How to Betray Your Country James Wolff (fun to read txt) 📖

protocol we would have put someone unimportant in front of him, but he asked for me by name. Said that he knows I am a “senior diplomat” and not involved in “the great game of espionage” but that he places a lot of weight on “the personal touch” and was able to tell during our short encounter that I possess “enormous integrity, understanding and compassion” (his words). He asked that I pass the information he was about to provide to a colleague who works in intelligence but to omit any mention of him as the source, as he considered this a one-off and was not prepared to attend further meetings with British officials under any circumstances.

For a neophyte, he gave an admirably succinct, to-the-point and waffle-free account of the facts. In brief, he has a childhood Syrian friend (name withheld) in Turkey who is involved in low-level criminality: people-smuggling, theft, procurement of false documents, etc. HADDAD himself disapproves of much of what his friend does but accepts the imperative to provide for one’s family. In the past, he told me, this friend has performed services on behalf of IS in return for payment. When pressed for an example, he said that he had once procured a piece of medical equipment for a high-ranking member of the group with a kidney condition.

Anyway, this friend has heard rumours that a “significant” IS emir has been expelled from the group and forced into hiding in Turkey. So far, routine scuttlebutt. Nothing at all to get excited about – in your position you’ll no doubt hear a dozen such rumours in any given week. Two “facts” set this apart. Firstly, that this emir was until his expulsion in charge of the foreign-fighter battalion, which means – if true – he would be aware of a) the identities and whereabouts of all Europeans fighting with IS and b) any extant attack plans focused on the UK. Secondly, that this individual is described as being Iraqi, in his mid-fifties, a former member of Saddam’s secret police and – are you sitting down? – a one-time resident of London. I’m pretty sure I know which name has just popped into your head. American reporting suggested he had gone the other way, towards Baluchistan – but what if he’s here? I don’t need to tell you what a coup it’d be to get our hands on him first.

Next steps, Freddy: take a deep breath, walk around the room, eat a chocolate biscuit – whatever it is you do to relax. Don’t call William. Talk to Nigel or Meredith to get a sensible view on this – and make sure you tell them I’m involved. That’ll reassure them.

HADDAD was adamant that he didn’t want to discuss this matter further and under no circumstances would countenance doing a little spadework to find out more, but I persuaded him to give me a contact number. It’s apparent that he holds me in high regard and so I would strongly suggest that I remain in pole position on this case and either a) declare as an intelligence officer or b) offer to act as an honest broker on his behalf with the intelligence community. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which is better. I’m confident I can manoeuvre him into an active role in order to provide us with more intelligence but, if needed, we have leverage aplenty: he is, after all, an undocumented migrant in a hostile country, and we can always fall back on his wife and daughter if necessary. He seems pretty desperate to find them.

Cheerio,

Lawrence

PS. I’ll send details of HADDAD’s selectors separately. Can you find a competent analyst to pull together a summary of the LEG IRON files, and get GCHQ to have a quick-and-dirty peek at HADDAD’s recent phone usage?

• • • •

VESTIBULE/002

top secret

foia exempt

subject:LEG IRON file summarydate:18 December 2016

1. Our understanding of the background and career of Ahmed Naji Al Hadithi (also known as Abu Laith Al Dulaimi and Abu Laith Al Iraqi but hereafter referred to as LEG IRON) is marked by significant gaps. Defector reporting suggests that he was born between 1960 and 1963 to a relatively poor family in the town of Haditha in Iraq’s western Al Anbar province, and that his father worked in a local bakery. LEG IRON himself was the youngest of five siblings.

2. A former general in the Iraqi Air Force (POLARITON) told his US debriefer in 1992 that he had been LEG IRON’s commanding officer in the mid-1980s, and that LEG IRON had graduated from military academy with a reputation for ambition, discipline (he had taught himself at least four languages) and ruthlessness, and for having briefly been part of the Iraqi national wrestling team, a position he gave up in order to concentrate on his military career. At some point in the late 1980s he requested a transfer to Air Force intelligence and served with distinction during the latter years of the Iran–Iraq War. Liaison reporting indicates that during this period he was part of a small team responsible for tracking down deserters who had fled the extremely arduous conditions on the front line, and for enforcing discipline among rank and file Iraqi conscripts. This was achieved through beatings, torture and public executions, as well as the practice of cutting off deserters’ hands or ears and branding a horizontal line across their foreheads (the latter following complaints from veterans with genuine war injuries that they had been mistaken for deserters).

3. LEG IRON reappears in our files in the aftermath of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Following the Allied rout of the Iraqi army, uprisings began to appear across the south of the country, fuelled by the expectation that Western powers would support them in their attempt to overthrow Saddam Hussein. When this support did not materialize, Saddam mounted a series of brutal counter-attacks to suppress internal opposition. In a notorious film clip from March 1991, Ali Hassan Abd Al Majid