Step by Step Page 8

  We met halfway across the track and agreed to go to a nearby pub to talk. I had never met anyone like these men. They had committed acts of pure evil. But instead of fearing them, I could see they were pathetic. One was a weaselly-looking thin guy with darting eyes. The other was a much bigger Neanderthal with hairy hands and terrible body odour. They didn’t impress me. I wasn’t in awe of them and I didn’t feel fear. I was a pathetic and nervous lad, but even I could see they were just two thugs full of hate and venom. These two men had been identified as a powerful destabilising force in South Africa, yet to me they seemed amateurish.

  Between them they carried two heavy holdalls. One bag contained clothes and weapons. They opened it to reveal handguns, more to show off than as a threat. The other contained documents they said could prove they had been funded, not by a rogue element within the South African secret service, but officially by something called the Civil Cooperation Bureau, an organisation run by the South African Defence Force, which had been involved in the murder and attempted murder of anti-apartheid activists.

  They said they had carried out the taxi-rank bombing on the orders of the CCB man who recruited them. They claimed a ‘third force’ was at work in South Africa, trying to pit rival black parties against each other in an attempt to preserve white rule. They told me, and we later confirmed, that before they escaped they had been moved into a hospital from maximum-security prison after they started a hunger strike.

  They also said they could prove that South Africa was channelling arms to a guerrilla army in neighbouring Mozambique to destabilise the government there, and the South African Defence Force had given thousands of rifles to the Zulu rivals of Mandela’s ANC in the hope of igniting war between the groups. They showed me documents and mentioned specific names of officials and officers.

  We sat in a corner in the quiet pub, a few regulars glancing occasionally in our direction, while they talked in hushed tones about their involvement with military intelligence contacts, a ‘Mr Sting’, sanctions-busting arms deals, the white-supremacist Church of the Creator, and the extremist Order of the Boer Nation. They spoke calmly about what they had done, as if they were merely business transactions. Not once did they question why a teenager had been sent to meet them.

  I should probably have walked out. Run out. Called my mum. Panicked. But I didn’t. I actually felt that in this dark world I had found my calling. I listened carefully. I made notes. They sounded like the real thing, genuinely awful, and said they would talk to the paper, so I called the Sunday Times, spoke to the foreign desk, and told them I would bring the pair to London. Hotels were arranged, tickets immediately purchased.

  I suspect all this couldn’t happen today. In a time of risk assessments and corporate health and safety, I doubt a newspaper could send an untrained kid to find, debrief and deliver a couple of terrorists. But this was a different time, when risk was more acceptable, and it meant I was able to be involved in investigations that would normally take a degree, training and a decade of experience.

  I persuaded them to drop their weapons back at their safe house, and then I took the South Africans, including the nervous wife and daughter of the weasel, who appeared from a car hidden around the corner, back to London. If it had been strange coming on the branch line on the way there, it was ten times more bizarre heading back on the train again with the farmers and the schoolchildren, and two nutjob terrorists.

  In London I remember their shock when a police car, driven by a black officer, pulled alongside our taxi. Weasel nudged Neanderthal and then said to me: ‘Well, that’s not good, is it, Simon?’

  I ignored him and looked out of the window. We were nearly back in Wapping. One of the senior journalists met us and took over the babysitting a large article appeared in the paper that weekend. I was just pleased to have been involved. I hadn’t fouled things up. Quite the opposite. Everyone was delighted with what I’d done. Critically, I realised that terrorists, who I had always imagined as horned devils, could be worryingly human.

  I mentioned it to Peter, and he told me about the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who wrote a seminal work on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi responsible for organising the transportation of millions of Jews to concentration camps during the Final Solution. Arendt described Eichmann as ‘terrifyingly normal’. She coined a phrase: ‘the banality of evil’. It applied perfectly to the South Africans. They were pathetic, but they had still managed to threaten the peace process. Terrorism became something I would study intently. But first, that evening when I got back from Boston, I went straight back in to sort the mail.

  My first mission led to many more, often for Peter or the elite Insight team on the Sunday Times which also ran long-term investigations. But I was still a post-boy, so I had to juggle two ludicrously different roles. One moment I would be collecting the mail or a bundle of designer clothes for a photoshoot from the courier drop-off point at ‘Gate Six’ at the far end of the Wapping plant, and the next I’d be asked to work on an investigation into drug smuggling or the IRA. With hindsight, it was absurd.

  But the newspaper was a meritocratic sort of place. One of the most brilliant writers on the paper had started there on two weeks of work experience, but he kept his security pass when he was supposed to have left, sat in a corner and waited until he was asked to help on a story. People there were interested in results, not where I had come from, what my background was, how old I was, or whether there were two sacks of mail needing sorting. I found myself involved in investigations into ever more dodgy subjects, including arms dealing and smuggling. The Soviet Union was collapsing and imploding. The world was awash with weapons. One of the investigators took me to a meeting with an intelligence contact.

  ‘Who’s this?’ said the contact with a smile, shaking me by the hand.

  ‘This is Simon. He might be me in the future,’ said my colleague with a laugh.

  I was stunned. It was an enormous vote of confidence.

  ‘Fair enough,’ said the intelligence officer. That was good enough for him.

  The contact was chatty, garrulous and charismatic. Each meeting I had with him was memorable. It was always on an understanding that we would share gossip and briefings but check and double-check anything we put into print. It might sound like a cosy relationship between the state and the media, but I came to see it as another check and balance on the power of both. He talked to us because we questioned but respected his work. He was ideological and driven by a desire for the world to be a better place. He could have been an aid worker or a campaigner, and we were a safety valve for information he thought should be shared and disseminated. Over the years he opened more doors and guided me into other areas of darkness. But then, he was talking about nuclear weapons.

  In the early 1990s the intelligence world was racing to monitor the Soviet nuclear stockpile and prevent it falling into the hands of rogue regimes or terrorist groups. Secret reports suggested Russian scientists had created a strange and exotic substance called ‘red mercury’, that enabled the creation of briefcase-sized nuclear bombs that could be easily smuggled and yet utterly devastating. It was the stuff of a Tom Clancy novel, and years later red mercury became the focus of Hollywood movies. But in the early 1990s, in my late teens and early twenties, I was researching and investigating both its existence and the shadow world in which it was supposedly being smuggled.

  Contacts told us their sources in Russia were adamant red mercury could be used to create a pure fusion bomb the size of a football, possibly even a hand grenade, that it was invisible to all available detection measures, and that if used it could wipe out life in a mile or half-mile radius. Documents later claimed to show Boris Yeltsin had issued a licence to a mysterious Russian firm to export red mercury, presumably to rogue regimes. People were talking about multi-billion-pound deals, that red mercury was a substance that could provide clean energy as well as fuel weapons, that it was worth ten times more per gram than gold, then a thousand times
more than diamonds. Arms dealers who were thought to be brokering deals were found dead, shot in the head or with plastic bags over their heads. Then a British executive with a South African chemical company was found chopped into small pieces in the trunk of his luxury car in Soweto near Johannesburg in November 1991. His body was covered in a strange black gunk. Intelligence reports suggested he might have tried to sell red mercury to buyers from the Middle East. It was appalling, dark and tangled.

  I was sent to Newcastle to speak to his family. I remember the way they looked – ghost-like – as they tried to come to terms with the horror of what had happened. I saw autopsy photos of his remains. They were the most graphic and appalling images I had ever seen. I was nineteen years old. There was no training. My flight to Newcastle was the first time I had ever been on a plane. I didn’t know how to put on the lap-belt. I didn’t eat the snacks I was offered because I thought you had to pay for them. I was such a kid. I was still sorting the post, for goodness’ sake. But I was pitched into ghastly and fascinating investigations.

  Peter Hounam became my unofficial mentor, and the newspaper became the education I had missed. It was my college and university. I learned how to investigate difficult and demanding subjects. How to dig, flatter and flirt for information; how to read, understand and mirror people; I learned how to move from chatting with a gang in East London or talking on the phone with a shady business in Dubai, to meeting with an MP in Parliament.

  My principal weapon was a telephone, which I would have glued to my ears for hours. The name and authority of the paper helped secure access and kept people on the line. Peter taught me silence is a great way of encouraging others to speak.

  Then we had computers linked to public records and, even before the advent of the internet and the World Wide Web, early databases of articles that were a powerful resource, giving an experienced user access to stories and information from around the world. The system we used gave me as much intelligence-gathering capability as that of a small country. Researching the killing in South Africa, for example, I could guarantee that local newspapers in the area would have fresh and different leads from their own contacts that we could also chase up and follow. But the database also had scientific journals, press releases, texts from obscure conferences and government tenders.

  Another tool was Companies House in London, where detailed records for all UK limited companies were kept. The elite and the dodgy might be able to hire PR teams and lawyers and hide much of what they were doing, but every firm had to file annual returns and – crucially – list their directors with their home addresses. It was a goldmine. I spent hours going through microfiches looking for people we were investigating, until flicking through the documents on film would give me dizzying motion sickness.

  I never hacked phones. But I certainly used tactics that would come into a grey zone of legality. My defence would have been simple. I felt then, and believe still now, as pompous as it might sound, that I was working on investigations that were in the public good. I wasn’t involved in any activity my own moral code deemed unacceptable, although I was certainly underhand. I learned to obtain information by pretty much any means possible. I spent days on surveillance jobs sitting in the back of vans watching target addresses, eating cold pizzas and peeing in bottles.

  The investigators on the paper were dogged, thoughtful and caring. I thought and still think the work they were doing was a vital check on power, and essential for a healthy democracy. Watching them and learning from them was an education no university could offer.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Walkie-talkies and Binoculars

  It was a tip from a whistle-blower that sent me undercover into the BBC’s dirty laundry. One week I had a call from an engineer who worked at the iconic Television Centre in White City. He was worried about fire safety in the passages and corridors down in the bowels underneath the building.

  ‘The whole place is a death trap,’ he told me. ‘It could go up at any moment! I’ve complained over and over again and nobody is listening to me.’

  We met and talked and agreed I needed to see the issues with my own eyes. The plan was for me to play squash with him at the BBC’s internal sports club, then hide until the club closed. When we finished a couple of games he thought the area would be empty, but several people were still working around the club, so I had to hide for an hour in a large wheeled basket underneath dirty towels from the sports club. They stank of stale male sweat, like socks that hadn’t been washed for weeks. It was one of the least pleasant experiences of my working life. But when everyone else left for the evening the engineer returned and I was able to hop out.

  I had a covert body-worn camera, which I had bought from a spy shop for a previous investigation, to capture images of what the whistle-blower said were extreme breaches of fire safety. But I was carrying just a racquet and still wearing my gym kit, on the grounds we could say I was heading back to the club if discovered, so I had nowhere I could hide the camera. My sports T-shirt was too tight for unsightly camera bulges, so I had to strap the camera around my waist inside my shorts.

  We came to an area deep under TV Centre where one fire door seemed to be missing and another was propped open by jerry cans of chemicals. Wood stanchions, posts and rolls of paper were stacked together further along the corridor almost as if they were ready for a bonfire.

  ‘Look, look!’ he said, getting very agitated. ‘Go on, take a photo.’

  Then I had to pull my shorts down at the front and take a photograph, before quickly hiding everything away before anyone came wandering past.

  The whole thing was, of course, ridiculous, and the images I took were too dark for any fire safety expert to verify as a problem.

  But I was game, and the newspaper decided to send me on a course in Portsmouth where they taught me shorthand and how to write without libelling people. I shuttled to and from London, still trying to work on projects. I don’t know when I ate and I can’t recall where I slept, because I was pretty much running on empty. I remember driving back from Portsmouth so tired that a voice in my head said I’ll just close my eyes until I get to the bridge ahead. The next thing I knew was the wheels rumbling over the cat’s eyes. I had tried to take a nap while driving. I’m not sure what Darwin would make of that.

  Before long, Peter and other journalists were suggesting I should be writing my own stories. I started by drafting articles for the hacks. They gained by having someone collate thoughts and quotes, but they also had to work through and then rewrite the ramblings of a school-leaver. My first piece was on arms smuggling. Seriously. I sent it over to Peter’s computer and sat next to him as he read it. He finished it, sat back in his chair, linked his hands over his stomach and looked at me kindly.

  ‘Always remember there’s a thousand ways of writing a piece like this,’ he said.

  It was a brilliant way of telling me it was a pile of manure, without bruising my fragile ego. I watched closely how he wrote the real article, and what he looked for and used from his notes. He picked a few phrases from my words and worked them into his own, which helped my confidence. I learned quickly. I’ve heard people say that if you start at the bottom in the media the first thing you need to do is kiss it. Very crude. I never had to grovel or suck up to anyone at the Sunday Times. There were privileged and brilliant young graduates at the paper. One was a peer, another was the daughter of Michael Heseltine. Several became friends. They all treated me with respect and kindness. But it probably helped that I was open-minded and eager. I watched, I volunteered, I always said yes to a request, even if I was supposed to be heading home, and I was prepared to go an extra mile to do the job well. I tried to give people what they wanted, but equally I tried to show initiative by being proactive and pushing ideas and suggestions.

  Pretty quickly I learned that being flexible was also key, and that I couldn’t expect everyone to accept me on my terms; I had to be able to adapt to different circumstances and situations. I stopped
talking to older people at the paper in the same way I would talk to my mates in Acton. I learned to fit in. Perhaps if I had been less of a blank canvas that would have been more challenging. I think my ordinary background and absence of education actually helped.

  Almost every day something would crop up and I would be off investigating or even tailing people, trying to find out where they lived or where they were going. I was part of a small pool of youngsters on the paper with no training, no risk assessment and no thought for health and safety. I didn’t care, my confidence was growing every week and I loved the job. It was all very Boys’ Own.

  On one occasion I was part of a small team, armed with walkie-talkies and binoculars, that had to follow an arms dealer from Gatwick Airport into the heart of London. We had received a tip-off he was travelling on a scheduled flight, hiding in plain sight. It was thrilling, even when we realised another surveillance team was on his tail.

  Another time I had to drive around London in a hired convertible Mercedes for a weekend while a black investigator drove another identical car to test who would be stopped by the police. I went off script that weekend. At one point I had six friends in the car while we drove to a party with the roof down. I clearly remember thinking that even if I lost my job it was worth it. I was not stopped once. My colleague was stopped within half an hour, and several times afterwards.

  I was learning every day and the hours were ludicrous. I was at the paper six or seven days a week. Often I wouldn’t make it home at all and would crash on a sofa at a colleague or friend’s house and buy a clean shirt in Asda on the way back to work in the morning. Others would leave in the small hours, then come back in early, put their coat on the back of their chair and switch their computers on to make it look as if they were working, and then go back to their car or sit on the toilet for a couple of hours and have a nap. There was a general expectation that you would come in early and leave very late. Every day off I had I slept for twelve hours. Every week of holiday I had I was ill, as if my body knew that finally it was able to give up.