David Monnery - Mission to Argentina

Bryan Weighell, or ‘Wheelie’ as he had been known in younger days, briskly made his way through the various checkpoints separating the car park from his destination in the bowels of Whitehall. It was a sharp spring Sunday, sunny but far from warm, and he was still wondering what the hell he was needed for. It could not be anything to do with the teams inserted into East and West Falkland the previous night; all that was being handled through the usual channels. Starting in the ladies’ lavatory aboard Resource , he reminded himself with a grin. He could still imagine Mike Phillips’s face when the Navy told him that this was the SAS’s floating HQ for the duration.

He wished he was there in person. They also serve who sit around and drink Guinness, he told himself. But it did not feel the same, not at a time like this.

In Conference Room B only one empty seat remained. The Prime Minister, whom rumour claimed had been known to punish unpunctuality with exile to one of the caring ministries, actually greeted him with a smile. What does she want, Weighell wondered.

‘Lieutenant-Colonel Weighell, Officer Commanding 22 SAS Regiment,’ she introduced him.

He acknowledged the various nods and half-smiles.

‘Perhaps I should go round the table,’ the PM decided. ‘Cecil Matheson,’ she began, smiling at the tall, patrician-looking individual on her left, ‘Deputy Head of the Foreign Office and Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.’ On his left was Reginald Copley, a thin, grey-haired man who was apparently head of the Foreign Office’s Latin American Desk. Last in line was the moustached Air Marshal Sir George Railton, Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff.

At the end of the table an arrogant-looking young man in a plain dark suit represented MI6. His name, hard though Weighell found it to credit, was Anthony Sharp. On the PM’s right, between her and Weighell, sat Brigadier Mark Harringham, representing Fleet HQ at Northwood, and the imposing bulk of Dennis Eckersley, the Number 2 at the Ministry of Defence.

Seven men and one woman, Weighell thought. Seven professionals and one politician. Seven smelling of Old Spice and one of gardenia. He remembered a particularly disgusting joke about Snow White and her favourite Seven-Up. He told himself to snap out of it.

‘We have a problem,’ the PM began. ‘Cecil?’

Matheson recounted the gist of his telephone conversation with the American State Department the previous evening, and though he made no overt criticism of the American decision to deny the Task Force AWACS assistance, he left little doubt in the minds of his audience what he thought of it.

The Prime Minister’s stony face suggested to Weighell that she shared Matheson’s irritation but had had enough time to suppress her natural instinct to express it. Maybe there was an inflatable model of Reagan hidden away somewhere in Number 10, on which she launched occasional assaults with her handbag.

‘Do you have comments, Brigadier?’ she asked Harringham.

‘It’s not good news,’ he said mildly. ‘I don’t want to sound alarmist, but the AWACS were our last chance of going into action with even half-decent air protection…’

‘Perhaps you could spell out the details, Brigadier,’ the PM suggested. ‘I doubt everyone here is fully aware of them.’

‘Certainly. But there’s nothing complex involved. Our ships in the South Atlantic are simply under-protected, particularly against the Super Etendards and their Exocet missiles. The Sea Dart missile systems on the Type 42 destroyers have no defensive efficacy against low-level attack. The Sea Wolf system, which does, is only mounted on the two Type 22 frigates. For air defence we have only the Sea Harriers, and there are pitifully few of them. In fact, there are only thirty-two Harrier airframes in existence. Once they’re gone…’

‘What about radar?’ the MI6 man asked.

‘Shipborne radar is notoriously ineffective in heavy seas,’ Harringham said, ‘and we have no airborne radar. This is not,’ he added with an air of understatement, ‘the war we were designed to fight. But…’

‘Thank you, Brigadier,’ the PM interjected. ‘Very well, gentlemen. This is the problem we are here to discuss. There appears no way in which the Task Force can be certain of protecting itself, and I need hardly spell out the consequences if, say, one of the carriers were to be put out of action. In such an instance I don’t think we could countenance the recapture of the islands. We would have no choice but to return with our tails between our legs. Another Suez, gentlemen. Britain would be a laughing-stock.’ She glared at the company, as if daring them to imagine such an outcome.

‘But,’ she continued, ‘there are other options. Mr Sharp, would you like to give us an update on the intelligence situation within Argentina?’

Sharp almost preened himself, Weighell thought sourly. He had never had much time for intelligence types. As one of his friends had memorably put it: these were the boys at public school who tried to wank in silence.

‘We now have an agent in place,’ Sharp was saying. ‘And we’re expecting some useful information about the location of particular units, and about the sort of stuff the Argies are airlifting into Port Stanley.’ He surveyed the table in triumph.

The PM ignored him. ‘Is that it?’ she asked Matheson. ‘We have one man in Argentina?’

Our man in Argentina, Weighell thought irreverently, and, as it turned out, wrongly.

‘It’s a woman,’ Matheson said coldly. ‘I need hardly remind everyone here,’ he went on, ‘that the budget for what is called “humint” – human intelligence – has been cut to the bone in recent years, with most of the available resources going to the procurement of “sigint” – signals intelligence, of course – either from GCHQ or the Americans. It’s an unfortunate fact of life, but like the Navy’ – he glanced across at Harringham – ‘the Intelligence Services have been organized with Europe in mind, not South America.’

The PM looked less than mollified. Weighell found himself idly wondering who would come out of this particular imbroglio with more egg on their faces: the Foreign Office, the Navy or the Intelligence Services.

‘As a matter of interest,’ the Latin American Desk man was asking, ‘where is this agent “in place”?’

Sharp hesitated, caught the look on the PM’s face, and blurted out: ‘Rio Gallegos – it’s one of the two airbases closest to the Falklands…’

‘But unfortunately not, as we had thought, the one with the Super Etendards,’ Matheson admitted. ‘It seems they are based at Rio Grande on Tierra del Fuego.’ He reached into his briefcase, extracted a clear plastic folder full of photocopies of a map, and passed them round.

Weighell examined it with interest. He had spent so much time poring over maps of the Falklands that the mainland 400 miles to the west had more or less escaped his attention.

‘Brigadier,’ the PM asked, ‘I take it that the destruction of these airfields and the planes based there would drastically reduce the vulnerability of the Task Force?’

‘Of course.’

‘Does the Air Force have the capacity, Air Marshal?’

‘I would like to say yes, Prime Minister, but frankly I doubt it.’ He looked round the table. ‘Most of you probably haven’t heard the news, but early this morning one plane dropped a stick of bombs on the runway at Port Stanley…’

There were murmurs of appreciation all round the table.

‘It was an epic flight,’ Railton conceded, ‘and the psychological impact on the occupying force may have been worth something, but I’m afraid the military efficacy of the operation was rather more doubtful. Only one bomb actually hit the runway, and bear in mind that Port Stanley, unlike the Argentine bases, is known territory. Even more to the point, the Vulcan needed seventeen in-flight refuellings en route . I doubt if we could send more than one plane at a time against these two mainland bases. They’d be sitting ducks.’