The Deceiver

The Deceiver by Frederick Forsyth

The Cold War lasted forty years. For the record, the West won it. But not without cost. This book is for those who spent so much of their lives in the shadowed places. Those were the days, my friends.

In the summer of 1983 the then Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service sanctioned the formation, against a cer­tain internal opposition, of a new desk.

The opposition came mainly from the established desks, almost all of which had territorial fiefdoms spread across the world, for the new desk was designed to have a wide-ranging jurisdiction that would span traditional frontiers.

The impetus behind the formation came from two sources. One was an ebullient mood in Westminster and Whitehall, and notably within the ruling Conservative government, following Britain’s success in the Falklands war of the previous year. Despite the military success, the episode had left behind one of those messy and occasionally vituperative arguments over the issue: Why were we so taken by surprise when General Galtieri’s Argentine forces landed at Port Stanley?

Between departments, the argument festered for over a year, reduced inevitably to charges and countercharges on the level of we-were-not-warned-yes-you-were. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, had felt obliged to resign. Several years later, the United States would be seized by a similar row following the destruction of the Pan American flight over Lockerbie, with one agency claiming it had issued a warning and another claiming it had never received it.

The second impetus was the recent arrival at the seat of power, the General Secretaryship of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, of Yuri V. Andropov, who had for fifteen years been Chairman of the KGB. Favoring his old agency, Andropov’s reign instituted an upsurge of increasingly aggres­sive espionage and “active measures” by the KGB against the West. It was known that Andropov highly favored, among active measures, the use of disinformation—the spreading of despondency and demoralization by the use of lies, agents of influence, and character assassination, and by the sowing of discord among the Allies with planted untruths.

Mrs. Thatcher, then earning her Soviet-awarded title of the Iron Lady, took the view that two can play at that game and indicated she would not blanch at the notion of Britain’s own intelligence agency offering the Soviets a little return match.

The new desk was given a ponderous title: Deception, Disinformation, and Psychological Operations. Of course, the title was at once reduced to Dee-Dee and Psy Ops, and thence simply to Dee-Dee.

A new desk head was appointed in November. Just as the man in charge of Equipment was known as the Quartermaster and the man in charge of the Legal Branch as the Lawyer, the new head of Dee-Dee was tagged by some wit in the canteen the Deceiver.

With hindsight—that precious gift so much more prevalent than its counterpart, foresight—the Chief, Sir Arthur, might have been criticized (and later was) for his choice: not a Head Office careerist accustomed to the prudence required of a true civil servant, but a former field agent, plucked from the East German desk.

The man was Sam McCready, and he ran the desk for seven years. But all good things come to an end. In the late spring of 1991 a conversation took place in the heart of Whitehall. ...

The young aide rose from behind his desk in the outer office with a practiced smile. “Good morning, Sir Mark. The Per­manent Under-Secretary asked that you be shown straight in.”

He opened the door to the private office of the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office—the FCO—and ushered the visitor through it, closing the door behind him. The Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir Robert Inglis, rose with a welcoming smile.

“Mark, my dear chap, how good of you to come.”

You do not become, however recently, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS, without developing a certain wariness when confronted by such warmth from a relative stranger who is clearly about to treat you as if you were blood brothers. Sir Mark steeled himself for a difficult meeting.

When he was seated, the country’s senior Foreign Office civil servant opened the scarred red dispatch box lying on his desk and withdrew a buff file distinguished by the red diagonal cross running from corner to corner.

“You have done the rounds of your stations and will doubt­less let me have your impressions?” he asked.

“Certainly, Robert—in due course.”

Sir Robert Inglis followed the top-secret file with a red, paper-covered book secured at its spine by black plastic spiral binding.

“I have,” he began, “read your proposals, ‘SIS in the Nineties,’ in conjunction with the Intelligence Co-Ordinator’s latest shopping list. You seem to have met his requirements most thoroughly.”

“Thank you, Robert,” said the Chief. “Then may I count upon the Foreign Office’s support?”

The diplomat’s smile could have won prizes on an American game show.

“My dear Mark, we have no difficulties with the pitch of your proposals. But there are just a few points I would like to take up with you.”

Here it comes, thought the Chief of the SIS.

“May I take it, for example, that these additional stations abroad that you propose have been agreed upon with the Treasury, and the necessary monies squirreled away in some­body’s budget?”

Both men well knew that the budget for the running of the Secret Intelligence Service does not come wholly from the Foreign Office. Indeed, only a small part comes out of the FCO budget. The real cost of the almost-invisible SIS, which unlike the American CIA keeps an extremely low profile, is shared among all the spending ministries in the government. The spread is right across the board, including even the unlikely Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food—per­haps on the grounds that they might one day wish to know how many cod the Icelanders are taking out of the North Atlantic.

Because its budget is spread so widely and hidden so well, the SIS cannot be “leaned upon” by the FCO with a threat of withholding funds if the FCO’s wishes are not met.

Sir Mark nodded. “There’s no problem there. The Co-Ordinator and I have seen the Treasury, explained the position (which we had cleared with the Cabinet Office), and Treasury has allocated the necessary cash, all tucked away in the research and development budgets of the least likely minis­tries.”

“Excellent,” beamed the Permanent Under-Secretary, whether he felt it was or not. “Then let us turn to something that does fall within my purview. I don’t know what your staffing position is, but we are facing some difficulties with regard to staffing the expanded Service that will result from the end of the Cold War and the liberation of Central and Eastern Europe. You know what I mean?”

Sir Mark knew exactly what he meant. The virtual collapse of Communism over the previous two years was changing the diplomatic map of the globe, and rapidly. The Diplomatic Corps was looking to expanded opportunities right across Central Europe and the Balkans, possibly even miniembassies in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia if they secured independence from Moscow. By inference, he was suggesting that with the Cold War now laid out in the morgue, the position for his colleague in Secret Intelligence would be just the reverse: reduction of staff. Sir Mark was having none of it.

“Like you, we have no alternative but to recruit. Leaving recruitment to one side, the training alone is six months before we can bring a new man into Century House and release an experienced man for service abroad.”

The diplomat dropped his smile and leaned forward ear­nestly. “My dear Mark, this is precisely the meat of the discussion I wished to have with you. Allocations of space in our embassies, and to whom.”

Sir Mark groaned inwardly. The bastard was going for the groin. While the FCO cannot “get at” the SIS on budgetary grounds, it has one ace card always ready to play. The great majority of intelligence officers serving abroad do so under the cover of the embassy. That makes the embassy their host. No allocation of a “cover” job—no posting.

“And what is your general view for the future, Robert?” he asked.

“In future, I fear, we will simply not be able to offer positions to some of your more ... colorful staffers. Officers whose cover is clearly blown. Brass-plate operators. In the Cold War it was acceptable; in the new Europe they would stick out like sore thumbs. Cause offense. I’m sure you can see that.”

Both men knew that agents abroad fell into three categories. “Illegal” agents were not within the cover of the embassy and were not the concern of Sir Robert Inglis. Officers serving inside the embassy were either “declared” or “undeclared.”

A declared officer, or brass-plate operator, was one whose real function was widely known. In the past, having such an intelligence officer in an embassy had worked like a dream. Throughout the Communist and Third Worlds, dissidents, malcontents, and anyone else who wished knew just whom to come to and pour out their woes as to a father confessor. It had led to rich harvests of information and some spectacular defectors.

What the senior diplomat was saying was that he wanted no more such officers any longer and would not offer them space. His dedication was to the maintenance of his department’s fine tradition of appeasement of anyone not born British.

“I hear what you are saying, Robert, but I cannot and will not start my term as Chief of the SIS with a purge of senior officers who have served long, loyally, and well.”

“Find other postings for them,” suggested Sir Robert. “Central and South America, Africa ...”

“And I cannot pack them off to Burundi until they come up for retirement.”

“Desk jobs, then. Here at home.”

“You mean what is called ‘unattractive employments,’ ” said the Chief. “Most will not take them.”

“Then they must go for early retirement,” said the diplomat smoothly. He leaned forward again. “Mark, my dear chap, this is not negotiable. I will have the Five Wise Men with me on this, be assured of it, seeing that I am one myself. We will agree to handsome compensation, but ...”

The Five Wise Men are the Permanent Under-Secretaries of the Cabinet Office, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the Ministry of Defense, and the Treasury. Among them, these five wield enormous power in the corridors of govern­ment. Among other things they appoint (or recommend to the Prime Minister, almost the same thing) the Chief of the SIS and the Director General of the Security Service, MI-5.

Sir Mark was deeply unhappy, but he knew the realities of power well enough. He would have to concede. “Very well, but I will need guidance on procedures.”

What he meant was that, for his own position among his own staff, he wanted to be visibly overruled. Sir Robert Inglis was expansive; he could afford to be.

“Guidance will be forthcoming at once,” he said. “I will ask the other Wise Men for a hearing, and we will lay down new rules for a new set of circumstances. What I propose is that you instigate, under the new rules that will be handed down, what the lawyers call ‘a class action’ and thus establish specimen counts.”

“Class action? Specimen counts? What are you talking about?” asked Sir Mark.

“A precedent, my dear Mark. A single precedent that will then operate for the whole group.”

“A scapegoat?”

“An unpleasant word. Early retirement with generous pen­sion rights can hardly be called victimization. You take one officer whose early departure could be envisaged without demur, hold a hearing, and thus set your precedent.”

“One officer? Had you anyone in mind?”

Sir Robert steepled his fingers and gazed at the ceiling.

“Well, there is always Sam McCready.”

Of course. The Deceiver. Ever since his latest display of vigorous if unauthorized initiative in the Caribbean three months earlier, Sir Mark had been aware that the Foreign Office regarded him as a sort of unleashed Genghis Khan. Odd, really. Such a ... crumpled fellow.

* * *

Sir Mark was driven back across the Thames to his headquar­ters, Century House, in a deeply introspective mood. He knew the senior civil servant in the Foreign Office had not merely “proposed” the departure of Sam McCready—he was insisting on it. From the Chief’s point of view, he could not have chosen a more difficult demand.

In 1983, when Sam McCready had been chosen to head up the new desk, Sir Mark had been a Deputy Controller, a contemporary of McCready and only one rank above him. He liked the quirky, irreverent agent whom Sir Arthur had ap­pointed to the new post—but then, so did just about every­body.

Shortly afterward, Sir Mark had been sent to the Far East for three years (he was a fluent Mandarin-speaker) and had returned in 1986 to be promoted to Deputy Chief. Sir Arthur retired, and a new Chief sat in the hot seat. Sir Mark had succeeded him the previous January.

Before leaving for China, Sir Mark had, like others, specu­lated that Sam McCready would not last long. The Deceiver, or so ran the received wisdom, was too rough a diamond to cope easily with the in-house politics of Century House.

For one thing, he had thought at the time, none of the regional desks would take kindly to the new man trying to operate in their jealously guarded territories. There would be turf wars that could only be handled by a consummate diplo­mat, and whatever else his talents, McCready had never been seen as that. For another, the somewhat scruffy Sam would hardly fit into the world of smoothly tailored senior officers, most of whom were products of Britain’s exclusive public schools.

To his surprise Sir Mark, on his return, had found Sam McCready flourishing like the proverbial green bay tree. He seemed to be able to command an enviable and total loyalty from his own staff while not offending even the most die-hard territorial desk heads when asking for a favor.

He could talk the lingo with the other field agents when they came home for furlough or a briefing, and from them he seemed to amass an encyclopedia of information, much of which, no doubt, should never have been divulged on a need-to-know basis.

It was known he could share a beer with the technical cadres, the nuts-and-bolts men and women—a camaraderie not always available to senior officers—and from them occa­sionally obtain a phone tap, mail intercept, or false passport while other desk heads were still filling out forms.

All this—and other irritating foibles like bending the rules and disappearing at will—hardly caused the Establishment to become enamored of him. But what kept him in place was simple—he delivered the goods, he provided the product, he ran an operation that kept the KGB fully stocked with indi­gestion tablets. So he had stayed ... until now.

Sir Mark sighed, climbed out of his Jaguar in the under­ground car park of Century House, and took the lift to his top-floor office. For the moment he need do nothing. Sir Robert Inglis would confer with his colleagues and produce the “new set of rules,” the “guidance” that would enable the troubled Chief to say, truthfully but with a heavy heart, “I have no alternative.”

It was not until early June that the “guidance”—or in reality the edict—came down from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and enabled Sir Mark to summon his two Deputies to his office.

“That’s a bit bloody stiff,” said Basil Gray. “Can’t you fight it?”

“Not this time,” said the Chief. “Inglis has got the bit between his teeth, and as you see, he has the other four Wise Men with him.”

The paper he had given his two Deputies to study was a model of clarity and impeccable logic. It pointed out that by October 3, East Germany—once the toughest and most effec­tive of Eastern European Communist states—would literally have ceased to exist. There would be no embassy in East Berlin, the Wall was already a farce, the formidable secret police, the SSD, or Stasi, were in full retreat, and the Soviet forces were pulling out. An area that had once demanded a large operation by the SIS in London would become a side­show, if any show at all.

Moreover, the paper went on, that nice Mr. Vaclav Havel was taking over in Czechoslovakia, and theirspy service, the StB, would soon be teaching Sunday school. Add to that the collapse of Communist rule in Poland, Hungary, and Romania, its coming disintegration in Bulgaria, and one could grasp the approximate shape of the future.

“Well,” sighed Timothy Edwards, “one has to concede we won’t have the operations we used to have in Eastern Europe, or need the manpower there. They have a point.”

“How kind of you to say so,” smiled the Chief.

Basil Gray he had promoted himself, his first act on being appointed Chief in January. Timothy Edwards he had inher­ited. He knew Edwards was hungry to succeed him in three years’ time; knew also that he had not the slightest intention of recommending him. Not that Edwards was stupid. Far from it; he was brilliant, but ...

“They don’t mention the other hazards,” grumbled Gray. “Not a word about international terrorism, the rise of the drug cartels, the private armies—and not a word about prolif­eration.”

In his own paper, “SIS in the Nineties,” which Sir Robert Inglis had read and apparently approved, Sir Mark had laid stress on the shifting rather than the diminishing of the global threats. At the top of these had been proliferation—the steady acquisition by dictators, some of them wildly unstable, of vast arsenals of weapons; not war-surplus pieces such as in the old days, but high-tech modern equipment, rocketry, chemical and bacteriological warheads, even nuclear access. But the paper before him now had treacherously skimmed over these matters.

“So what happens now?” asked Timothy Edwards.

“What happens,” said the Chief mildly, “is that we envis­age a shift of population—our population. Back from Eastern Europe to the home base.”

He meant that the old Cold War warriors, the veterans who had run their operations, their active measures, their networks of local agents out of the embassies east of the Iron Curtain, would come home—to no jobs. They would be replaced, of course, but by younger men whose true profession would not be known and who would blend into the embassy staffs unperceived, so as not to give offense to the emergent democ­racies beyond the Berlin Wall. Recruitment would go on, of course—the Chief had a Service to run. But that left the problem of the veterans. Where to put them? There was only one answer—out to pasture.

“We will have to set a precedent,” said Sir Mark. “One precedent that will clear the way for the smooth passage into early retirement for the rest.”

“Anyone in mind?” asked Gray.

“Sir Robert Inglis does. Sam McCready.”

Basil Gray stared across with his mouth open. “Chief, you can’t fire Sam.”

“No one’s firing Sam,” said Sir Mark. He echoed Robert Inglis’s words. “Early retirement with generous compensa­tion is hardly victimization.”

He wondered how heavy those thirty pieces of silver had felt when the Romans handed them over.

“It’s sad, of course, because we all like Sam,” said Ed­wards predictably. “But the Chief does have a Service to run.”

“Precisely. Thank you,” said Sir Mark.

As he sat there he realized for the first time exactly why he would not be recommending Timothy Edwards to succeed him one day. He, the Chief, would do what had to be done because it had to be done, and he would hate it. Edwards would do it because it would advance his career.

“We’ll have to offer him three alternative employments,” Gray pointed out. “Perhaps he’ll take one.” Privately, he sincerely hoped so.

“Possibly,” Sir Mark grunted.

“What have you in mind, Chief?” asked Edwards.

Sir Mark opened a folder, its contents the result of a conference with the Director of Personnel.

“Those available are the Commandant of the Training School, the Head of Administration/Accounts, and the Head of Central Registry.”

Edwards smiled thinly. That should do the trick, he thought.

Two weeks later the subject of all these conferences prowled around his office while his deputy, Denis Gaunt, stared gloom­ily at the sheet in front of him.

“It’s not all that bad, Sam,” he said. “They want you to stay on. It’s just the question of the job.”

“Someone wants me out,” said McCready flatly.

London flagged under a heat wave that summer. The office window was open, and both men had removed their jackets. Gaunt was in a smart pale-blue shirt from Turnbull and Asser; McCready had a confection from Viyella that had turned woolly from much washing. Moreover, the buttons had not been inserted into the right buttonholes so that it rode up on one side. By the lunch hour, Gaunt suspected, some secretary would have spotted the error and put it right with much tut-tutting. The women around Century House always seemed to want to do something for Sam McCready.

It baffled Gaunt, the matter of McCready and the ladies. It baffled everyone, for that matter. He, Denis Gaunt, at six feet, topped his boss by two inches. He was blond, good-looking, and as a bachelor no shrinking violet when it came to the ladies.

His desk chief was of medium height, medium build with thinning brown hair, usually awry, and clothes that always looked as if he had slept in them. He knew McCready had been widowed for some years, but he had never remarried, preferring apparently to live alone in his little flat in Kensing­ton.

There must be somebody, Gaunt mused, to clean his flat, wash up, and do the laundry. A charlady, perhaps. But no one ever asked, and no one was ever told.

“Surely you could take one of the jobs,” said Gaunt. “Itwould cut the ground right out from under their feet.”

“Denis,” replied McCready gently, “I am not a school­teacher, I am not an accountant, and I am not a bloody librarian. I’m going to make the bastards give me a hearing.”

“That might swing it,” agreed Gaunt. “The board won’t necessarily want to go along with this.”

The hearing inside Century House began as always on a Monday morning, and it was held in the conference room one floor down from the Chief’s office.

In the chair was the Deputy Chief, Timothy Edwards, immaculate as ever in a dark Blades suit and college tie, the man the Chief had picked to ensure the required verdict. He was flanked by the Controller of Domestic Operations and the Controller for Western Hemisphere. To one side of the room sat the Director of Personnel, next to a young clerk from Records who had a large pile of folders in front of him.

Sam McCready entered last and sat in the chair facing the table. At fifty-one, he was still lean and looked fit. Otherwise, he was the sort of man who could pass unnoticed. That was what had made him in his day so good, so damned good. That, and what he had in his head.

They all knew the rules. Turn down three “unattractive employments,” and they had the right to require you to take premature retirement. But he had the right to a hearing, to argue for a variation.

He brought with him to speak on his behalf Denis Gaunt, ten years his junior, whom he had raised over five years to the number-two slot under himself. Denis, he reckoned, with his brilliant smile and public school tie, would be able to handle them better than he could.

All the men in the room knew each other and were on first-name terms, even the clerk from Records. It is a tradition of Century House, perhaps because it is such a closed world, that everyone may call everyone by first names except the Chief who is called “Sir” or “Chief” to his face and “the Master” or other things behind his back. The door was closed, and Edwards coughed for silence. He would.

“All right. We are here to study Sam’s application for a variation of a Head Office order, not amounting to redress of grievance. Agreed?”

Everyone agreed. It was established Sam McCready had no grievance, inasmuch as the rules had been abided by.

“Denis, I believe you are going to speak for Sam?”

“Yes, Timothy.”

The SIS was founded in its present form by an admiral, Sir Mansfield Gumming, and many of its in-house traditions (though not the familiarity) still have a vaguely nautical flavor. One of these is the right of a man before a hearing to have a fellow officer speak for him, a right that is often invoked.

The Director of Personnel’s statement was brief and to the point. The powers-that-be had decided they wished to transfer Sam McCready from Dee-Dee to fresh duties. He had de­clined to accept any of the three on offer. That was tanta­mount to electing early retirement. McCready was asking, if he could not continue as Head of Dee-Dee, for a return to the field or to a desk that handled field operations. Such a posting was not on offer. QED.

Denis Gaunt rose.

“Look, we all know the rules. And we all know the realities. It’s true Sam has asked not to be assigned to the training school, or the accounts, or the files because he is a field man by training and instinct. And one of the best, if not the best.”

“No dispute,” murmured the Controller for Western Hem­isphere. Edwards shot him a warning look.

“The point is,” suggested Gaunt, “that if it really wanted to, the Service could probably find a place for Sam. Russia, Eastern Europe, North America, France, Germany, Italy. I am suggesting the Service ought to make that effort, because ...”

He approached the man from Records and took a file.

“Because he has four years to go to retire at fifty-five on full pension.”

“Ample compensation has been offered,” Edwards cut in. “Some might say extremely generous.”

“Because,” resumed Gaunt, “of years of service, loyal, often very uncomfortable, and sometimes extremely danger­ous. It’s not a question of the money, it’s a question of whether the Service is prepared to make the effort for one of its own.”

He had, of course, no idea of the conversation that had taken place the previous month between Sir Mark and Sir Robert Inglis at the Foreign Office.

“I would like us to consider a few cases handled by Sam over the previous six years. Starting with this one.”

The man of whom they were speaking stared impassively from his chair at the rear of the room. None present could guess at the anger, even despair, beneath that weathered face.

Timothy Edwards glanced at his watch. He had hoped this affair could be terminated within the day. Now he doubted it could.

“I think we all recall it,” said Gaunt. “The matter concern­ing the late Soviet general, Yevgeni Pankratin. ...”