The New Spymasters Read online

  It was not that customs had a particular problem but rather that there was a sort of perfect storm brewing: just as intelligence activities were coming in for much higher scrutiny by the courts and the public, there was this push to deploy more covert agents in the risky criminal world. As part of their efforts to establish a new role after the Cold War, intelligence agencies had put themselves into the public domain. But, in both Europe and the US, this openness also triggered an unprecedented scrutiny of intelligence activities. The more experimental business of placing spies inside organized crime could not always bear such scrutiny. The final indignity for British customs was a corruption inquiry, ironically named Operation Virtue, launched by Thames Valley Police, one strand of which involved Antoniades and the men who handled his case.

  By the early 2000s, Antoniades’s value as an informant had diminished. The London crime scene had come to suspect who Antoniades was working for: when drug dealers were arrested, their defence lawyers demanded to know from prosecutors if he was involved in the case. Even if they were caught red-handed with drugs, they would claim that Antoniades had put them up to things.

  In July 2002 there was a more serious incident. Chris Yakovidis, a businessman who had been arrested over an alleged £1.4 million VAT fraud, swore in a statement that he had paid a fee of over £250,000 to Antoniades to get himself cleared of the charges. He said Antoniades had promised to get it done using his contacts in customs. When the charges were not dropped, he decided to finger Antoniades.

  The police suspected more than just fraud by Antoniades; they were concerned about serious corruption within customs. That summer Operation Virtue officers swooped in dawn raids, arresting both Nick Baker and Lionel Savery, Antoniades’s long-term handlers. Baker, who had risen to become chief of customs’ covert operations, was suspended from duty for several months, though he was later cleared of all suspicions, as were Savery and other customs officers. Antoniades, however, had been out of the country at the time and a police warrant was issued for his arrest. Until it was dropped, he declared he had no intention of returning.

  Though the customs officers were cleared, their institution was dying. The main investigative branch of customs was wound up and folded into a new outfit, the Serious and Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), in which former or detached intelligence officers were placed in many leading roles. It was thought, perhaps, that those who had been supposedly trained in handling agents could do a better job of spying on criminals than police or customs had managed so far.

  Baker, who retired soon after, had obviously been harmed by the police investigation, yet he remained sanguine. ‘In this business, we level hard accusations against people. You have to expect people to throw accusations back, however baseless they may be,’ he said.

  Through it all, he remained loyal to his agent, Antoniades. I asked him if customs had really been so sure that Antoniades was not gaming the system and working both as a criminal and an informer. He replied that all kinds of checks were in place to stop that.

  ‘We did use him to provide information, to identify targets,’ Baker said, but after getting information on a drug dealer, for example, many other methods were used to double-check the tip. Other sources said extensive use was made of phone taps. Customs had more ‘lines’, as phone intercepts were called, than any other agency. Baker insisted that nothing they received from Antoniades was relied upon without verification; it was merely raw material that was checked and rechecked. As far as he was concerned, Antoniades had performed a vital service for British customs, achieving more than almost any other agent of theirs.

  As for Antoniades, he always denied the accusations made by police that he remained criminally active. But, he revealed, he did play the system. He said that customs at first distrusted him and followed his every move, deploying people to track him and bugging his calls. ‘Do you think they left me alone?’ Later, though, things changed. ‘In the end, they trust me fully. They let me do what I want.’

  He had a network of people who supplied him with information (his ‘sub-sources’ in intelligence speak). He said that customs knew he ‘made people believe’ that if they gave him information he would not only pay them but, if they asked for help, he would give it. He tipped off some drug couriers to avoid arrest. Conversely, he said that he also issued threats, telling dealers, ‘I know what you do. Give me some information or you are going to see problems.’

  Over the years, he admitted that three people who had worked for him were killed by other criminals: ‘Not because they were informants but because they were stupid.’ His reputation also kept many of his other informers alive: ‘They mentioned my name and said if you bother me I am going to call my friend Keravnos. When they mention my name people shut up, you understand?’

  So, I asked, was he running a form of protection?

  ‘Listen, my friend,’ he said, ‘people know me. They know I’ve been shot ten times and been in prison three times and still I’m here. They know this man is something.’

  * * *

  On Friday 11 February 2011 I got an email out of the blue. I was sitting in a hotel in Afghanistan. It was from Antoniades’s stepson, Fahim.

  Dear Stephen

  A few years back you wrote about my father, Andreas Antoniades. He is now 80 and ready to talk about his past activities. If you are interested please get in touch.

  Many thanks, Fahim Antoniades

  The message referred to an article I had written on Antoniades for the Sunday Times. Over lunch at a Mayfair restaurant, Fahim and his mother, Hafiza, Antoniades’s wife, filled me in on their story. They revealed that Antoniades was in Tunisia, where he had gone to try to establish another casino. He could not return to London because there was still an arrest warrant from Thames Valley Police, from the team that had been investigating allegations of corruption at customs. Could I fly out and see him?

  When I got to Tunisia, where the dictator, President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, had just been toppled, it was clear that Antoniades was trapped. So many things seemed to be closing in on him. He was angry that after all these years he had no money and no pension. He couldn’t come to Britain and no one in Britain would try to cut a deal with the police to negotiate his return. It all made him furious.

  I began to research Antoniades’s history as an informer, going back to his time with EOKA. In Cyprus, I met some of his old comrades – both those who despised him as a traitor and those who defended him. I also discovered the fate of Hollowday, who, contrary to what Antoniades had thought all those years, had not died in the attack, but instead had been crippled by a bullet that pierced his spinal cord. He spent the rest of his days in a wheelchair, returning home to Lincolnshire and then dying in Portugal in 1967.14 His wife, who died a few years later, left behind a beautiful account of their life among the pine and almond trees of Cyprus, which the couple’s daughter-in-law kindly shared with me. I never met Lionel Savery. I left a couple of messages on his answer machine but then I heard, in April 2012, that he had died. A tribute in the Daily Telegraph testified to his ‘dangerous life as an intelligence officer in Malaya and Cyprus’. After leaving the military, he had become a ‘labour relations adviser’ in the magazine industry. That sounded rather like the cover story of a spy to me. His wife, Marisa, also had connections to British intelligence, according to friends.

  From Antoniades there were yet more tales of adventure. After his release in Germany, he started another secret venture: this time for the CIA. Hafiza was an Afghan and after the fall of the Taliban, using her contacts, he went into business helping the CIA to buy back weapons from the former anti-Soviet mujahideen warlords they had once supplied. The operation went well until, while he was away in Dubai, his British security guard, an ex-soldier, shot dead two Afghans in an unexplained struggle at a hotel. It was the end of another scheme – and a blow to Hafiza’s hopes of returning to live in her country.

  I had often wondered how much to believe Antoniades, even though I came to
like him a great deal. I could verify his work as an informer: I had seen the documents and spoken to his handlers. But should I believe his protestations, despite what policemen such as Collins said, that he did not continue, on the side, to be a major criminal? As a writer, I always wanted to reach a conclusion, to come to some certainty about where the truth lay. But with him, just when I thought I had got the story straight, a little detail changed and somehow that provoked new doubts. But, from another angle, his ability to keep you guessing also indicated why he was so good, why he was such a survivor. When I asked him once what it took to be an informer, he suggested that the trick was fooling people. ‘You have to be smart,’ he said. An informer stayed alive only by using his wits to maintain an act. ‘Because I have been an informant for twenty years and everybody thinks I was a drug dealer. Even now the police think I played a double game.’ He had survived so long as an informer by deceiving people; he had the ability to talk his way out of any situation. But knowing he had the skill to betray others so well always left me with the nagging worry that I was being cheated too.

  Back in England, Nick Baker still took phone calls from Antoniades and was there to help his former agent, or at least to do what he could from retirement. He always remained a believer. But that was his professional obligation, just as it was Savery’s. ‘It’s like a marriage,’ said Baker. ‘When you recruit someone like this you are with them all your life, good and bad.’

  As for most of the secret services, they moved on from such work. The priority of fighting crime kept them occupied for a few years, but only until something else appeared. By the late 1990s it was already becoming clear to some that a more pressing problem than drug dealing was on the horizon: they would be called upon to combat a terrifying new threat, an ultra-brutal form of terrorist who considered ordinary Westerners as justifiable targets, and aimed to instigate attacks wherever hundreds of civilians would be killed. But even as secret services turned their attentions to this threat, the deployment of spies in the criminal world did not end, and nor did the recruitment of criminals or ex-criminals as spies.

  Despite some mistakes in the way his case had been handled, Antoniades had proved that agents could be used for successful operations against major criminals and drug gangs. But for secret services engaged in more sensitive spying work such as combating Islamist terror, he had some character traits that were less than ideal – or even positively dangerous. Antoniades had always been a flamboyant, larger than life person, with a strong sense of his own importance as a known figure in his community. This meant he could never blend into the shadows or ignore a slight; he was never going to be a subtle spy. Moreover, he was both incredibly generous and addicted to gambling, which meant that every penny he earned would be either given or frittered away. He would never retire gracefully and, all in all, was a security risk.

  On the other hand, Antoniades’s versatility, resourcefulness and willingness to work against any enemy were incredibly valuable qualities. As we shall see, agents with his kind of raw courage, combined with a tough background, proved to be among those able to be a ‘man on the rock’, an agent at the heart of a radical terror group.

  Just as the Taliban, in their search for cash, had been willing to deal with Antoniades, almost any radical Islamist terror group – however pure and spiritual or political its motives – found people with criminal contacts immensely useful. Any serious campaign of violence required weapons and explosives, and help with illicit identity documents, cash and travel tickets. Frequently, the group also looked to a ready source of illicit income. All of these might draw the terrorists close to someone like Antoniades who knew this world, even if they had no motives in common. And, for the intelligence agency, Antoniades may have been chaotic but his principal motives – money, excitement and loyalty to his handlers – were much easier to deal with than those of a religious extremist. Ex-criminals might make risky spies and were hardly agents of choice, but they would prove their value as New Spies.

  * * *

  It is so often the fate of secret agents that, long after they have completed all useful work, they never accept retirement and never accept that they have been well compensated. Worst of all are the agents once protected by defunct agencies whose legacy has few defenders.

  Antoniades, despite it all, remains proud. But he is angry too. ‘You believe one thing. I am eighty years of age. And I passed so many difficulties. The only people who beat me up are the British when they arrested me. No gangster punched me or gave me black eye. Strong people came to see me and left with broken noses or cut eyes. I had to fight every day in London but I wasn’t touched.’

  How much had he done for Britain and how much had Britain done for him?

  ‘I was with them thirty years. Now they throw me into the street. No pension. No money. I am just like a dog. I helped the Americans too in Afghanistan. Now like a dog. They chew the lemon and then spit it out.’

  Chapter 5

  Jihad

  ‘The reason we didn’t prevent 9/11 is simple: neither the CIA nor its intelligence allies, Western or Muslim, had a spy or an informant inside al-Qaeda’s command structure’

  – Michael Scheuer, former head of the Osama bin Laden unit, CIA1

  It was close to the last time to do some shopping before the start of the holy month of Ramadan; the streets of Algiers were full of people stocking up on supplies. At around 3.20 p.m. on 30 January 1995 terror struck, transforming the busy thoroughfare into a scene of bloody twisted carnage. A car packed with more than 220 pounds of explosives, driven by what the security forces called a ‘volunteer of death’, was detonated in front of a bank and close to police headquarters. Forty-two people were killed.

  The horrific brutality of the attack caused consternation. It was blamed on a group known as the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), the breakaway military wing of Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front, a movement that had been banned after almost winning a national election.

  Algeria’s ruler, President Liamine Zeroual, reiterated his intention to hold presidential elections that year despite the violence and opposition from all main political parties, including the now-outlawed fundamentalist movement. He vowed to ‘fight terrorism until it is eradicated’. In Washington, the White House issued a statement from President Clinton condemning the ‘senseless terror’ that ‘cannot be excused or justified’.

  Across the border in neighbouring Morocco, one man knew a secret that, if disclosed, could have made all that rhetoric seem hollow. While employed as an agent for the French secret service, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE), he had, just days before, driven a carload of explosives and weapons from Belgium, through France and Spain, to North Africa. He was a member of a GIA cell in Brussels and the weapons were for the GIA in Algeria. He had not imagined the purpose of the shipment, but he seemed to have supplied the very explosives used in the Algiers bomb. ‘It was obvious for me it was mine,’ he said later of the explosion. He had done the smuggling ‘to convince them that I am one of them, to spy more deeply on them. I am risking my life there.’2

  I will refer to this Moroccan as Omar Nasiri, a pseudonym he later chose. His employer, the DGSE, had once planted and detonated a bomb on the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in a harbour in New Zealand, killing a photographer. The agency had a ruthless reputation – which was why Nasiri chose to work for it.

  Nasiri, whose job for the GIA was to buy and traffic arms from criminals, had contacted the French several months earlier. Like many potential agents, he had believed the fiction about spying and overestimated the importance of what he knew. He had hoped to pass on his secrets in return for a huge reward, for protection and a new identity. But the French valued his position above his knowledge. They asked him to stay in the group and find out more.

  As he began to spy, he faced the classic dilemma of all spies active inside a gang of murderers. In both the old and new worlds of espionage, such issues were always present, but now they
would become even more significant. The GIA was not a political group or government agency plotting only mild evil; these men were the authors of massacres. The danger for an agent was not so much how to get inside such a group but how to stay in it. Could or should innocent lives be lost to save other lives? Officially, among Western secret services, the answer was always a firm no. But was that really the way things worked? Did they evade the dilemma by keeping their agents at arm’s length? This was the same question the British had faced in Northern Ireland, but, given the Islamists’ callousness about taking innocent lives, the problem was more acute.

  Intelligence agencies have come up with plenty of tactics for spying on people who plot to kill without having their agents commit murder. Spymasters try to recruit, say, a terrorist’s girlfriend or driver, not a fellow gunslinger. But someone like Nasiri, close to the inner circle of a terror cell, was always a tantalizing prospect.

  Nasiri’s story is not typical. Intelligence services normally run a mile from someone as self-willed and unpredictable as he was. ‘If you have to deal with a difficult agent, it is with fear and trepidation and with a gun in your pocket,’ as one former senior CIA officer said. Nasiri, I discovered, was a case study in conflicted loyalties. Given how far he ventured into the world of jihadism, and his candour about his own mentality, it did illustrate the special challenges of penetrating the modern Islamist terror group, of finding someone able to go deep inside and possibly disappear for months who you could also trust to come back and not kill you. Sometimes the ‘man on the rock’ was the man you did not want.