'That's right,' Fenwick agreed.
'Can you remember where you were at the time?'
Alex considered.
'In February 1996 I was in Bosnia,' he said.
'I was part of the snatch team that grabbed Maksim Zukic and two of his colonels for the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague. But we heard about the Canary Wharf bomb pretty much as it happened, and later about the FRU guys too.'
'Ray Bledsoe,' added Widdowes.
'And Connor Wheen.'
'Yeah, that's it. Bledsoe and Wheen. We didn't see that much of the FRU when we were on tours in the province, but I probably met both of them at various times.'
Angela Fenwick frowned.
'Am I right in thinking that you were number two on the sniper team when Neil Slater shot the Delaney boy at Forkhill?'
'Yes, that was a year later.'
'The information about the weapons cache at the Delaney farm came from a tout originally cultivated by Ray Bledsoe.'
'Is that so?' said Alex.
'We tend not be told stuff like that.'
'Why didn't you tell me last night that you thought there was a PIRA connection to the murders?' asked Dawn Harding accusingly.
'You didn't ask me,' Alex answered mildly.
'But I was pretty certain of it as soon as Mr. Widdowes here mentioned six-inch nails.'
Angela Fenwick nodded.
'I just wanted to establish that you knew about the Bledsoe and Wheen incident.
And you're right, the roots of this thing do indeed lie in Northern Ireland. But they go back a little further than 1996. Back to Remembrance Day in 1987, in fact.'
'Enniskillen,' said Alex grimly.
'Precisely. Enniskillen. On the eighth of November in 1987 a bomb was detonated near the war memorial in that town, killing eleven people and injuring sixty three. A truly horrendous day's work by the volunteers.'
Alex nodded. Widdowes and Dawn, sidelined, were staring patiently into space.
'The day after the explosion there was a crisis meeting attended by six people. Two of those the former director and deputy director of this service are now retired. Of the remainder one was myself, one was George, and the others were Craig Gidley and Barry Fenn. I was thirty-nine, a little younger than the others, and I had just been put in charge of the Northern Ireland desk.
'The purpose of the meeting was to discuss something that we were acutely aware of already: our desperate need to place a British agent inside the IRA executive. As you'll probably be aware, we had a pretty extensive intelligence programme running in the province at the time. We had informers, we had 14th Intelligence Company people, and we had touts.
What we didn't have, however, was anyone close to the decision-making process. We didn't have anyone sufficiently senior to tip us off if another Enniskillen was in the wind and there couldn't be -there absolutely couldn't be another Enniskillen.
'So basically we had two choices. To turn a senior player or to insert our own sleeper and wait for him to work his way up. The former was obviously the preferable choice in terms of time but in the long run it would have been much less reliable, as we could never be sure that we weren't being fed disinformation. We tried it, nevertheless. Got some of the FRU people to approach individual players that 14th Int had targeted and make substantial cash offers for basically harmless information. The hope was that we could hook them through sheer greed and then squeeze them once they were incriminated. Standard entrapment routine.
'But as we half expected, none of them went for it.
Even if they had any ideological doubts and in the wake of the slaughter at Enniskillen one or two of the players certainly did have ideological doubts they knew only too well what happened to touts. Apart from anything else, they knew they'd never be able to spend any money we gave them. So they told our people where to get off and in a couple of cases published their descriptions in the Republican newspaper An Phoblacht. Which, as you can imagine, made us look pretty damn stupid.
'So the decision was made to put in a sleeper. Not someone who, if he was lucky, might be allowed to hang around the fringes of the organisation and report back snippets of bar talk. Not a glorified tout, in other words, but a long-term mole who would rise through the ranks. Someone who had the credentials to rise to the top of this highly sophisticated terrorist organisation, but also the courage, the commitment and the sheer mental strength to remain our man throughout.
We would need someone exceptional, and identifying him would be a major project in itself.
'Operation Watchword, classified top secret, was planned and run by the four of us myself, George, Gidley and Fenn. It had a dedicated budget and a dedicated office, and no one else in the Service was given access of any kind. It was to be divided into three stages: selection, insertion and activation. Our man, once we found him, would be known as Watchman.
'Selection began in October 1987. The first thing we did was to make a computer search through MOD records. We were looking for unmarried Northern Irish-born Catholics aged twenty-eight or less and ideally those who had been the single children of parents who were now both dead. We looked at all the armed services. From the list that we got, including those with living parents and siblings, we eliminated all the officers, all those above the rank of corporal or its equivalent and all those with poor service records for drinking, fighting, in discipline and so on.
'We were left with a list of about twenty men, spread across the various services, and at that point we borrowed a warrant officer named Denzil Connolly from the RWW.'
Alex nodded. He had never met Connolly but knew of him by reputation. A right hard bastard by all accounts.
'Connolly dropped in on the various commanding officers and adjutants. He didn't enquire directly about the individuals we were interested in, merely asked if he could make a brief presentation and put up a notice calling for volunteers for Special Duties, which pretty much everyone knew meant intelligence work in Northern Ireland. Afterwards, over a cup of tea or a beer, he'd ask the adjutant if there was anyone he thought might be suitable. Self-sufficiency, technical ability and a cool methodical temperament were what was needed. If the target name failed to crop up he'd bring out a list that included the man in question. He had been given a dozen possibles, he'd say. Could the CO grade them from A to D in terms of the qualities he'd mentioned?
'By Christmas we had the numbers down to ten, all of whom answered the selection criteria and had either been directly recommended or assessed as As or Bs.
The ten were then sent to Tregaron to join the current selection cadre for 14th Intelligence, bumping the course numbers for the year up to about seventy. You probably know more about the 14th mt course than I do, Captain Temple, but I believe it's fairly demanding.'
'It's a tough course,' said Alex.
'I think it prepares people pretty well for what they're going to encounter as undercover operators.'
Angela Fenwick nodded.
'Well, of the ten we sent on the course, four were among those returned to their units as unsuitable by the staff instructors at the end of the first fortnight. The other six were pulled out of Tregaron by us at the same time, although they assumed that what followed was part of the normal selection course. They were housed in separate locations in the area where our Service's psychiatric people interviewed them over several days to assess their suitability.'
'Why not let them just go through the normal 14th Int selection course?' asked Alex.
'Because there was a big difference in what we wanted out of them. Working undercover is lonely and solitary work but ultimately you're still part of a team. You're still a soldier on a tour of duty, and there are plenty of times in an undercover soldier's life when he can let his guard down, put aside his cover, socialise with his colleagues and be himself The man we were looking for, on the other hand, would have no such opportunity. Once
