The Network

7

Even today I am reluctant to go into the details, and the knowledge that the players and the protocols have all changed since then does nothing to ease the task. It’s true I want things to be told, but to abandon the habit of secrecy on which your life and that of others has at times depended is like pulling shrapnel from a wound. It may seem like the necessary thing to do, but the act sometimes risks killing the victim. It does feel like a kind of death, a relinquishment of something that’s been part of my survival, and which year after year I’ve managed to conceal.

His code name is Orpheus, and his real name is Emmanuel, but I’ve known him personally as Manny since before the beginning of all this. Fate had thrown us together in the Pakistani town of Peshawar, not far from the Afghan border, in the late 1980s, and our lives have been linked ever since.

We meet one evening in the restaurant of the notorious Green’s Hotel, a favourite haunt of the many misfits and adventurers drawn by the lure of the secret and dangerous war in Afghanistan under Soviet occupation. We’re starved for company and like each other at once. Manny’s been hiking in Chitral in his summer holiday from university and has made his way to Peshawar, as have I, in the hope of joining a mujaheddin group who’ll take him across the border into Afghanistan itself. At twenty-three, he’s only a year older than me but has a worldly confidence that I admire and enjoy. He’s been awarded a short-service commission by the army, which pays his way through university, after which he’s set his sights on a cavalry regiment. I’m toying with the idea of Sandhurst myself in a year’s time, so I soak up everything he tells me about his plans. We share a fascination with Afghanistan, and the chance to get closer to the conflict is irresistible to both of us.

Green’s is a dismal hotel. It’s gloomy, run-down, inefficient and, worst of all, has no alcohol licence. The Pakistani staff all know that the majority of the guests are not there for love of the hotel, but have fallen in some way under the spell cast by Afghanistan, which beckons from beyond the tribal territories some fifty miles distant. They do not share our enthusiasm for Afghanistan or its people, and make no secret of the fact they think we’re misguided. We take a morbid pleasure in their cynicism, and it’s in keeping with this spirit of defiance that Manny has smuggled a bottle of duty-free whisky into his room.

That same night we stay up drinking, and by dawn we’re planning our trip ‘inside’ together. It’s reckless and dangerous, but we reason that two heads are better than one because anything might happen once we’re inside a war zone and it seems wiser to combine our talents. There’s no way to communicate with the outside world once we’re actually in Afghanistan, and we exchange addresses at home in case one of us has to pass on bad news to the other’s family.

For a week we explore together, diving into the noise and anarchy of the bazaars in the old part of the town, where we buy Afghan clothes in preparation for our first journey into war. We make friends with a Pashtun tribesman who lives in the tribal territories near the border with Afghanistan, and travel with him to a few of the wild frontier settlements where the law has scarcely ever reached and where guns and drugs can be bought like sweets at a tuck shop. At Darra we try out a selection of a gunsmith’s wares, and the locals are duly impressed by Manny’s marksmanship. An old man, hearing we are from England, tells us the story of the charismatic faqir of Ipi, known as Mirza Ahmed Khan to the Pashtuns, who fifty years earlier led a guerrilla-style jihad against the British presence in the region. Forty thousand troops were sent to the wilds of Waziristan to hunt him down, but failed to find him in a campaign lasting more than a decade.

Then comes the news we’ve both been waiting for. A mujaheddin group agrees to smuggle us into Afghanistan to its regional headquarters in Logar province, not far south of the capital Kabul, and a few days later we settle our bills at the hotel and send our final letters home. At dawn the next day we’re moving towards the ragged purple profile of the mountains that mark the border, where we join a party of a dozen armed mujaheddin leading a small convoy of horses laden with arms and supplies.

We walk day and night, moving from village to village, sleeping in caves and on mountainsides, and are quickly immersed in all the hazards and romance of life with our guerrilla hosts. We share our first taste of warfare. Distantly at first, in the form of long, sonorous rumbles of artillery barrages laid down miles away, and in the fleeting sight of Soviet jet fighters glinting like silver arrows against the cobalt Afghan sky. And then more closely, when the village in which we’ve slept is inexplicably struck by two bombs, and in the chaos of the aftermath we catch sight of the limp and broken bodies of several villagers killed by the blasts, and the war becomes suddenly real for us.

At the time we are young enough to feel immortal. Our hosts, who are as hardy and friendly as they are ill-equipped and untrained, allow us to join them on several operations against their enemies. We accompany them on mine-laying operations to cripple military convoys, and on attacks against military posts in the region. Our happy-go-lucky party is itself frequently a target, and we experience the perverse relish of hearing the musical whine of ricocheting bullets nearby and of dusting ourselves off after diving for cover from incoming shells.

At first we carry no weapons and agree only to observe the plight of our hosts. Then one night, by moonlight, we join a team of thirty-five men who steal towards an enemy position in the hope of shooting it into submission. It’s a mud-walled fortified house with two small watchtowers, manned by Afghan army conscripts under Soviet command. Ten yards short of the perimeter fence an explosion sends our commander flying into the air, his leg severed at the knee by a powerful anti-personnel mine. Manny is behind him, his face blasted by flying grit from the explosion, but he manages to drag the commander into cover. We withdraw in chaos as the incandescent threads of tracer rounds tear into the darkness around us. One of our party is shot cleanly through his hand, and another has a miraculous escape as a bullet lodges in the rifle which he’s slung over his back. We walk for several hours to reach our headquarters, which comprises a network of caves carved into an escarpment beneath a village. At dawn, with the name of God on his lips, our commander dies.

It’s not our war. But Manny puts forward the idea that with some explosives and a few more fighters we can take the enemy post, and he begs the deputy commander to request additional forces for a follow-up attack. Unprompted, he ignites the promise of retribution in the grief-stricken minds of our group. He has a natural authority and confidence that fascinates the Afghans, and in the days following the commander’s burial on the hillside above our cave, there are long discussions.

A daylight reconnaissance of the building lends force to his argument. We study it from half a mile away through an ancient pair of binoculars and discover the shape of a bricked-up arched doorway in its rear wall. This is likely to be the weakest point and it’s here that Manny suggests we attack. He makes an earth model of the fort and rings it with tiny pebbles to indicate the minefield that surrounds it. In the dust he draws the fields of fire, the points at which the men are to position themselves, and where to put the cut-off groups which will deal with any attempted counter-attack. All this he communicates in the small but forceful vocabulary of Persian he has taught himself over the course of a couple of weeks, and I’m jealous not only of his grasp of tactics but also of his precocious talent with a foreign language. It’s a powerful combination. A few days later, a dozen more fighters, dark-skinned, bearded and draped with bandoliers of ammunition and automatic weapons, appear at the entrance of our cave, asking for the Christian mujahid.

It’s a daring plan, refined over the course of several evenings. A lead man will prod his way through the mined perimeter, allowing Manny to advance to the rear of the building. An explosive charge, cast from the melted TNT of anti-tank mines, will destroy the wall, allowing entry to a storming party. The fort’s towers, which contain light machine guns, will be attacked by rocket-propelled grenades. Three Soviet parachute flares will illuminate the attack. Manny drives home the importance of timing and coordination, and the disciplined use of directed fire. The men are entranced.

And incredibly, it works. There is no need for the storming party. The rear wall is thinner than we calculate, and the explosive charge tears open a hole the size of a garage door. Our light machine guns pour fire into the breached wall, and we wait for the signal to move. But within seconds the terrified occupants are already pouring out, caught in the eerie artificial sun of the hissing flare overhead. Two members of the dreaded KHAD, the Afghan secret service, are betrayed by the surrendering men, and are killed resisting capture inside the building. The attack is a textbook success, and the hated post has fallen.

When Manny starts showing signs of a violent fever a few days later I’m secretly relieved. News of the Christian commander’s victory has spread with electrical speed, and we both know that before long the Afghan secret police will hear of it and report the presence of a foreign mercenary to their Soviet masters. The risks of staying are too great both for ourselves and our hosts, and the decision is made for us to return to Pakistan to recuperate. On the day of our departure I witness the incongruous sight of tears in the eyes of several of the men, warriors we imagined were impervious to pain.

I have no doubts about what would have happened to us had we stayed on. Manny possesses a combination of daring and ambition which, in a war as unpredictable and brutal as Afghanistan’s, will eventually end in a tragedy I don’t want to witness. Two weeks later we’re in England, shocked and depressed at how unreal everything seems. We long, silently, to return at once to Afghanistan and to the danger and the beauty of the place that has made us feel so very alive. We have shared in the thrill of near-death and in the agony of a nation torn apart by conflict: we are modern-day blood brothers. The prospect of ordinary life among people who care nothing for the privileges of peacetime yet whose lives are filled with a thousand petty worries, seems like a prison sentence to us both.

Manny emerges from Sandhurst to join a cavalry regiment with a reputation for dash and courage. I visit him for the occasional party at the officers’ mess, where the spirit of romance is kept alive among fit and idealistic young men in red jackets and gold piping. The dinners are pleasantly rowdy and fuelled by a generous flow of wine. At one I embarrass myself by not passing the port along. Later, I watch Manny attempt a ritual capture of the commanding officer’s spurs, by crawling beneath the long tables decorated with regimental silver ornaments from Balaclava. At another, the evening culminates in a fire-extinguisher fight in the corridors of the mess.

I decide to follow suit, and join my father’s regiment after being awarded a short-service commission. In the dreary lecture rooms that huddle behind the grand facades at Sandhurst I plough through Clausewitz and the grand concepts of attrition and manoeuvre. My knowledge of Middle Eastern languages has not gone unnoticed, and takes me to the army language school in Beaconsfield and to Ashford to spend time with the Green Team, better known as the Intelligence Corps. In my private life, by a cruel coincidence, Manny and I fall for the same woman, with whom we both spend, at different times, our every spare moment. For a year we are in a bittersweet competition for her favour, and our friendship is heavily strained by rivalry. When the woman we are in love with finally abandons both of us, our friendship is restored, almost magically intact.

Meanwhile, in the affairs of the greater world, there’s a kind of watershed. After a brutal ten-year occupation, the Soviets make their ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan, and their empire unravels. The Red Army’s venture in Afghanistan is over, and I can’t help feeling that the world’s last good war has come to an end. Manny feels the same.

I have known the Baroness, or imagine I’ve known her, since her appearance in my childhood home as my father’s guest and old friend. Her precise connection with my father is never explained and it doesn’t occur to me to ask. She’s an academic of the old school, and has written a book about her adventurous travels in the Middle East. I think her husband was a diplomat. She is courteous to a fault, and a woman of poise and genuine charm. I’ve never seen her not wearing her most formal clothes.

Of all the adults who crossed the horizon of my youth, it’s the Baroness who stands out. It is to her that I owe my stock of stories about Africa and the Middle East, as well as my decision to study Middle Eastern languages at university. I introduce Manny to her not long after our first return from Afghanistan, and she takes a kindly, godmotherish interest in our future careers, going to the trouble of sending us newspaper clippings or alerting us to films or documentaries on subjects which she thinks will interest us.

One day she calls to invite us to her London home in Little Venice. We join her for dinner, and when the subject of Afghanistan comes up, as it always does, Manny surprises us both by delivering a passionate attack on the immorality of the Western powers who have abandoned the country and are doing nothing to help rebuild a nation in whose destruction they have participated.

The Baroness listens attentively. Then, in a tone of seriousness to which we’re unaccustomed, she extends the argument in a direction that leaves us dumbfounded. Until this moment she’s seemed to us a refined and kindly old lady.

‘Have you thought,’ she asks, ‘of the wider consequences of the war in Afghanistan and how much we will all be affected by it? You are both seeking something out of the ordinary. Perhaps today is the day to explore it.’

We are entering a new era, she says, in which the real threat facing the West is not a military one. The Western powers will no longer fight conventional wars because the enemy of the future will be more diffuse. It will, in part, grow out of the disaffected peoples of the Islamic world, she tells us. We have meddled in and manipulated their countries for far too long. Now Afghanistan has shown that a poor but determined people can successfully resist impossible odds, and the ten-year-long war against the Soviets has served as a rallying call throughout the Muslim world. But the Afghans’ hard-fought victory is being exploited by extremists, who have begun to gather in the country with the intention of spreading their violent agendas ever further afield. It is from these loosely allied militant groups that the threat is really incubating, she says, and there is a small organisation, to which the Baroness belongs, that takes an interest in such things. If we agree to speak nothing of it, she will tell us more. Manny and I are spellbound.

She calls it only the Network, and says she was introduced through a friend and former SOE agent called Freya. The Network’s original goal was to establish a structure, to be activated in times of need, to penetrate key groups relevant to British interests in the Middle East and gather information on their activities. It operated independently of the more conventional intelligence services, with which its relationship was collaborative when necessary, but for the sake of secrecy never shared operational details. Being much smaller, and not limited by the approval of ministers or the political agendas of the time, it functioned with both greater freedom and greater risk. It was successfully brought into play several times over the past few decades, but the loss of British influence in Middle Eastern affairs led to its suspension.

Now the world is again facing a crisis of new proportions, and the Network has been resurrected across several continents. The Baroness’s role is to address the emerging need for intelligence from Afghanistan, and this, she confesses, is why she has chosen to speak to us on the matter.

Napoleon’s dictum that a single spy in the enemy’s camp is more valuable than a thousand soldiers on the battlefield is more pertinent than ever, she tells us. It is not so difficult, she goes on, for someone with the relevant talents to infiltrate a group of potential terrorists. What is difficult is to gather useful information about their activities over a long period and communicate this to one’s allies. The ideal structure for such a task is a pair of individuals. One disappears from sight of the world and leads a secret life inside the target’s camp. The other follows at a distance, receiving and transmitting signals like the polished mirror of a telescope.

‘It is the work of years, rather than weeks or months,’ she says, ‘and the very practice that the ordinary intelligence services have abandoned. We like to think of it as directed towards obtaining higher intelligence. The Service addresses the changing affairs of the day. We march to a different drum. By its nature it involves a fateful commitment and the sacrifice of all lesser ambitions. Above all, this task must be secret and known only to the smallest possible number of people. As long as the Network exists, its work cannot be spoken about to outsiders.’

It is for this reason, she adds, that its members are painstakingly recruited from the families of trusted friends who have demonstrated what she calls the ‘appropriate spirit’.

The Network serves an idea, not an authority. It has no overt hierarchy. Even the Baroness has her teachers, she says. The role of its members is to understand a given target, to deepen their understanding and to transmit this to those who can hear. Their ambition is not to change the world, but to influence it, for lasting change is brought about by understanding rather than the application of external force. Advancement in the Network is acquired on the basis of understanding alone.

We will never know its exact numbers, the Baroness tells us, because no such information exists and its members never gather in a single place. They collaborate when necessary, but not for gain or advancement. There are Network members in government, in the military, in commerce and academia; others serve in more dangerous roles. They are content for their work to be invisible and for the most part lead ordinary lives, incorporating, without any outward show, their hidden task into the fabric of their daily responsibilities.

Such a possibility, if we wish to reflect on it, now exists for us.

She gives us time to think, but we don’t need long. We are young and keen, and we accept. Nothing changes for us on the surface of things, but in our spare time we meet the Baroness whenever our duties allow, and begin our secret course of study.

There are some things you learn which, when you first encounter them, make each day seem like a gift beyond value. Our first few sessions have this quality. The fact that what we’re learning must be kept secret adds a further, intoxicating aspect to our work, which is why the protocols for secrecy are drummed into us from the start.

The success of all our future work is founded on the twin arts of observation and clandestine communication – essential practices, the Baroness tells us, which have not changed since men first learned to spy on one another, and which require nothing of technology. We learn first to see and hear through a new version of our senses, as if an extra dimension has been added to their habitual function. Our task is to act at all times on the assumption that we are being observed, and to see ourselves through the eyes of our observers. We learn to watch and follow a human target, to note and then predict his actions. Then, by inverting the same skills, to evade a follower and to conceal our own telltale gestures of impatience, anxiety or relief. We must be able, the Baroness endlessly reminds us, to transmit the signals of whatever emotion we choose to whoever is watching, as well as to draw the attention of others in whatever direction we wish.

To sharpen our skills of observation, she invites us to assign a portion of our attention to something going on around us, and then points out when our attention has faltered. Our ordinary power of attention must acquire a second track, she reminds us. At meetings in restaurants she challenges us to describe the faces we have seen at the tables on our way in and to recall the numbers of buses or taxis we’ve used on the way. She explains how to use mental mnemonics to remember lists of things or names. We must learn these skills, she says, practise them in small ways every day, and live them until they become instinctively natural, betraying no trace of our ulterior agendas.

A large part of our time is devoted to arranging and conducting meetings. For secret information to pass between two parties, there must be a moment of contact, and this is the most perilous moment of all. A ‘chance’ meeting, which has in fact been arranged in advance, may be best when the exchange must be verbal. When information can be passed on without the need for a conversation, a brush contact may be best, involving a fleeting and wordless exchange of secret material. An innocent third party, or cut-out, may be another solution. Each has its advantages and corresponding risks. Brush contacts must be arranged carefully in advance and executed with precise timing; a cut-out may be unreliable and describe both parties if interrogated; and a chance meeting must stand up to intense scrutiny if suspected. But a meeting can also be arranged remotely, by an advertisement in a paper, a phone call with a disguised message, or take the form of a ‘dead letter box’ at an agreed location, visited by both parties at different times, perhaps days apart. The Baroness’s preferred method for transmitting short messages is an ‘innocent’ letter, in which an ordinary text disguises a broken-up message, previously enciphered by means of a key known only to the recipient. To this end we practise a variety of codes and ciphers that can be created in the field without potentially incriminating aids such as printed one-time pads or code books, and study the theories of fractionation and homophony, and the various ways to combine codes that will render them impenetrable in the short term.

We learn of famous historical double agents and illegals and of their successes and failures. We study the career of one of the CIA’s greatest spies, the Soviet GRU officer Oleg Penkovsky, and are invited to decide whether he was a triple agent or not. We learn too of the quiet English mother of three to whose children Penkovsky passed microfilm-stuffed sweets in public parks and on trains, trained by the SIS for the purpose but never caught. We are told of the reckless extravagance of Aldrich Ames, whose tailored suits, bought with KGB dollars, went unnoticed while he betrayed hundreds of CIA assets abroad. We consider the long successes of illegals with carefully constructed legends such as Rudolph Abel and Konon Molody. Abel lived in New York as a retired photofinisher; Molody in London as a bubblegum-machine salesman. Both masterminded spy rings, both were eventually caught and given long prison sentences, and both were later exchanged for Western spies captured in the Soviet Union.

We are on one occasion delivered a fascinating lecture analysing the daring escape from Moscow, organised by his SIS handlers, of the KGB colonel Oleg Gordievsky. The lecture is given by a middle-aged man with a serious-looking face, straw-coloured hair and a distinct Slavic accent, on loan to us for the day with the approval of his agent resettlement officer from the Firm. Afterwards, I confess how impressed I’ve been by the speaker.

‘It is the lessons of tradecraft you are being asked to consider on such occasions,’ she says, ‘not the personalities involved.’ The Baroness lets this sink in. ‘Look more closely, and you will see the cold-hearted pride and ruthless vanity from which such people suffer.’

It becomes an axiom of our training that whatever the chosen means of communication and however it is passed, there must always be a credible cover story, as well as innocuous signals, agreed in advance, to indicate danger to one’s allies. The closer the cover story is to the truth, the better. But there must always, always be a cover story.

When Saddam Hussein is foolish enough to invade Kuwait, the Baroness summons us to discuss things. We are both preparing to deploy to the Gulf and awaiting our final orders. It won’t be real war, the Baroness tells us. She predicts confidently that Kuwait will be quickly liberated, but that the West will be blinded by its victory to the greater consequences of the conflict. America’s willingness to turn its back on the heroic and ruined nation of Afghanistan but to spend billions in defence of a corrupt oil-rich state will confirm the deepest cynicism of its opponents. The time, she says, is drawing near. She offers us a final chance to withdraw. The war in Kuwait will provide the context for our operational phase with the Network. She is fond of the term context. She advises us to await our orders and do nothing except what is expected of us. We will know the signal when it is given to us. ‘Like a passing bus,’ she says, ‘you will know when to jump on it.’ It is better, she explains, that neither of us sees it coming.

We do not, in the event. When hostilities begin, we are both assigned unusual extra-regimental roles with the same interrogation team in Kuwait. Our parent unit is the Joint Services Interrogation Wing, housed at Ashford and commanded by a I Corps lieutenant colonel, hence our ‘2’ designations, which indicate an intelligence role. The assignment is unusual because the forward interrogation team to which we’re assigned – me as operations officer and Manny as 2i/c – is formed primarily from reservists who are volunteer members of 22 Int Coy, the Naval Reserve unit HMS Ferret, and 7630 Flight. We have relevant backgrounds, having both been through DSL Beaconsfield, but we’re not regular senior NCOs or Reserve officers, and in time-honoured fashion we blame the mistake in tasking on the army. Most of the interrogation teams deploy forward to where enemy prisoners are being held, but we’re assigned to Category 1 prisoners, who are usually senior officers and intelligence personnel, and our team takes over a warehouse on the outskirts of the city and converts it into an interrogation centre. We’re barely up and running when the war screeches to a halt. Saddam Hussein’s great army has fled before the allied onslaught, and the Baroness’s prediction has proven uncannily accurate. The active combat phase of Desert Storm has lasted one hundred hours, Kuwait is liberated, and Saddam’s ‘mother of battles’ turns out to be a rout.

When the raid occurs, we’re not expecting it. Neither Manny nor I can have any notion of how deeply, and irreversibly, that ten-minute period of our lives will change things for us both. Manny has no idea that he will be seized by an Israeli commando team, beaten senseless and confined to a Mossad safe house in Kuwait City. But when the same Mossad officer – who has been beating Manny around his face so that the bruises will look much worse than they really are – slips him a narrow hacksaw blade and pats him on the back for good luck before throwing him into a cell with a suspected Arab terrorist, Manny knows that this is the bus he’s expected to jump on. When Manny cuts through both sets of handcuffs and then through the metal bar that secures their window, the Arab can’t believe his luck. He has no reason to suspect that his escape has been engineered. All he knows is that an enraged English soldier, vowing jihad against the Zionists, has freed him from his enemies, and he can’t believe his luck. He’s only too happy to introduce him to his superiors. Manny’s dangerous work has begun.

Not everything goes according to plan. I am not supposed to shoot and kill a man. But the Israelis are willing to overlook the accident, since they have been allowed to seize Gemayel in the process, and they have wanted him for years. Such is the deal that has been struck. Mossad gets its man, and Manny’s cover story – bruises and all – is brilliantly established from the start.

It’s nearly six months before our first contact arrives at a PO box in London. It takes the form of an ‘innocent’ letter sent from Jalalabad in southern Afghanistan. It’s what the Baroness calls a ‘sign of life’. Manny, to whom we’ve given the code name Orpheus, has made it to Afghanistan with a forged New Zealand passport, and requests an address in Kabul to which his reports can be sent. Thus begins the new phase of my work. The Baroness tells me a vacancy has come up with a British de-mining trust operating in Kabul which favours ex-servicemen, and it’s obvious she’s used her influence with the founder. The fact that the plans for me to move to Afghanistan coincide with the outbreak of civil war in the country is, in the Baroness’s words, ‘problematic but not insurmountable’.

There is no Internet, mobile or terrestrial phone network, nor even a reliable postal system in Afghanistan at the time, so the address to which Manny’s messages must be delivered is transmitted in a pre-recorded code by radio from England. Radio enthusiasts call such transmissions number stations, and rightly suppose they are the preferred method of communicating with agents in the field, though no government has ever officially acknowledged them. Orpheus needs only an ordinary short-wave radio to receive the signal, which is transmitted every day. But he has no other special equipment of his own, so his reports must be personally delivered by couriers who know nothing of their hidden content.

They begin to arrive at the trust’s office in Kabul a month later, addressed to a pseudonym. The first takes the form of a book of Afghan poetry. Into its spine he’s glued a sheet of paper, dense with handwritten numbers. I copy the numbers onto a grid called a straddling chequerboard, and transpose them using a keyword into letters that reveal the message.

Slowly, as the words take shape, I’m filled with a sense of awe that that our fragile link has successfully spanned so many hazards. The numbers we’ve agreed to use as a security device are correct and the message opens with characteristic humour: bgns msg 0786 all well despite urgent need saqi. I am filled with relief to learn that he’s well, despite a craving for wine. He’s living at the Jalalabad headquarters of an Afghan mujaheddin commander called Sayyaf, known for his extreme Islamicist outlook and strong links with fundamentalists in the Arab world. Orpheus’s knowledge of Arabic is allowing him to translate for his Afghan hosts and to serve as interpreter when Arab guests visit the headquarters. It’s not much news but it’s the sign of life we’ve been waiting for. The final line of the message alludes to the need for patience by reminding me that one of the Muslim names of God is the Patient One, al-saboor: allahu saboor send greetings uk qsl msg ends.

I fax news of the message to the Baroness using the satellite phone at the office, knowing that she will arrange for confirmation of its receipt to be sent by a one-way signal which Orpheus can hear on a short-wave radio. Our little portion of the Network, against the odds, is up and running.

Orpheus’s messages continue in the same manner for the next six months. They are, not surprisingly, irregular. Afghanistan is spiralling downward into ever more violent civil war, and on those days when the rockets rain into the south and west of the city I spend much of the time in the basement of my rented home. Because of the ongoing fighting, most of the trust’s work takes me north of Kabul to the once fertile and prosperous Shomali plain, which bears the scars of fifteen years of conflict. We survey minefields sown by the Soviets and gather unexploded ordnance from settlements where people are still living. In collaboration with the United Nations we develop a mine awareness course but the daily casualties from mines and UXOs are a constant reminder of the hugeness of our task. It is difficult at times not to be seized by depression.

The messages from Orpheus arrive with traders, drivers and refugees, who will occasionally accept a reward for their efforts and from whom I gain a picture of events in the south. Then the first of the computer diskettes arrives, hidden this time in the thick cover of a Qur’an. Orpheus now has access to a computer, which eliminates the long task of manual encryption and decryption and enables him to send messages of infinitely greater length.

It’s the beginning of a series of long disturbing reports that confirm the violent intentions of the broad spectrum of foreign militants gathering in the south of the country. They are financed from overseas and the Afghan government is too weak to touch them. The Afghans, in any case, don’t have the money to finance terrorists and can’t even pay the salaries of their own government ministers. The religious fervour of these new foreigners has no place in their culture.

To judge from his reports, Orpheus has also gained access to lists of names, financial details and plans for plots against targets all over the world. I can only wonder about how he’s being affected by the company he’s keeping. He writes at length about the ideas and aspirations of the organisations he’s learning about. A new kind of international war, aimed far beyond Afghanistan, is steadily incubating. Its proponents use Islam, traditionally a religion of tolerance, as a rallying banner, but increasingly stripped of its humane principles and twisted towards violence.

Extremism is new to Afghanistan, but it’s on the rise. One of Orpheus’s reports accurately predicts the unprecedented mas-sacre of Hazara families in Afshar by henchmen of the brutal warlord Sayyaf, and in another he forecasts the assassinations of rival mujaheddin leaders both in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But there are also details of larger-scale acts of terror, which are increasingly inventive and ambitious. They seem fantastic and unrealisable. There are plots to blow up hotels in the Middle East and public buildings in New York, and to hijack airliners in Europe. There are details of a plan to kill both the Pope and the US president. Orpheus has been tasked to translate American military manuals on improvised explosives, poisons and the manufacture of biological toxins. But in the very country where these unprecedented campaigns are taking shape, the powers at which they are directed have no plans to intervene.

Then the reports stop. The newly formed Taliban is advancing through the south and west of the country, and I can only assume that the headquarters where Orpheus lives has been overrun or dispersed. Communication and transport between Kabul and the rest of the country are virtually severed. I allow myself to hope that he’s safe, but that it’s become impossible for him to get messages out from wherever he is.

Three months pass and there’s nothing from him. The daily stress of life adds to my feelings of desperation. Twice I visit the front lines in the west of the city towards the Taliban positions in Maidan Shahr, and find myself drawn too close to the fighting for my own good. I notice that I am taking risks with my own security and losing my sensitivity to danger. I don’t know it at the time, but the effects of the war are reaching into me in unexpected ways, and I am being changed by them. I am surrounded by destruction and the randomness of death, which I cannot fathom. I have felt the closeness of death as tangibly as the intimate whisper of a murderous seducer, and felt the richness, twinged by guilt, of having escaped its grasp. I have seen too often the numb lost look of men consumed by undiluted grief, and heard the howl of children as their mothers are pulled from the rubble of a rocket-blasted home, and I am coming to understand the long dark pain of those who silently endure what at first seems unendurable.

One evening, in the gloomy, oak-panelled bar of the United Nations club, an Australian journalist friend who’s been covering the war gives me his characteristically frank assessment.

‘You’re a bloody basket case,’ he says. ‘Got it written all over you,’ he gestures, drawing a finger across his chest. ‘Burned out. You need to get yourself out of this shit hole and get some R amp; R before someone has to pick you up in little bits and put them in a paper bag.’

A week later he’s badly wounded by a mortar explosion and is flown out of the city by the International Red Cross. He’s paralysed and will live the rest of his life in a wheelchair. The news hits me hard. It’s as if he’s shown me my own fate.

I have no wish to abandon Orpheus, but it’s time to pull out, so after nearly two years I resign from the trust. Nothing can describe my feelings of devastation as I board a United Nations flight to New Delhi and circle away from the airfield at Kabul, where the surrounding fields are still littered with the debris of destroyed Soviet aircraft. My sense of ruin is complete.

I return to England. I am racked by feelings of guilt at what I have seen of a conflict to which the world is largely indifferent, and experience shock and loathing at the comforts of ordinary life back home. In Afghanistan I have lived surrounded by random death, destruction and misery of every kind, and am mystified at why people in England, a country at peace, seem so very miserable.

The Network’s operation in Afghanistan has died. There is nothing more that can be done. As time passes I make my peace with ordinary life, and my hopes of seeing Manny again harden into a knot of despair. I refuse to believe he is dead, and he haunts me like the phantom limb of an amputee. There is not a day that passes when I do not think of him. I know in the deepest part of myself that one day, somewhere, I will find him, or his corpse, and be free of this pain, which is like a barrier between me and life, and through which all my experience is unwillingly filtered. When I experience moments of joy, I wish Manny were there to share them; when I am stalked by misery, I think of the difficulties and loneliness he must be having to face. He is my closest friend. With Manny I have shared the unforgettable intimacy of being alive – not only with the personal intensity that war or a shared love can bring to a friendship, but with the greater and impersonal love born of being in the service of something wholly bigger than us both.

The Baroness offers me a new role. While I start my landscaping business, finding consolation in working with nature, I’m given the task of advising and instructing new recruits to the Network. In London I teach the rudiments of counter-surveillance and field codes to a small number of men and women who will operate in places I don’t know about.

One afternoon I’m in Selfridges to demonstrate the use of switchback escalators as a surveillance trap. The idea is to carefully clock the faces of travellers on a lower escalator, ‘trapping’ them into becoming visible. Part of good counter-surveillance is not giving any indication that you suspect you’re being followed, which means techniques like stopping to tie shoelaces or peering at reflections in shop windows are never really used, and the switchback configuration of escalators in big department stores is one of the few ordinary means to see who’s behind you without having to turn around in the manner of a fugitive. But life is so strange you couldn’t make it up. I’m just wondering about a good way to challenge the three pairs of young watchers trying to keep up with me when I spot a striking-looking woman on the escalator below. I follow her, deciding that I’ll demonstrate to my watchers impromptu techniques for getting the telephone number of a perfect stranger. I catch up with the woman I’ve chosen on an upper floor. She’s flicking through clothes on a rail, and already I’m thinking of a story about being a designer and how, if she loves those designs, she’ll love the line I’ve designed, which is about to be launched. But she’s unexpectedly beautiful, and has the predatory gaze of a panther, and I’ve already fallen under the spell of her feline power and grace. I make a joke about the colour of a dress she’s considering. She’s American, it turns out, and within a few seconds she asks me the question that takes English people months to get around to, enquiring what line of business I’m in.

‘I teach spies how to pick up good-looking foreign women.’

‘Saw you coming,’ she says.

And perhaps she did. I manage to get her phone number, but I haven’t had to tell a single lie. Six months later we’re married, and our first child is soon on the way. But we’re not happy. I’ve been blinded by her beauty and energy, and have failed to notice a cruel streak that makes all the other cruel people I’ve met seem like Good Samaritans. My attempt at family life turns out to be a multiplying sequence of disasters, and my wife is destructively angry at the whole of life. She’s angry at England, angry at the English, angry at my friends and angry at me. One day, before I’ve lost all hope for the relationship, I call her mother in America to ask why her daughter is so angry.

‘Angry?’ she laughs chillingly. ‘She was born angry.’

I’m two years back into life as a bachelor when the Baroness calls an urgent meeting. I drive from London to Chevening House, where she occasionally holds quiet gatherings with members of the Foreign Office. With her are two nameless officials who are eager to know my assessment of a piece of intelligence just received by the Americans. It’s single-threaded, meaning it comes from only one source, and as such would normally be unactionable. But it’s so hot the CIA is screaming for help to assess its authenticity, and has turned to its allies for advice. The source suggests that a summit meeting is about to be held in Afghanistan involving all the leading jihadist commanders currently in the country. Bin Laden, who’s on the ascendant, is planning to be there himself, and the Americans need to decide how to act. Based on everything I’ve learned from Orpheus’s reports, I confirm that the details seem credible, and that the location and the names of the parties involved are consistent with what I know. The officials thank me for my contribution.

Later, I stroll with the Baroness through the grounds, and we walk to the green boathouse on the northern edge of the lake. We sit on a small bench. ‘I thought I should tell you first,’ she says as we look across the water. I feel a momentary sense of dread as she speaks these words, and I remember how at that moment my eyes fall on the dark green calfskin gloves she is wearing, and how her hands are folded in her lap. ‘There’s a rumour,’ she goes on, ‘of an Englishman operating in one of bin Laden’s groups. He’s been in prison in Chechnya for a year, which makes him a bit of a hero. The Americans felt they should share it with us.’ She pauses, then speaks again before I can ask the question. ‘They don’t have a name, but apparently he’s called the Christian commander, based on a military operation he led in the time of the jihad against the Soviets.’ Then she turns to me with a slight smile. ‘They remember that sort of thing, don’t they?’

I hardly dare believe it. Despite periods of numbing doubt I have never fully believed he was dead. It strikes me that the east, where fate put us together like a cosmic matchmaker, is now delivering him back to me.

The Baroness has read my mind again. ‘I know,’ she says with a look that suggests she understands how much the news means to me. ‘We need to get you back there. I shall have to arrange a context.’

My mind’s racing, then comes to a sudden halt at a dark thought. ‘It’s been a long time,’ I say. ‘We don’t know what’s happened to him in the meantime.’

‘He should come in. You either bring him back,’ says the Baroness quietly, looking across the water, ‘or you deal with the situation on the ground as you see fit. You were his best friend, and it must be for you to decide.’

It’s February and I realise I’ve forgotten that the next day is my birthday.