Stella Rimington - Breaking Cover

‘Thanks, Miles. So it was all very vague and there didn’t seem to be much we could do about it, except keep our ears to the ground. Then Mischa resurfaced saying he had more specific information. By that time he had been posted to Tallinn and I met him there.

‘What he told me was that the Russians are operating two Illegals in this country, and suggested they were a couple. Their original brief was to infiltrate protest movements in the UK and subtly influence them to cause as much trouble and disturbance as possible, with the aim of weakening both government and society. But then the nature of that operation changed. The man managed to get close to a woman who was in some way connected with one of the intelligence services and his partner was targeting a man who might be able to provide information about another of our services. They were now calling the operation “Pincer”. I suppose they were imagining a pair of jaws snapping up two of our services.

‘That was the background. Now we get on to the current situation, which as you will all appreciate is highly sensitive as it involves a member of one of our services and a close contact of another. It appears that our two Illegals got lucky. We assume that they were targeting the anti-surveillance lobby, probably trawling through internet chat rooms, looking for people to approach, when they must have come across a notice for a lecture that Jasminder Kapoor was giving at King’s College, London, where she worked at the time.

‘It seems certain that the female attended the lecture. Who knows how many people present were potential targets, but we are aware of one in particular – a lecturer at the college called Tim Simpson – who asked a fairly aggressive question and made it clear that he didn’t think Jasminder’s lecture was radical enough. Tim was active on the internet, on various anti-snooping blogs. He was approached at the talk by a woman calling herself Marina, and they chatted for a while, then continued their conversation by email.’

There seemed no good reason not to mention that Tim was also Peggy’s partner so Liz continued, ‘Unsurprisingly, Marina’s interest in Tim increased dramatically when she learned he lived with a member of MI5. It was then that she gave him a special phone to use when communicating with her, telling him that it would be more secure from surveillance. Charlie has had a close look at this phone and is ready to tell us what he’s found out.’ And before anyone could interrupt to ask the identity of the MI5 officer concerned, she turned to Charlie Simmons.

‘Yes. Thanks, Liz,’ said Charlie, sitting to attention. ‘The phone, which is now in bits at Cheltenham, looks like an ordinary iPhone 5c, and it is – but that’s not all it is.’ Everyone was looking at him now as though he were about to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

‘I’m reasonably good at spotting things, but it took me three days to work out what’s inside this. They’ve been very clever. First of all, they fronted it with an app that automatically erases messages and texts that might be lying about. I couldn’t find any history of messaging, much less the messages themselves, simply because they’d all been wiped as soon as they were received and read or transmitted.’

Liz said, ‘Tim mentioned that to me. He thought it must be for security purposes.’

‘He’s right, but it also hides a multitude of other sins. Capabilities the person who gave it to Tim didn’t want him to know about.’

‘What else does it do?’ asked Miles Brookhaven.

‘The hardware has been rigged. It can be turned on remotely and all the functions can be operated by a third party. The camera’s ready to video whatever Tim’s looking at; the audio component’s set to transmit any conversation on the phone – and off the phone too. It’s like carrying a microphone around. And the phone can be made to transmit its location. So if Tim had the phone with him, his “friend” would know exactly where he was.’

‘The complete works,’ said Miles. ‘That’s got to be state-sponsored. No private individual could do all that.’

‘That’s the bad news,’ said Charlie.

‘You mean there’s good news?’ asked Bruno.

He nodded. ‘Yes, and that is… these utilities haven’t been used. It’s as if someone had decided they’d made a mistake setting Tim up with all this. The links are all fallow; it’s like they couldn’t be bothered. Very odd.’

‘Indeed,’ said Fane. He sounded unimpressed.

‘Why’d you think that is?’ Peggy asked.

‘They must have decided Tim was never going to be one of them,’ said Charlie.

Fane said, ‘So it’s a bit of a damp squib, isn’t it? This Marina woman doesn’t want to play.’

‘Oh, I’m sure she does – just not with Tim, when he’s so unforthcoming. But she’ll keep sniffing around until she finds someone who can be more helpful. In fact for all we know, she may have other people in play right now. So it’s important that we find her.’

‘How are you going to do that?’ Fane still sounded sceptical.

Liz sat further forward in her chair. ‘We hope that she will resurface. With Tim or someone else. But that’s just one side of their pincer movement. As Geoffrey and Bruno already know, we seem to have uncovered another, even more dangerous, plot that looks set to compromise their service.’

And she explained what they had discovered about Laurenz, detailing how he had met Jasminder, his cover as a Norwegian banker, and how the fact that he had given her the same model of iPhone had spurred them into taking a closer look at the man. She described the recent surveillance operation, and the shock discovery that Laurenz Hansen was actually Karpis, aide-de-camp to a Russian oligarch living near Manchester.

‘And this is the same chap who was romancing Jasminder Kapoor, new Communications Director of Six?’ said Fane in an incredulous tone. ‘How did this interesting personal connection escape the vetters?’

‘I’m afraid she failed to declare that she had a boyfriend,’ said Liz. ‘As soon as we began to suspect there was something wrong about Laurenz Hansen, we checked.’

‘Yes. And unfortunately he seemed to find her easier to exploit than Marina did Tim.’

‘So this is where Bruno comes in,’ went on Liz, ‘and why we asked him to get alongside Jasminder. And it seems to me that what we do next partly depends on what he’s found out. Over to you, Bruno.’

He had been sitting back in his chair, eyes half closed, but now he came to life. He put his elbows on the table and rested his chin on his hands, pursing his lips contemplatively. ‘I haven’t any evidence that she’s under anyone’s control or acting to any brief. But I spent an evening with her, and I have to say it made me more suspicious rather than less. She was clearly under a lot of stress – she looked exhausted for one thing. That may of course be pressure of work, but if that’s all it is, I’d be surprised.

‘From the outset, she was at pains to let me know she was single and unattached – and if what you say about this Laurenz Hansen is still the case, then that wasn’t true. And we all know she has never declared him to the Service, so why is she hiding him? I think, following your investigation and now we know he’s actually a Russian and not a Norwegian banker, it’s pretty obvious.

‘But just to finish on my evening out with her… more tellingly than her claim to be unattached, at least as far as I’m concerned, was that throughout the time we spent together she tried to steer the conversation to the Moscow Station; she especially wanted to know about our informants there. I played along up to a point, but every time I changed the subject, she brought it back to Russia. Then she tried the Baltics. I felt like a trout that won’t rise, even when the fly’s put right above his nose. I can only give you my impression but I came away thinking something’s amiss there; I like Jasminder, but I felt she was asking me things at someone else’s behest. I don’t believe she personally could give two hoots about the Moscow Station. Someone’s put her up to it and she’s pretty desperate, would be my conclusion. But I have no proof.’ He sat back in his chair.