Same Disclaimer as before

This chapter discusses events which took place in Season 5 Episode 5 as well as some Episodes in Season 6.

If anyone has not seen Season 5 and/or Season 6, consider yourself warned that this chapter contains spoilers.

Chapter 6

Late March 2009, London

By the time Harry finished having breakfast with Sherman, he had already decided what he must do. First he called Connie and told her to start drawing up the necessary papers under the Official Secrets Act in order to get DS Boyd to hand over the original encoded document together with its plastic envelope. She was to hold on to the papers and serve them on Boyd's office only when he told her to. Then Harry called both the MI5 Director General and the Home Secretary and asked for an urgent meeting. Before the meeting, Harry went back to his office in order to gather some paperwork.

Harry met with the Home Secretary and the DG that afternoon. There had been a recent change in Government and there was now a woman installed as the new Home Secretary. Of all the government departments, the new Home Secretary found it most difficult to deal with the security and intelligence agencies since she was never sure how far she could trust them.

"First of all, I would like to thank both of you for accommodating me at such short notice. I've called this meeting to discuss Cotterdam ..."

"Cotterdam? Harry, isn't Cotterdam all water under the bridge? Is this about the Binyam Mohamed case? I know how upset you were with that High Court decision and your protest over how MI5 was portrayed has been duly noted," said Peter Pemberton, the Director General of MI5. "I thought we've already been through all that. Our hands were tied as to how much information could be disclosed in the legal proceedings without at the same time compromising security operations. On the evidence presented to the Court, they couldn't have reached a different conclusion. You know how in this country, we cannot interfere with the independence of the judiciary."

In August 2008, the High Court issued its judgment on the Binyam Mohamed case. Binyam Mohamed was an Ethiopian national who had sought asylum in Britain in the 1990s. He became a suspect in various terrorist activities and was somehow spirited out of Britain and imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay where he claimed that he was tortured by the Americans. He also claimed that his torturers were able to taunt him with information which could only have been gathered by MI5 in their surveillance of his activities in Britain. Although the case was not primarily centered on MI5's involvement in the matter, the judges concluded as part of their findings that MI5's role in that case went "far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing". The 'wrongdoing' in this instance being a euphemism for the offshore torturing of terrorist suspects. #There is a note at the end of this Chapter for more information on this case.#

Harry was livid when he read this judgment. Despite all his best efforts to distance his Section from claims of torture and renditions, MI5 was still held to have been involved in facilitating the rendition of Binyam Mohamed by the Americans. One of his first thoughts was that Ruth had 'died' in vain. As long as he did not know where she was, he could not do anything about it. But now that he knew where she was, he was damned if he was not going to try and resurrect her.

"Harry, you know that the official position of the Home Office has always been that Britain's security and intelligence agencies do not participate in, encourage or condone the use of torture in relation to the interrogation of suspects of terrorist activities," the Home Secretary pointed out. "What is there to talk about?"

"I'd like to remind you of how Section D came into possession of some minutes in October 2006 which blew the lid off this whole discussion of extraordinary renditions in this country. You will recall that those were minutes of a meeting between senior politicians and civil servants where it was decided that it was acceptable to fake the deaths of certain prisoners with a terrorist background so that they could be spirited outside of Britain for the purpose of being interrogated under more flexible circumstances, i.e. tortured for information without having civil liberty groups knowing about it or kicking up a fuss over it. You may also recall that amongst the attendees listed in the minutes was a person code-named "Fox" from Section D. The reference to "Fox" was an attempt to implicate me. I'm sure that by now, you know me well enough to believe me when I say that I did not have an involvement in that meeting, or with that whole conspiracy to collude in renditions. My allegiance has been, and will always be, to this country and by and large, I always work within the confines of the democratic process."

Harry then tabled a copy of the minutes in question. He noticed that neither the Home Secretary nor the DG bothered to pick up the document for a quick look.

"In order to expose the Cotterdam conspiracy as quickly as possible, it was necessary to disclose the existence of these minutes. For MI5 to do that in the shortest time without having fingers pointed at its own possible involvement in this matter, someone had to admit to being 'Fox'. Against my advice and without my prior consent, one of my officers, Ruth Evershed, assumed the moniker of 'Fox' in order to divert attention away from me."

"Harry, how can you be sure that this Ruth Evershed was not really 'Fox'? Wasn't there evidence produced at the time which supported a link between her and Oliver Mace?" The DG decided that they had to indulge in Harry in another one of his rants.

"My officers had to manufacture evidence in order to support the suggestion that Ruth was 'Fox' named in the minutes." Harry tabled the 'before' and 'after' photos of an alleged meeting between Oliver Mace and Ruth. "If it had not been for Ms. Evershed's tenacious efforts and her analytical skills, we might not have obtained those minutes. That document was made available to her through a series of bogus drops organized by Mik Maudsley, a Special Branch officer who was aware of the plot to spirit prisoners out of Cotterdam under cover of a fire at the prison. One of those bogus drops turned out to be the real thing. If Ruth Evershed was 'Fox', why would she have gone to the trouble of hunting down those minutes in the first place? I have here a summary of how my Section came into possession of the minutes." Harry put more paper on the table.

"When Oliver Mace and his cronies discovered that Mik Maudsley wanted to expose their conspiracy, they arranged for Mr. Maudsley to be killed by pushing him under a tube train. They then tried to pin the murder on Ms. Evershed in the hope that this will put pressure on me to endorse their little scheme. The outcome of the unpleasant discussion about this matter between myself and Oliver resulted in my being arrested. In order to save me, Ms. Evershed decided that she had to become 'Fox'. "

Harry could still remember the smirk on Mace's face when he said to him, over lunch on that fateful day, 'save Ruth and join a club'. Harry then tabled a copy of the police report relating to his arrest after he smashed a wine glass and used it to cut Oliver Mace in the arm.

"Didn't this Evershed woman end up dead?" The DG was still unclear as to where this discussion was going.

For Harry, now came the hard part.

"Ms. Evershed faked her death. I couldn't allow her to spend time in prison whilst we tried to clear up this whole sorry mess. When I dealt with the Attorney General's Department in a similar situation a few years ago in relation to another one of my former officers," said Harry, remembering Zoe Reynolds, "that experience did not fill me with a nice warm feeling. With all due respect to our legal system, I was not prepared to take my chances this time."

Zoe Reynolds had inadvertently killed an undercover police officer during one of her ops and the Government actually brought murder charges against her, for a variety of reasons, many of which were political. The Attorney General initially assured Harry that Zoe would be given nothing more than a slap on the wrist, so when she was given a long jail term at the end of the trial, Harry felt that he, and his Section, had been screwed by the Government. At the time, Harry felt that he had no alternative but to arrange for another prisoner to take Zoe's place and permit Zoe to assume a new identity and relocate to South America. To add insult to injury, Lord Young, who was Attorney General at the time, later turned up as Sholto, a high ranking officer in Yalta, the group which was the bane of Harry's life for most of 2007 as they managed to turn Ros Myers and set in train a series of events which resulted in her 'death'. Harry would not forget in a hurry having to sit there and watch helplessly whilst Juliet Shaw administered a fatal injection to Roz. Harry was sick and tired of losing his officers on account of machinations on the part of the Government and politicians.

"I see," said the DG. "I now recall that at the time, you asked me to approve a rather large payment to the informant who provided you with those wretched minutes. I guess that was Ms. Evershed's getaway money, Harry?"

"Yes, Peter." Harry shifted in his seat.

"I still don't see why we are revisiting this incident, other than to hear your confession of your part in arranging the fake death of one of your former officers," the Home Secretary said very patiently. "Doesn't this sort of thing happen in your line of work all the time?"

"We lost track of Ruth after she 'died'. However, it has recently come to my attention that she has resurfaced in the Far East and is now in the hands of the Chinese." Harry then gave a quick summary of his recent discussions with DS Boyd and Sherman Tang. The DG raised an eyebrow when he heard about the encounter between Harry and the Chinese spy.

"So, one of your former officers may now be working for another team. Again, I don't see why I've had to reschedule some of my other meetings in order to hear this. Surely she wasn't senior enough to be in possession of any sensitive or useful information which she could have passed to the Chinese," said the DG. The Home Secretary nodded in agreement.

Harry decided that perhaps his summary of recent events was too brief and went into greater detail about Sherman Tang's offer to switch the document and his request for the document not to be passed on to the Americans. Harry placed a copy of the decoded document on the table. Again, neither the DG nor the Home Secretary bothered to pick it up to read. Neither was sure whether he/she wanted to be implicated in this matter yet, and no blame could be pinned on them if they could claim ignorance of the matter.

"As long as we already know what is in the encoded document, it really doesn't matter that the document itself has to be returned to the Chinese or that we have been asked to give a confidentiality undertaking in that respect," Harry explained. "The usual problem with confidentiality undertakings applies, in that we can undertake not to disclose the existence of a particular document or the specific contents contained in that document, but there are always ways and means of disseminating or utilizing the information in question without committing a technical breach of the confidentiality undertaking. As for not telling the Americans …"

"Its not as if they have shared everything with us in the past, so I guess there are ways of working around that as well," said the DG.

"Quite. I am not really concerned that there was a thinly disguised attempt to blackmail me, but I'm more concerned over Ms. Evershed's safety. You see, we don't know how her fingerprints ended up on the document in the first place or whether she had any part in trying to smuggle the information out of China. If she did have an active involvement, the fact that Sherman Tang now knows about it could place her in some danger, in which case, she is in need of assistance. If we give the impression that we could not care less about her continued existence, that would leave the Chinese free to do whatever they like to her. If they keep her alive for the moment, that could only mean that they want to save her for a trade on some other matter in future."

"I'm not sure I understand what you mean. In what ways do you think that the Chinese might want a trade?" The Home Secretary was beginning to get a sense of where all this discussion was heading but she wanted Harry to spell it out.

"As you may have noticed, the Chinese have increased their activities in this part of the world in recent years in their bid to achieve world domination," Harry pointed out. "I believe that they are becoming more brazen in their dealings with all branches of Government."

"Yes, we have noticed that they have been vacuuming up British companies at every available opportunity," said the Home Secretary who was not at all pleased with this development. The British economy had gone into recession and the Chinese were picking up British companies at bargain basement prices. However, there was a limit as to how much interference or influence a democratically elected Government in a free market economy could exert over primarily commercial transactions.

"And in the US as well," added the DG who was obviously up with his current affairs.

"Perhaps the Chinese Security Service wants us to give them greater latitude in their operations in Britain," Harry suggested, "given the increase in activities by their nationals in this part of the world. They have been complaining for a long time now that we have not done enough to curb demonstrations against China in London, or to share information about potential demonstrations which we might have prior knowledge of."

On any given day, there was always someone or some group protesting about something in some corner of London. These were police matters and they seldom if ever got escalated into Section D matters. Even so, it had not stopped Sherman Tang and his colleagues from lodging complaints with Harry from time to time. Harry got an earful when the Olympic torch passed through the centre of London in April 2008 and caused massive protesting which nearly ended in a riot. Harry had given up, a long time ago, any attempt to try and explain to these people the concepts of freedom of speech and democracy. There was nothing he could do about these demonstrations and even if he had any information about the demonstrators, he was not about to share them with the Chinese and allow them to mete out their own form of retribution against these demonstrators. When he was approached by Sherman Tang this morning, Harry initially thought it was another attempt by the Chinese to bellyache about Tibetan protestors in London.

"There is always the possibility that they wish to muscle in on the party where the Russians are concerned," Harry continued. "Historically, the Chinese have had a love hate relationship with the Russians. There might be occasion when the Chinese wants us to share with them whatever intelligence we have on the Russians. Whatever it is, the Chinese seems to think that the potential exposure of the continued existence of Ms. Evershed might somehow embarrass us, and I would not put it past them to use this to their advantage."

"We wouldn't want that to happen, to be embarrassed, I mean," the DG observed.

"The way we handle this situation may affect how the Chinese will behave towards us in future. In my view, the only way to stop the Chinese from thinking that they have us over a barrel is to give Ruth Evershed her identity back, to 'resurrect' her, so to speak."

"How do you know that Ms. Evershed is still interested in getting her old identity back? Are you at all sure that she has not switched sides permanently?" The DG was not happy about this proposal and the look which the Home Secretary gave him showed that she concurred with his unease.

"You're right, I don't know that for certain, which is why I'd like permission to go to Hong Kong to see her and talk to her. I have not have not had any contact with her since she left us in October 2006."

The Home Secretary looked at Harry for a long time and then exchanged a look with the DG. Granting a resurrection might set a very bad precedent, but then again, it is quite unusual for someone as senior as Harry Pearce to plead the case on behalf of one of his supposedly dead officers in such a fervent manner. This is not going to be an easy decision.

"What Ms. Evershed did in relation to Cotterdam was above and beyond the call of duty. If indeed she is in danger or is interested in coming back to us, we should not reward an otherwise fiercely loyal officer by leaving her out in the cold. We need to send a message to the Chinese, loud and clear, that the British Security Service is not in any way embarrassed by the fact that Ms. Evershed is still alive. Once we get her back, the Chinese will no longer have any leverage against us."

"Harry, is it absolutely necessary for you, personally, to go? I mean, can you not send someone else?" The Home Secretary was not at all happy about Harry's request.

"No, Home Secretary, I don't think that Ruth will meet with or talk to anyone else about this matter. It has to be me. If you have concerns about letting me go, you can treat me as having been temporarily relieved of my duties whilst I go and investigate this matter further."

Harry waited for either the Home Secretary or the DG to make a comment, and when none was forthcoming, he went on.

"You may wish to reprimand or punish me for having been complicit in arranging for Ruth Evershed to abscond the jurisdiction over Cotterdam. I am prepared to resign." Harry then took an envelope out of his jacket pocket and slid this across the table to the Home Secretary. "If I fail to return in due course or if I am wrong in my assessment of the situation, you can activate that resignation immediately. I have left it undated."

"Now, Harry, let's not be too hasty …" the DG piped up.

The Home Secretary thought about it for a moment and then said to Harry, "this is a lot for me to digest in such a short time, Harry. Why don't you leave it with me for a couple of days. Let me discuss this with some of my colleagues in the cabinet and I'll get back to you. At the very least, I need to talk to the Foreign Secretary to find out where we currently stand where the People's Republic of China is concerned." The Home Secretary noticed that Harry was very disappointed with her response. "Don't worry, I will give you an answer, one way or another."

"In the meantime, you better get DS Boyd to turnover the relevant items to you as soon as possible," ordered the DG.

After he left the meeting, Harry called Connie to give instructions as to what she should do with the papers to be served on Boyd's office. Then he placed a call to DI Boyd to see if they could meet for a drink.

"Look Boyd, we've had the document decoded and it doesn't look as if it will help you catch whoever was responsible for the Hampstead Heath rape/murder," Harry told Boyd after they got their drinks and found a small table in the pub closest to Boyd's office.

"But how can you be sure? How do you know that the person responsible for preparing that document, or the person who was supposed to receive that document, does not have a connection to my case?"

"You'll just have to take my word for it. The boy was only used as a courier and probably had very little to do with either the author or the intended recipient of the document. I'm sorry that I can't be more helpful. If I do come across anything which might help your case, I will be in touch. In the meantime, Boyd, you should know that papers issued under the Official Secrets Act are being served on your office right now."

Boyd grunted. Another dead end. This job is so full of dead ends.

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The Binyam Mohamed judgment was handed down by the High Court on 21st August 2008. Any one interested in further readings on this case can google his name and work through hundreds of online commentaries on this subject. The bits which I used in this chapter came via this link :

go to the sundayherald dot com website and search for an article posted on 23rd August 2008 in the Opinion and Debate section. I would have given you the hyperlink except that the fan fic site does not allow me to do that.

Any one who is interested in reading the actual judgment can follow the link below; there is an embedded link in this article which will let you download a PDF version of the actual judgment – 75 pages of the best legalese written by English judges.

go to the globaldashboard dot org website, key in the following words after the website address : terrorism / binyam-mohamed-high-court

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Once again, thanks for the reviews. All reviews will be gratefully received.