I’d only been working for the British government for a few weeks when I met my first spy.
I’d already had my background checked, and I thought that part was over when I first met Eve in the kitchenette at my office. She was new she said. Worked in the legal department. A few days later I ran into her in the coffeeshop I went to every morning. And two days after that she was in the office canteen during my lunch break. She was a little younger than me, around twenty-eight, quite pretty and very funny. One of those people you confide in without meaning to.
She asked lots of questions about my family, my history – why had I moved to England from the US? Why had I decided to work for the government? I chatted away about everything, right up until she disappeared.
And I mean, really disappeared. Her email was gone from the system, her desk phone didn’t work. She was gone.
A few days later, I was given my first serious project working with intelligence officers. Doors that had been closed to me for weeks, opened. That was when I realised Eve had been a spy. And that my background check now really was complete.
Some people might have figured it out quicker than I did, but this wasn’t my world at all. I had been a newspaper reporter for years, and then an editor at a small publishing house – I never even thought about being a civil servant. The fact that I worked for the government was a complete accident. Someone who knew me had been looking for someone to write about counter-terrorism and ‘not get scared’, as she put it. She knew I’d been a crime reporter, and she thought of me.
The early 2000s were dangerous times. The 7/7 bombings had just occurred on the tube in London when I first started. My job was to convince spies to talk to the public and tell them all they were doing to keep them safe. The only problem was, the spies didn’t want to talk to anyone.
I had long meetings with stern people from various intelligence agencies, who would listen to me explain about social media, live streams, and websites until I’d exhausted myself. No matter what I suggested, the reply was always the same. “No.”
“You should go on Facebook!” I would say. “It could completely change your image. You can talk to the public directly. Let them see that you’re just normal people doing a difficult job.”
“Good lord, no,” a counter-terrorism official told me with absolute horror. “What an awful thought.”
They didn’t want a website, they didn’t want to go on Facebook. They didn’t even want to have an email account. They didn’t want to talk to the public at all. Ever.
It’s not hard to understand why, of course. Spies live in the shadows. Secrecy is essential to their work. Anonymity is what keeps them safe. Also, they know the internet is a two-way street. If they could talk to the public, the public could talk back. If they were on social media, they could be hacked. If they had an email address, it could be phished. Everything I was offering them would have introduced vulnerabilities into their world, and they would never allow that.
If they had their way, nobody would know anything about them. Even me. I worked in their office, and yet I never really could be certain who was a spy and who wasn’t. After all, nobody ever walks up to you and says, “Hi, I’m Jason. A spy.”
They say, “I’m James from Logistics.” Only there is no Logistics. And James isn’t his name at all. But you figured that out later. In the moment, it all seems perfectly plausible. Everyone is so believable and normal. But everyone is lying and normal is not a thing there. And you never know anything.
It creates an environment where everyone is suspicious of everyone else. Everyone wonders if you are one, but no one ever asks.
It’s like walking on shifting sands. The deception over little unnecessary things – I still don’t know if anything anyone ever told me back then was true – is wearing. And even spies don’t always know if the person they’re talking to is telling the truth. They assume everything is false.
This isn’t James Bond spying, all martinis and ball gowns. This is gritty, feet on the ground, hands in the dirt, spying.
One of my main jobs was helping out with real-life training, when intelligence, soldiers, and police would go deep into the countryside and blow things up. Then they figure out how it blew up and how to stop it blowing up next time. It’s both incredibly simple and quite extraordinary.
These spy training events are still the most astonishing things I’ve ever been part of. They can involve thousands of people, and government officials at the most senior level, all decamping to the muddy countryside, some of them to stage a terror attack, and the rest of them to try to stop it.
The simulation I remember most clearly took place in a very quiet village in Wales. The government blew up a fake chemical factory on a Friday afternoon, and the game was on. Police, counter-terrorism, MI5, the Army, ambulance services, the Coast Guard – all were there to react to the series of attacks that were simulated over the course of three days.
I was part of a team playing the press – writing vicious articles about the failures of the government and the police to find the terrorists and bring them to justice. These were then prominently displayed on the computers of everyone taking part in the simulation. If I pulled my punches in an article, someone from Cabinet Office would call me and politely suggest I could try harder. “I don’t think you’re really hitting him below the belt enough,” a very posh voice informed me one afternoon, after I’d written an article about one government official. “I suggest you say that he’s failing to appropriately inform the public, and that it appears he’s losing control of the situation.” He added brightly, “Be as horrid as you like. All very useful.” And hung up.
I did as he ordered, wincing as I described one of the heads of my own department as “failing” and “weak”.
The next day in a mock press conference, that official shouted at me furiously, “I believe the press needs to exercise discretion,” before storming out, slamming the door behind him.
The posh voice from Cabinet Office appeared on the phone again that afternoon, sounding gleeful. “Oh, very well done. You should probably back down now before you give him an aneurism.”
While all this was happening inside, outside a band of spies pretending to be terrorists hijacked a school bus filled with soldiers wearing t-shirts that said CHILD on the front, and disappeared in the Welsh hills as police and agents hunted fruitlessly.
It was disastrous. The ‘children’ on the school bus were killed, the ‘chemicals’ from the factory blew out over a nearby village and gassed many people, and the terrorists escaped.
And yet we felt good about it. Because this is why everyone was there. To train the police about wind directions and chemicals. To understand how attackers might react when under fire, and where they might hide. To practice communicating to the public better in order to keep everyone safer.
When I sat down to write about spies, all of this was in my mind. The meetings in unmarked buildings, the long weekends in the middle of nowhere, the endless training and preparation – all of it affected how I write about my fictional spies.
There wasn’t a single tuxedo in sight in all those years. Not the slightest hint of Daniel Craig. But there was excitement and danger and risk. And so many lies. A mountain of lies.
So when people ask me if my books are realistic, I can honestly say: Probably not. But maybe so.
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