Page 7 - double revenge 3.

‘Which amounts to nothing.’ I was starting to feel irritable myself.

Having been out of fieldwork for several years I had no wish to be back on the streets, even if they
were the familiar streets of London rather than Berlin but trying to get over my wife’s death was
not easy so perhaps something out of the ordinary might prove a welcome distraction. The one
thing I knew was that George would never have his Home Desk Director searching for missing
persons. The Met has a department, ”MISPERS”, which specialises in that area and if Arnold was a
security risk then on home soil MI5 should be searching for him. I could only guess that there was a
lot more to Arnold Warner than contained in the briefing notes but I was sure George would soon
be a little more forthcoming over a large whisky.

My concentration therefore wavered and I became fascinated by the pall of pipe smoke gently
wafting in the breeze of the ceiling fan with no intention or opportunity to escape this
soundproofed, triple glazed high security office.

William Collinson, always William and never Bill, was the cause of the acrid pollution, smoking, as
he always did in George’s office, his meerschaum pipe full of foul smelling scented Dutch tobacco.
No one had ever seen him smoke it anywhere else. Poor old Mrs Mcluskey’s watercolour paintings

were already showing a yellow deterioration and the Oak panelled walls had long ago lost their
sheen. I often wondered if the pipe smoking was an act of resentment for not getting the top job.

Collinson had the Afghanistan desk at the time the Americans were supporting the rebels to fight
the Russian invaders and with his long association with the Americans he had seemed to be the
logical favourite to head a department specially set up to work in close liaison with them.
Instead, Mr Reliable, George Mcluskey, the staid Scotsman who was reaching the end of a long and
distinguished career, was seen as a safer pair of hands to handle the backlash from the Whitehall

Mandarins. The Iron Lady had not only set up a new and independent intelligence section but also
made it responsible directly to her and not to the Parliamentary Intelligence Committee or even the
Cabinet.

Her decision had been made against the background of the diplomatic manoeuvring by former
American Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, to turn America against us over the Falklands. She was
determined that the two largest allies in the free world should have much quicker access to the
Heads of State than the slow and sometimes very political channels of the diplomatic service. Both

she and Reagan had agreed this and both had paved the way for the introduction of a much more
streamlined interchange of intelligence between them.

Our department was set up in 1990, and located just a few minutes’ walk from the then MI6
Headquarters at Century House. There had been an attempt to bring us back into the new
headquarters at number 85 The Embankment, the new MI6 building George liked to refer to as
“The Big House.” George had resisted that, we assumed, with a great deal of assistance from the
new incumbent of No.10 who relished this elitism. George was bound to get a peerage on his

retirement.