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MONDAY, 30 MARCH 1992
CENTURY HOUSE, LONDON

`Interesting, if true.' The biro had run out of ink at the `f' and the anonymous author had not bothered to get a new pen, scratching the remaining letters into the paper. I was looking at the `customer comments' box at the bottom of my first CX report, which had just come back to my in-tray. I issued it a week earlier after debriefing a small-time British businessman who had just returned from a business trip to the Ural mountains. He'd been shown some industrial diamonds that his Russian contact said were made in a controlled explosion, the same method which I had experimented with unsuccessfully in South Africa. Back in Century House, I mentioned it to H/SOV/OPS. `I'd write that up as a CX report,' he said, holding his head slightly to one side in affected sincerity. I didn't greatly trust Fowlecrooke and suspected that his advice was more to make me feel useful than for any genuine need for such minor intelligence.

I wrote it up as a CX report, classified `TOP SECRET, UK EYES A', and sent it off to R/CEE/D, the requirements officer responsible for issuing technical reports from the East European controllerate. He graded it `two star' and forwarded it to the relevant desk in the DIS. A two-star grading meant that the information was only of minor interest and would be seen only by a junior desk officer; a three-star might influence the thinking of a head of a Foreign Office or Ministry of Defence department; a four-star would perhaps be seen by a permanent secretary of a Whitehall department, and a five-star grading would be seen by the government at cabinet level. Most of MI6's CX output got two-star gradings, and the reports were usually returned by sceptical and largely disinterested customers bearing the `interesting, if true' dismissal. Considerable store was placed on an officer's ability to extract high-grade CX from a source, and every overseas station and head office UK station was given annual CX production targets. Setting targets in this way was open to abuse, since MI6 itself judged the star-grading of each report and its accuracy was dependent on the integrity of the officer who drafted it. As in any walk of life, the scruples of MI6 officers varied. Some had reputations as `CX embellishers' and others pressured R officers to increase the grading of their reports. The problem was widespread, but few cheats were exposed. One who was went down in MI6 folklore.

During the '70s, when Britain was negotiating its entry to the European Common Agricultural Policy, the tactics and negotiating position of the French government were an important requirement. The head of the Paris station, H/PAR, made his number two, PAR/1, responsible for this intelligence and he successfully recruited an agent in the French agricultural ministry. Soon a steady stream of two- and three-star CX started flowing. A few eyebrows were raised in Century House at the financial demands of PAR/1's new informant, but his productivity gave good value for money. Over the next 18 months, this agent became the mainstay of intelligence production by the Paris station. When PAR/1's two-year tour in Paris came to an end, the handover to his successor at first went smoothly. But every time a meeting was arranged to introduce the star agent, PAR/1 would announce some excuse to cancel it. Eventually Head Office became suspicious and an SBO (Security Branch Officer) was sent out to Paris to interview PAR/1. He cracked and confessed to what his colleagues had started to fear. Like Graham Greene's agent in Our Man In Havana, he had invented the agent and all the meetings, fabricated the CX and pocketed the agent's salary. He was dismissed from the service, though no charges were brought. Fearing adverse publicity if the fraud was exposed, MI6 bought his silence with a pay-out and used its contacts to arrange a job for him in the Midland Bank. Eventually he rose to become one of the most prominent figures in the City of London.

I got up to see if Anna, in the office next door, wanted some tea. She was typing up a YZ (highly classified) telegram for Fowlecrooke, which she covered discreetly as I entered - being a probationer, I could not be privy to such information. Anna had followed her brother and sister into the service; MI6 likes to recruit from the same family as it simplifies the vetting process.

`Has that telegram to Moscow gone off?' I asked.

`You only gave it a ROUTINE status - it'll go this afternoon,' she replied without taking her eyes off the computer screen. `I've got something more important to do for Mr Fowlecrooke, he'll be furious if I don't get it done immediately,' she added. Rick Fowlecrooke, a former army officer who had no work experience outside the military and MI6, had specially requested me for SOV/OPS, rather na‹vely imagining that the few hated months I had spent in management consultancy would give me invaluable insight into the Russian economy. Luckily he was soon moving to a new posting and Anna and I would have another line manager.

I made the tea, sat down at my desk and looked out from my perch on the 13th floor at the panoramic view of London, from Canary Wharf in the east to the Oval cricket ground in the south. The spectacular view contrasted with the otherwise dingy office. The walls were covered with maps of the Soviet Union, pinned above grey, chest-high steel safes, the only colour provided by a sickly spider plant. The battered safes were plastered with peeling stickers exhorting us to ensure that they were securely locked. The need for security had been drummed into us on the IONEC and every evening before leaving the office we had to ensure all our documents and every scrap of paper - no matter how innocuous - were securely locked away. The security guards diligently inspected each room every night and if they found even the slightest lapse the miscreant was issued a written `Security Breach Warning'. Paul, a GS clerk who shared my office, got `breached' one evening for leaving a monogrammed shirt on the coat hook after an evening football match. Three `breaches' in a year incurred a formal reprimand by personnel department which could mean being ruled out of consideration for overseas posts.

I switched on my ATHS (Automatic Telegram Handling System) terminal and waited for the cogs to start turning. ATHS was a neolithic internal networked computer system, designed especially for MI6 at great expense. Its development fell so far behind schedule that it was out of date when it eventually came into service in early 1990. It was supposed to allow officers to send and receive telegrams directly from their desks without the inefficiency of using a secretary and paper-based system. Unfortunately the word processing system was so cumbersome that only computer-literate junior officers used it, and the message handling system was so slow and unreliable that it was often quicker to resort to old-fashioned pen and paper. After what seemed like an eternity, the screen warmed up and I flicked through to see if there were any telegrams for me. There were none, so I would have to find something else to do. Such were the early days in SOV/OPS. The novelty was interesting but the slow routine was anticlimactic after the hurly-burly of the IONEC. Every few days I would debrief an agent - mostly British businessmen with interests in Russia - then spend the next day writing up the ensuing paperwork. So far, I had produced only the one rather obscure CX report. My contribution did not feel as if it was vital to the execution of British foreign policy - unless we were trying to do some paper-exporting nation a favour.

I joined the East European controllerate in changing times in both the controllerate and the geographical area that we covered. The Berlin wall had recently fallen and news bulletins were filled every day with the political break-up of the Soviet Union and the realignment of the former Sovbloc countries with the West. Changes swept through the old Soviet administrative machine and even the KGB had not escaped. Under the leadership of Yevgenniy Primakov the old directorates were reorganised into two new organisations. The SVR was responsible for gathering oveseas intelligence, roughly equivalent to MI6. The FSB was responsible for counter-intelligence, the approximate analogue of the British MI5.

In Century House this news was received with satisfaction at having defeated the old enemy, tempered with caution. MI6 had to reorganise its strategy in response and one of the first changes was to enter into liaison relationships with the SVR and FSB, something that would have been unthinkable only a few years earlier. Both sides recognised that dialogue would be mutually beneficial, so H/MOS, John Redd, was `declared' to the SVR and a programme of regular liaison meetings started. There were still more requirements for intelligence on Russia than on any other country, but their scope changed. The greater political openness brought by `Glasnost' meant that information which would once have been regarded as intelligence was now openly available. It was now fairly easy to find out from public sources what a particular factory in, say, the Ural mountains manufactured. What MI6 remained interested in was at a higher level; in intelligence parlance, the CX `threshold' was higher.

As a probationer in the service, I would not be indoctrinated into the most sensitive Russian casework, known as `YZ' cases, which were the source of most of this high-grade intelligence. I had to start at the bottom, with the consolation that even the most productive cases sometimes had the most humble and unlikely beginnings.

It was with this in mind that Stuart Russel, who had just replaced Fowlecrooke, developed my first serious task. Russel had served in Lisbon, Stockholm and most recently Moscow, and was now at the crucial stage of his career where he had to mark himself out to be a high-flyer (otherwise his career could peter out in a series of unimportant Head Office jobs or postings to sleepy stations in Africa and the Far East until compulsory retirement at 55). He had his eye on heading the Vienna station. It was one of the biggest and most important MI6 stations and would be an opportunity to prove his potential as a high-flyer. But first, he had to sort out SOV/OPS after the departure of the ineffective Fowlecrooke.

Russel called me into his office. He had enlivened the grim civil service decor with oil paintings and souvenirs acquired on his overseas postings, and from his desk he enjoyed a splendid view over Lambeth Palace and up the Thames. The new SOV/OPS chief was reading a telegram from John Redd, recording the first liaison meeting with his FSB counterpart. The first task in a fresh liaison relationship is to establish mutual trust, and Redd and his counterpart had done this by swapping details of suspect intelligence officers which each side had identified over the past decade. `They identified me while I was there and nicknamed me the ``Silver Fox'',' giggled Russel. Partly the nickname was attributable to his thick, smooth silver-grey hair, but partly it was because of his cunning tradecraft while under surveillance.

Discarding the telegram into his out-tray, Russel outlined my assignment. `I want you to devise an operation to sift through Russian defence journalists, and recruit one with good access to military secrets,' he explained. `As you know, journalists do not normally make good agents because their inclination is to publish what they know which instantly makes it unusable as CX, but they sometimes have good relationships with key decision makers which occasionally gives them access to confidential information.' Russel's objective was for me to track down such a journalist and cultivate him. `I suggest that you set up a fake newsagency in London, use that to make the initial contact, then see where that takes you,' Russel advised. `And go and see NORTHSTAR - he'll have lots of ideas for you, I am sure,' he added as an afterthought.

NORTHSTAR was the codename for Mikhael Butkhov, a former KGB officer who had defected to MI6 a year earlier. He had worked under cover in Norway as a TASS journalist, so knew many of the genuine Russian journalists. Hopefully he would be able to provide a long list of names to get the operation kicking.

I borrowed a maroon Ford Sierra from Century House's underground garage, one of a fleet of similarly uninspiring models in inconspicuous colours, falsely registered so they could not be traced to MI6. It was a two-hour drive to the pleasant commuter village of Pangbourne, just outside Reading. NORTHSTAR had certainly benefited materially from his defection. His modern four-bedroom detached house was set in a spacious garden, and parked in the drive were a new Rover Sterling and his girlfriend Maria's sporty red Citro‰n BX19 Gti, its dents and scrapes suggesting she had not mastered driving on Britain's clogged roads.

`Come on in,' called NORTHSTAR in impeccable English with only a distant trace of a Russian accent. He ushered me into the livingroom and bade me sit down on a black leather sofa. The room was dominated by an expensive television and hi-fi system and was sparsely furnished with brand new, soulless pieces from a soft-furnishing chain.

NORTHSTAR recognised me from a brief meeting on the IONEC. Trips to the Fort were important to his morale, as he was now suffering from post-usefulness syndrome. Every tiny detail of his training, his KGB colleagues and his career had been sucked from him, and the heady days of VIP treatment, champagne receptions and all-expenses-paid trips to visit friendly intelligence services in Washington, Paris and Sydney were now over. His value to the West, and the sense of importance that this had bought, was now gone and he was bored and demoralised. MI6 had tried to find him a new career, but without success. Work experience as an intelligence officer is not very marketable, and besides there are few careers which can match the fascination and intrigue. So although MI6 set him up with a nice house and a lifelong pension and persuaded the Russians to let his girlfriend and daughter join him, he was restless.

He made coffee and took me through to his study where we could discuss the plan in private. A half-finished model of a Sea Harrier jump-jet and a tube of glue lay on the desk with his computer and a few manuals. I sat down in a black leather chair and outlined Russel's idea. `Why not let me run it?' NORTHSTAR asked before I had finished. `I have worked as a journalist with TASS, am a trained intelligence officer and Russian is my native language - I have the perfect background.' NORTHSTAR's arguments were persuasive, but the Russians were still smarting over his defection and if they found out that we were using him in operations against them it might damage the fledgling liaison relationship. `I'll have to ask if it is OK,' I replied. `But no promises.'

Back in Century House, I wrote up the proposal in the form of a minute and popped it in my out-tray. First Russel, as my immediate line-manager, would want to pass comment. Next P5, the production officer for Moscow station, would want to check that there were no implications for other operations under his control. SBO/1, the security officer for Russian operations, would need to comment on operational security. R/CEE, the requirement officer, would want to comment on whether it was likely to yield any worthwhile intelligence. Finally, the controller of the East European controllerate, C/CEE, would want to be kept informed about what was going on beneath him. Such a circulation list was typical and it could often take many weeks for all the decision makers to have their say. This decision-making process would be impossibly cumbersome in a commercial organisation, but its advantage is that it usually avoids coming to the wrong conclusion. The disadvantage is that when the decision is obviously wrong, it is very difficult to reverse. Too many officers have laid down their reputation on paper and so stubbornly defend the decision, no matter how foolish it seems in hindsight.

Fortunately, this decision was quick. Only a few days later, the minute was returned to my in-tray by one of the messenger clerks. The hand-written scrawl by the various addresses added to the bottom boiled down to an agreement to allow NORTHSTAR to be involved in the operation, but on no account could he be allowed to run it alone. I would have to stay closely involved and monitor all his activities.

Setting up the operation was straightforward. The only equipment I needed was an ordinary fax machine, which TOS supplied. I called my newsagency `Trufax', alluding to the true facts that I hoped would be received by the facsimile machine, and attractively close to the name of the Russian newsagency `Interfax'. Normally operations of this sort would be run out of Century House, using an out-of-area telephone number and call diverter provided by British Telecom. But NORTHSTAR, like other defectors, was not allowed in the building so I rented a small office, hardly big enough for a desk, on the top floor of a rabbit-warren of an office block in Conduit Street. TOS manufactured a small brass plaque bearing the Trufax name, which the building's caretaker added to the other plaques on the outside door of the building, and G/REP, the printing and forging department, ran off some smart Trufax stationery. I got myself a fresh alias, Ben Presley, with matching passport and driving licence from CF (Central Facilities) department, but getting NORTHSTAR sorted out with an alias identity required a bit more imagination. Any Russian journalist on speaking to him would almost certainly enquire about his background and how he arrived in the West. The wisdom of a more experienced officer was needed to come up with a suitable legend, so I went to see SBO/1, John Bidde.

SBOs are in charge of overseeing operational security in each controllerate. They are sometimes casually referred to as `retreads' because they are past the normal MI6 retirement age of 55 and have been rehired for their rich operational experience. Their role is advisory and they have no control over operations, but only a foolish officer would ignore them. Bidde had been East European controller during the Cold War, so his experience was particularly valued.

I found Bidde in his 12th-floor office chuckling to himself. He was analysing a plan proposed by TOS to bug the penthouse flat of a suspected Russian SVR officer in Lisbon. One of the Lisbon station secretaries had rented the flat three storeys below in the same ancient, rickety apartment block and TOS proposed to use this as a base for the recording equipment. They had identified a means of breaking into the loft above the target's flat, and reckoned that it would be easy to find a suitable place to mount and hide a small microphone. Unfortunately, for technical reasons, it would not be possible to link the microphone and recording equipment with the normal radiolink and they would need to be physically connected with a fine wire, running from the loft to the secretary's flat below. The only means of hiding it from view was to thread it down a convoluted drain-pipe which wound its way down the building. After experimenting with various mechanical crawling devices which had all proved unable to work their way down the pipes, TOS had hit upon the idea of using a mouse. They reckoned that by leaning out of one of the loft skylights under cover of darkness, using a fishing rod, they could dangle the mouse, harnessed to the end of the fishing line, into the top end of the drainpipe. They would then lower it down the vertical section of the pipe to the first right-angled bend. From there the mouse could scurry along the horizontal part of the pipe to the next vertical section and so on, down to the bottom of the pipe where it could be recaptured. The wire could then be attached to the fishing line and pulled through the pipe.

Clandestine night-time trials of the murine wire delivery system on the Century House drain-pipes, using three white mice borrowed from the chemical and biological weapons research establishment at Porton Down, proved reasonably successful. One mouse, nicknamed Micky, was a natural and scampered along the pipes enthusiastically. A second, Tricky, occasionally tried to climb back up the fishing line when dangled, but once in the pipe was reasonably competent. The last mouse, christened Thicky, had kept trying to climb back up the pipes and so had been sent back to Porton Down to continue his secret work on chemical-weapons antidotes. Micky and reserve Tricky were to fly covertly to Portugal in the S&D Hercules because they could not be overtly taken out of the country without special export licences. Bidde's dilemma was whether it was ethically correct to recruit animals to use in spying operations. `Thicky is probably lying bleary-eyed at the bottom of a jamjar by now,' giggled Bidde, `and the fate of Micky and Tricky is less unpleasant, so I guess it is ethical.' He squiggled an approval at the bottom of the minute and placed it in his burgeoning out-tray. I later learnt that Micky and Tricky carried out their mission successfully, were returned to the UK in the C-130, given an honourable discharge from duties at Porton Down, and went into comfortable retirement in a TOS secretary's London flat. The fate of Thicky remains a state secret.

Still chuckling, Bidde turned his mind to me. `What can I do for you, young man?' he asked benevolently. Trying to keep a straight face, I explained that his help was needed to devise a suitable cover story for NORTHSTAR's involvement in the Trufax operation. Bidde quickly invented a suitable legend. `He should claim to be a second-generation descendant of one of the Russo-Germanic families from the German colonies around the lower Volga River basin,' he suggested. `The Germans have recently given lots of them German passports,' Bidde explained. `You should get him a Germanic-sounding alias - how about Valery Ruben?' he suggested.

Valery Ruben was at work at the Trufax office in Conduit Street the following day. Within a week he had contacted nearly 20 journalists in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev and had a steady stream of information flowing to his fax machine. None of it was CX, but it was early days. It would take a while to establish which journalists had good access and which were second-rate.

NORTHSTAR focused his relationship on to one promising Muscovite journalist. Pavel Felgengauer, a 40-year-old freelancer specialising in defence issues, appeared to have some of the characteristics that might just make him a good agent. He had excellent access, being close to Yeltsin's defence minister, Pavel Grachev. The reports that Felgengauer provided after his meetings with Grachev often came tantalisingly close to the CX threshold so we decided to cultivate him.

NORTHSTAR spoke to Felgengauer at length from the Trufax office. Bit by bit, we built up a character profile of his career, lifestyle and aspirations in the hope that we might find a motivation for him to spy for us. But cultivating him over a telephone line was a slow business. To make real progress we needed to meet him face to face, so we tried to persuade him to visit London. Although he would accept payments for his stories - we sent out several substantial lump sums to him by TNT courier - he would always have an excuse to cancel or postpone any tentatively arranged trips out of his country. Eventually, we reluctantly and disappointedly accepted that Felgengauer was most likely playing the line with us, possibly in collaboration with Russian intelligence. We had hooked him, but now he was just teasing us, accepting payments and throwing back morsels of quasi-intelligence to keep us interested. It was a classic disruption tactic, used many times by Russian intelligence to waste MI6 resources. Russel closed down Trufax after three months to NORTHSTAR's intense disappointment. In total, it cost around œ40,000 and did not produce a single CX report. Trufax, it would seem, had to be put down to `experience'.

Russel, meanwhile, was reorganising SOV/OPS. Unlike other natural cover sections which regularly mounted overseas operations into their target countries, SOV/OPS had hitherto limited its operations to Russians travelling outside Russia. Now that the KGB was reformed and weakened, Russel proposed to strengthen his department and start running natural cover operations into the heart of Russia. He renamed the section UKA, bringing its nomenclature in line with other natural cover stations based in Century House. Then he badgered personnel department for reinforcements. One of the first to join was Spencer. He was bored of his job as a targeting officer and wanted to get into natural cover work. Russel allocated him a desk in my office and put him to work running MASTERWORK. Platon Obukov, a Russian diplomat in his 20s, was the son of a former Soviet deputy foreign minister who had worked on the SALT II disarmament talks. MASTERWORK's own direct access at the Russian foreign ministry was not important, but his father was still influential in Moscow and MASTERWORK had indirect access to this. Spencer planned to meet MASTERWORK for debriefing sessions in Tallinn, capital of the new Baltic republic of Estonia. It was a safe location because Estonia was cosying up to the West, yet Russians could still travel there freely without a visa or passport. Spencer chose to travel as a journalist so went down to I/OPS to beef up his credentials. I/OPS looks after MI6's media contacts, not only to provide cover facilities but also to spin MI6 propaganda. For example, during the run-up to the 1992 UN Secretary General elections, they mounted a smear operation against the Egyptian candidate, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was regarded as dangerously Francophile by the CIA. The CIA are constitutionally prevented from manipulating the press so they asked MI6 to help. Using their contacts in the British and American media, I/OPS planted a series of stories to portray Boutros-Ghali as unbalanced, claiming that he was a believer in the existence of UFOs and extra-terrestrial life. The operation was eventually unsuccessful, however, and Boutros-Ghali was elected.

`Flippin' outrageous!' Spencer laughed as he came back from his visit to I/OPS. `They've got the editor of a magazine on the books. He's called SMALLBROW,' he chuckled. `He's agreed to let me go out to Tallinn undercover as a freelancer for his magazine - the only condition is that I have to write an article which he'll publish if he likes it. Cheeky bastard wants a story courtesy of the taxpayer!'

Russel's ambition to expand the role of UKA hinged on his ability to convince C/CEE that natural cover operations into Russia were practical and secure. To help persuade them that such operations could be carried out by a VCO (Visiting Case Officer) he asked me to research cover legends suitable for use in Russia. There would be no possibility of me actually using the cover in Russia - being fresh off the IONEC, such responsibility would not be entrusted to me. My job was just to do the groundwork for somebody else to take over later. Nevertheless, it was an interesting assignment.

No natural cover is unbreakable as no matter how carefully it is researched, it can never be as rich and varied as a real life. To plug every hole would be futile and expensive, so I needed to tailor the cover to match the likely inquisition by the Russian defences. This entailed first examining the sort of jobs that could be done in Russia under natural cover. The most likely would be one of the simple tasks which were time-consuming for a station officer to undertake, such as letter-posting. Posting an SW letter to an agent is fraught with risk because even after dry-cleaning for several hours, perhaps even a whole day, it cannot be guaranteed that surveillance has not observed the posting and dropped a marker letter on top. When the postbox is emptied, the letters immediately beneath the marker would be scrutinised, the addressees noted and traced, and any holding jobs with access to secrets would come under suspicion. Letter-posting is thus not a popular job with members of the station. But if a VCO could enter Russia without attracting surveillance, letter-posting would be simple and relatively cheap. We knew from defectors such as NORTHSTAR and OVATION that even the FSB did not have the surveillance resources to watch every British businessman visiting their country.

The FSB relied heavily on visa applications to screen visitors to their country, examining every detail against their records for discrepancies. The easiest to check was the birthdate because in the UK every birth is registered in a legend at St Katherine's House, which is open to public inspection. Each birth is entered consecutively when the child is born, so it is impossible to enter back-dated births and MI6 do not use `dead baby' aliases, as described in Frederick Forsyth's book The Day of the Jackal, for fear of legal action by angry relatives if the operation should go wrong and be publicly exposed. For most operations, this lack of birth registration is not a problem because the resources of the opposing counter-intelligence service were not that inquisitive, but to fool the enquiries of the FSB visa inspections a workaround was required.

The solution was simple. My own birth was not registered in St Katherine's House because, although a UK citizen, I was born overseas in New Zealand. Enquiries by the Buenos Aires station revealed that in Argentina they had no verifiable register of births, so if I claimed to have been born of British parents in Argentina, it would be difficult for the FSB to check its veracity.

I asked G/REP to forge me an Argentine birth certificate, based on a genuine one that they held in their files. Then through their liaison with the passport office, CF obtained me a British passport in the name of Alex Huntley, born in Buenos Aires on 13 January 1963. From the DVLA they got me a driving licence and then provided a robust ACA (alias cover address) keeper. ACA keepers are agents who act as a cover landlord for VCOs, providing a checkable home address. With an address, CF arranged a bank account and credit card with the Natwest Bank.

All DSS (Department of Social Security) files of Britain's 54 million inhabitants are computerised and held in Newcastle. CF occasionally used these records to obtain information on people of interest to us. But what if the FSB were able to hack into the DSS computer? It wouldn't be difficult as it was linked to every high street DSS office and the log-on procedure was not complicated. The only way to make my alias stand up to hacking was to falsely enter the details in the DSS central computer. This had not previously been done but, after a few weeks' negotiation with the DSS, Alex Huntley had a full DSS record with national insurance number and registration card.

The next task was to research a legend for my alias life. Every element would need to be plausible but uncheckable. A check through the Public School Handbook revealed that Scorton Grammar School in Richmond, North Yorkshire, had gone into liquidation in the late '80s, leaving no publicly available records of its ex-pupils, so I could safely claim to have studied there. The records of the University of Buenos Aires were hopelessly disorganised, so this is where Anglo-Argentine Alex Huntley claimed his economics degree, proved with a G/REP forged certificate. From my experience at MIT, I knew a small university in Boston, the Massachusetts Community College, which had gone out of business, and so awarded Huntley a MBA from there. Thereafter, drawing on records from Companies House, I invented a CV in a series of small companies and consultancies which all went bankrupt shortly after Huntley supposedly left, then fudged tax records in the DSS computer to match his career. Huntley needed a plausible current occupation. The usual practice is to front the BCA (business cover address) in a highstreet business-answering service; a modest subscription secures a mailing address and a receptionist to answer incoming calls. Their disadvantage is that they could be too easily checked by the FSB. For my purpose, a more robust BCA was needed.

CF maintained a list of small companies whose managing director was prepared to vouch that an MI6 officer was a bona-fide employee, and they suggested a small Sussex investment company, East European Investment, which worked in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, but not Russia. This gave perfect cover; they had no track record in Russia that I could be quizzed about, but it would be plausible if Alex Huntley were to start exploring business opportunities there. I went to see the managing director and he took me on as a consultant.

The bones of my false life were in place, but they needed fleshing out. Regularly using my Huntley credit card built up a realistic spending pattern on the bills, and consultancy `payments' from East European Investment into my bank account ensured that it would appear realistic to inspection. My alias documentation was beefed up with miscellaneous `wallet litter', forged ... la carte by G/REP. I chose membership cards to Tramps and Annabel's nighclubs, and Sarah and I spent some enjoyable evenings ensuring that Alex Huntley was familiar to the doormen.

My file on Huntley was now bulging with plausible information, but some genuine Argentine documents would be useful. MI6 often obtains and uses genuine documentation from friendly liaison services such as the Danes and Austrians for `false flag operations'. The station in Buenos Aires had just entered into a tetchy liaison relationship with the Argentine security service, so I fired off an ATHS telegram asking whether SIDE might provide Huntley with documentation. I expected a swift and curt response ridiculing my idea, but H/BUE, an enthusiastic officer, asked at the next liaison meeting. SIDE agreed and sent a genuine Argentine passport, driving licence and identity card in the name Huntley. The documents arrived on my desk a fortnight later and I promptly lent them to G/REP so that they could examine and photograph them for their files in case it became necessary in the future to forge similar documents.

It took just over two months to make the Huntley cover strong enough to satisfy the scrutiny of Russel and Bidde, and I submitted the dossier for examination by C/CEE. He wrote at the bottom of the report, `An excellent piece of work. This will be a solid foundation for future VCO operations into Russia.' It was glowing praise and I was pleased with my contribution.

Meanwhile, Spencer was back from his own natural cover trip to Estonia. `MASTERWORK's a nutter!' he announced as he chucked his hand-luggage on to his desk. `Completely off his rocker! So much for that crap that Ball taught us on the IONEC about only recruiting agents who are mentally stable,' he chuckled. Spencer explained how MASTERWORK had turned up at the meeting wearing a Mickey Mouse hat, clutching the manuscript of a manic and twisted book he was writing. `The guy should be getting pyschiatric help, there's no way we should be running him as an agent,' Spencer concluded. But his judgement was over-ruled by P5 because MASTERWORK helped meet the controllerate CX targets, and Spencer was ordered to continue the bi-monthly meetings in Tallinn. The relationship was later taken over by the Moscow station and they ran MASTERWORK until one clandestine meeting in a Moscow restaurant in April 1996 was rudely interrupted by FSB. They arrested MASTERWORK, charging him with `broadcasting classified information of a political and strategic defence nature to a foreign intelligence service'. The female case officer at the meeting and three other officers from the Moscow station were expelled from Russia. In July 2000, after four years in a pyschiatric detention hospital, MASTERWORK was sentenced to 11 years in a top security prison. The Russians were alerted to MASTERWORK by his rambling boastings that he was a spy, but the real fault lay with MI6 who should never have continued to run an agent so manifestly unstable.

As a probationer, I was expected to take every opportunity to learn from the work of senior colleagues. An objective of UKA was to acquire advanced Russian weaponry, and one operation had been very successful. Russel told me to read the file, adding, `It's a classic operation, you'll learn a lot from studying it.'

BATTLE was one of the arms dealers that MI6 had on its books. Arms dealers are useful sources of intelligence on international arms deals and can be influential in swinging the deals to British companies. BATTLE, a multi-millionaire Anglo-Iranian, earned a salary of around œ100,000 per year from MI6. In late 1991, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) asked BATTLE to buy them a consignment of new BMP-3 armoured personnel carriers. The BMP-3, then the most advanced APC in the Russian armoury, was a heavily armed tracked amphibious vehicle, capable of carrying seven infantry and its three-man crew. The MOD heard rumours that its performance was better than western equivalents and asked MI6 for intelligence.

BATTLE set to work on the deal, flying regularly between the BMP design bureau in Kurgan and Abu Dhabi, and he eventually sealed a deal for the Russians to sell a batch of the lower-specification export variant BMP-3s to the Gulf state. He did not omit to see his MI6 handler every time he passed through London, however, and on one visit mentioned that he had been shown around the advanced variant of the BMP-3 on his last trip to Kurgan. MI6 persuaded him to try to acquire one. On his next trip, with a œ500,000 backhander and forged end-user certificate provided by MI6, BATTLE persuaded his Russian contact to hide one of the advanced specification BMP-3s amongst the first batch of 20 export variants which were shipped to the UAE.

The consignment of BMP-3s went by train from Kurgan to the Polish port of Gdansk. There the 20 UAE vehicles were offloaded into a container ship and sent on their way to Abu Dhabi. The remaining vehicle, under the cover of darkness and with the assistance of Polish liaison, was loaded into a specially chartered tramp steamer and shipped to the army port of Marchwood in Southampton. From there it was transferred to the RARDE (Royal Armaments Research and Development Establishment) for detailed examination and field trials.

The RARDE technicians were highly impressed by their new toy and established that the BMP-3's firepower was substantially higher than anything in the UK's armory. Field trials on army ranges in Scotland - with the vehicle disguised under a fibreglass shell to prevent being spotted by Russian satellites - revealed that its manoeuvrability, cross-country ability and speed were also better than western equivalents. The complicated and expensive operation was a great success and they invited most of the East European controllerate to their establishment near Camberley to thank us for the operation.

While reading BATTLE's file, I came across something that, though just mildly interesting at the time, became significant five years later. Some of the meetings that were described took place at the Ritz hotel in Paris, and intelligence on the whos, whats and wheres of these meetings was provided by an informant in the hotel. The informant did not have a codename and was just addressed by a P-number, referring to the number of his personal file. The P-number was mentioned several times in BATTLE's file so, curious to get a better fix of his access, I called up central registry and asked for the file. Flicking through, it was no surprise to learn that he was a security manager at the Ritz and was being paid cash by his MI6 handler for his reporting. Hotel security managers are useful informers for intelligence services because they have access to the hotel guestlist and can be helpful in bugging operations. What was a surprise was that the informer's nationality was French, for we had been told on the IONEC how difficult it was to recruit Frenchmen to work for MI6 and for this reason he stuck in my mind. Although he was only a small cog in the operation and his name was unimportant to me at the time, I have no doubt with the benefit of hindsight that this was Henri Paul, who was killed five years later on 30 August 1997 in the same car crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Al Fayed.

Most breakthroughs in espionage come after a lot of methodical research and tedious sifting of leads and contacts, but occasionally a worthwhile lead came out of the blue. Such was the case when one morning in June 1992 a former colleague in the TA called me asking for some advice. The sergeant, a keen long-distance runner, had recently gone to Moscow to run in the city marathon. A spectator who spoke English approached him at the finish line and it emerged that he was a colonel in the Russian strategic rocket forces. The two men became friendly and the sergeant invited the colonel to visit him if ever he were in England, not really expecting that it would be taken up. But the colonel did take him up and he was due to arrive at Gatwick airport the following week. `Would we be interested in meeting him?' my former colleague asked. Russel agreed that the story was worth checking out. The following day I took the train out to Clacton-on-Sea, a couple of hours east of London, to visit the sergeant in his home.

Terry Ryman greeted me at the front door and ushered me into the pin-clean front-room of a small terraced house where his wife served tea. Ryman was in his 40s, greying with milk-bottle glasses, but took pride in his fitness. He worked as a black cab-driver in London to earn his living.

Ryman verified the story that I'd heard over the telephone. When a friend suggested that they enter the Moscow marathon together, Ryman didn't hesitate. He had spent many years training for war against the Soviets, learning to recognise their tanks and armoured cars, studying their fighting tactics and shooting snarling images of them on the rifle range, and he wanted to experience the country and its people first-hand. When a real-life Russian introduced himself at the end of the race, speaking good English, Ryman was thrilled.

Colonel Alexander Simakov had invited Ryman around to his flat in a distant northern suburb of Moscow which he shared with his wife, daughter and mother-in-law. Ryman was fascinated and appalled at the cramped living conditions of such a relatively senior officer. Simakov moaned about his pay and conditions and said how much he envied the English lifestyle. `He says he wants to come to England just to see Stratford, Oxford and Cambridge,' Ryman explained. `But,' he added, lowering his voice conspiratorially, `I think he wants to, you know what I mean, defect, to Britain.'

`OK, when he comes next week, we'll find out if he knows anything useful,' I replied.

Simakov would have to offer some spectacular CX to be accepted as a defector. As their world crumbled with the Berlin wall, several Sovblock intelligence officers offered their services to MI6, and most were turned away. MI6 only had the budget to accept high-level defectors such as OVATION and NORTHSTAR, and even they had to work for several years en poste before being allowed into Britain. Even the likes of Viktor Oshchenko, a KGB officer specialising in science and technology who offered his services in July 1992, did not have an easy time persuading MI6 that he was worth a resettlement package. His revelation that, while serving in London in the mid-'80s, he had recruited a GEC-Marconi sales engineer was regarded as only mildly important and I saw an MI5 report which concluded that the engineer, Michael John Smith, did not pass damaging secrets. (This did not stop MI5 having Smith arrested in an entrapment operation, and this paper was not made available to Smith's defence at his trial. He was sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment, the judge summing up with the outlandish claim that Smith had done incalculable damage to Britain's national security.)

Given Oshchenko's difficulty in winning defector status, I would most likely have to persuade Simakov to return to his job in Russia and then earn defector status by providing regular intelligence to the Moscow station. If his intelligence was valuable then he might earn a reasonable salary, paid into a UK account so that his new found wealth would not attract suspicion. Perhaps on his retirement he could be allowed to come to the UK to enjoy his money, but even then MI6 would probably try to persuade him that retirement in his homeland would be more enjoyable. My task on meeting Simakov would be to assess his access and motivation, recruit him if suitable, then persuade him that this was his best option.

Ryman looked grim when he answered the door the following week. He took me through to the living-room, dark because the curtains were drawn against the afternoon sun. A bulky, pallid and unshaven man, dressed in tight polyester T-shirt and jeans, struggled to his bare feet from the sofa. Ryman icily introduced me to his guest, jerked open the curtains and made an excuse to leave. Simakov glared after him as the door slammed shut. Next to the sofa were two large red plastic suitcases, straining against the string which held them together. Beside them was a battered cardboard box, filled with books and journals. He had been reading some of them and they lay opened, scattered on the low coffee-table along with several unwashed mugs and biscuit wrappers.

`I have defected,' he announced triumphantly in a thick Russian accent. He paused for a moment, then realising that I was not about to give him an ecstatic bearhug, he adjusted the cushions and sat back down on the sofa.

`Tell me a bit about yourself, first,' I asked, putting off discussion of defection until later. In good English, Simakov related his life story. He had been born into a poor family in a village north of Kiev in the Ukraine. His father was killed in a mining accident when he was five and his mother died of tuberculosis when he was seven, so he and his two younger sisters were bought up by his maternal grandmother. The young Simakov would probably have followed his father into the mines but from an early age showed a talent for mathematics. He got the best grades of his class in every term except one, when he had broken his leg and couldn't walk the three miles to school. Simakov was still proud of this achievement and rummaged in the cardboard box to dig out the certificates to prove it. His mathematical prowess was his only hope of getting out of a life of poverty.

Simakov won a scholarship for secondary education at a military school in Kiev. Finishing there with high grades, he was selected to join the Soviet Strategic Rocket Force as a research scientist. After basic military training, he studied for a degree and a doctorate in Leningrad. Compulsory English lessons there fuelled a lifelong interest in England and particularly its literature - he knew far more about Shakespeare's plays than I would ever be likely to know. On completion of his studies he was posted to the Soviet ballistic missile test ranges in the far eastern peninsula of Kamchatka and spent his entire career working there as a flight-test engineer. After compulsory retirement from the military in his mid-40s, he had been unable to get another job and he, his wife and eight-year-old daughter were forced to move into the one-bedroomed Moscow flat of his ageing mother-in-law. Life soon became intolerable; his military pension was decimated by inflation, his daughter started to suffer from asthma and his wife was desperately unhappy.

The final straw came when Simakov emerged from his flat one morning to find his Lada on bricks, with all four wheels missing. He vowed to move to England where, he fondly believed, such things never happened. He set about scouring the streets of Moscow to find an Englishman who could help him accomplish his plan and he stumbled across Ryman. The two of them made an unlikely couple. Fate had transpired to bring them together and produce the tragedy which I could see was about to unfold.

Simakov's aspirations were wildly starry-eyed. In return for defecting, he wanted `a house with a straw roof and a garden full of flowers for his wife, œ100,000 cash and a Ford Orion Gti with Executive pack'. He produced a copy of Autocar magazine from his cardboard box and jabbed his finger at a picture of the car of his dreams.

It was not going to be an easy task to let him down. Far from being able to waltz into the country, he would probably be hard pressed to persuade the Home Office to give him leave to remain. Only if he had some spectacular CX could MI6 ask the Home Secretary to make an exception of him. Depending on how much CX he produced, he might receive a few thousand pounds in a one-time payment. Thereafter, he would have to rely on DSS housing and income support. Simakov's surly nature wasn't going to make things any easier either. He had quickly outstayed Ryman's welcome, but being used to the cramped quarters of his mother-in-law's flat he couldn't understand why Ryman was fed up with him living on the sofa. `I don't understand Terry,' Simakov said, scratching his stomach. `When we were in Moscow, he was like a long-lost brother. Now he doesn't want to know me.'

Ryman was just as unhappy with the situation. He thought he had done his duty and expected me to take Simakov off his hands. `My wife is going spare,' he explained out of earshot of Simakov. `He can't stay here much longer.' It was a mess that I couldn't sort out immediately. Everything would depend on how much CX Simakov could produce but, as his knowledge was too complicated for me to assess, it would require the expertise of one of the technical specialists in the office. I bade goodbye to the odd couple in Clacton and returned to Century House.

There were around 15 specialist officers in MI6 who provided expertise which the IB, with their broader career paths, could not master. They covered technical disciplines such as chemical, nuclear and biological weapons and ballistic missiles, or had expert knowledge in areas of particular interest such as the Middle Eastern oil industry. Martin Richards, who dropped out of our IONEC, was earmarked for this branch.

Malcolm Knightley, R/CEE/D, was the missile specialist in the East European controllerate. A physicist by training, he developed his expertise in Soviet missiles in the DIS. Knightley was on secondment to MI6 for two years but was hoping for a permanent transfer judging by the way he laboured fearsomely long hours behind a huge in-tray. I arranged for Knightley to meet Simakov the next day in `Room 14', the suite of MI6 interview rooms in the Old Admiralty Buildings in Whitehall.

`The guy's a goldmine,' Knightley told me afterwards. `We've got to get him residency here.' Knightley explained that Simakov had worked in mission control for every ballistic missile test the Soviets had done between 1984 and 1990. His information would be invaluable to the DIS, GCHQ and, more importantly, to the Americans. Knightley booked Room 14 for a series of weekly debrief meetings.

`We've decided to recommend to the Foreign Secretary that we accept him as a full defector,' Russel advised me once the first reports had filtered up to him. `You'll need to get him a codename, write the submission to the Foreign Secretary and sort out his resettlement with AR.'

AR (Agent Resettlement) were responsible for easing defectors into a new life once their usefulness to MI6 had expired. OVATION, NORTHSTAR and other important defectors all had their own dedicated AR officer who was responsible for helping them find a house, adjust to British life, administer their pensions and, hopefully, find a decent job. AR got in touch with Clacton DSS and found a small cottage for Simakov, so at least he was off Ryman's hands. A few weeks later, his wife and daughter flew out to join him and AR sorted the family out with DSS payments and schooling.

I wrote the `submission' to the Foreign Secretary arguing that there was justification for allowing SOU, the codename now allocated to Simakov, to remain in the UK. MI6 does not need any authorisation to mount small operations such as Trufax. But operations which might have embarrassing consequences or, as in this case, affected the interests of another part of the civil service, required the authorisation of the Foreign Secretary. Douglas Hurd was notoriously diligent about examining submissions, so my arguments had to be carefully drafted.

Meanwhile, Knightley finished another long debriefing session with SOU. He stuck his head into my office late one afternoon, clutching a thick sheaf of notes from the four-hour session. `We've hit the jackpot with this guy,' he enthused. `He's just given us the location of the Russian MOD's new strategic command headquarters.' Knightley produced a sketch map showing the location and layout of a new, top secret command bunker set deep inside a mountain in the Urals. It was a Russian equivalent to the American NORAD complex in the Colorado mountains. `I'll be issuing this as a five-star CX. It will go up to the PM,' Knightley said. He later told me that it eventually reached President George Bush's office. `But there's loads more to come,' he added. `Apparently he left a notebook filled with notes from the missile tests in his mother-in-law's sewing-box in Moscow. If we can get that notebook, we'll really be in business.'

Knightley explained that the notebook described perturbations in the flight paths of every ballistic missile fired from the Soviet missile test range in Kamchatcka between late 1987 and early 1990. SOU had obsessively and illicitly noted all the numbers in a couple of school exercise books after each test flight. Such detail would aid the DIS's understanding of the accuracy and range of the Soviet missile armory. More importantly, Knightley would pass the intelligence to the Americans who could use it to improve their anti-ballistic missile defences. It would bring considerable kudos for MI6. `We've got to get that notebook out of Moscow,' concluded Knightley.