course, with each new relationship there was the added complication that Joe was repeating the same mistake he had made with Isabella; that is to say, he was bound by duty and could not come clean about his work for SIS. As far as he was concerned, he was entering a pointless cycle of deception and hurt. Why bother? Why put another woman through the same agony?
What gave the situation an added complexity was the shame Joe felt at having been outmanoeuvred and humiliated by Miles. The resentment he harboured towards his former friend and colleague was almost as strong as the love he continued to feel for Isabella. Even seven years later, when the two of us were walking in west London on a wet night during the turbulent summer of 2004, I could sense that his memories were still as detailed and vivid as if his break-up with Isabella had taken place only days earlier.
“So do you think they’ve made it work?” I asked.
“Made what work?”
“The marriage. China. Do you think she made the right decision?”
We were heading towards Al-Abbas, the famous Arab supermarket on Uxbridge Road. Joe turned to cross the street outside a branch of Blockbuster Video and gave me an impatient, quizzical look.
“Who knows?” he replied flatly.
“But you’re still holding out, aren’t you? You still believe there’s a chance of the two of you getting back together?”
“Will,” he said, “when people make decisions of any kind, they do so in the belief that what they’re doing is right. Now that decision may prove to be self-destructive, it may turn out to be the worst decision they ever made. But at the time it didn’t feel that way. At the time it felt like they had no choice.”
He jaywalked across the road. A light drizzle was falling and I watched him weave between an oncoming bus and a beaten-up Fiat Punto. There was something about Joe living in London that didn’t make sense. He didn’t seem to belong in England; he wasn’t settled or happy. Much of this had to do with the circumstances under which he was working for SIS; 2004 had been a wretched year for MI6. The Butler Report had been published in July, castigating the quality of the intelligence that Six had passed on to government ministers and officials in the run-up to the war in Iraq. SIS officers had been criticized for the manner in which they had gathered intelligence on WMD and, in particular, for their readiness to believe dissident Iraqi sources who later proved unreliable. As a requirements officer for the Far East Controllerate, Joe was not directly involved in any of this, but he felt the slump in Office morale none the less and questioned, on several occasions, the good sense of continuing to work for an organization which was being constantly undermined by the government and relentlessly criticized in the media. At the tender age of twenty-three, Joe Lennox had signed up to a life in the secret world partly out of a belief that British values were worth fighting for, that it was admirable to dedicate one’s working life to the security and prosperity of the British people. One of the organizing principles of any intelligence agency is patriotism of this kind, but to be patriotic in the age of Blair and Bush, of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, was a task of Herculean proportions. Everything from Alastair Campbell’s “sexed-up dossier” to the death of Dr. David Kelly ate away at Joe’s faith in the system. What was he fighting for? What would be the price of his own professional complicity in the invasion of Iraq? To work for British intelligence in this period was to work on behalf of the American government; there was no other way of spinning it. Yet Joe would switch off the television in his flat rather than suffer the grinning, adolescent rictus of President George W. Bush. He abhorred Cheney and Rumsfeld, whom he regarded as borderline sociopaths, and even joked about asking Sky TV to remove Fox News from his satellite television package. I once asked him, in a similar spirit of jocularity, whether this newfound anti-Americanism was connected to what had happened with Miles. To my surprise, Joe became very angry.
“I am not anti-American,” he said. “I just despise the current American administration. I despair that Bush has made ordinary, decent people all over the world think twice about what was once, and still could be again, a great country, when what happened on September 11th should have made ordinary, decent people all over the world embrace America as never before. I don’t like it that neo-conservative politicians bully their so-called allies while playing to the worst, racist instincts of their own bewildered electorate. I don’t like it that we live in an era where to be anti-war is to be anti-American, to be pro-Palestine is to be anti-Semitic, to be critical of Blair is somehow to be supportive of Putin and Chirac. All anybody is asking for in this so-called age of terror is some leadership. Yet everywhere you look in public life there is no truth, no courage, no dignity to speak of.”
Such sentiments inevitably caught the attention of the SIS personnel department, a shifty, cynical lot who often seem to me to be more interested in undermining the confidence of their employees than in ensuring that staff are in the correct frame of mind to do their jobs properly. There were dark mutterings that Joe had “gone soft”: he had been observed reading a copy of No Logo on the District Line and had even recommended articles by Robert Fisk and John Pilger to an Arabic translator in the Vauxhall Cross canteen. Luckily, calmer heads prevailed. Lennox wasn’t a protolefty; his record demonstrated that he was prepared to take tough decisions and to condone some fairly unsavoury operational practices in order to secure a long-term advantage for the Service. Any misgivings he felt about the direction of government policy in Iraq were merely reflective of wider public opinion and, for that matter, of about seventy-five per cent of SIS personnel.
One additional characteristic of Joe’s three-year posting to London was that he was bored. Travelling by Tube to Vauxhall station every morning doesn’t really compare to the eye-popping spectacle of taking the Star Ferry across Victoria Harbour. Nor does liaising with Whitehall on intelligence requirements compare to the excitement and challenge of obtaining that intelligence oneself. A night owl by nature, Joe missed the bars and restaurants of Kuala Lumpur, the crush and sweat of Asian streets. Going out in Singapore was a case of picking up the phone, arranging to meet a friend two hours later, and of staying out until five or six in the morning. Going out in London involved making an arrangement two weeks in advance, securing names on a guest list, queuing for half an hour for entry into an overpriced, crowded nightclub, and then dodging piles of vomit on the way home. In any case, by 2004 most of Joe’s friends from the old days had settled down. He felt increasingly disconnected from their world of nappies and marriage. Joe was fond of quoting Goethe’s maxim-“A man can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days”-and longed to be posted back to Asia. “That’s where I’m most at home,” he said. “That’s where I’m happiest.”
Matters came to a head in the autumn of 2004. At a dinner party in Tufnell Park, Joe ran into an old university friend named Guy Coates who was looking to recruit a fluent Mandarin speaker to set up a representative office in Beijing for Quayler, a niche pharmaceutical company which was hoping to expand into China. Offices of this kind need be no more than a desk and a fax machine, but they allow Western companies to promote and market their products on a limited scale in advance of being registered as a fully fledged business by the Chinese government. At a lunch in the City three days later, Coates offered Joe a five-year contract worth about?90,000 a year, with an apartment in Sanlitun and a small amount of equity thrown in. Joe was tempted, not least by the salary, which was more than twice what he was earning at SIS. I also played a part in trying to lure him back to the East. By coincidence, SIS had just pulled some strings to secure me a job in Beijing with an American news organization and I reckoned my social life would be greatly enhanced if Joe was on the scene. “It’ll be just like the old days,” I told him on the phone. “Besides, you need to get the hell out of London.”
Joe was in a dilemma. Stay with SIS and risk a three-year posting to an Asian backwater, or jump ship to work in the Chinese capital during a period which would coincide with the run-up to the 2008 Olympics? Joe had never been motivated by money, and the Far East Controllerate might have more interesting options than, say, North Korea, but he felt compelled to discuss the situation with his line manager at Vauxhall Cross. Disheartened that Joe might pull the plug at a difficult time for the Service, and anxious not to lose one of their best and most experienced officers, SIS dispatched David Waterfield in a last-ditch effort to talk him round. After all, the interventions of Joe’s mentor had succeeded before. There was no reason to suppose that they could not succeed again.
26
Nobody really knows what happened to Josh Pinnegar. Nobody knows if it was accident or design. The incident is still talked about in the bars and restaurants of San Francisco, although in Chinatown itself enquiries are
