Dressed in one of his custom-tailored black pin-striped suits, a hand-stitched white shirt, and a striped club tie, Dearlove had sat in his office overlooking the Thames River while Meir Dagan set out his case for why the presence of terrorists in Britain must stop.
The Mossad chief knew exactly the right tone to strike with one of the grandees of the intelligence world, commanding a staff of 2,000—of whom 175 were field intelligence officers, spies. Dearlove had a salary of £150,000 a year, many times greater than Dagan earned. The head of MI6 also had enviable perks: a car with an armed driver, and membership to several exclusive London clubs.
Dagan did not begrudge him any of this. He knew Dearlove had earned his perks.
After graduating from Cambridge, Dearlove joined MI6 in 1964. Four years later he was working undercover in Nairobi. From the Kenyan capital he often traveled to South Africa, making contacts with BOSS, then the South African security service. In 1973 he was posted to Prague as deputy head of the MI6 station. In that position he ran an operation to penetrate the Warsaw Pact. Under his guidance several senior pact spies defected to the West.
After a stint in Paris he was posted to Geneva, his cover was that he was a diplomat attached to the United Nations. There he made his first serious contacts with Arab intelligence officers from Iraq, Syria, and Iran.
A year later he turned up in Washington as a senior liaison officer for MI6 with the U.S. intelligence community. In the spring of 1992 he was back in London, charged with the task of supervising MI6’s move from its crumbling headquarters in Century House in the rundown suburb of Lambeth to its postmodern £236 million structure in Vauxhall Cross. It is said that by the time the building was opened, Dearlove had personally checked out every room, tested the menus in the canteen, and slept in the beds in the basement dormitory used by staff during a crisis.
His trips to Washington were frequent. He had astonished his counterpart at the CIA, George Tenet, by making it clear that he no longer saw the hunt for Osama bin Laden as a top priority for MI6. Privately Dearlove had been heard to say that “capturing bin Laden, dead or alive, is very much Bush seeking a headline.”
Dagan had warmed to Dearlove when the latter said he was no devotee of the American faith in “Sigint”—satellite signals intelligence. He believed spies on the ground were more valuable and trustworthy, that with human intelligence “you get what they see at close up, not from outer space.” In a world of encrypted e-mail messages and superenhanced satellite imagery, Dagan found something endearing in that judgment. It mirrored his own views.
Dagan looked forward to his meeting with Eliza Manningham-Buller more than with any other spy chief. The director of MI5 was only the second woman to head the service. With her double chin and a booming laugh, which seemed to come from somewhere in her ample bosom, she was a striking figure.
At fifty-three, four years younger than Dagan, she also earned a salary far greater than he could ever hope to command; indeed, she earned more than her ultimate political master, Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Her crystal-shattering voice went with her upper-class pedigree. She was the daughter of a former lord chancellor of England; one of her two sisters was married to a former deputy keeper of the privy purse to the Queen.
She had attended Oxford, where she’d been known as “Bullying Manner” for her intimidating ways. In 1968, the university’s Dramatic Society pantomime program for
That night an MI5 recruiter—an Oxford don—suggested that Eliza should give up any plans to take up acting and join MI5. She listened carefully, then consulted her father. He said spying was no career for a lady.
Eliza promptly joined MI5 as a transcription typist of tapped telephone conversations, mostly those of Soviet Bloc diplomats in London. But soon she displayed a talent for making sense of their guarded talk. She became a counterintelligence officer—a spy catcher.
“Bullying Manner” became “Formidable Manner.” She rose rapidly through the structured MI5 hierarchy.
Taller than most of her colleagues, she had an imperious way of looking down her Roman empress nose when someone annoyed her. Rebuke delivered, she strode off down one of the cheerless corridors of MI5 “like a man o’war in full sail,” one colleague said. She had worked in Washington, and in those other postings where the streets have no names. She headed the MI5 team that investigated the Lockerbie disaster and spearheaded MI5’s undercover war against the IRA.
