inserted he would probably never speak to another soldier again. He'd be giving up everything and everyone he'd ever known. We needed to know that he was capable of that.'
'And there were other factors,' added George Widdowes.
'We didn't want our man known as one of those who successfully completed the course. As part of his cover story he needed to have failed. And to have failed early enough for it to be believable that he couldn't remember much about the other sixty-odd blokes on the course. We didn't want our operation to compromise the security of the ones who passed.'
Alex nodded.
'Yes, I see what you mean.
'The other thing at that stage was that we had to separate our six men from each other in case they figured out what they had in common and put two and two together. It wasn't a huge risk,
but even at that stage we had to be one hundred per cent security conscious.
'Right.'
'We interviewed the six,' continued Angela Fenwick, 'and, as George explained, they assumed the process was part of the normal 14th Int selection.
Four of them we were happy with, the other two we sent back to Tregaron. The four we liked the look of were bussed one at a time to different points in an MOD training area in the North-West Highlands near Cape Wrath, given rudimentary survival and communications kit, and ordered to dig in. It was January by then and conditions were atrocious, with blizzards and deep snow.
'Over the next three weeks, although they were never more than a few kilometres from each other, none of the four men saw each other or another human being. They were given their instructions by radio or through message drops and ordered to carry out an endless series of near impossible tasks marching all night to food drops where there turned out not to be any food, processing unmanageable amounts of data, repairing unmendable equipment, that sort of thing and made to do it all on next to no sleep and in the worst possible physical conditions.
The idea, obviously, was to test their mental endurance, and although the four never saw them they were in fact being monitored throughout by a three man team from the SAS training wing at Hereford.
'At the end of the three weeks they were each put through an escape and evasion exercise. This culminated in their being captured, given a beating and driven to a camp near Altnaharra where they were subjected to forty- eight hours of hard tactical questioning by a team from the Joint Services Interrogation Wing.
'After this the four were assessed by the instructors.
One was in a very bad way by then and clearly unsuitable I think he ended up having a nervous breakdown and leaving the army. Two were reckoned to be tough enough but essentially more suited to teamwork than a solo placement and were taken back to Tregaron to continue the 14th Intelligence course.
The fourth one the one they recommended was a Royal Engineers corporal named Joseph Meehan.
'We had been hoping that Meehan would be the one they went for. He was young, only twenty-three at the time of the Watchman selection programme, and very much a loner. So much so, in fact, that his CO had been worried about his long-term suitability for regimental life. At the same time he was highly intelligent, highly motivated, and had an exceptional talent for electronics and demolitions. As it happened, he was also on the waiting list for SAS selection.
'For our purposes he seemed to be perfect. We needed someone young it was going to take years rather than months to get him to a position of authority within the IRA. And of course we needed a loner. As far as we were concerned he had everything.
'Anyway, Meehan it was. From Altnaharra he was helicoptered down to London and installed in one of our safe houses in Stockwell. At the point at which George and I first met him, in February 1988, he still thought he was on the 14th Int course. He thought everyone did a month's solitary in Scotland. Even said he'd enjoyed it.
'We told him the truth. Explained exactly what we wanted of him. Said that if he took the job his soldiering days were effectively over. That he'd never be able to see his army mates again. He told us what he'd told the psych team a month earlier, that he hated the IRA with every bone in his body and would do or say whatever was necessary to destroy them.
Knowing Joe Meehan's life story as we did, we were inclined to believe him. He was the only son of a Londonderry electrician who, when the boy was twelve, attracted the attention of the local IRA for accepting a contract to rewire a local army barracks.
Meehan senior was knee capped his business was burnt out and he was chased from the province, eventually resettling in Dorset. Joseph went with him, left school at sixteen, and apprenticed himself to his father, but by then the old man was in a pretty bad way. He was crippled, drinking heavily and going downhill fast. He died two years later.'
'Was there a mother?' Alex asked.
'The mother stayed behind in Londonderry,' said Widdowes.
'Disassociated herself from the father completely after the kneecapping. Asked Joseph to stay behind when the father left and when he wouldn't she shrugged and walked away. Ended up remarrying a PIRA enforcer who ran a Bogside pool hall
'Nice,' said Alex.
'Very nice,' agreed Widdowes.
'And that was the point when Joseph joined the British army. One way or another he was determined to avenge his father's treatment. His hatred of the IRA was absolutely pathological he described them to our people as vermin who should be eliminated without a moment's thought.' Widdowes blinked and rubbed his eyes.
'And from our point of view this was good. Hatred is one of the great sustaining forces and Meehan's hatred, we hoped, would keep him going through the years ahead. When we told him the nitty-gritty of what we wanted, he didn't hesitate. Yes, he said. He'd do it. We had our Watchman.'
NINE.
'Training Joseph Meehan took six months,' said Angela Fenwick, staring out over the grey-brown expanse of the Thames.
'We would have liked to have given him more time, but we didn't have more time, so we packed everything into those six months. He lived in a series of safe houses, always alone, and the instructors came to him. Without exception these were the top people in their respective fields and permanently attached to Special Forces or Military Intelligence institutions on the mainland. For obvious security reasons no serving personnel were let anywhere near him. To start with we put him in one of the accommodation bunkers at Tregaron. Isolation conditions, of course, and we bugged the room and tapped the phone.'
Alex knew Tregaron well. Two hundred acres of windswept Welsh valley, rusted gun emplacements and dilapidated bunkers, all of it behind razor wire.
He'd blown up a few old cars there as part of his demolitions training. Bloody miserable place to stay on your own, especially in winter.
'Who did you put in charge of him?' asked Alex.
'An RWW warrant officer, who provided us with progress reports and so on. We started off by getting a couple of the Hereford Training Wing NCOs to put him through their unarmed combat course, and sharpen up his advanced weapons and driving skills.
Apparently he managed to bring the unarmed combat instructor to his knees by the end of the third session.
'Impressive,' confirmed Alex.
'I wouldn't fancy trying to deck one of those guys.
Fenwick nodded.
'At the same time we had an instructor from Tregaron taking him through his surveillance and anti- surveillance drills, and generally familia rising him with intelligence procedures drop offs dead-letter boxes and so on. After this we brought in a rapid succession of people to teach him individual skills like covert photography, lock picking bugging and counter-bugging, demolition and so forth. You probably know most of the specialists in question?'
'Stew for locks?' asked Alex.
'Bob the Bomber for dems?'
