The Watchman (13 page)

"Over the next three weeks, although they were never more than a few kilometres from each other, none of the four men saw each other or another human being. They were given their instructions by radio or through message drops and ordered to carry out an endless series of near impossible tasks marching all night to food drops where there turned out not to be any food, processing unmanageable amounts of data, repairing unmendable equipment, that sort of thing and made to do it all on next to no sleep and in the worst possible physical conditions.

The idea, obviously, was to test their mental endurance, and although the four never saw them they were in fact being monitored throughout by a three man team from the SAS training wing at Hereford.

"At the end of the three weeks they were each put through an escape and evasion exercise. This culminated in their being captured, given a beating and driven to a camp near Altnaharra where they were subjected to forty-eight hours of hard tactical questioning by a team from the Joint Services Interrogation Wing.

"After this the four were assessed by the instructors.

One was in a very bad way by then and clearly unsuitable I think he ended up having a nervous breakdown and leaving the army. Two were reckoned to be tough enough but essentially more suited to teamwork than a solo placement and were taken back to Tregaron to continue the 14th Intelligence course.

The fourth one the one they recommended was a Royal Engineers corporal named Joseph Meehan.

"We had been hoping that Meehan would be the one they went for. He was young, only twenty-three at the time of the Watchman selection programme, and very much a loner. So much so, in fact, that his CO had been worried about his long-term suitability for regimental life. At the same time he was highly intelligent, highly motivated, and had an exceptional talent for electronics and demolitions. As it happened, he was also on the waiting list for SAS selection.

"For our purposes he seemed to be perfect. We needed someone young it was going to take years rather than months to get him to a position of authority within the IRA. And of course we needed a loner. As far as we were concerned he had everything.

"Anyway, Meehan it was. From Altnaharra he was helicoptered down to London and installed in one of our safe houses in Stockwell. At the point at which George and I first met him, in February 1988, he still thought he was on the 14th Int course. He thought everyone did a month's solitary in Scotland. Even said he'd enjoyed it.

"We told him the truth. Explained exactly what we wanted of him. Said that if he took the job his soldiering days were effectively over. That he'd never be able to see his army mates again. He told us what he'd told the psych team a month earlier, that he hated the IRA with every bone in his body and would do or say whatever was necessary to destroy them.

Knowing Joe Meehan's life story as we did, we were inclined to believe him. He was the only son of a Londonderry electrician who, when the boy was twelve, attracted the attention of the local IRA for accepting a contract to rewire a local army barracks.

Meehan senior was knee capped his business was burnt out and he was chased from the province, eventually resettling in Dorset. Joseph went with him, left school at sixteen, and apprenticed himself to his father, but by then the old man was in a pretty bad way. He was crippled, drinking heavily and going downhill fast. He died two years later."

"Was there a mother?" Alex asked.

"The mother stayed behind in Londonderry," said Widdowes.

"Disassociated herself from the father completely after the kneecapping. Asked Joseph to stay behind when the father left and when he wouldn't she shrugged and walked away. Ended up remarrying a PIRA enforcer who ran a Bogside pool hall

"Nice," said Alex.

"Very nice," agreed Widdowes.

"And that was the point when Joseph joined the British army. One way or another he was determined to avenge his father's treatment. His hatred of the IRA was absolutely pathological he described them to our people as vermin who should be eliminated without a moment's thought." Widdowes blinked and rubbed his eyes.

"And from our point of view this was good. Hatred is one of the great sustaining forces and Meehan's hatred, we hoped, would keep him going through the years ahead. When we told him the nitty-gritty of what we wanted, he didn't hesitate. Yes, he said. He'd do it. We had our Watchman."

NINE.

"Training Joseph Meehan took six months," said Angela Fenwick, staring out over the grey-brown expanse of the Thames.

"We would have liked to have given him more time, but we didn't have more time, so we packed everything into those six months. He lived in a series of safe houses, always alone, and the instructors came to him. Without exception these were the top people in their respective fields and permanently attached to Special Forces or Military Intelligence institutions on the mainland. For obvious security reasons no serving personnel were let anywhere near him. To start with we put him in one of the accommodation bunkers at Tregaron. Isolation conditions, of course, and we bugged the room and tapped the phone."

Alex knew Tregaron well. Two hundred acres of windswept Welsh valley, rusted gun emplacements and dilapidated bunkers, all of it behind razor wire.

He'd blown up a few old cars there as part of his demolitions training. Bloody miserable place to stay on your own, especially in winter.

"Who did you put in charge of him?" asked Alex.

"An RWW warrant officer, who provided us with progress reports and so on. We started off by getting a couple of the Hereford Training Wing NCOs to put him through their unarmed combat course, and sharpen up his advanced weapons and driving skills.

Apparently he managed to bring the unarmed combat instructor to his knees by the end of the third session.

"Impressive," confirmed Alex.

"I wouldn't fancy trying to deck one of those guys.

Fenwick nodded.

"At the same time we had an instructor from Tregaron taking him through his surveillance and anti-surveillance drills, and generally familia rising him with intelligence procedures drop offs dead-letter boxes and so on. After this we brought in a rapid succession of people to teach him individual skills like covert photography, lock picking bugging and counter-bugging, demolition and so forth. You probably know most of the specialists in question?"

"Stew for locks?" asked Alex.

"Bob the Bomber for dems?"

"Well, it's not exactly how they were introduced to me," said Angela Fenwick with a smile.

"But I think we're probably talking about the same people. We had a couple of our own Service people bring him up to speed on computers, too. The technology was obviously less advanced than it is now but it was clear even then that the intelligence war was going to be fought every bit as keenly in cyberspace as on the ground.

"Meehan learnt very fast indeed, especially the technical stuff. According to his service record he'd always been a natural with electronics and the SAS demolitions people described him as the best pupil they'd ever had. The usual routine was that he'd do the physical stuff in the mornings and the classroom stuff in the afternoon. The Tregaron people updated him on the geography of the province and told him the locations of all the drinking houses, social clubs, players' homes, safe houses et cetera, to the point where he could almost have got work as a minicab driver, and at least once a day they ran him through different aspects of his cover story. Like all the best cover stories, this had the advantage of being ninety five per cent true. Only nine months of it would have to be fictionalised. Nine months and a lifetime's beliefs."

Alex was impressed by Fenwick's grasp of the salient details of the operation. She certainly seemed more on top of things than most of the MI-5 agents he'd met in the field. He was also beginning to feel the beginnings of sympathy for Meehan. If the ex Royal Engineer was twenty-three in 1987, thought Alex, he's just a year older than me. We were probably learning much the same things at much the same time. The difference being that I was learning them in company with a bunch of mates and going out on the town on Friday nights and he was stuck in an isolated bunker in Tregaron with a tapped phone.

Poor bastard.

"Anyway," continued Fenwick, 'the instructors hammered away at him pretty much full-time, seven days a week. We had a couple oftheJSlW people come down and take him through his story until he was practically reciting it in his sleep. And, of course, we played the usual mind games, getting him to memonse complex documents, waking him up in the middle of the night to check minute aspects of his cover, that sort of thing. Every room in the house was plastered with pictures of IRA players, so even in his time off he was taking in information."

She paused. To either side of her George Widdowes and Dawn Harding sat in trance-like silence.

"After three months we moved him down to Stockwell for a couple of days so that the Watchman team could spend some time with him and from there it was on to Croydon for a couple of months of advanced field craft training with our service instructors. By that stage we were very much concentrating on demilitarising him, on knocking the professional soldier out of him. For that reason his time at Croydon was deliberately made as unstructured as possible. We fed him junk food, beer and roll-ups, slowed his metabolism down, sent him on the sort of exercise that involves spending the day in a pub. There's a test we set field agents that involves selecting a total stranger in a public place pub, launderette, that sort of place and seeing what information you can extract. There was a checklist we had name, address, phone number, car registration number, job description, place of birth, spouse's maiden name, credit card number... It's not an easy skill but Meehan got to be very good at it indeed and he always made the other people think that they were the ones doing the questioning. All in all, he was a natural. A fantastic find." She coughed and patted her throat.

"Sorry, as you can see I'm not used to doing so much talking."

Standing, she walked to a small table beside her desk and poured herself a glass of Evian water. George Widdowes half rose, as if about to pat her on the back, but caught Dawn Harding's eye and sat down again.

The room, Alex noticed, was becoming uncomfortably stuffy.

"After Croydon," Widdowes said, 'we put our man through his first real test. We sent him back to the Royal Engineers two weeks before the 14th Int selection course was completed the course, that is, that we'd pulled him out of several months earlier and told him to get himself kicked out of the regiment. Left it up to him how he managed it.

"What he did was to go around telling everyone he'd been kicked off the 14th Int course because he was Catholic and Irish-born. He made it look as if this had really dented him -he started drinking a lot, picking fights, getting his name on charge sheets and so on. He'd already visibly put on weight and was a long way from being the lean, mean fighting machine the Engineers had originally sent up to Tregaron.

There was an insubordination charge, a complaint of insulting behaviour by one of the civilian catering staff and some incident with a pub bouncer in Chatham all slippery-slope stuff. The end came when one of the warrant officers discovered some detonator cord in his locker in the course of a room search. He claimed that it was a mistake, that he'd signed it out for instruction purposes and forgotten to sign it back in again, but the CO wasn't having it and Meehan was out on his arse."

Alex whistled quietly and Widdowes shrugged.

"It was the only way. The whole thing had to be believable we couldn't risk asking the CO to fake up a dishonourable discharge. Enough people were in the know already.

"Immediately after his discharge Meehan moved back to London and got a bed in a working men's hostel in Kilburn. Within a couple of weeks he'd picked up work with an emergency plumbing and electrical repair outfit run by a local tough called Tony Riordan. He stuck with Riordan long enough to figure out all the scams and fiddles, and generally acclimatise himself in the role of jobbing electrician, and in the evenings, like any other twenty-three-year old he'd hit the bars. As we hoped would happen before too long in that area, he ran into a few exiles from Belfast and Derry, and picked their brains about job prospects over there. Wasn't a political guy, he said, just had family over there and wanted a change.

"He ended up being given a few names. Nobody who'd seen the quality of his work thought twice about recommending him. And finally, over the water he went.

"The first thing he did over there was to visit his relatives. There was his mother, of course, still living over the pool hall in Bogside, and there were the usual uncles and aunts and cousins scattered around the place. He looked them all up, said his hellos, paid his respects. He didn't advertise the fact that he'd been in the army, but he didn't try to hide it either. Just told anyone who asked that he'd got fed up and left.

"He saw his mother for the first time in more than ten years, but made no secret of how he felt about her walking out on the family. The boyfriend, by now a pissed old fart approaching sixty bit like me tried on a bit of Republican stuff, told him there were people he should meet and so on, but Meehan wasn't buying.

Didn't want to know, he said. Wasn't interested.

"By the autumn he was living in Belfast. A cousin who was a chartered surveyor highly respectable guy, married, kids, house in Dunmurry offered to take Meehan in until he'd found his feet. Meehan stayed there for eight weeks or so, sorted himself out a job with the service department of a store in the city centre, a sort of Tandy-type place called Ed's Electronics, and moved into a rented place a few streets away from his cousin. He also started seeing a girl, a hairdresser called Tina Milazzo. She was a careful choice Catholic, clearly, but not part of any obvious player set-up. Her family were immigrants and her parents ran a cafe in the Andersonstown Road. The Milazzo family were known to us because of Tina' sbrother Vince, who fancied himself as a hot-shot driver and all round dangerous dude, and liked to hang out where the players hung out. He would never have been allowed within a mile of any real action because he was a loudmouth, but he was tolerated.