The Big Breach - Index of

The Big Breach; From Top Secret to Maximum SecurityCompliments of http://www.192.comfictional background. Probably a trick anyway - Ball and Long had nodoubt arranged for attractive undercover women to sit next to all of uson our flights, hoping that one of us would accidentally drop our coverand let something about our real lives slip out. Ball warned us in theSOLO briefing that one trainee once fell for such a trick. He was atManchester airport, waiting in the departure lounge for his flight toAmsterdam, when an attractive woman sat down next to him. She startedchatting to him and he responded, at first sticking to his cover story;but, becoming increasingly attracted, he wanted to get in touch afterthe exercise and crassly told her that he was an undercover MI6 officerand gave her his real home phone number. At the post-exercise debrief,his newly acquired `girlfriend' strolled in and revealed that she wasan undercover customs officer. Needless to say, he was never allowed toundertake any real natural cover work. There was no way that Ball wasgoing to dupe me into the same error during our two-hour flight fromHeathrow to Rome's Fiumicino airport.The girl turned towards me, smiling. `Hi, I'm Rebecca. Are you stayinglong in Rome?'The DS would expect me at least to give out part of my cover story. Iwas posing as a nerdy academic, so hopefully it would put her off. `I'mDan. I'm just off to Velletri for a week.'`Oh really?' she replied. `What are you doing there?'`I'm a historian, writing a post-doctoral thesis on the contrastingapproaches to urban reconstruction after the Second World War in the UKand Italy.' To my relief, her friendly smile waned. Pulling out aweighty academic book on post-war urban redevelopment in Italy,borrowed from London University library, I started to study earnestly.With a shrug of her shoulders, she reached into her shoulder bag andpulled out Hello magazine. We sat in silence for the rest of theflight.Velletri in February was not an enticing place and it had not been easyto devise a plausible cover story for visiting such an unremarkabletown in the depths of winter. It had no industry of note, ruling outbusiness cover. Journalism, the other mainstay cover for MI6 officers,was also not easy as I discovered in my research through the libraryarchives that little of note ever happened in Velletri. Indeed, theonly reference to the town in the Italian tourist office in London wasthat it had been heavily bombed by the American air force during thelast days of the Second World War as they drove the retreating Germanarmy northwards. In the absence of anything more plausible, thisbombing campaign would have to form the basis of my cover for thevisit.In my spare time in the fortnight preceding EXERCISE SOLO I carefullybuilt up a thick file of notes, photocopies and cuttings aboutVelletri. The archives of the Imperial War Museum, fortuitously only astone's throw from Century House, furnished a wealth of detail on thewartime events in the town. Noticing one day an advertisement in theeducation supplement of The Guardian for a vacant post-doctoral urbanredevelopmentteaching post at University College, London, I appliedusing an alias and false academic qualifications, forged by TOS. Aninvitation to interview arrived shortly afterwards. I would not attend,page- 53 - To purchase the original limited edition hardback version of this bookplease call 08000 192 192 or go to http://www.192.com