Читать книгу Dirty Little Secret - Jon Stock - Страница 20

Fielding worked fast after the PM had hung up. First he rang Marchant, but his phone went straight to voicemail. He didn’t leave a message. Then he called the duty officer at Legoland, giving a password that authorised an emergency lockdown. The main green gates of the pedestrian and vehicle entrances on Albert Embankment were always shut at night, but within moments a second set of barriers rolled into place behind them. At the same time, steel blinds closed on all the windows and the order went out that nobody was to leave – or enter – the building until further notice.

The last time Legoland had shut down in anger was in 2000, when the IRA had damaged an eighth-floor window with a Russian-built RPG-22, launched from Spring Gardens across the railway track. Fielding tried not to dwell on the fact that this time the threat was from Britain’s closest ally.

These latest developments were beginning to remind him of the 1960s, when relations between Britain and America had been at an all-time low. Fielding had been rereading the files, hoping to learn lessons from the past. Washington, still reeling from Kim Philby’s defection, had been appalled at the election in 1964 of Harold Wilson, whose Labour government was against the US’s Polaris nuclear-missile programme. President Johnson was equally suspicious of Britain’s intelligence establishment, believing that it was still riddled with Soviet spies. The President duly dispatched two spooks to London to review the effectiveness of MI5. Accompanied by the CIA’s London head of station, they were granted widespread access, including to MI6’s headquarters, without anyone on the British side knowing their real purpose.

Their damning report concluded that the UK had insufficient counter-espionage resources, and that MI5 was leaderless under its Director General, Roger Hollis. If James Angleton, then head of counter-intelligence at the CIA, had got his way, MI5 would have been run by Americans and become an outpost of the CIA’s London station. Plus ça change …

The most recent analysis to cross Fielding’s desk suggested that 40 per cent of the CIA’s efforts to prevent another atrocity in homeland America were now being directed at the UK. What was the ghastly phrase someone at the Agency had used to describe Britain? ‘An Islamic swamp,’ Fielding recalled, as he tried to ring Marchant again.