Perhaps he thought that need-to-know was a two-way street. Perhaps he thought the detail too unimportant. It had to do with a muttered conversation in the shadows of a cave hospital run by Arabs at a place called Jaji.
PART TWO
Warriors
CHAPTER FOUR
The decision in the Hampshire orchard led to a blizzard of decision-making from the two spymasters. To start with, sanction and approval had to be sought from both men’s political masters.
This was easier said than done because Mike Martin’s first condition was that no more than one dozen people should ever know what Operation Crowbar was about. His concern was completely understood.
If fifty people know anything that interesting, one will eventually spill the beans. Not intentionally, not viciously, not even mischievously; but inevitably.
Those who have ever been in deep cover in a lethal situation know that to trust in one’s own tradecraft never to make a mistake and be caught is nerve-racking enough. To hope that one will never be given away by some utterly unforeseeable fluke is constantly stressful. But the ultimate nightmare is to know that capture and the long, agonizing death to follow was all caused by some fool in a bar boasting to his girlfriend and being overheard – that is the worst fear of all. So Martin’s condition was acceded to at once.
In Washington John Negroponte agreed with Marek Gumienny that he alone would be the repository, and gave the go-ahead. Steve Hill dined at his club with one man in the British government and secured the same result. That made four.
But Gumienny and Hill knew they could not personally be on the case twenty-four hours a day. Each needed an executive officer for the day-to-day running. Marek Gumienny appointed a rising Arabist in the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Division: Michael McDonald dropped everything, exp
lained to his family that he had to work in the UK for a while, and flew east as Marek Gumienny returned home.
Steve Hill picked his own deputy on the Middle East Desk, Gordon Phillips. Before they parted company the two principals agreed that every aspect of Crowbar would have a plausible cover story so that no one below the top ten would really know that a western agent was going to be slipped inside Al-Qaeda.
Both Langley and Vauxhall Cross were told that the two men about to go missing were simply on a career-improving sabbatical of academic study and would be away from their desks for about six months.
Steve Hill introduced the two men who would now be working together and told them what Crowbar was going to try to do. Both McDonald and Phillips went very silent. Hill had installed them both not in offices in the headquarters building by the Thames, but in a safe house, one of several retained by the Firm, out in the countryside.
When they had unpacked and convened in the drawing room he tossed them both a thick file.
‘Finding an ops HQ starts tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You have twenty-four hours to commit this to memory. This is the man who is going to go in. You will work with him until that day, and for him after that. This’ – he tossed on to the coffee table a thinner file – ‘is the man he is going to replace. Clearly we know much less. But that is everything the US interrogators have been able to secure from him in hundreds of hours of interrogations at Gitmo. Learn this also.’
When he was gone the two younger men asked for a large pot of coffee from the household staff and started to read.
It was during a visit to the Farnborough Air Show in the summer of 1977 when he was fifteen that the schoolboy Mike Martin fell in love. His father and younger brother were with him, fascinated by the fighters and bombers, aerobatic fliers and first-viewing prototypes. For Mike the high point was the visit of the Red Devils, the stunt team from the Parachute Regiment, free-falling from tiny specks in the sky to swoop to earth in their harnesses right in the heart of the tiny landing zone. That was when he knew what it was he wanted to do.
He wrote a personal letter to the Paras during his last summer term at Haileybury, in 1980, and was offered an interview at the Regimental Depot at Aldershot for the same September. He arrived and stared at the old Dakota out of which his predecessors had once dropped to try to capture the bridge at Arnhem, until the sergeant escorting the group of five ex-schoolboys led them to the interview room.
He was regarded by his school (and the Paras always checked) as a moderate scholar but a superb athlete. That suited the Paras just fine. He was accepted, and began training at the end of October, a gruelling twenty-two weeks that would bring the survivors to April 1981.
There were four weeks of square-bashing, basic weapons handling, fieldcraft and physical fitness; then two more of the same plus first aid, signals and study of precautions against NBC (nuclear, bacteriological and chemical warfare).
The seventh week was for more fitness training, getting harder all the time; but not as bad as weeks eight and nine: endurance marches through the Brecon range in Wales in midwinter, where fit men have died of exposure, hypothermia and exhaustion. The numbers began to thin out.
Week ten saw the course at Hythe, Kent, for shooting on the range where Martin, just turned nineteen, was rated a marksman. Eleven and twelve were ‘test’ weeks – just running up and down sandy hills carrying tree trunks in the mud, rain and freezing hail.
‘Test weeks?’ muttered Phillips. ‘What the hell has the rest been?’
After test weeks the remaining young men got their coveted red beret before three more weeks in the Brecons for defence exercises, patrolling and ‘live firing’. By then, late January, the Brecons were utterly bleak and freezing. The men slept rough and wet, without fires.
Sixteen to nineteen covered what Mike Martin had come for: the parachute course at RAF Abingdon, where a few more dropped out and not just from the aircraft. At the end came the ‘wings parade’ when the wings of a paratrooper were finally pinned on. That night the old 101 club at Aldershot saw another riotous party.
There were two more weeks devoted to a field exercise called ‘last fence’ and some polishing-up of parade-ground skills; week twenty-two saw Pass-Out Parade, when proud parents could finally view their spotty youths amazingly transformed into soldiers.
Private Mike Martin had long been earmarked as POM – potential officer material – and in April 1981 went to join the new short course at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, passing out in December as a Second Lieutenant. If he thought glory awaited him, he was entirely mistaken.
There are three battalions in the Parachute Regiment and Martin was assigned to Three Para, which happened to be Aldershot in penguin mode.
For three years out of every nine, or one tour out of three, each battalion is off parachuting and used as ordinary lorry-born infantry. Paras hate penguin mode.