BY MICHELE HEWITSON
If this were a spy thriller, the three piles of unbound paper would have arrived in this newspaper office via a circuitous, secretive route.
These pages would, perhaps, have been exchanged in what is known in the spy trade as a "brush," a fleeting meeting with an agent where the papers would have been handed over hidden in a copy of the Truth.
Or deposited in what is in spy jargon a "dead letter box," behind a loose brick or in an old tree stump. Or they could have arrived in the country on a commercial flight, concealed in a child's Garfield pyjama case.
Except for the pyjama case fiction - and truth, as those pages will reveal, is often far sillier than fiction - training in such methods of transferring information is standard spy school stuff.
Such are the revelations of these photocopied pages. For this is The Big Breach. The much talked about expose of MI6, Britain's Security Intelligence Service, by former agent, Ngaruawahia-born Richard Tomlinson.
So explosive, apparently, are these pages that they could not wing their way to a New Zealand Herald desk via airmail. They had to travel to New Zealand accompanied by a representative of the London agent for the Moscow publisher, which proved to be the only country Tomlinson could get his book published in until recently.
The Russians must have been rubbing their hands in glee over that little turn of events. Delivered by hand to the Herald office, the instruction was that the pages were to be quickly photocopied, the bound copy then removed rather hurriedly.
What jolly intrigue. It was a fitting enough way to get one's mitts on a book with a publishing history at least as intriguing as its contents: one man's story of what goes on behind the bomb-proof, bug-proof doors of MI6.
Tomlinson, who began work for MI6 in 1991, was sacked, for reasons which never become completely clear, in 1995. It was, he has long claimed, an "unfair and illegal" dismissal. Poison Dwarf, the personnel officer (not a code name but one of those nicknames staff everywhere create for unpopular colleagues) had it in for him, says Tomlinson, after he was spotted drinking a beer, alone, at lunchtime on the day he received the news that his girlfriend Sarah was told that the cancer, of which she would soon die, had spread into her lymph system.
Tomlinson says that the reason given for his dismissal was that he wasn't a team player, and ludicrously, that he was "motivated by challenge." His dismissal certainly motivated him to challenge his former employers: he lodged an application in an employment tribune. MI6 responded by offering to set Tomlinson up with a job in "the city", and by blocking his application to have the case heard with a Public Interest Immunity certificate - a neat trick which allows the service to block the release of any documents, in this case Tomlinson's personnel details, deemed a risk to national security.
This, writes Tomlinson, "was a disgraceful and cowardly lie. My personnel papers contained no more secrets than the papers of an employee of the gas board."
It proved to be an unfortunate analogy, for MI6. Because Tomlinson, enraged by MI6's treatment of him (he imagines that they probably began bugging his phone the minute he filed a claim), and broke, proves to be more toxic to MI6 than any gas leak.
This is a book written, Tomlinson has said, to expose the secrecy and inefficient management of the service. Any example serves as grist to the disgruntled writer's mill. He even credits, with palpable relish, the service's outplacement officer with giving him the idea of writing a book. Prospect (the codename for the officer) tells Tomlinson that he's just finished reading a book by a jobless, homeless "young chap" who joined the French Foreign Legion then wrote a book about his experience.
"Anyway," Prospect continued, "things turned out right for him in the end."
The French Foreign Legion "was not an option," writes Tomlinson, "but how about writing a book?"
The writing of that book has given him a predictable amount of grief: Tomlinson served a six-month jail term (he was charged with breaking the Official Secrets Act); has been hounded around the world, including in New Zealand where his hotel room was raided and his laptop confiscated (and where, peculiarly, he describes a constable as "limbering up with a gentle haka".) He was refused an entry visa to Australia, roughed up by French gendarmes. This book must, you can only surmise, contain secrets which would blow the secret service's cover for all time.
Well, yes and no. You can certainly see why MI6 wanted it banned. Not least because it makes them look like chumps, like little boys with posh accents who grew up dreaming of jobs where they could play with secret ink and guns disguised as fountain pens.
The cheap shot about the Garfield pyjama case is not so far off the mark: Tomlinson reveals that the transmitter for something called a Short Range Agent Communication device was often concealed by agents in those Garfield stuffed animals which are attached to car windows by their suckered feet.
And the Pentel rollerball pen, we learn, is the MI6's secret weapon in the invisible ink war. It was discovered, in a detail designed to humiliate the service, by accident when a secret message from Russia was being developed and was found to contain Cyrillic script from a letter it had been sitting on top of in the post. A world-wide search for the pen which had made the imprint was instigated. "Every MI6 station was asked to send a secretary to the local stationery store and to buy every make available. It took many weeks to identify the magic pen. Offset [the method of secret writing] is now used routinely by MI6 officers in the field." Quite possibly it, like the Garfield toys, have now been abandoned: Tomlinson has provided information on how to spot a spook at 20 paces.
To become a spook, one must first pass a series of tests designed to weed out the wimps (or the drunks) from the sleuths. Wanna-be agents were provided with £8.50 ($28), sent into a pub and told to elicit from a member of the public name, birthdate, profession and passport number. Tomlinson did this with ease: by chatting up a couple of nurses and wooing them with the promise a trip on a luxury yacht (he would need their passport details for Customs clearance). Another trainee got drunk, had a win on the pokies, shouted the bar and forgot what his mission was.
Recruiting agents was an important part of the round. Tomlinson, on detail in Bosnia, was told to recruit an Australian accountant working in Bosnia as a clerk. String Vest, his immediate superior, (Tomlinson, like a naughty, sneering boy, gives his former work mates really stupid code names like Fish and Beetroot and Santa Claus) instructed Tomlinson to "play on his Anglophilian interest in cricket to pursue a recruitment."
This is all very silly, and raises a titter or two. But there has to be more than a titter to lift The Big Breach beyond the vitriolic memoirs of a disgruntled former employee of, say, Winz. The thrills come from the top secret forays, to Moscow where he posed as an industrialist, and where his mission was to nab details about the performance of a new Russian missile system. In the Balkans he claims to have revealed suspicions, with a little help from a conservative MP, that a Tory party candidate, a Serb who was allegedly a strong supporter of the Bosnian Serbs under indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic, was a channel through which Serbian money was being offered to the Conservative party's coffers.
Tomlinson alleges he was instructed to destroy his report. For which we have only Tomlinson's word. And there are warning bells ringing from the beginning of this book about the veracity of words.
How, for example, is Tomlinson able to recite huge chunks of quoted dialogue from his first induction day in 1991? It is unlikely that the trainee spy was surreptitiously recording people like the head of the service; if he was taking notes you'd imagine that even a service as inept as the one painted by Tomlinson might have asked questions. Perhaps, to give him the benefit of the doubt, he has total recall. He certainly remembers some plots staggering in their sweep. One of the maddest of these is an alleged intelligence plot to assassinate Slobodan Milosevic, while he attended peace talks in Geneva, by blinding his driver with a strobe light. A car crash as Milosevic's cavalcade passed through a tunnel would then be engineered.
Tomlinson's response to this plan, he claims, was the reasonable: "You're off your trolley." The plan was shelved but was later - and this is the maddest of his allegations - resurrected to murder Diana, Princess of Wales. His explanation for this is never coherent. It hinges on the similarity of the alleged Milosevic plot and Tomlinson's assertion that Henri Paul, Di and Dodi's chauffeur on the night they died, was in the employ of MI6. Paul was found, Tomlinson claims, to have on his body a large amount of cash from an unexplained source. A suggestion which, unless you're really into conspiracy theories, might merely lead you to conclude that being recruited by MI6 is pretty profitable - and highly dangerous.
"Interesting if true," was the comment attached to Tomlinson's first report for MI6 which arose after debriefing a British businessman who claimed that diamonds were being artificially created through "controlled explosion" in the Ural mountains.
It's a postscript which might equally apply to The Big Breach. Conspiracy theorists will no doubt lap it up. MI6 will continue spending £150 million ($496 million) a year (that's the "official" figure) protecting Britain's secrets. God knows how much they spent attempting to block publication of Tomlinson's book.
The good news for a man on his biggest mission is that The Big Breach went on sale in Britain on February 13, and that its first print run outside of Russia, a run of 12,500 copies, had almost sold out by the following day.
The bad news for Tomlinson is that, while Government lawyers conceded that there was nothing more they could do to stop it, they are determined that Tomlinson will make no money from sales of the book. In 1997 Tomlinson signed an agreement - under, he says, duress - handing over copyright to the Crown.
But the really bad news for readers, other than those hardcore conspiracy theorists, is that there's little new here. That stack of papers represents a book that has been hyped like no other since the new Hannibal Lecter novel. And with that book there were no leaks, no interviews giving away the plot. It's ironic, really, that its very publication ends the game of spies stalking spy that made it all so enticing a story. The cloak is whisked away; the dagger is revealed to be a blunt instrument.
Tomlinson book akin to James Bond and Austin Powers
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