Occasionally I heard an accent different to my own that marked that person down as among the ‘them’ tribe. A few of us mingled with fellow undergraduates from the North, the west of England, even overseas students, out of mild curiosity.
We frequented various Cambridge pubs, or went back to someone’s rooms. All the time we were talking, reading and absorbing new ideas about politics and society. In those three years my eyes were opened. There was no way I could go back to the closeted world my parents would have wanted for me. When I finished my degree I joined the publishers Random House as a Publicity Assistant. I spent several months writing press releases, preparing press kits and mailing publicity materials; I was involved in coordinating author tours and book signings. I wanted to break free from my background, because it was stifling me.
I had ambitions to move up the ladder, but in truth I was a little lost; everything I had learned in my first eighteen years had been disturbed by what I had been exposed to at Cambridge. Yes, I think ‘disturbed’ best describes it. I still clung to the values that Robert Kennedy alluded to when he wrote:-
‘Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.’
However, I had come to appreciate that there was another world out there which was where the ‘savageness of man’ was omnipotent and unreachable. I had learned that evil, poverty, injustice and more horrors besides existed with no-one to fight the corner of the people who lived under that oppression every day of their lives. I wanted to do something about that, but as an ingénue of twenty one pretty much vacuous years I didn’t know how to take that first step.
I continued to live in Belgravia and one Friday evening after work a friend and I decided to visit a local pub, rather than drink a bottle of wine in her flat. It was pretty crowded and she saw an old school chum across the bar and threaded her way through the scrum of people to have a chat. I was alone at our table. A casually dressed woman in her late thirties, stopped as she passed by, dropped a card in my lap and merely said that if I wanted a more challenging job, perhaps I should ring this number.
That was the turning point although I didn’t realise it; I put her card in my handbag and forgot all about it. My friend returned with her pal in tow, plus a trio of young chaps. The rest of the night involved several silly drinking games and a tussle in the back of a taxi where a young man got a knee in the groin for his troubles.
It was a week or so later before I used that particular bag again and as I was hunting for my mobile phone, I saw the card and remembered that evening in the pub. I’d had a fairly obnoxious author to work with all that week and I was pretty fed up, so once I’d found my wretched phone I rang the number on the card immediately.
I was invited to attend a meeting in an unmarked building in central London and eventually found myself sat across a desk from a young man who informed me he was an intelligence officer. It was the first step towards my life as a spy.
After that first exploratory conversation, the intelligence world enveloped me; it was like being returned to the womb, I was insulated from the world outside and yet my everyday working life at Random House carried on in the same humdrum manner as before until my vetting process was completed.
That process was interminable. Of course, they have to be certain that they have targeted the right people, I understood that. I couldn’t tell anyone what I was going to be doing. My family, friends and work colleagues were gradually at arm’s length; as soon as I had signed the Official Secrets Act, it became less and less possible to maintain the same familiar degree of contact with them.
My desire to ‘make a difference’ was what attracted them. They told me that I would be protecting the country, helping to save lives, that sort of thing, but although the secrecy element is huge, there is very little glamour or financial reward.
Some time later I received a home visit. My parents were in Cannes at the time. It was just as well too, as the personal questions I was exposed to for the next hour or so would have turned my poor parent’s hair white overnight! I was interrogated about every personal relationship I’d ever had! No stone was left unturned.
Initially, that feeling of being cut off from the real world was all consuming. When I left Random House and my first posting came through, I walked from home to my new office and started as an Intelligence Analyst. In due course I would go on to become an MI5 officer co-ordinating various counter terrorist operations. It was imperative that the team worked as a cohesive unit. I increasingly only socialised with other officers and developed several close friendships as it had become virtually impossible to have a life in my old world. We all talked the same ‘in house’ language and if anyone overheard snatches of our conversations they would have been hard pressed to work out what was being discussed.
Most of the operations we tackled were very fast-paced and officers are required to work around the clock on those occasions; if things go well and a terrorist threat is nipped in the bud, you might crash into bed, absolutely bushed and get up later to find hardly a mention of it on the news or in the papers. You’re so proud of your efforts and the damage to property and loss of life that was prevented, yet nobody knows about it and you certainly can’t share your contributions with anyone. Those were the times when I felt most isolated.
We didn’t always get it right; if you missed something, the tiniest scrap of information that just might have avoided a bomb going off, people dying, that’s when you feel frustrated, angry and above all guilty.
In 2005 we were inundated with new recruits, training and new initiatives; the terrorist threat on the streets of the UK had been ramped up; the government’s reply was to pile more and more work onto us. We were stretched to breaking point.
I had been assigned to a team investigating the threat of a terrorist attack in ’04; two of the suicide bombers who carried out the July London bombings had appeared on the fringes of that operation. We had surveillance photos of them but we had not identified them or followed up in any detail as they appeared to be petty criminals, not involved in attack planning. There was no reason to believe that they would do what they did. We finished up the ’04 investigation with arrests of the main protagonists and switched our attention to another item on our ever growing list.
Hindsight is a great thing; every day I wonder what my life would have been like if we’d put those two bit part players under the microscope. Over Christmas at the end of that year I went to several parties with friends and colleagues from the service. I had a little too much to drink and slipped on an icy pavement as we left about the seventh bar; one of my friends helped me get to the closest Emergency Department where I was seen by a young doctor.
He judged my ankle was badly sprained and that I would be suffering from a hangover in the morning. As he held my ankle gently and looked into my eyes I felt something I’d never felt before.”
“Cold hands?” Colin asked mischievously.
Athena glared at him and continued.
“Despite the problems that my job would pose and the unsocial hours that he undoubtedly worked, I was dead set on seeing him again. We started dating in the New Year and by the end of June we were engaged. I can’t reveal his name for obvious security reasons but I loved him dearly.