PRAISE FOR
“Nothing that Frederick Forsyth has written in the 20 years since his debut,
“Forsyth’s stalwart tribute to the spies who came in from the cold: four ingenious thriller-novellas featuring the intrigues of British superagent Sam McCready ... sophisticated, shrewd, roundly satisfying spy-stuff.”
“A master of Cold War suspense, Forsyth here points out a few directions toward which
The Deceiver
by Frederick Forsyth
In the summer of 1983 the then Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service sanctioned the formation, against a certain internal opposition, of a new desk.
The opposition came mainly from the established desks, almost all of which had territorial fiefdoms spread across the world, for the new desk was designed to have a wide-ranging jurisdiction that would span traditional frontiers.
The impetus behind the formation came from two sources. One was an ebullient mood in Westminster and Whitehall, and notably within the ruling Conservative government, following Britain’s success in the Falklands war of the previous year. Despite the military success, the episode had left behind one of those messy and occasionally vituperative arguments over the issue: Why were we so taken by surprise when General Galtieri’s Argentine forces landed at Port Stanley?
Between departments, the argument festered for over a year, reduced inevitably to charges and countercharges on the level of we-were-not-warned-yes-you-were. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, had felt obliged to resign. Several years later, the United States would be seized by a similar row following the destruction of the Pan American flight over Lockerbie, with one agency claiming it had issued a warning and another claiming it had never received it.
The second impetus was the recent arrival at the seat of power, the General Secretaryship of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, of Yuri V. Andropov, who had for fifteen years been Chairman of the KGB. Favoring his old agency, Andropov’s reign instituted an upsurge of increasingly aggressive espionage and “active measures” by the KGB against the West. It was known that Andropov highly favored, among active measures, the use of disinformation—the spreading of despondency and demoralization by the use of lies, agents of influence, and character assassination, and by the sowing of discord among the Allies with planted untruths.
Mrs. Thatcher, then earning her Soviet-awarded title of the Iron Lady, took the view that two can play at that game and indicated she would not blanch at the notion of Britain’s own intelligence agency offering the Soviets a little return match.
The new desk was given a ponderous title: Deception, Disinformation, and Psychological Operations. Of course, the title was at once reduced to Dee-Dee and Psy Ops, and thence simply to Dee-Dee.
A new desk head was appointed in November. Just as the man in charge of Equipment was known as the Quartermaster and the man in charge of the Legal Branch as the Lawyer, the new head of Dee-Dee was tagged by some wit in the canteen the Deceiver.
With hindsight—that precious gift so much more prevalent than its counterpart, foresight—the Chief, Sir Arthur, might have been criticized (and later was) for his choice: not a Head Office careerist accustomed to the prudence required of a true civil servant, but a former field agent, plucked from the East German desk.
The man was Sam McCready, and he ran the desk for seven years. But all good things come to an end. In the late spring of 1991 a conversation took place in the heart of Whitehall. ...
The young aide rose from behind his desk in the outer office with a practiced smile. “Good morning, Sir Mark. The Permanent Under-Secretary asked that you be shown straight in.”
He opened the door to the private office of the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office—the FCO—and ushered the visitor through it, closing the door behind him. The Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir Robert Inglis, rose with a welcoming smile.
“Mark, my dear chap, how good of you to come.”
You do not become, however recently, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS, without developing a certain wariness when confronted by such warmth from a relative stranger who is clearly about to treat you as if you were blood brothers. Sir Mark steeled himself for a difficult meeting.
When he was seated, the country’s senior Foreign Office civil servant opened the scarred red dispatch box lying on his desk and withdrew a buff file distinguished by the red diagonal cross running from corner to corner.
“You have done the rounds of your stations and will doubtless let me have your impressions?” he asked.
“Certainly, Robert—in due course.”
Sir Robert Inglis followed the top-secret file with a red, paper-covered book secured at its spine by black plastic spiral binding.
“I have,” he began, “read your proposals, ‘SIS in the Nineties,’ in conjunction with the Intelligence Co- Ordinator’s latest shopping list. You seem to have met his requirements most thoroughly.”
“Thank you, Robert,” said the Chief. “Then may I count upon the Foreign Office’s support?”
The diplomat’s smile could have won prizes on an American game show.
“My dear Mark, we have no difficulties with the pitch of your proposals. But there are just a few points I would like to take up with you.”
“May I take it, for example, that these additional stations abroad that you propose have been agreed upon with the Treasury, and the necessary monies squirreled away in somebody’s budget?”
Both men well knew that the budget for the running of the Secret Intelligence Service does not come wholly from the Foreign Office. Indeed, only a small part comes out of the FCO budget. The real cost of the almost- invisible SIS, which unlike the American CIA keeps an extremely low profile, is shared among all the spending ministries in the government. The spread is right across the board, including even the unlikely Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food—perhaps on the grounds that they might one day wish to know how many cod the Icelanders are taking out of the North Atlantic.
Because its budget is spread so widely and hidden so well, the SIS cannot be “leaned upon” by the FCO with a threat of withholding funds if the FCO’s wishes are not met.
Sir Mark nodded. “There’s no problem there. The Co-Ordinator and I have seen the Treasury, explained the position (which we had cleared with the Cabinet Office), and Treasury has allocated the necessary cash, all tucked away in the research and development budgets of the least likely ministries.”
