guards.

`Yes, of course. I'm PTCP/7, staff number 813317.'

The guards led me into their watch-room, tapped my staff number into the computer and studied briefly the resulting message on the screen. `We're sorry, sir, but your pass has been cancelled. We've been told we have to take you up to personnel department.'

The two security guards escorted me across the lobby in front of a crowd of onlookers. Wheeler, back from Moscow, was waiting to go up the lift and studied his shoelaces rather than greet me. Something must be seriously wrong to get dragged up to personnel department in this way, but I had no idea what it could be. My mind raced desperately. Presumably there must be a mistake and soon all the problems would be cleared up, I reassured myself.

The guards escorted me up to the eighth floor where Poison Dwarf was waiting. He led me into his room and bade me to sit down. He didn't mince his words with any pleasantries. `As you know, last time we met I gave you a warning that unless your performance improved, you would not be able to stay in the office. It has not improved, so you are fired.'

The words took a moment to sink in. `How can you make such an absurd claim?' I blurted out when the shock had subsided. `H/PTCP has just given me a glowing SAF.'

Poison Dwarf talked over me, assuring me that the office would find me alternative employment `in the City' but I was too dumbstruck, incredulous and devastated to pay much attention. Poison Dwarf's assured manner made it plain that he was acting with the support of officers above him. There was no point in arguing and the atmosphere rapidly became unpleasant. `My secretary will show you out of the building. Go home and don't come back until we contact you,' Poison Dwarf dismissed me.

Back home, I lay down on my sofa deeply upset and confused. Poison Dwarf had given me no plausible reasons for dismissal and his claim that he had given me a warning was a brazen lie. Badger had just given me a good report, so that could not be the reason. I suspected the devious hand of Fowlecrooke but there was nothing more to do except to wait until personnel department contacted me.

A couple of desperate days later, one of the secretaries from personnel rang up and told me to come in for an interview with the head of the department, Julian Dimmock. I had never previously met HPD, but knew that he was an ex-marine with no work experience outside MI6, and that he still carried a lot of military baggage. He was fond of the city uniform of loud pin-stripe suit and clicky shoes and the office rumour was that he was after a job as personnel manager with one of the banks that employed ex-MI6 officers in return for titbits of economic intelligence. He wasn't an ideal person to be in charge of personnel department, but MI6 often appointed ex-military officers to the post, mistakenly believing that a few years in the army was all the training needed for the job. Still, I supposed that he couldn't be worse than Poison Dwarf and Fowlecrooke.

`So what are your reasons for sacking me?' I asked belligerently as soon as we had shaken hands.

`Why on earth do you want any reasons?' Dimmock replied smoothly as he settled into the low seat behind the coffee-table. `It won't do you any good, and in any case somebody like you won't have any problems finding a good job in the City.'

`Under UK law, you have to give reasons for a dismissal,' I replied, firmly sticking to my ground. The afternoon spent in Kensington library looking up employment law was not wasted.

`Your personnel officer, PD/2, gave you the reasons for your dismissal at your last meeting,' Dimmock huffed.

`No he didn't, he gave me none at all,' I replied with conviction. Dimmock was cornered, and shifted uncomfortably. `Give me the reasons, right now,' I pressed home my advantage.

Dimmock thought for a moment. `You are motivated by challenge.'

I ridiculed his meaningless excuse. `What does that mean, and why is that bad?'

He couldn't reply. `You lack commitment,' he claimed.

`Oh yeah, sure,' I replied sarcastically. `So that's why you posted me to Bosnia.'

Once again he couldn't substantiate it with any evidence or explain why it should be a reason to sack me. He dreamed up another. `You are not a team player,' he claimed.

`So how come P4 gave me glowing praise for the relationship I built with 602 troop in Bosnia, then?' I replied angrily.

Dimmock squirmed as he dreamed up more excuses, but like the others they were vague, meaningless, easily overturned by me and completely unsubstantiated by any of my line managers' reports. Dimmock's bluster was based on some hearsay from Poison Dwarf or Fowlecrooke and he had not thought through the issues for himself.

`I want these reasons committed to writing, which is my right under employment law,' I demanded.

`You know we can't possibly give you anything on paper, it would break the Official Secrets Act,' Dimmock replied weakly.

But I stood my ground. `I want them tomorrow.'

`All right, I'll see what I can do,' Dimmock meekly agreed.

But I was not finished. `And I suggest you do it properly, because you've dismissed me illegally and I intend to take MI6 to an employment tribunal.'

Dimmock looked really appalled. After a moment for the implications to sink in, he replied, `We really hope you won't do that. It would cause a lot of bad publicity for us. In any case, what would be the point? Even if you won, we wouldn't give you your job back. Nobody can tell the Chief of MI6 what to do.'

This last sentence of Dimmock's was perceptive, though he didn't realise it himself. It was this belief, which he held in common with many other senior officers in MI6, that was the reason behind the patently unfair dismissal and the cause of the long disagreement between me and MI6 that was to follow. Dimmock genuinely believed that MI6 was above the laws of the land. There were mechanisms such as the submissions process that conferred token accountability to the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister, but to the likes of Dimmock, these were just minor bureaucratic formalities that needed to be completed in order to carry out important operations. Democratic oversight did not apply to something as trivial as employment law. In his eyes, MI6 had no obligation to give any warning that my job was in jeopardy, or to provide any reasons justifying my dismissal. He expected me to take the sacking on the chin, not complain, not demand any explanation, and meekly accept their offer of help with a stiff upper lip. `We'll get you a job in the City,' blustered Dimmock feebly as I stood up angrily.

`Keep your feeble ambitions to yourself,' I shouted, storming out.

Dimmock picked the wrong person to impose his arbitrary authority on. There was no way that I would let MI6 get away with such a casual abuse of power and I resolved then and there to fight them to the end. It was not just because I liked my job and had no interest in working in the City. It was also a matter of principle. I knew that if I did not fight them, they would do the same thing to somebody else, then somebody else.

A few days later, personnel department allowed me back into the office for an hour to make a final appeal to the Chief himself, David Spedding. Dimmock assured me that it would be an impartial appeal and that Spedding had not been briefed about the background to my case. But it was clear from the first words of the meeting that this was a lie. Spedding was already fully briefed, the decision was firmly cut and dried, and I had no chance at all of getting it overturned. Spedding dismissed me with a wave of the hand, adding, `I understand personnel department have already found you some interesting possibilities in the City.'

My perfunctory firing was a classic example of the type of behind-closed-doors MI6 decision that happens regularly in the service due to the ultimate lack of accountability of the Chief. As Dimmock had pompously pointed out, the Chief answers to nobody. He never has to justify a decision, no matter how crass or stupid, to a parliamentary select committee or to the Foreign Secretary or Prime Minister, and so has no incentive to scrutinise recommendations that are passed up to him. His non-existent upwards accountability means he needs only to cultivate the support of power-brokers below him. It is expedient to accept recommendations where they are politically easy, such as the dismissal of a junior officer, so that he has a stronger power base for more difficult internal decisions. Just as in a dictatorship, this shoddy decision-making cascades down the power structure, and explains how the decision to dismiss me had been taken. Poison Dwarf decided he wanted me out, wrote a recommendation to Fowlecrooke, who signed it off and passed it up the chain to Dimmock. He in turn signed it off without bothering to form his own opinion by interviewing me and passed the decision up to the highest levels of the service. Like many ex-military people, Dimmock did not know the difference between `leadership' and `rigidity' and by the time he actually met me for himself, he dared not reverse his decision.

I left Spedding's office frustrated and angry, realising that this last chance was just a sham. I waited in the corridor outside his office for the guards who were supposed to escort me out of the building, but after a few minutes I realised they had forgotten. My first instinct was to do my duty and make my way directly home. But rebellion was brewing inside me. `Bastards,' I thought. They hadn't even let me clear out my desk and say goodbye to Badger. `Sod 'em, I'll go and see him whatever.' Brazenly walking through the centre of the building to Badger's office was too risky - somebody might collar me. It was nearly 11 a.m., so Badger would be having his morning `breath of fresh air' on the fire escape. Down on the ground floor by the gym, I dodged into the fire-escape stairwells and made my way through the clammy connecting tunnel to the PTCP fire-escape.

Badger was there having a cigarette and, unusually, was alone. `Hey, how are you doing?' he greeted me enthusiastically. `I'm really sorry about what they did to you. As soon as I heard, I rushed up to personnel to persuade Dimmock he was making a mistake, but he wouldn't listen,' Badger explained angrily. `They've ruined BELLHOP,' Badger continued. `Without you, we've no choice but to abandon it. And we just had a big breakthrough. Kiddie phoned Fahd yesterday. He wanted you to go to Vienna to meet him.' Badger threw down his cigarette stub with annoyance. `And Dimmock said something very strange to me,' he added, `he said that they were very worried about having a potential Aldridge Ames in the service.'

`What?' I asked incredulously. `What the hell has Ames got to do with me?'

`I really don't know,' replied Badger sympathetically `he wouldn't elaborate.'

We spoke for a few more minutes, but I was struggling to hold back tears so I bade goodbye to Badger and checked out of the office for the last time.

Ames was a CIA officer who had recently been arrested in America and sentenced to life imprisonment for systematically betraying secrets to Russian intelligence over many years in return for millions of dollars. To this day I don't know whether Dimmock's comment was supposed to imply that I was some form of potential security risk, but it was a deeply unpleasant and unprofessional comment to make, and for which he had absolutely no justification.

Personnel department gave me three months' pay after the sacking. In that time they expected me to come to terms with my dismissal, identify a new career and find a suitable job. I had a mortgage to pay and other financial commitments, and no idea what to do for an alternative career. Even if I were to lamely accept their advice and work in the City, a prospect that appalled me, it would mean starting at the bottom of an unfamiliar and considerably less interesting career, with a much reduced salary. I would accept such misfortune without complaint if my dismissal was merited, but it wasn't.

I went to see Dimmock and made my feelings clear but, secure in the knowledge that his decision was unquestionable, Dimmock had little time for my complaints. `PD/PROSPECT has already lined up some interviews for you in the City,' he urged, `but if you really must insist on complaining, here's the Staff Counseller's details.' He handed over me the business card of Sir Christopher France with undisguised exasperation.

The Staff Counsellor was a vetted senior civil servant, supposedly independent, to whom members of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ could take complaints or concerns about the conduct of the services, which he was then empowered to `investigate'. The mechanism was supposed to allow members of the services to let off steam internally, thus removing the need to go to the courts. In reality, it was little more than window-dressing to fend off criticisms from legislators. Dimmock showed his exasperation because he knew that my complaint could not change the decision but would cause him extra paperwork. Nevertheless, I made an appointment to see France in his Whitehall office the next day, and he listened to my complaint patiently, concernedly noting details. I felt that at least I had a sympathetic ally.

France invited me back to his office a month later to give me the result of his investigation. `I went to see the Chief,' he announced loftily, `and Sir David Spedding assured me that his personnel department had done everything they possibly could for you.'

`But didn't you ask to see the papers I told you about? Personnel department's own minutes directly contradict that claim,' I replied with barely contained exasperation.

`Oh, I could not possibly ask to see the papers of the Secret Intelligence Service!' France replied with horrified surprise. `And in any case, to do so would be to doubt the word of Sir David,' he added loftily.

I left the meeting close to tears and with anger welling up inside me. It was not that the procedure had proved ineffective: that I had expected. It was just that France, who at the first meeting had appeared genuinely concerned at my mistreatment, had then dismissed my version of events after no more than a quick gin and tonic with the Chief, and had effectively branded me a liar. Unwittingly, France drove the wedge between me and MI6 deeper.

The only way now to seek an independent judgement of the legality of their actions was to go outside the service, and that meant going to an employment tribunal. A quick search of the telephone directory turned up a small law firm in north London, Bahsi and Partners, that specialised in employment disputes and advertised themselves with the banner `NO WIN, NO FEE'. This pledge was attractive because my small savings were not sufficient to pay lawyers. Satisfyingly, the partners all had Farsi names and I smiled at the thought of Dimmock receiving a disclosure demand from an Iranian lawyer. A quick phone call and we'd arranged a meeting. Two days later they had sent MI6 a preliminary notification letter, requesting copies of all my personnel papers.

My hunch was correct. Dimmock rang me at home. `We can't possibly have you taking us to court, we'd have the whole of Fleet Street outside the court building,' he whined. `Why don't you come in to see the outplacement officer, PD/PROSPECT? He's got you a really well-paid possibility in the City.'

`I've told you already I'm not the slightest bit interested in working in the bloody City, so please stop imposing your own career regrets on me,' I replied angrily. `You bastards sacked me illegally and it is my right to take you to an employment tribunal.' Dimmock rang off impatiently.

Dimmock wrote to me a few days later, now addressing me as `Mr Tomlinson' instead of `Richard'. They'd probably already started tapping my phone too, I thought to myself. Dimmock wanted me to change my law firm to something `more established' and offered to pay my legal fees. On the face of it, it was quite a generous offer but inevitably there was a hidden agenda behind personnel department's uncharacteristic platitude. Another search of the phone book, this time looking for expensive-looking companies with big adverts, turned up the prestigious city firm of Herbert Smiths. The efficient receptionist put me in touch with John Farr, their partner specialising in employment law. Over the next few weeks, we put together a detailed application to an employment tribunal and submitted it to the tribunal centre in Norwich. My last paycheque from the office, for the month of August, arrived a few days later. It would take three or four months for the application to come to courts, so my limited savings would have to support me in the interim. I was not too concerned - my case for unfair dismissal was straightforward and when I inevitably won MI6 would be forced to reinstate me with full back-pay.

My optimism was na‹ve and I underestimated the deviousness of personnel. Farr called me up at home and asked me to go into his offices near Liverpool Street station to see him.

`There's been an interesting development,' he said, from the other side of his designer desk. `They've used a Public Interest Immunity certificate to stop your application.'

`What?' I cried angrily. `How the hell can they justify that?' PII certificates are a legal mechanism - a sort of `get out of jail free' card - that MI6 occasionally use to get them out of difficult legal situations. They had last used one to cover up their failings in the Matrix Churchill and Astra scandals. The certificates, obtained from the Foreign Secretary via a submission, allow them to block the release to the courts of any documents that they assert could `damage national security'. Farr explained that he had been visited the previous day by three legal officers from SIS, who had served the PII certificate on him, gravely explaining that any discussion of my case in court, even in closed session with no access to the public gallery, would be `gravely prejudicial to national security' and that they had been `reluctantly forced to ask the Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, to sign the PII certificate'.

This was a disgraceful and cowardly lie. My personnel papers contained no more secrets than the papers of an employee of the gas board. Discussion of the circumstances of my dismissal by responsible lawyers in a closed court with no journalists or members of the public present could not endanger national security in any way. The real reason MI6 had obtained the PII certificate was that they knew that they would lose their case. The ludicrous reasons that Dimmock had dreamt up for dismissing me, and which I had ambushed him into committing to paper, would have been roundly ridiculed in a court. Poison Dwarf would have been obliged to admit the dishonesty of his claim to have warned me that my job was under threat and MI6 would have been forced into an embarrassing climb down.

I left the meeting with Farr completely disgusted with MI6, my resolve to fight them undiminished but now tinged with growing anger. Moreover, MI6 told Farr that they would no longer pay his fees after he had presented a first interim bill for œ19,000, so I would have to find another lawyer.

On the IONEC, a guest-speaker from MI5's counter-subversives branch had lectured us sneeringly about the activities of `Liberty', a civil rights lobby group based in south-east London. Amongst other issues, they campaigned against excessive state secrecy, lack of accountability of the intelligence services and the misuse of PII certificates to cover up government cock-ups. Their principal lawyer, John Wadham, agreed to see me after a nervous call from a public phonebox. It was with some trepidation that I knocked on the door of their slightly dilapidated premises at 21 Tabard Street.

`There is no legal remedy available to you now except to appeal to the IST (Intelligence Services Tribunal),' Wadham explained over a cup of tea. `This is a panel of three senior judges who've got the power to examine the legality of actions by MI6.' The tribunal was set up shortly after the avowal process in 1992 in order to give MI6 token public accountability. In theory, any member of the public could make a complaint about illegal activities of MI6 and the tribunal was obliged to investigate. But there were many restrictions on its powers and loopholes that MI6 could exploit, and it was little more than a fig-leaf to give token respectability to the accountability supposedly conferred by avowal. `They might agree to investigate a case of unfair dismissal,' Wadham advised sceptically, `but your chances of winning would be nil whatever the merits of your case. They've never once found in favour of a plaintiff.'

It was my only remedy, so I gave it a go depsite Wadham's pessimism. Unusually, the IST requested to interview me personally and appointed a meeting in a committee-room at the Old Bailey towards the end of October. The panel, consisting of appeal court judge Lord Justice Simon Brown, a Scottish Sheriff and a senior solicitor, were seated imposingly at a heavy raised table, with thick dossiers in front of them, presumably the documents that MI6 had submitted to them about me. The court clerk bade me sit down at a desk a dignified distance from the panel. Lord Justice Brown, the chairman, spoke first, explaining their powers of investigation and outlining their understanding of my case. It was several minutes before I was invited to speak. `Can I be assured that you will take the decision only on papers that I have seen myself?' I asked, aware of Wadham's warning.

Lord Justice Simon Brown paused for reflection before replying. `There are indeed papers here that you have not seen and will not see,' he gravely admitted, indicating the thick pile of papers on which they were taking their decision. He was clearly uncomfortable with this basic betrayal of a fundamental legal principle. `I am sorry to say that we cannot be more transparent. We can only work within the terms of the Act.' The huge pile of papers that they were examining, far more than personnel department had ever shown to me, was not encouraging. Personnel had probably rewritten most it, knowing I could not contest its veracity. My prospects of success were non-existent.

In November, I took a short holiday in South Africa to visit my uncle and aunt and to follow some of the England cricket tour of the country. I could scarcely afford the trip but I'd made the commitment before my dismissal. Later I learned that my trip had cost MI6 far more. Concerned that in my disaffected state I might be vulnerable to recruitment by South African counter-intelligence, they pulled my friend Milton out of the country and cancelled the whole undercover operation. In fact, the South Africans made no approach and I wouldn't have cooperated if they had done. But rather than just interviewing me on my return, MI6 wrote off many thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money.

The tribunal were unable to give a date or even a time-frame for their decision. Over the coming months Dimmock wrote several letters urging me to accept help from PD/PROSPECT, but they went straight in the bin. Conceding to their help would be like accepting a set of false teeth from somebody who had just kicked my face in. Besides, even if they dragged me kicking and screaming into one of their tame companies in the City, my previous experience in management consultancy had been so disastrous and unpleasant that I would not last a week.

I had a lot of spare time on my hands and little cash. The little outstanding DIY tasks in my flat and garden were soon completed. Having no money curtailed my enjoyment of London's nightlife, my sacking cut me off from mixing with colleagues in the office, and unemployment left me feeling ostracised from outside friends. I needed to find a new activity to keep myself occupied. By chance, walking down King's Road one afternoon I bumped into a former girlfriend and together we spontaneously bought a set of rollerblades and tried them out in Hyde Park. After an hour of cuts and bruises, she gave up and never used them again. But the sport hooked me and thereafter every waking hour was spent blading around the myriad paths of Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens and Regent's Park. I soon fell in with a gang of hardcore bladers who were also rarely employed, amongst them Shaggy and Winston, two dread-locked black guys who had been blading together since childhood. They were an eclectic bunch, but good fun and a refreshing change from MI6 staff. However, my money could not last forever.