• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 838 0

he described how a month previously a British Airways flight arriving at Bogota International Airport from London Heathrow had been shot at from the ground. There was no doubt that the attack had happened while the aircraft was on its final approach to the Colombian capital. It could never have happened while taking off from Heathrow. And certainly not during its flight across the Atlantic and the eastern edge of the South American continent. There wasn’t a rifle made that could fire a bullet vertically for seven miles. And it had been a single bullet fired into the underbelly of the aircraft. The bullet had been recovered – a 5.56mm which was common enough and suggested a military issue rifle. As to the make, that was impossible to determine. The incident had initially been labelled as nothing more than vandalism. People loosed off shots at commercial aircraft all the time, particularly in poorer, more unstable parts of the world. But when the same thing happened a week later to a French commercial airliner on its final approach to Nairobi, ears pricked within the Western intelligence community.

Yet it wasn’t until several fine threads of intelligence were weaved together from various sources that the two attacks began to take on the form of something more significant.

Stratton sat quietly absorbing every detail. The MI6 man spoke methodically without pausing to take questions. Stratton would observe the usual protocol, which was that all queries be left until the briefer had completed his task.

The MI6 man kept talking. They had seen a spike over the previous twelve months in the interest among certain known terrorist arms providers in ground-to-air missiles. This interest had gradually become refined to the hand-held, man-portable variety of the weapon. That was always enough to set alarms ringing. But it was nothing new. The threat had been there ever since the Americans handed the Afghans large numbers of Stinger missiles during the USSR’s invasion of their country. The mujahideen had used them against Soviet aircraft with great success.

A subsequent sting operation conducted by the CIA netted a handful of potential buyers of ground-to-air missiles but the trail to the ultimate end-users was never uncovered to any satisfaction.

A few months ago the interest in the deadly weapons seemed to dry up, said the MI6 man. This was significant and had happened for three possible reasons. One, the end-users had failed to acquire the weapons and given up the effort, perhaps redirected their energies into a different scheme. Or two, they had just changed their minds about whatever they were planning to use the weapons for and no longer needed them. Or three, they had managed to find a reliable source for the deadly weapons.

The intelligence community had been speculating that the third option might be the case and that Islamic terrorists had managed to acquire portable ground-to-air missiles. Whereas it was always wise to prepare for the worst, it was also dangerous to assume anything. What they needed was some ‘A1’ category evidence – A1 being hard evidence witnessed by an intelligence organisation’s own personnel. The source of the weapons couldn’t be identified but there was still talk of them going round. For a time the rumour was thought to be the result of a collating phenomenon. Like Chinese whispers. One intelligence organisation asks another if they know anything about a given topic, such as the purchase of man-portable ground-to-air missiles by a terror organisation. The question gets passed on to another intelligence agency, which passes it to another. On its journey the question gets distorted, perhaps thanks to an inaccurate translation here and there, and, without any evidence to support it one way or another, it comes back to its point of origin in the form of an answer. Experienced analysts have an eye for such a result. And a warning for any analyst irresist -ibly attracted to a particular theory for whatever reason: ‘If you look for something hard enough, you’ll find evidence of it, even if it doesn’t exist.