Stella Rimington - Illegal Action

The flattery was wasted on Fane, for already he was thinking about what to do with this interesting piece of information. “But I mustn’t keep you from your dinner,” said Adler, now lighthearted. The implication was clear: he’d done his bit.

The plane was an hour late taking off from Charles de Gaulle. With security at the same high level on both sides of the Channel, Peggy knew she would have been better off on the Eurostar, right from the middle of Paris to Waterloo, just across the river from Thames House.

But there was something about the prospect of those fifteen minutes deep under the sea which put Peggy off. Even the thought of it brought her mild claustrophobia bubbling to the surface. She knew aeroplanes affected some people in the same way, but to her air travel seemed open—nothing around you except sky.

She didn’t know why she suffered from claustrophobia. She had had it mildly since she was a child, a shy, serious child with freckles and round spectacles, who was much happier with her head stuck in a book than out with friends or playing games. It had troubled her much more in her first year at Oxford, preventing her from going to crowded parties or even to concerts where she might be stuck in the middle of a row. But after she settled down at Oxford and began to be successful, it largely disappeared, only to return again in her first unsatisfactory job in a private library in Manchester, working with a middle-aged librarian who barely exchanged a word with her.

Peggy was not one to give in to weakness, which was how she regarded claustrophobia. She had fought against it, but she had learnt to win her battles in life bit by bit, opportunity by opportunity and very patiently. Since she had joined MI6 as a researcher and was seconded to MI5 to work with Liz on the mole investigation, it had gone away almost entirely. Avoiding the Channel Tunnel was, she hoped, its dying twitch.

Peggy felt tired now. She had spent a day and a half in a hot, airless room, in the basement of the headquarters of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire on rue Nélaton. Even in France, smoking was now forbidden inside government buildings, but she’d had the misfortune to sit next to Monsieur Drollot, the French official from the Renseignements Généraux, who at every coffee break rushed outside and chain-smoked Gitanes. Now, tilting her chair back as the seat-belt sign went off at last, the memory of the Frenchman’s stale aroma made her feel slightly sick.

She had seen nothing of Paris and would have regretted not adding a day off to her schedule—enough time anyway to see at least one museum, dawdle over coffee in one café—had she not felt she must get back to Thames House urgently. Because towards the end of the meeting, she’d learnt something startling.

She had not expected any surprises. The meeting had been an assembly of “friends,” security services from Western Europe with a long history of close cooperation, along with a Polish representative, the lone emissary from the old Iron Curtain countries. The Scandinavians had been there—a stereotypically gloomy man from Sweden and a reserved, soft-spoken woman from Norway known only as Miss Karlsson.

The delegates had convened round a large oval table in the basement meeting room. Peggy had felt a secret thrill, sitting for the very first time behind a card marked “United Kingdom” and a little Union Jack. She had looked around her, taking everything in. A team of interpreters sat in a glassed-in gallery, providing simultaneous translation to the twenty or so intelligence officers sitting below them, each putting on and taking off their headphones, depending on the language being used. Most people in the room knew each other, if not by appearance, at least by name, because they communicated from their head offices, sharing information regularly by secure phone and fax.

The interpreters too were part of the charmed circle of intelligence professionals. They spent their days, when they were not interpreting at conferences, listening to intercepted telephone calls in various languages or straining to hear what was said on concealed microphones in buildings all over Europe. They too knew most people in the room—and their linguistic foibles. The Spanish major, for example, who insisted on speaking French, with an accent so thick that he was almost incomprehensible, even though there was a very competent Spanish interpreter present, or Miss Karlsson, who spoke beautiful, almost unaccented English, but in a voice so quiet that the interpreters were continuously on edge to catch her words.

The discussion was wide-ranging. The breakdown of the old East-West divide had produced new players on the espionage scene and an ever increasing targeting of the advanced economies of Western Europe. A lively debate developed during the first morning session about espionage versus commercial secrets. Peggy found herself in an argument with her neighbour at the table, the smoky M. Drollot, when she said that companies must look after their own security. When the Spanish major chipped in to make a point in his fractured French, even M. Drollot looked confused and put on his headphones to pick up the English translation, only to hear the interpreter unprofessionally muttering, “At least I think that’s what he said.”

Peggy wasn’t used to public disagreement, though she held her end up with M. Drollot, and was glad when in the afternoon the discussion moved on to the less controversial theme of the activities of the intelligence officers in the Russian embassies in the capital cities of Europe. All agreed that they were back to something approaching their pre–Cold War strength.

When it was Peggy’s turn to speak, she listed the intelligence officers she had identified in London and their roles. Her mention of Vladimir Rykov, an SVR officer fairly recently posted from Germany to the Russian Trade Delegation in Highgate, produced a loud guffaw from Herr Beckendorf. “Well, you won’t have too much trouble with that one,” he announced. “He has two left feet. When he was in Dusseldorf we knew exactly what he was doing. I can’t think how they thought he was up to a posting to London.”

But it was something else Herr Beckendorf said, on the second day, that riveted Peggy. It emerged at the very end of the morning from a joint presentation by Beckendorf and Miss Karlsson. Beckendorf, a grey-haired veteran of the old West German security service, was a tall, dour man, who wore a sleeveless jumper under his jacket and comfortable shoes. Like Brian Ackers, he had spent his career combating the efforts of Iron Curtain spies, and he seemed just as sceptical that anything had changed. This would be the last presentation of the meeting before they broke up after lunch, and as Beckendorf began to speak, several delegates were looking bored and struggling to suppress yawns. But as he got into his stride, there was a stirring of interest.

“The new world of espionage we have been hearing so much about is undoubtedly very exciting,” Herr Beckendorf began, and listening to the voice of the interpreter, it took Peggy a moment to grasp the sarcastic edge to his words. “But I would like to raise the renewed presence of an old kind of threat. Miss Karlsson and I have observed activity which we believe indicates the Russian SVR is once again actively planting Illegale .”

There was a pause in the translation and the interpreter said tentatively, “Illegals.”

Most of the audience were long-time intelligence officers who understood, but Signor Scusi, a young Italian army officer, new to his service, asked in broken English, “Illegals? What are they?”

“Ah,” said Beckendorf. “For those of you new to the phenomenon, Illegals are officers of an intelligence service who live outside the embassy. They assume a false nationality and identity to cover their presence.”