Foreign Affairs

Telegraph ^ | 11/09/03 | Adam Lusher

[Not gonna take it anymore]

Mission improbable
(Filed: 09/11/2003)

The BBC is searching for would-be spies to be coached by real intelligence officers for a reality TV programme to be shown next year. Adam Lusher became a trainee spook for a day.

The voice on the other end of the telephone was pleasingly furtive. "Mr Lusher, do you want to become a spy?" Did I want to? Did I want to travel the world? Tropical islands with Spectre bases hidden in the volcano a speciality?

Did I want to drive fast cars, catch criminal masterminds? Did I want to tangle with dangerously beautiful women? Well, you know, if my country needed me. "Very good. We will be in touch." The line went dead.

I read the books. I watched the films. I drank the vodka martinis (shaken, not stirred). I waited for the call, and yes, I confess, I experienced the doubts familiar to all untried agents: if the mission required it, could I really bring myself to seduce Pussy Galore?

Eventually, the call came. "You are to be at Hammersmith Tube station at 10.10am precisely. Your contact will be under the clock carrying a rolled-up copy of the Financial Times. Good luck."

Perfect. I'd watched the films. I knew the drill. A quick change into my best Milk Tray man ski jumper and I'd be there. How difficult could it be? Well, as it happens...

Perhaps it's just as well that you are reading this, as it means that it wasn't happening for real. I was a mere guinea pig for a television programme. Spy, to be broadcast on BBC2 (and BBC3) next year, will recruit eight members of the public willing to abandon their everyday lives and spend seven weeks training to be spies.

Their teachers will be real intelligence officers, and already 30 genuine operatives, some with experience of the security services, have acted as consultants to the programme's producers. The tests facing participants will be those used by the likes of MI5, MI6 and Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.

The students will plant bugs and infiltrate offices, not in a safe training college, but in the real world, among unsuspecting members of the public. I loitered outside the station last week armed not with a Walther PPK (James Bond's favourite piece of armoury) and a licence to kill, but a notebook and instructions.

Things started well, I thought. There were, of course, two people under the clock with the FT: a harmless, shambolic-seeming woman on the verge of dropping her A-Z of London, and a tense, shifty-looking man.

It was obvious. I went to the shambolic woman and made contact. You see, in the murky world of spooks, you have to expect the unexpected.

Oh, okay then, so I cheated. I waited, I watched a few of my fellow "students" approach the man and walk off looking confused. Then I approached the woman. And I would have got away with it, too, if I hadn't let myself be observed. And photographed. (A dozen times.)

Back at base, actually the upstairs of a local pub, the shambolic woman metamorphoses into the epitome of cool efficiency. She says she is "Sandy", married, in her forties, and "I could jokingly say there's a price on my head".

Only she's not joking. "You cheated. You are disqualified," she says to me. I am shown the incriminating pictures, and a nice set of photos of my flat, taken, of course, without my knowledge. Sandy won't say who she has worked for, or indeed much else.

"My husband has no idea of the specific details of what I have done," she points out. "He knows I have done this kind of work, but I didn't tell him that until some time after we got married."

Before she joined? whenever and whatever she joined? Sandy worked in a shop and as a childminder. She scoffs at the suggestion that she is university-educated, or, Heaven forbid, Oxbridge.

Perhaps a little pointedly, she says: "Women are very good at this job. Put a woman somewhere and every time people will see 'a woman'. Put a man there and people will think 'police'."

I sense this is not the time to stress my respectable middle-class origins, my masculinity, or, indeed, the fact that unlike that Cambridge rabble (Philby, Burgess, Maclean), I went to a proper university: Oxford.

We then meet "Steve" and "William". Steve already knows us. He's the one who has photographed our houses. William works "in counter-espionage". "My background really isn't important," he says softly.

He is the gadgets man, a 50-year-old Q figure with an estuary accent. He shows us what looks like a walkie-talkie, but is in fact a "scanning receiver", capable of listening into a vast range of radio frequencies. Very useful for eavesdropping? via a radio microphone? on board or Cabinet meetings, apparently.

We are taught to tell our "DLBs" (dead letter boxes) from our "brush contacts". Dead letter box: a secure place to leave messages for retrieval. Brush contact: looks like two people passing in the street, but is actually two agents discreetly exchanging messages or documents.

We are told about "black bag jobs": what the FBI does when it sneaks into offices or embassies in the US. We are taught very little about the perfect vodka martini. From Steve, we hear about the vital importance of "going grey", blending in to any environment.

"You need a good legend, a cover story to talk your way out of it when you get questioned. And if your legend doesn't work, you've got to be able to run like hell." Along with the cheery advice, he hands me and James, a fellow student, what to you might look like a harmless silver cigarette lighter.

To those of us trained in the dark arts of "field craft" it is obviously a tracking device. Steve takes us to the window and points to a woman minding her own business in the coffee shop opposite. "See her handbag on the floor? Put my lighter in it."

It goes like clockwork. I ask her the time, James fiddles with his shoelaces and drops the lighter in her bag while she's distracted. We slink away to shake hands in triumph. God, we're good. We're smooth. We're professional.

We're back just in time to watch from the window as the woman and an alert gentleman who spotted us go through the pantomime to try to find what the shifty men put in her bag. We're "blown". We're "burned". We're "compromised".

At least the tracking device works well enough for a squad of the programme's researchers to find the woman? an unsuspecting member of the public? before she calls the police.

So far then, things haven't gone swimmingly, but we are getting ready for the deciding mission. There's everything to play for. All I have to do to come top of the class is smuggle myself into an office, sneak past reception and spend 10 minutes looking over the whole building.

I'm assigned an architect's office in Hammersmith. I'm even given two boxes of photocopier paper as "props". I become John the photocopier paper delivery man. The cunning disguise works brilliantly. Too brilliantly.

The nearest architect leaps from his seat to help the poor delivery man struggle through the door with the boxes. "Thanks very much," he says, as he kindly takes the boxes from me. "We'll just leave them here. They are for us, aren't they?"

Arguably, I am just about through the door, but "past reception" is definitely a long, long way away. And the bewilderment of the "nice" architect, plus the two receptionists, is rapidly turning into suspicion. This isn't good, especially as the idea was "going grey", not bright red.

What would Bond do? What would Smiley do? Hell, what would Powers (Austin) do? Probably not stare wildly around the office trying to memorise any visible details while mumbling: "Err. Yes. Paper. For you. So I'll be. Um. Going, now. Goodbye."

They said 10 minutes. I reckon I managed five. Seconds. Sandy attempts diplomacy. "There's room for improvement," she says to me. There certainly is. The Telegraph, middle-class Oxford man, supposedly stereotypical spy material, ends the day on zero points, with no missions accomplished.

I am consoled by Alan Judd, a former Foreign Office hand who wrote The Quest for C, the biography of Sir Mansfield Cumming, the founder of the British secret service. "Don't worry," he tells me cheerily. "You are not so unusual in getting everything wrong. Even Mansfield Cumming had the odd cock-up.

"That's what most spy fiction tends to ignore: the cock-up factor is enormous. I know someone who spent his entire first operational evening talking to completely the wrong target. Then there was the KGB officer who put the vital package in the boot of the wrong car. And spent a pleasant evening trying to steal his bugging equipment back from a Swiss businessman."

The whole point of training is that they want you to make mistakes. You remember what you're supposed to learn if you make a fool of yourself." Music to my ears. Visions of vodka martinis and dangerous women return.

So, I really could make it as a spy even though I am a complete bungler? There is a long pause. "Well, you would normally expect people on operations to get it right."

Time to ponder Sandy's final matter-of-fact pronouncement. "If you get caught, they'll do all sorts of horrible things to you. And then kill you. If you're lucky." I never did like those vodka martinis anyway.

• Potential spies have until December to apply to www.codenamespy.co.uk

[Not gonna take it anymore]

I'm thinking of getting my passport and racing over there for this.