How to Betray Your Country by James Wolff (pocket ebook reader txt) 📗

will be to identify the member of staff responsible for the leak described below.

2. On 30 September 2012 a Sunday newspaper published an article under the headline “Terror Sheikh in Prostitute Love Triangle” that claimed Islamist cleric Abu YAHYA Al Biritani @ Nigel WILLIAMS (METAL CUSHION of Operation FOSSILDOM) was a regular client of two Walthamstow-based prostitutes. The article included quotations from “a top-secret phone call” between the cleric and one of the prostitutes that had allegedly been handed to the paper by “a government insider”.

3. The newspaper’s website contains a link to a 22-second excerpt of the phone call. We have confirmed it is genuine. The excerpt contains a brief negotiation over the price of a particular sex act and general discussion about the scheduling of the appointment. As the total call duration was 7 minutes and 16 seconds, much of which was taken up with conversation of a sexually explicit nature, we assess that the “government insider” is likely to have only given the newspaper the 22-second excerpt, as we can see no reason why the editor would have refrained from using some of the more colourful passages.

4. METAL CUSHION has been a priority SOI for investigators for the past three years, and remains a highly effective radicalizer of young and vulnerable men in the south-east.

5. We can assume that knowledge of the recording was widespread within the intelligence agencies and counter-terrorism police because of its sensational nature. In recent years, high-profile investigations such as ELVEDEN have highlighted the unofficial relationships that exist between some police officers and journalists – relationships that, while dwindling in number, remain a cause of serious concern to this team. However, preliminary enquiries indicate that although a written transcript of the call may have been shared widely with police partners, only those within this building have access to the recording itself. For this reason, we are treating it as an internal breach and will investigate accordingly under the name Operation INKWELL.

6. We are focusing our early efforts on creating a list of those staff members with the technical access required to obtain a recording of the call. We have also begun to review vetting files for any mention of this subject, such as an expression of frustration at the way that METAL CUSHION has been able to get away with his radicalizing activities for years, or for any instance of an officer reporting a colleague making unauthorized contact with a journalist. Warrantry to allow further investigation of the journalist in question is currently with the Home Secretary.

7. One final note on motivation. There are aspects of this leak that raise questions. Why did the “government insider” choose to provide a recording rather than a written transcript, given that this has put them at greater risk of being identified? If they provided this material for financial gain, why did they only hand over a partial excerpt of the call? Why did they not include the most sensational segments? We remain open-minded about these questions. We also remain open-minded about the possibility that this is a leak of a non-traditional nature, and that the motivation of the officer in question was a desire to harm the reputation of METAL CUSHION and degrade his ability to radicalize impressionable young men rather than a straightforward wish to make money.

5

August couldn’t remember much about his new employer. He couldn’t even remember what the company was called, other than that it was something to do with chess. Castle Communications? Knight Strategies? Bishop was too obviously Christian, king and queen a little old-fashioned, pawn out of the question for a number of reasons. When he finally turned up at the address he’d been given, one day after arriving in Istanbul, there wasn’t a sign outside the building as he’d hoped, just a walk up three flights of what appeared to be a run-down residential block to a reinforced door opened by buzzer after a wait of several minutes, and inside a four-bedroom apartment, the furniture pushed into corners and covered with plastic sheeting. Nobody was waiting for him. In one room three Syrian men were talking loudly about a video they were watching on a laptop, and in another a man was shouting in Turkish into a mobile phone. Wires hung from the ceilings and a puddle of grey water sat in the middle of the floor.

“Can I help you?”

A young man wearing a cream-coloured linen suit and a pair of dirty white running shoes stood in a doorway off to one side.

“I’m August. It’s my first day.”

“William.” He offered a delicate hand. He was in his early thirties, with thinning shoulder-length hair so blonde it was almost white. “Beatrice is on a call with London. Wasn’t she expecting you … earlier?”

“Really?” said August. Three hours earlier, to be exact, but he had either slept through his alarm or forgotten to set it. After he had woken up and realized how late it was, it had still taken him over an hour to get out of bed, and even then the only real reason for moving was to get away from room 18 in the Hotel Turkish Delight. At one point between three and four in the morning he had sat upright in bed and considered going down to the reception desk to complain about the cockroaches or the rattling window or the thin mattress and demand to be moved. Not that any of those things bothered him in the slightest. He just didn’t think they would take him seriously if he complained about a ghost. He couldn’t blame them. And it wasn’t as though he had seen anything, or heard any inexplicable noises. It was just that everywhere he went she was both there and not there, a presence and an absence, and he didn’t know any other way to describe that.

“Beatrice is more than a little annoyed, I won’t lie,” William was saying. “Brace yourself for a telling-off. She said the mobile number you gave her wasn’t working.