Dead Spy Running

36

Fielding had ordered his driver to turn round and head back to the office after dropping Myers in Trafalgar Square, where he said he would pick up a night bus to a friend’s flat in North London. Legoland was reassuringly busy as Fielding took the lift up to his office. It troubled him when the place was quiet. He left a message on Denton’s mobile, asking him to get in early the next day, and then settled back down at his desk to read through Leila’s Developed Vetting report, which he had called up from the night duty manager. At about 3 a.m. he asked for the latest files on the Bahá’í community in Iran, Ali Mousavi, and the London Marathon attack, which needed to be delivered by trolley.

By the time dawn broke, a vivid orange warming the dark Thames beneath his window, Fielding had a better understanding of the threat posed by Leila, and the implications of her unprecedented triple-agent status for the Service, for Stephen Marchant, and for his own career. The Americans would have to make their own assessment, based on a briefing he would give Straker in a few hours. She was their problem now.

The implications for MI6 were still catastrophic, though, if Leila, one of the Service’s star recruits, had been working for VEVAK, Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, from the day she arrived at Legoland. Developed Vetting, introduced ten years before, was meant to guarantee the highest level of clearance, far superior to routine counter-terrorism and security checks. Such vetting was more important than ever now that the intelligence services were recruiting from such diverse ethnic backgrounds, but in Leila’s case it appeared to have suffered an unprecedented failure.

A wide-ranging interview had been carried out with Leila shortly after she first applied to the Service, followed by two further interviews before she began training at the Fort, nine months after her initial application. The last of these had been conducted in the presence of a senior vetting officer, and triggered an ‘aftercare’ concern about family ties to Iran.

A more junior vetting officer was dispatched to interview Leila’s mother at her home in Hertfordshire. Widowed two years earlier, she had been a resident of the UK for more than twenty-five years, after fleeing her job as a university lecturer in Tehran at the time of the Revolution. She was a devout Bahá’í, and had continued to follow her religion in England, joining a small local group.

The subsequent DV report raised no security objections, describing Leila’s mother as a fully integrated member of British society. Along with other Bahá’ís who had left Iran to live in Britain, she was vehemently opposed to the current regime in Tehran, but she was a low-key member of the expatriate Bahá’í community. Significantly, she had not been associated with any of the various political campaigns around the world that called for religious freedom in Iran.

Two months before Leila began her training at the Fort, her mother was interviewed for a second time. She was still at the same address, but there was talk of her moving out to a nursing home in Harpenden. The interview came back clean, and a handwritten note had been added to the file suggesting that further interviews should be avoided if they were not strictly necessary. Much of what she said appeared muddled, and it was concluded that she was presenting signs of early onset Alzheimer’s.

What troubled Fielding was the vetters’ complete failure to pick up on the mother’s move back to Iran, which must have taken place shortly after her last interview. As far as the vetters were concerned, she was still residing in Hertfordshire. It would have been Leila’s responsibility to inform MI6 of any change in her family circumstances, particularly given the West’s sensitive relationship with Iran, but she had clearly chosen not to tell a soul. Within Whitehall it was acknowledged that Developed Vetting relied too heavily on the responsibility of the individual to report such changes, but the system’s fundamental flaws had never been so exposed.

Fielding tried to take the charitable view. If Leila had been aware of her mother’s plans in advance, she would have opposed them, knowing that they could potentially expose her to blackmail. But once she was back in Iran, what could Leila do? She was fiercely ambitious, and her promising career in MI6 would have been over before it had started if she had told the authorities what had happened.

Fielding decided she probably had no warning, just a call from her mother explaining what she had done: instead of moving into a nursing home, she had taken a flight back to Iran. Had the mother’s muddled manner in her last interview been a bluff? Once she was settled in Iran, Leila’s worst fears would have been confirmed. Her mother was soon being targeted because of her faith, and VEVAK came knocking at Leila’s door in London, knowing that she was about to embark on a career with MI6.

Two hundred Bahá’ís had been killed in Iran in the early 1980s, and many thousands had been arrested. In recent years, the Islamic government had renewed its campaign to eliminate all Bahá’ís from the country. Leila must have been given a stark choice: work for VEVAK, or her mother dies. She wouldn’t be the first or the last Bahá’í to be executed.

For a brief moment, Fielding felt sorry for Leila. The files suggested a touchingly strong bond between mother and daughter, made even stronger by Leila’s father’s drinking. They had been united against his excesses, which included violence towards Leila’s mother, but not towards her, although their relationship was far from close. One entry in her file suggested that there was a complete breakdown of communication between the two after Leila had started at Oxford University. She had told her vetting officer that the tears she shed at her father’s funeral, in her final year, were solely for her mother.

Fielding stood up from his desk, stretched and looked out of the window as the first planes into Heathrow stirred London from sleep. There was a knock on the door, and Otto, who had served as a butler for three Chiefs, brought in a pot of Turkish coffee, a small basket of warm flat breads and some labneh cream cheese. Fielding’s tours of duty had left their mark on his palate.

‘You must take some time off, Otto,’ Fielding said. ‘Working late last night, here so early today.’

‘It’s no problem, sir. The duty manager called me. He said you had been up all night and so forth.’

‘The difference is that I’m paid enough to work through the night, you’re not,’ Fielding said, pouring a coffee. He knew that many of MI6’s new recruits bridled at the notion of a butler working in Legoland, until the practicalities of the Chief dining with anyone of importance were pointed out to them. On most days of the week, he lunched with politicians, senior civil servants and colleagues from other agencies, but their conversations were too sensitive for even the most trustworthy restaurants (MI6 had a number of small, security-cleared establishments in central London on its books).

Otto was originally from Yugoslavia. He had arrived in London in the 1960s, having learnt his English entirely from reading 1950s spy novels. The dated turns of phrase had gradually disappeared over the years, but he still surprised people with the occasional ‘ruddy’ expletive, a ‘chin chin’, or even, the office’s favourite, ‘We meet again.’ Fielding often wondered what the outside world would once have made of the Chief of MI6 employing a butler from Eastern Europe. Now, of course, there was nothing unusual about his nationality, but at the height of the Cold War it must have raised a few eyebrows in Whitehall.

‘Family keeping well?’ Fielding asked, as Otto cleared away some cups from the night before and headed for the door.

‘Yes, sir. Thank you. Mr Denton is here. Be seeing you.’

Fielding’s brief moment of sympathy for Leila passed as quickly as it had arrived when Ian Denton, unshaven and carrying a coffee from the canteen, reminded him of what her work for the Iranians might have entailed: not only betraying her country by facilitating a wave of terrorist attacks, but personally destroying his predecessor’s career.

As Fielding filled Denton in on the night’s developments, he became increasingly certain that Leila was the mole who had done so much to destabilise the Service in the past year, leading to Stephen Marchant’s early retirement, ill health and death. Britain had made no secret of its opposition to Iran’s nuclear programme, and although the government had fallen short of supporting America’s calls for a military invasion, Fielding was only too aware of the Treasury funds that were currently being channelled through MI6 to opposition parties, bloggers and students in Iran who supported regime change.

He and Denton both knew, though, that it would take time to prove Leila’s role in the wave of bomb attacks that had preceded Marchant’s departure. An unknown cell in South India, with links to the Gulf, was thought to be behind the blasts. But the trail had invariably gone cold, the network analysis maps always had holes. The terrorists had been at least two steps ahead of MI5, prompting fears that they had inside help. MI6’s role had been to explore the overseas links, and Leila, working for the Gulf Controllerate on the second floor of Legoland, had been a part of the team liaising with MI5. It was all so obvious now.

South India had been in the frame again for the attempted London Marathon attack, although the chatter and network analysis had increasingly pointed to a Gulf connection. That speculative link had since become a reality, thanks to Paul Myers, whose transcripts pointed to Iran’s involvement, as well as Leila’s.

‘Should we have suspected her earlier?’ Fielding asked. He was worried about Denton, who worked too hard and was always ill when he took leave, which was not often enough. (Fielding had to persuade him to use up his annual holiday allowance.) He had never seen him unshaven before, either.

‘It depends on when we think she started to work for VEVAK,’ Denton said.

‘From the off, I fear. They must have made their approach soon after her mother returned to Iran, and before Leila started at the Fort.’

‘And the Americans? Did they know from the beginning?’

‘No. It took them the best part of a year to notice her mother was back in Iran.’

‘A year quicker than us.’

‘Quite. Once Spiro had got wind of the mother’s whereabouts, he used it to recruit Leila.’

‘And Spiro had no idea she was already working for the Iranians?’

‘None. Leila must have convinced him that she hadn’t been compromised by her mother’s move. The CIA was looking for someone close to the head of MI6. Who better than the lover of the Chief’s son? Leila agreed to work for them. She could hardly believe her luck. It was her insurance policy against any future mole-hunt in Legoland.’

Fielding took a piece of flat bread and spread it with labneh. He gestured at Denton, inviting him to share his breakfast, but he declined. Denton preferred a sausage sandwich from the canteen.

‘Leila’s been very smart, Ian,’ Fielding continued. ‘If the West queries her actions, she knows they’re consistent with her undercover role for the Americans. Why did she find herself near the American Ambassador, one runner in 35,000? Because she was working for the CIA, who were worried about an attack. Did she set up Marchant at the marathon, giving him his old phone? Maybe, but if she did, it was on behalf of the CIA, whose distrust of the Marchants was well known.’

Agreeing to spy for America, in other words, had provided Leila with the perfect operational cover for her real job: spying for Iran. A part of Fielding admired her technical prowess. The Service’s instructors at the Fort spent weeks insisting on the need for good legends. Leila must have been listening.

But there was one thing that troubled him above all: why had she remained committed to working for VEVAK? If she was so concerned for her mother’s safety, couldn’t she have asked the Americans to protect her when they discovered that she was living in Iran? They agreed to pay for her mother’s private hospital treatment, so why didn’t she take them into her confidence, explain that VEVAK was threatening to kill her? Perhaps she was in too deep; but Fielding felt there was something else.

‘We still don’t know why she sabotaged the London attack,’ Denton said, interrupting Fielding’s line of thought.

‘No.’ Fielding picked up the transcript of the first conversation between Leila and her mother, on the evening after the marathon, and handed it to Denton. A section of the dialogue had been highlighted in green marker pen:

Mother (Farsi): ‘You told me they wouldn’t come. Others here have suffered, too.’

Leila (Farsi): ‘Never again, Mama. They won’t come any more. (English) I promise.’

Mother (Farsi): ‘Why did they say my family are to blame? What have we ever done to them?’

‘You can see that the mother was clearly told that her family — Leila — was to blame,’ Fielding said, watching Denton as he read the dialogue. ‘When word reached Tehran that the bomber hadn’t detonated his belt, VEVAK turned up and beat her mother’s much-loved cook. If there was a deal between VEVAK and Leila, she had clearly broken it by preventing the attack.’

‘And she didn’t go through with it because of Marchant?’ Denton asked, passing back the transcript. ‘Because she didn’t want her lover to die?’

Fielding hoped so. It would prove that Leila had a weakness — and spies lived for human flaws.

‘Maybe her relationship with Marchant counted for something, I don’t know. Perhaps she felt, for some reason, that a successful attack would have blown her cover. Either way, the Iranians stuck with Leila because she wasn’t just working for MI6, she’d wormed her way into the CIA too. A priceless asset, in other words, who deserved a second chance. And she knows she can’t afford to mess up again. We need to get to Delhi.’

But before Fielding had reached for his jacket, there was a commotion outside. He heard Otto swear — twenty-first-century expletives this time — and then the door swung open. Harriet Armstrong stood there, Sir Marcus Chadwick by her side.

‘We need to talk about Daniel Marchant,’ Chadwick said.