The War of the Spooks - a story by Forcon & James G

forcon,

Good to know that little worm got caught, along with his handler. However I wonder why now as there might be the possibility of feeding false information to the Russians. Or possibly they have known for some time and been feeding false info - although that would be difficult without his knowledge - and decided there's no point in continuing.

Steve

But Alena doesn’t have diplomatic cover anymore- if she ever did. Pretty easy to lean on Charles to build a case then present her the option of cooperation or punishment. Alena has a support network that can be rooted out, and leaning on Charles to help turn her is a first step. You can also interrogate Charles for previous collection requirements. This will help fuse with other information acquired by various means to begin to identify the enemy’s strategic plans and concerns.

It could have been the case that he was known about and fed clever disinformation. It is hard to do, risky, but has been done by intelligence agencies in the past, MI-6 included.

Five


Adam Young wanted to be the Prime Minister. He’d entered politics for that reason. It drove him, that desire to get to the very top. There was no other reason which he saw to be in this game called national politics if it wasn’t to aim for the highest he could go. He was currently a couple of rungs down from the top of the ladder. Yong served as Security Minister, under the Home Secretary at the UK’s Home Office. His career path upwards wasn’t something that he could accurately plot out because it would always be subject to events, but he intended to soon move to a Cabinet job, then one of the Great Offices of State before being in Downing Street eventually. Another few years and he’d be there. There were some crazy people in Moscow who wanted to interfere with this process though. They were trying to put a blot on his career with their insane war which they had launched against Britain and its NATO partners. Just over a day ago now, those coup-ists in Russia’s capital had sent their army into the Baltics. Young was a government minister but he wasn’t fully briefed on the exact details of how the war was progressing there in Eastern Europe. These things were secret, need-to-know. It wasn’t one being lost by NATO but neither, propaganda aside, was it currently being won either. A big mess it all was. Hundreds of British casualties had been taken out there in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. The war came here to Britain too. Young wasn’t ultimately responsible for how the fight against Russian efforts with their spies and Spetsnaz was going but he was intimately involved in the political side of things. He wanted to claim credit where there was some to take and to make sure that none of the sticky stuff stuck to him when it was sprayed about. The former would win him one day that position at the top which he coveted; the latter would see a shameful return to vacuum of the backbenches.

Not a core member of government’s crisis committee which was unofficially being called the War Cabinet, Young was still a participant when called in. He went to his second briefing this morning. Whitehall felt like a military camp. There were armed soldiers everywhere, even some light armoured vehicles including a couple mounting air defence missiles pointed up into the bright blue sky. Sandbags, concertina wire and metal barriers were up all around the heart of London’s government district. Young went through the checkpoints along with the Met. Police officer who’d been assigned as a bodyguard for him at a time of war. The Cabinet Office had its main entrance on Whitehall. The road was closed to traffic and pedestrians this Sunday morning. It was still busy though with all sorts of people about. Officials, policemen and soldiers were passed on the way in by Young and his little entourage. He came to the Cabinet Office with that bodyguard, an aide and a spook from MI-5 whom he’d handpicked to join him in meeting with the PM and his top team. There were those at the Security Service whom Young had recently rubbed up the wrong way due to several matters and this was one of them. In the long run, it might not do that spook’s career any good because of how he was making use of her but that didn’t concern Young. On his way to the top, everyone else was disposable. There was a War Cabinet meeting at ten o’clock. Young showed up early but found he wasn’t the only one already here. He spoke with one of the junior ministers from the Ministry of Defence and then the Chief Whip who was also in the building but not due to attend the meeting. Then, going down belowground, Young went with only Hargreaves from MI-5 to the Cabinet Office Briefing Room A: COBRA.


The Foreign Secretary was absent and so too was the Deputy PM. Young knew that the first would be missing – the China issue had her attention – but he was surprised to see the second member not here. In the yesterday’s briefing which had required Young’s attendance, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (the deputy role was de facto for many who held that Cabinet portfolio) had been present and was rather involved in discussions concerning Russian activity on British soil. He’d spoken more at that meeting than Young’s boss the Home Secretary. Missing he was though, not at the PM’s side. If there was something seriously wrong, such as a Russian attempt against his life, Young would know about that. So… it was something else, something political or diplomatic which he might be informed about or might not. Regardless, the man whom Young wanted to impress wasn’t here. This put a dampener on his mood somewhat. The path to power for Young was currently through that man. Alas, that was an issue for later. Meanwhile, there was this briefing to get through. Other top-level attendees beside the PM and Home Secretary were the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Defence Secretary, the Attorney General and the uniformed Chiefs of the Defence Staff & General Staff. Young was joined by other junior people, his most recent pet from MI-5 included, because this gathering was concerning Operation Castle Moat. Other events would be brought up in relation to that ongoing effort to protect Britain at home from the war being fought mainly overseas but it really was about the domestic fight.

The PM asked Young to begin by running through the recent instances of hostile Russian activity which had occurred since the last meeting. The Security Minister did just that. There had been no more military-grade commando actions followed the initial ones which came in the immediate hours following the opening of hostilities. The attacks made by Russian Spetsnaz at the airbases of RAF Lakenheath and RAF Waddington, plus the sinking of that vessel as a blockship off the Royal Navy base at Devonport, hadn’t been followed up. The hunt was still ongoing for the surviving members of the teams which made all three of those big strikes with success achieved in Lincolnshire: four Russian special forces soldiers on the run had been caught and either died fighting or were captured alive. Finding those responsible for the Devonport mission was still not showing any positive sign of progress but there were some breadcrumbs being followed with some men who’d got away their attack in Suffolk against the Americans. As to the fourth Spetsnaz mission, that one which they failed to get going against Army Headquarters at Marlborough Lines in Hampshire, the complete team remained in custody. They’d been caught in uniform, literally minutes after changing out of civilian clothes, and were thus being held as internationally recognised POWs. The wounded were under guard like those uninjured were: this was the case with other prisoners taken in those further enemy actions.

Moving on, Young addressed the issue of Russian operatives acting in a paramilitary role committing semi-terrorist actions rather than as special forces raiders. There had been two further attacks by them overnight. Lone attackers armed with explosives had now committed half a dozen bombings and acts of arson against civilian targets. These latest strikes hadn’t been as high-profile as Heathrow Airport or MI-6 headquarters which had been seen when the war started but instead low-profile, big reward targets out in Buckinghamshire and up in Ayrshire. Civilian power and telecommunications links had been hit at the most exposed places to cause maximum effect. Military wise this did nothing for Russia’s war in Eastern Europe yet these were done to undermine British public morale as part of Moscow’s hybrid warfare geo-political strategy. There were a couple of these terrorists in custody and one was in a body bag; three more were as-yet unidentified. Those who had done this were long time deep cover agents and where their false identity was known, the pretend lives they led were being picked apart. Young was asked if there were likely going to be more of these attacks. He could only say that that was unknown. The chance was there that Russia had shot its bolt – six agents was quite the number to have hidden for so long – but there might be others. This caused several worried looks among the faces of those present. These politicians were more concerned about these than the ‘traditional’ commando attacks. What had happened at Heathrow was still fresh in their minds and Young knew that they, like he, feared another mass casualty event but also knew that there would be public unease when the lights went out and the internet went down across the country.

When it came to Russian spies, Young led in the update given to the War Cabinet by the spook from MI-5 which he had brought here. He himself was on top of his brief when it came to espionage matters but an expert in the field was the best person to tell them what they wanted to know. Young didn’t want to put his foot in it anywhere: if she did, which he doubted, it wasn’t his career on the line. He’d chosen Hargreaves because she could talk with the confidence required but also didn’t ‘frighten’ the PM and others either by being too clever, too mysterious and too arrogant… Young knew there were plenty of other spooks who would love to be here but would fulfil that unwelcome criteria. He turned it over to her at right moment. Sitting back and listening to her, Young revelled in his wisdom of picking her. She was pretty and smart. She could speak their language. Her briefing was missing unnecessary details yet gave them what they needed. Young had arranged with her beforehand what was to be covered. He wasn’t hiding anything from the War Cabinet, it wasn’t a case of that, but there was a way of doing this which he wanted to see done. It had to make him look good. Intelligence agents of Russia’s two principle espionage agencies had been arrested on British soil. There were GRU and SVR officers picked up since the war had started. Police teams, supported by MI-5 who had no powers of arrest themselves, had detained ones known about previous to the opening of hostilities. There had been some incidents yet nothing too dramatic. A few had escaped the net cast with several runners caught though not all. The hunt was on to find the rest of them. None of these had diplomatic cover and had been pretending to be businesspeople, journalists or emigres. MI-5 had surveillance and counter-espionage operations underway against them before the war. Now those operations were blown but the spies were in custody. Of course, there were more: others not previously known about. Multiple lines of enquiry were being followed to identify further spies. There had been some success achieved already. One of those detained early on had expressed a wish to sell out Mother Russia for a better life – naturally, he put it a different way: who would believe it but he apparently actually had a conscience, wanted to do the right thing and loved Britain? – and there had been some good information which came from that: two arrests had been made with one of them a previously unknown spy and the second a traitor to Queen and County. There were some more breadcrumbs to follow from this, to a safehouse in South London. From out of the Russian Defence Attaché’s Office there had come a secondary source of intelligence. Hargreaves went into more detail on that than she and Young had discussed but not enough to steal his coming thunder. All told, one hiccup at the end aside, she did what he wanted from her. He’d chosen well. Young was here for the glory and wanted it all alone.


Both the PM and the Attorney General (the country’s top law officer) had questions. Young handled those. The Security Minister informed the man whose job he wanted that, yes, everything was being done when it came to working with British domestic partner agencies in the fight against Russian spies as well as their commandos and terrorists. Allies were being worked with too, especially the Americans and the French. British sovereignty in the realm of intelligence matters on its own soil was being adhered to in that complicated balancing act: it was all in hand. When it came to the Attorney General, Young struggled a bit with this man’s approach to questioning. The man was a former barrister (other holders of that post in the past hadn’t been when it would have been best if they had) and Young felt like the accused in a court of law! The two of them were party and parliamentary colleagues yet never had had a good relationship. Young gave assurances when demanded that arrested Russian – and Belorussian – diplomats held in detention by the UK Border Force were being treated properly. The Attorney General was more concerned about the treatment of the arrested spies, those without the protection afforded to accredited diplomats. Both the Defence Secretary and the head of the British Army each made remarks about not giving much of a damn about their rights but the rottweiler at the scuff of Young’s neck kept on with it. He wanted to be sure that the law was being followed where it came to them. Young asserted that it was yet the Attorney General still wasn’t happy with the responses on the subject which the Young gave him. Only finally did the Attorney General relent when the PM drove the briefing onwards. He wanted to know about one of those detained spies in particular, the one found with detailed plans of many Whitehall buildings in her home. This was concerning for the PM. Young made sure that his own face and tone shared that concern too. Hargreaves moved to interject but he quickly cut her off and handled the reply. There was a full investigation into that matter with all resources thrown at getting to the bottom of it all. The security situation in the middle of London here had been reassessed in light of uncovering of such plans which could be used to make an attack here while MI-5’s spooks were working on getting that woman to talk.

As the meeting concluded, the Defence Secretary took a moment of Young’s time and told him that he had done well. The Security Minister wasn’t trying to impress him though. Yet, thinking fast, Young realised that when it came to what intelligence nuggets had been gleamed from the SAS raid yesterday up in Highgate, success there would come from the intense cooperation between the armed forces and the spooks. Castle Moat was still on track to be an accomplishment which could only benefit him personally. There was the little matter of that bloody war raging in Eastern Europe, and of course a few thousand nukes pointed at opponents fighting a global war, but Young kept his focus on getting what he wanted in life: the PM’s office in Downing Street. He had his priorities where he wanted them to be.

I'm not sure what THEM is but I am gathering it is to do with the behaviour of dogs?
He is not a good guy. Not evil but not principled at all. Power drives him.




Not in my current plans for that to be the case but I might change my mind.
All Young wants is ultimate power soon enough and he'll use anyone to get it: a spook from MI-5 is only a tool. She might understand and by riding the wave.
There have been several leads uncovered and we are going to see them play out in the coming updates.