MI6 and me.........

Some people are mighty curious about what I actually do. They can’t quite make out how come I disappear off to all corners of the earth at a couple of days’ notice for a few days, weeks, months and years. I first met my next-door neighbour 2 years after moving into our present quarters. She said that she had assumed that I was a myth.

 

 

Many accuse me of being a spook. If I say ‘Yeah, right’, I get ‘I knew it all the time!’, and if I deny it they reply ‘Well, you would say that!’.

 

 

But a sequence of events started when I went to the Srpska Republic. There were two ex-military on the team. I met one, a retired Lt. Commander helicopter pilot who was hoovering down a large beer at 6.a.m. so I knew he was my kind of guy. The other was a retired army officer who eschewed the dubious pleasures of hotel life in Banja Luka (there are few enough) and preferred sleeping rough. As they knew nothing about the assignment I got the idea that they were not quite as they seemed.

 

 

As short while after returning home, I was taken out to lunch by two very polished gentlemen who were quite open about being from MI6 and that they were running the rule over me, so to speak. I heard nothing more.

 

 

Later that year I went on a long assignment to South Africa.

The hot story at the time was of a rogue MI6 operative called, from memory, David Shayler. He announced to the world that he had blown the cover of every MI6 agent in the world. The Johannesburg Sunday Times ran the story that they knew the identity of 2 of the 3 MI6 guys at the British High Commission but not the ‘third man’.

 

 

Later, at a diplomatic cocktail party one of the guests whom I knew well, especially for his awesome consumption of Irish whiskey – announced to the entire company that he knew the identity of the ‘Third Man’, and pointed at me! Big joke.

 

 

A few days later many of the same company joined us for dinner at which I introduced the consultant, an old friend, who was doing the interim report on my assignment. During the course of the meal she said by way of conversation that her daughter, who was a Captain in the Intelligence Corps, was leaving the army to join MI6. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Shortly afterwards we went on home leave. We were greeted on arrival by our neighbour who said that he thought the house had been burgled. Sure enough a lounge window had been forced and the intruder had then left by a study window. Nothing was missing but it seemed that my filing cabinet had been thoroughly inspected! It was certainly a pretty professional job.

 

 

When we arrived back at our house in SA, we found that we couldn’t unlock the front door. A locksmith also failed. My office manager and general factotum turned up, went around o the front of the house and minutes later opened the door. It turned out that the intruders had carefully removed the lounge window, shot the bolts on the door to avoid being disturbed, and had then equally carefully replaced the window. My colleague was able to remove it again very quickly because he spotted the fresh putty.

So we have some curious aspects.

 

 

First, burglars don’t go to all that trouble. Why bother to replace the window when you want to be away with the swag?

 

 

Nothing was taken except an ancient and worthless top-loading video machine to make it look like a burglary.

 

 

But my computer had been interrogated; I knew this because the phone bill showed that there had been a lot of traffic on the dial-up account during my two months absence.

 

 

So whoever carried out these two jobs in a remarkably coincident sequence were not burglars.

Who might they have been? It was certainly ‘joke over’!