Chapter 14

The weekend that changed Andrew’s life started normally enough. He got to work much earlier than normal having skipped his run that Friday morning. He had been told to be at a specific room at 8.15 where he would meet the people going with him to Colchester. A car would be waiting at the basement delivery area and Andrew would get the files down there from the records area. Manners was waiting at the File Room when Andrew went to get the files, together with a man who did not introduce himself. Each box was opened, the contents checked and then closed and padlocked. The four boxes took five minutes each to check and secure and then the four keys were handed to the person with Andrew, who he concluded was there to guard the files. The boxes were loaded onto a standard shipping dolly and the four of them descended to the basement. Again, Manners and this unnamed supervisor checked that the boxes were loaded into one vehicle while the guard with the keys went into a police car. It looked standard but Andrew realised that it was a MoD Police car rather than a normal Met police car. So there were four of them going, Andrew, a driver and the files in one unmarked car with the guard with the keys and another driver in a police car behind them. It was clear that the files were important.

For the first 20 minutes while they fought their way north and east out of the city centre the car was silent. This was considerably more secure and thorough than Andrew thought it would be, given that they were sending the summer student off with the files rather than a permanent employee. He was the support services person looking after the files but was effectively being watched by three guards. Andrew began to wonder what he would find when he got to the garrison at Colchester. And what was in those files! Then the questions started. And in less than a minute were answered. The fact that he had been there three days so far and then been given this assignment, and knew nothing about anything rather limited his line of questions.

“Jock.” Every Scot in the Army is Jock. “You are telling me you have no idea what you are heading towards?”

Andrew had been told to call him Mike but had no idea what his position or rank was.

“Mike, I told you, I have no idea. The call came in yesterday afternoon and we pulled the files and as the new guy I got the trip. You saw my boss and that other bloke eyeballing everything as they were loaded into the car.”

“Kid.”

Oh great, even better than Jock. Although to be fair Mike was old enough to be his father.

“This is a clusterfuck of monumental proportions. What started as a straightforward investigation has got completely out of control. Everyone is fighting, claiming jurisdiction which means they have found something. There are at least seven different groups chewing on this carcass. So a word to the wise, get the fuck back to London as soon as.”

Well wasn’t that just the vaguest, most unhelpful, yet fascinating little speech. Andrew was not sure how to respond. He didn’t need to as Mike wasn’t finished.

“Who are you taking these files to?”

Suddenly the line of questioning made Andrew cautious.

“Mike, I may only be on my 5^th day but Mr. Craig was very clear in the security briefing. I don’t know who you are, what you are, or whether you are involved in the investigation. Even if you are, I don’t know that I am allowed to tell you anything.”

“Fucking gobby little shite.”

His smile belied the aggression in the sentence.

“You are right. I am Detective Constable Mike Young. And nobody wants to come to the attention of Craig.” He shuddered theatrically.

And with that he changed the subject and started peppering Andrew with questions about Cambridge University and the OTC. Andrew didn’t know whether the questions were part of testing him to see if he would keep quiet or he was just fishing for himself. The questions about university passed the time as they fought their way out the A12 past Chelmsford and on towards Colchester. Andrew knew roughly where they were and where they were going but it was a part of the country that he had no knowledge about. As they got closer the unknown nature of this assignment started to weigh on his mind. But then he shook his head, he was literally the newest and most junior person there. He would drop off the files and be swimming at the Marshall Street Pool in the morning as usual.

Colchester has been a military town forever, going back to the Romans. The British Army had built extensively there over hundreds of years with the result that the place has installations scattered throughout the town. Andrew had no idea where they went to but once off the A12 and into the town itself they were at the gates to one of the barracks. Passes were shown and they were directed to the appropriate building.

“We wait her until someone comes to oversee the handover.”

Okay then, there really must be interesting files in those cases. The man with the keys had gone into the building and came back out with two other uniformed men. After much checking, the keys were handed over and signed for and then Andrew was allowed to load the dolly once again and followed one guard into the building with the other following along behind. Over the course of the following three days Andrew learned a huge amount of information, lots of it just important background. He was constantly having to build the picture in his head from lots of disconnected snippets.

If there was a threat of war or the threat of an invasion by the Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces into West Germany then units of the various NATO armies had 72 hours to get into their assigned position ready to augment the German forces as well as the permanently stationed NATO forces in West Germany. In Northern Germany that was the British Army with Dutch, Belgian and American forces as well. In Central Germany the NATO forces were predominantly American, Canadian and German defending the Fulda Gap. The military trained for this constantly and so there were annual exercises. As they were prone to do the military had codenames for them all. They were called REFORGER by the Americans, the REturn of FORces to GERmany. The 1984 British version of this reinforcement exercise, called Eternal Triangle of all things, had the 19^th Infantry Brigade, based there at the Colchester Garrison, deployed to West Germany and then returned back to Britain when the exercise was over. Normal stuff, had been happening for more than 10 years and all the NATO allies trained for this and practised it regularly.

So there were a lot of soldiers deploying from the UK to Germany and then back again. It was also an opportunity for soldiers to bring back contraband from the continent. It was a known and understood if not accepted part of deployments and there were inspections and checks done on the kit of soldiers returning from these exercises. Here was where Andrew started to understand different organisations having a very different outlook on actions. From what he gathered the main things brought over were Nazi and Soviet memorabilia, just for its scarcity value, so that soldiers could sell it to civilians and make a few quid. There was porn, most of which was for the soldiers own use. The UK had a very strict policy on porn and there was no penetration shown ever, on UK videos or in UK magazines, so the chance to get more explicit material was a significant temptation. There was some booze smuggled but soldiers got cheap booze in their messes and at the NAAFI so that was limited. And then there was drugs. Again, some was for personal use but the main concern was over importing with the intent to distribute to the general public. As a result there were a lot of inspections of soldiers’ gear returning from exercise.

Originally there had been a suggestion that something had come back from Germany, that a soldier or soldiers had brought contraband back. Something that had to be taken seriously and pursued but not a huge deal. Then the suspicion changed from simple contraband to something much more significant. What got everyone excited in a hurry was the concern that there had been espionage involved. The British had recently introduced a new tank which had a new kind of armour. The worry was that a sample of the armour had been obtained and smuggled out to the Soviets. The classic ‘pull a thread and things start to unravel’. This was the reason for the over the top security on the files.

West Germany offered automatic citizenship to all East Germans who made it to the west. The majority were real defectors who wanted to escape the Soviet bloc. Mixed in with them however, were a lot of spies. West Germany was chock full of spies. This made security of NATO installations and equipment much more onerous then in the Warsaw Pact countries, and East Germany especially. Where there are spies from one side there are spies and counterspies from the other. There were both military and civilian spy agencies working together, at least notionally, and at cross purposes in reality, in West Germany. The three largest groups being the Americans, the West Germans themselves, and the British. So what started out as a routine, serious but routine, investigation suddenly came to the attention of an alphabet soup of organisations. That was where Andrew stumbled into the proceedings. That first day he tried to follow the advice given in the car on the way up; keep his head down and try and get back to London as soon as possible.

But it had turned into an old fashioned bureaucratic turf war and everyone wanted to be involved in this investigation. Successfully uncovering a spy ring would mitigate some of the blame for allowing top secret military material to be stolen in the first place. So the Ministry of Defence Police responsible for the policing of military bases in the UK wanted to be involved in the investigation. Which would be fine if not for the fact that the alleged espionage had happened in West Germany, not part of the MoD Police’s area of responsibility. That Friday Andrew delivered the additional files to the main investigation room, only having to explain his presence and age about 15 times to various investigators. His pass was scrutinised and a call was made to London to confirm he was legit.

Andrew’s downfall was in two parts. The first, and more minor one, was that this investigation was very top heavy. Lots of people wanting to give instructions and orders and there were bugger all staff to actually carry out any of them. Andrew was told by the Superintendent in charge of the MoD Police on site to ‘make himself useful’ until he was able to be returned to London. So he started being the gofer for the MoD Police team, and this spread to other people in the investigation room. But the event that changed the course of the summer was an AIMS printout. Andrew had taken a couple of files over to one of the investigators from somewhere else, there being no introductions when he arrived surprise, surprise. He saw the AIMS printout and beamed a wide smile. Totally involuntary reaction but it just made him proud to see something he had helped create in such an important situation.

“Hey, you aren’t supposed to be looking at these. What is on it that made you smile?”

“Sorry sir. Nothing. I wasn’t smiling at what was on the page I was smiling at the printout.”

Even Andrew knew that sounded gash.

“What the fuck do you mean you were smiling at the printout?”

“I recognised the program that produced that printout, that was all. Sorry I didn’t mean to pry.”

Andrew had just done exactly what Craig had warned him not to do. He tried to walk away but the other man raised his hand to stop him.

“Son, that is a government security program, that we got from the West Germans. How do you know about it? Do the MoD Police use it?”

The phrase at the time was ‘everything was going Franz Klammer’. A dated cultural reference but one that Andrew still uses to this day. He was an Austrian ski racer and the dominant downhill racer for most of the 1970s. When ‘everything was going Franz Klammer’ it was going downhill fast.

They had got AIMS from the Germans? The Germans saw AIMS with the British Army of the Rhine and the government of North Rhine-Westphalia decided to buy it. This was not going to end well. The conversation had captured the interest of others in the room including Superintendent Lester, head of the MoD Police team.

“We don’t use this, in fact nobody here has been able to tie in these printouts to the physical records. Answer the question McLeod, how do you know about this program. We have been debating contacting the West Germans for help.”

Andrew might never forgive Freya Moray for suggesting this job, but he realised this was his own fault. He closed his eyes briefly before looking directly at Lester.

“I know this will sound ridiculous but I wrote the program sir. Or I was one of the two who wrote it. That is why I smiled when I saw the printout. I was proud that something I had helped create was part of this important investigation.”

To be fair to them the disbelief, although written on their faces, was not voiced out loud. Lester looked at Andrew for a long, long moment before he spoke.

“You will have to forgive me if I am skeptical of such an outlandish claim. I presume you can back it up.”

“Can we talk privately for a few minutes sir?”

After a few seconds of thought, and a piercing stare, Lester agreed although speaking privately involved three other people as well. He led them to an office off the main room and motioned for Andrew to sit and then looked at him.

“Nobody makes such a claim without it having some truth so tell me the story. And can you show me the proof?”

“I can prove everything that I say, and the names and companies that I am about to tell you about were disclosed in my security clearance responses, they will be on file. They were verified. I created the software with two friends. We formed a company and if you click on the ‘About’ tab on the program you will see it was created by Jullesand Software. Jul – Julian Strong, Les – Leslie Campbell, And – Andrew McLeod. Jul-Les-And. I have a degree in Computer Science from the Open University. I started there when I was 14. Given my age and how I was doing a subject that was all new and shiny and cutting-edge, I came to the attention of the government. I was interviewed by two ministers who wanted me to be the poster child of the government’s policies. I was utterly uninterested, I wanted none of the hassle or notoriety. After a meeting with Sir Adam Butler, a minister in the Department of Industry, the government bought 1000 copies of the program to test, to evaluate, I don’t know, maybe they were trying to change my mind. Anyway more than a year later the government of North Rhine/Westphalia decided to buy copies of the program but they insisted that they buy from a West German company so we sold the rights to the program to Siemens. The British Government owns this program, or at least a thousand copies of it. We speculated that it was the use with the British Army of the Rhine that brought it to the attention of the West Germans in the first place.”

The silence that followed was deep and thoughtful. One of the unidentified others spoke first.

“You know that we will be checking all that, but working on the assumption that it is true tell us about this AIMS system.”

“We developed it as a way for organisations that have lots of physical assets scattered across the country, even across the world, to keep track of them. It was designed as a way for a branch to enter all the high value buildings and equipment so that a head office or in this case, a headquarters, can ensure that it is all still there. No, that is not quite accurate. Leslie, who is the business brains behind the company, told us of an example her university lecturer told one day of someone going to check on a building only to discover that the site had been demolished. This is not an inventory system for spanners and spark plugs or bullets. This is for high value stuff. It was more for Head Offices to have a list of high value assets that they could verify. Anyway, that was the original intent. We refined it over the year, it can track maintenance dates now so that you know when stuff should be serviced or refurbished. It was designed to take advantage of the limited computing power right now and let organisations have some control over their branches, or in your case garrisons.

“But the thing to remember is that it is only as good as the people using it. Put shit in and all you will get is shit out. You can send a report to headquarters showing that three Landrovers need to be serviced. But you have to do it. Same with entering whether you have something. If you make an error, either accidentally or deliberately, you need other procedures to catch all that.”

Andrew stopped. It sounded like a sales pitch to a skeptical client.

“Wait outside a minute.”

It was an order given in a voice that brooked no dissent. He waited outside the office like a delinquent schoolboy. Two minutes later he was brought back into the office.

“You have Secret clearance and have signed the Official Secrets Act, correct?”

Oh, oh.

“Yes sir.”

“Okay, then you will be joining this investigation full time until the end of the summer. Given that you wrote the bloody program that is central to some of our concerns you seem ideal to assist us in resolving them. You need to return to London and pack. You will be here, and maybe other places, for the rest of your time. Do you have a passport?”

“Yes sir.”

“What about notice, will you have any issues with your landlord?”

Andrew’s lack of a poker face did him in.

“What, what was that look?”

“I am staying with friends in London but she works for the Ministry and is quite senior. Neither of us talk about our work but I will have to say something.”

“How senior?”

“Mrs. Moray, one of the Deputy Secretaries.”