Beaconsfield, being in the Home County of Buckinghamshire—which is to say, within easy reach of central London—was years ago a favored area for the elegant country homes of those who enjoyed high and wealthy status in the capital. By the early seventies, most of the buildings played host to seminars, retreats, executive courses in management and marketing, or even religious observation. One of them housed the Joint Services School of Russian and was quite open about it;
another, smaller house, contained the training school of the SIS and was not open about it at all.
Adam Munro’s course in tradecraft was popular, not the least because it broke the wearisome routine of enciphering and deciphering. He had his class’s attention, and he knew it.
“Right,” said Munro that morning in the last week of the month. “Now for some snags and how to get out of them.”
The class was still with expectancy. Routine procedures were one thing; a sniff of some real Opposition was more interesting.
“You have to pick up a package from a contact,” said Munro. “But you are being tailed by the local fuzz. You have diplomatic cover in case of arrest, but your contact does not. He’s right out in the cold, a local man. He’s coming to a meet, and you can’t stop him. He knows that if he hangs about too long, he could attract attention, so he’ll wait ten minutes. What do you do?”
“Shake the tail,” suggested someone.
Munro shook his head.
“For one thing, you’re supposed to be an innocent diplomat, not a Houdini. Lose the tail and you give yourself away as a trained agent. Secondly, you might not succeed. If it’s the KGB and they’re using the first team, you won’t do it, short of dodging back into the embassy. Try again.”
“Abort,” said another trainee. “Don’t show. The safety of the unprotected contributor is paramount.”
“Right,” said Munro. “But that leaves your man with a package he can’t hold onto forever, and no procedure for an alternative meet.” He paused for several seconds. “Or does he ...?”
“There’s a second procedure established in the event of an abort,” suggested a third student.
“Good,” said Munro. “When you had him alone in the good old days before the routine surveillance was switched to yourself, you briefed him on a whole range of alternative meets in the event of an abort. So he waits ten minutes; you don’t show up; he goes off nice and innocently to the second meeting point. What is this procedure called?”
“Fallback,” ventured the bright spark who wanted to shake off the tail.
“First fallback,” corrected Munro. “We’ll be doing all this on the streets of London in a couple of months, so get it right.” They scribbled hard. “Okay. You have a second location in the city, but you’re still tailed. You haven’t got anywhere. What happens at the first-fallback location?”
There was a general silence. Munro gave them thirty seconds.
“You don’t meet at this location,” he instructed. “Under the procedures you have taught your contact, the second location is always a place where he can observe you but you can stay well away from him. When you know he is watching you, from a terrace perhaps, from a café, but always well away from you, you give him a signal. Can be anything: scratch an ear, blow your nose, drop a newspaper and pick it up again. What does that mean to the contact?”
“That you’re setting up the third meet, according to your prearranged procedures,” said Bright Spark.
“Precisely. But you’re still being tailed. Where does the third meet happen? What kind of place?”
This time there were no takers.
“It’s a building—a bar, club, restaurant, or what you like—that has a closed front, so that once the door is closed, no one can see through any plate-glass windows from the street into the ground floor. Now, why is that the place for the exchange?”
There was a brief knock, and the head of Student Program poked his face through the doorway. He beckoned to Munro, who left his desk and went across to the door. His superior officer drew him outside into the corridor.
“You’ve been summoned,” he said quietly. “The Master wants to see you. In his office at three. Leave here at the lunch break. Bailey will take over afternoon classes.”
Munro returned to his desk, somewhat puzzled. “The Master” was the half-affectionate and half-respectful nickname for any holder of the post of Director General of the Firm.
One of the class had a suggestion to make. “So that you can walk to the contact’s table and pick up the package unobserved.”
Munro shook his head. “Not quite. When you leave the place, the tailing Opposition might leave one man behind to question the waiters. If you approached your man directly, the face of a contact could be observed and the contributor identified, even by description. Anyone else?”
“Use a drop inside the restaurant,” proposed Bright Spark. Another shake from Munro.
“You won’t have time,” he advised. “The tails will be tumbling into the place a few seconds after you. Maybe the contact, who by arrangement was there before you, will not have found the right toilet cubicle free. Or the right table unoccupied. It’s too hit-or-miss. No, this time we’ll use the brush-pass. Note it; it goes like this.
“When your contact received your signal at the first-fallback location that you were under surveillance, he moved into the agreed procedure. He synchronized his watch to the nearest second with a reliable public clock or, preferably, with the telephone time service. In another place, you did exactly the same.
“At an agreed hour, he is already sitting in the agreed bar, or whatever. Outside the door, you are approaching at exactly the same time, to the nearest second. If you’re ahead of time, delay a bit by adjusting your shoelace, pausing at a shopwindow. Do not consult your watch in an obvious manner.