1. I think it just possible that you might be able to assist me with some confidential work I have in hand. I therefore should be most grateful for an opportunity to have a talk.
2. If you are agreeable perhaps you would be kind enough to telephone me and we can discuss when it would be convenient for you to call. You should, incidentally, come to the side entrance of Old War Office Buildings in Whitehall Place and say you have an appointment in Room 055.
3. I will naturally reimburse you for any reasonable expenses. Please do not hesitate to take a taxi if you are pressed for time.
4. I should be grateful if you would treat this letter as confidential and not discuss it with anyone else; furthermore please bring the letter with you as a means of identification.
5. I very much regret that I cannot go into further explanations in a letter or on the telephone, but would naturally do so if we meet.
Yours sincerely,
D. Stilbury
Ten days later I was at the side entrance of Old War Office Buildings, a grey, uninviting building opposite Horse Guards Parade. I had called Stilbury and made an appointment. I figured that I should at least check the thing out. I mean, how often do you get an invitation to the epicentre of Britain’s spy network?
I had decided to eschew the taxi in favour of my trusted bicycle. On my way I stopped off at the main concourse of Waterloo station to photocopy the letter. I was well aware that it was both my passport to, and my proof of approach from, Her Majesty’s intelligence services. As I fed it into the plywood-boxed, freestanding photocopier in the middle of the station, the machine jammed. So paranoid was I that I had avoided photocopying the letter at LBC for fear that some stray copy would blow my cover. Now the even more public British Rail machine had the effrontery to jam. I tried again, and this time a copy spewed out onto the station floor.
As I had anticipated, the man at the Old War Office reception desk took the original letter from me, never to return it. A large woman in blue Civil Service rig sailed ahead of me along a labyrinth of corridors, up a few steps, down a few more. Grey stone, blue curtains, grey stone, blue curtains; everything was the same. She showed me into a bare and austere room. And there was Stilbury. He stood up from behind his desk, which was arranged across a corner. The only other pieces of furniture in the room were two low-slung modern tubular-framed armchairs in front of the desk. He pointed to one of them. He was tall, rather pale, public-school-looking, nondescript.
‘Do sit down,’ he said. I sat and was immediately reduced by the low-slung armchair to a height considerably below that of the now seated Stilbury. I was already at a disadvantage. ‘I’m Douglas Stilbury, and I work for SIS,’ he said. I doubted that he was who he said he was, but I had no doubt he worked for whom he said he worked for. ‘Do you know what SIS is?’
‘Not exactly,’ I replied.
‘We are the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. We are responsible for external, foreign intelligence.’
We started to talk. He had a considerable file on his desk which appeared to contain a very great deal about me. From women friends to politics, they had done their work.
‘We’d like you to work with us,’ he finally said.
‘Full time?’ I asked.
‘Oh no, we’d like you to pursue your chosen career and do bits and pieces for us along the way.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘there could be someone we are interested in, a Communist, who is meeting people – we might want you to get to know them.’
‘Sounds a bit domestic to me,’ I said. ‘But what really worries me, Mr Stilbury, is that I’m not sure you and I are on the same side.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We are accountable to the British Cabinet. As much to Mr Wedgwood Benn as we are to Mr Wilson.’ Tony Benn was the Cabinet’s unguided lefty at the time.
I think Stilbury could sense that I was thinking of saying no. ‘No hasty decisions,’ he said. ‘We haven’t talked pay. You would be paid direct into your bank account, no questions asked by the Inland Revenue, and the sum would be equivalent to your current basic salary, tax-free.’ ITN was about to pay me around £6000 a year at the time, the equivalent of £20,000 these days. ‘Now, if you want to know more about us, I suggest you read the report by Lord Justice Denning into the Profumo Affair. It gives the most coherent picture yet published.’
‘This isn’t for me,’ I said. ‘Any of my friends will tell you, I can’t keep a secret. I’m about to become a television journalist. Rather a public job for such private activity, don’t you think?’
‘I’m not taking any answer from you this time,’ he said. ‘I want you to go away and think about it, then come back and tell me your decision.’
I stepped out into the sunlight, got on my bike and pedalled off down Whitehall, looking over my shoulder.
To this day, I have never read the Denning Report. Instead I bought a copy of the great MI6 Cold War double agent Kim Philby’s book, My Secret War.
As I was still recovering from hepatitis, I decided on the spur of the moment to go skiing in the Spanish Pyrenees. I read Philby’s book on the sun-splashed deck outside my hotel-room window in Formigal. It was clear from the book that to be a good spy – and I would have wanted to be a very good spy – you’d have to be a double agent of some kind, and that it would then completely consume your life and ultimately destroy you. I was pretty certain I’d never do it anyway, not least because Stilbury and his ilk seemed to represent the element of the British Establishment that I felt most uncomfortable with. And to be honest, I really wasn’t sure they were on my side. I wanted change, meritocracy, progress. I suspected Stilbury didn’t.
But how had this approach come about? MI6 clearly felt I was a good prospect – a chap with radical beginnings who had seen the error of his ways, and was moving up the Establishment – perfect! And how was it that I was being approached now, in mid-transition from LBC to ITN? Did ITN have some kind of ‘controller’ in its midst? In which case, how many of my new colleagues were up to it?
‘How was Spain?’ Stilbury asked. I had never told him I was going.
‘I’m not going to work for you, Mr Stilbury,’ I replied, pretty shaken by how much he knew about me and my movements.
Stilbury became brusque and unfriendly. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I’m naturally disappointed. I think you are making a big mistake, but that’s it then. You are never to contact us, and we shall never contact you again.’
For the last time, I left Old War Office Buildings by the side entrance and, rather frightened, beetled off on my bike, checking occasionally to see if anyone was following me.
I DI AMIN IS IN A COMA, a few weeks from death, in Saudi Arabia. It is August 2003, and alas his unconscious condition has come a quarter of a century too late to be of much use to Uganda. An international debate rages over whether his vast remains should be allowed to be shipped home to breathe their last. In the meantime he resides all plugged up in a Saudi clinic, as pampered in dying as he was in life. It is said he has ballooned from his presidential 250 pounds to the same number of kilos. How was this mass murderer allowed to remain unprosecuted in the poolside confines of a Saudi-government-owned villa in Jeddah for so long? To some tiny extent I suppose I had a hand in his survival, but I’ll enter that admission later.
Saudi Arabia had granted Amin – a rare Haj-making African Muslim President – safety, along with two of his wives and twenty-four children, in 1979, after he was driven out