“He’s very romantic, you know,” she said, almost as if apologizing for falling in love with him. “He’s always surprising me, taking me away for little breaks and weekends.” I tried to summon up a picture of Miles presenting Isabella with boxes of chocolates, perfumed candles or flowers, but the images wouldn’t compute. After dinner, we spoke at length about the years in Hong Kong and she was a good deal less brittle on the subject of Joe. There were underlying reasons for her decision to end their relationship which Isabella seemed to have accepted. She admitted, for example, that she had perceived Miles as a challenge. He had a reputation as a ladies’ man; he was almost feral in his refusal to conform to people’s expectations of how a man in his position should behave. When he wanted to, Miles Coolidge could make a woman feel as though she was the only person in the room. Life with such a man was never going to be dull. Perhaps Isabella had been prepared to overlook his myriad faults for this reason. She doubtless started out in the naive belief that she could change him.
For Joe, however, the knowledge that his girlfriend was making a new life in an anonymous Chinese city with a man he despised corroded something elemental in his soul. For a long time after ’97 he was utterly withdrawn and focused only on work, recruiting and running as many as a dozen new Chinese political and military targets, to the delight of London but to his own almost total personal indifference. Just after the East Asian stock market crash in October, Joe gave serious consideration to quitting SIS but was persuaded to stay on by David Waterfield, who offered him a plum job in Kuala Lumpur.
“Get away,” he said. “Make a fresh start. Find out why you got into this business in the first place.” Joe packed his bags that Christmas.
His postings to Malaysia and, latterly, Singapore, are not particularly relevant to the story I am here to tell. People I have spoken to who knew Joe during this period refer to him as “quiet” and “reliable,” lively only when drunk but respected by everyone with whom he came into contact. He remained in South-east Asia, without seeing or speaking to either Miles or Isabella, for four years. I flew in to Singapore for his thirtieth birthday in the summer of 2001 and discovered that Joe had been seeing an Italian medical doctor named Carla for about three months. This seemed a positive step, but the two of them had soon gone their separate ways. “It just didn’t feel right,” he told me in an email. “It wasn’t going anywhere.” These were phrases Joe would often employ when discussing his relationships with women. In final analysis, none of them matched up to the Isabella template. It was as if he was walking around with a ghost of the perfect woman and would not rest until Isabella had come to her senses. Of course, with each new relationship there was the added complication that Joe was repeating the same mistake he had made with Isabella; that is to say, he was bound by duty and could not come clean about his work for SIS. As far as he was concerned, he was entering a pointless cycle of deception and hurt. Why bother? Why put another woman through the same agony?
What gave the situation an added complexity was the shame Joe felt at having been outmanoeuvred and humiliated by Miles. The resentment he harboured towards his former friend and colleague was almost as strong as the love he continued to feel for Isabella. Even seven years later, when the two of us were walking in west London on a wet night during the turbulent summer of 2004, I could sense that his memories were still as detailed and vivid as if his break-up with Isabella had taken place only days earlier.
“So do you think they’ve made it work?” I asked.
“Made what work?”
“The marriage. China. Do you think she made the right decision?”
We were heading towards Al-Abbas, the famous Arab supermarket on Uxbridge Road. Joe turned to cross the street outside a branch of Blockbuster Video and gave me an impatient, quizzical look.
“Who knows?” he replied flatly.
“But you’re still holding out, aren’t you? You still believe there’s a chance of the two of you getting back together?”
“Will,” he said, “when people make decisions of any kind, they do so in the belief that what they’re doing is right. Now that decision may prove to be self-destructive, it may turn out to be the worst decision they ever made. But at the time it didn’t feel that way. At the time it felt like they had no choice.”
He jaywalked across the road. A light drizzle was falling and I watched him weave between an oncoming bus and a beaten-up Fiat Punto. There was something about Joe living in London that didn’t make sense. He didn’t seem to belong in England; he wasn’t settled or happy. Much of this had to do with the circumstances under which he was working for SIS; 2004 had been a wretched year for MI6. The Butler Report had been published in July, castigating the quality of the intelligence that Six had passed on to government ministers and officials in the run-up to the war in Iraq. SIS officers had been criticized for the manner in which they had gathered intelligence on WMD and, in particular, for their readiness to believe dissident Iraqi sources who later proved unreliable. As a requirements officer for the Far East Controllerate, Joe was not directly involved in any of this, but he felt the slump in Office morale none the less and questioned, on several occasions, the good sense of continuing to work for an organization which was being constantly undermined by the government and relentlessly criticized in the media. At the tender age of twenty-three, Joe Lennox had signed up to a life in the secret world partly out of a belief that British values were worth fighting for, that it was admirable to dedicate one’s working life to the security and prosperity of the British people. One of the organizing principles of any intelligence agency is patriotism of this kind, but to be patriotic in the age of Blair and Bush, of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, was a task of Herculean proportions. Everything from Alastair Campbell’s “sexed-up dossier” to the death of Dr. David Kelly ate away at Joe’s faith in the system. What was he fighting for? What would be the price of his own professional complicity in the invasion of Iraq? To work for British intelligence in this period was to work on behalf of the American government; there was no other way of spinning it. Yet Joe would switch off the television in his flat rather than suffer the grinning, adolescent rictus of President George W. Bush. He abhorred Cheney and Rumsfeld, whom he regarded as borderline sociopaths, and even joked about asking Sky TV to remove Fox News from his satellite television package. I once asked him, in a similar spirit of jocularity, whether this newfound anti-Americanism was connected to what had happened with Miles. To my surprise, Joe became very angry.
“I am not anti-American,” he said. “I just despise the current American administration. I despair that Bush has made ordinary, decent people all over the world think twice about what was once, and still could be again, a great country, when what happened on September 11th should have made ordinary, decent people all over the world embrace America as never before. I don’t like it that neo-conservative politicians bully their so-called allies while playing to the worst, racist instincts of their own bewildered electorate. I don’t like it that we live in an era where to be anti-war is to be anti-American, to be pro-Palestine is to be anti-Semitic, to be critical of Blair is somehow to be supportive of Putin and Chirac. All anybody is asking for in this so-called age of terror is some leadership. Yet everywhere you look in public life there is no truth, no courage, no dignity to speak of.”
Such sentiments inevitably caught the attention of the SIS personnel department, a shifty, cynical lot who often seem to me to be more interested in undermining the confidence of their employees than in ensuring that staff are in the correct frame of mind to do their jobs properly. There were dark mutterings that Joe had “gone soft”: he had been observed reading a copy of No Logo on the District Line and had even recommended articles by Robert Fisk and John Pilger to an Arabic translator in the Vauxhall Cross canteen. Luckily, calmer heads prevailed. Lennox wasn’t a protolefty; his record demonstrated that he was prepared to take tough decisions and to condone some fairly unsavoury operational practices in order to secure a long-term advantage for the Service. Any misgivings he felt about the direction of government policy in Iraq were merely reflective of wider public opinion and, for that matter, of about seventy-five per cent of SIS personnel.