Free The Big Breach by Richard Tomlinson

company. That career ground to a halt, so he rejoined MI6 in the mid-'80s. At the time, redundancy or dismissal from MI6 was unheard of and it was not difficult or unusual to rejoin MI6 after a lengthy gap in another career. Long explained how he joined the service directly from Oxford, had been posted to Uruguay shortly after the outbreak of the Falklands war, then went to New York to work in the British mission to the United Nations.
     
    Looking around the table, I realised the new recruits were all from similar backgrounds. All were white, male, conventional and middle class. All of us were university graduates, mostly from Oxford or Cambridge. It was pretty much the background of all MI6 officers. The service's recruitment figures refute its claims to be an equal opportunity employer: only about 10 per cent of the officers were female, there were no black officers whatsoever, only one of mixed Asian parentage, and there were no disabled officers, even though there were plenty of suitable opportunities. These issues gave me no concern at the time, though. I was deeply enthusiastic about my new career and could hardly wait to get started on the training.
     
    4. INDOCTRINATION
     
    MONDAY, 9 DECEMBER 1991
    PORTSMOUTH, ENGLAND
     
    T he nine of us, crammed into the Bedford minibus, were silent and tense as we drove through the darkness and driving rain towards the centre of Portsmouth. It was 8.30 p.m. and the streets were almost empty. Only a few stragglers, huddled under umbrellas, were scurrying to the pubs. Ball drove, with Long silently alongside. One by one, they dropped us off in dark side streets or deserted parking lots to merge into the night. Castle went first, striding confidently towards his target, dressed in his suit with a Barbour jacket to protect himself against the elements. Spencer followed, sheepishly scuttling into the darkness under a Burberry umbrella. My turn was next and Markham wished me luck as I slipped out of the back door of the minibus and orientated myself towards my target.
     
    The IONEC was designed to train a recruit to a level of proficiency to step into a junior desk job in MI6. Approximately half of the course was spent in the classroom, learning the administration of the service, the theory of how to cultivate, recruit, handle and debrief agents, listening to case histories and receiving presentations from the different sections of the service. The remainder was spent in exercises, and we were on PERFECT STRANGER, the first of many increasingly complicated tests that were to form the backbone of the course.
     
    Our brief was simple but a little nerve-racking for novice spies. We were each assigned a pub in downtown Portsmouth in which we had to approach a member of the public and, using whatever cunning ruse we could invent, extract their name, address, date of birth, occupation and passport number. We were given an alias, but had to use our initiative to invent the rest of our fictional personality.
     
    Ball explained that the purpose of the exercise was three-fold. First, it was a gentle introduction to using and maintaining an alias identity in a live situation, an essential skill for an intelligence officer. Second, it would test our initiative and cunning in devising a credible plan to achieve the objective. Third, it would illustrate the workings and immense size of MI6's central computer index, or CCI. This is a mammoth computerised databank containing records of everybody with whom any member of MI6 has come into contact operationally since the start of record-keeping in 1945. The biographical details of our random victims were to be fed into this computer to see what, if anything, would be unearthed. The size of the database was such, Ball explained, that it was rare for an IONEC not to chance upon at least one individual with a mention in the CCI on a random trawl of the pubs of Portsmouth,
     
    Pushing open the heavy mock-Victorian door of my designated pub, the Hole In