The Network - Jason Elliot [56]
Of all the adults who crossed the horizon of my youth, it’s the Baroness who stands out. It is to her that I owe my stock of stories about Africa and the Middle East, as well as my decision to study Middle Eastern languages at university. I introduce Manny to her not long after our first return from Afghanistan, and she takes a kindly, godmotherish interest in our future careers, going to the trouble of sending us newspaper clippings or alerting us to films or documentaries on subjects which she thinks will interest us.
One day she calls to invite us to her London home in Little Venice. We join her for dinner, and when the subject of Afghanistan comes up, as it always does, Manny surprises us both by delivering a passionate attack on the immorality of the Western powers who have abandoned the country and are doing nothing to help rebuild a nation in whose destruction they have participated.
The Baroness listens attentively. Then, in a tone of seriousness to which we’re unaccustomed, she extends the argument in a direction that leaves us dumbfounded. Until this moment she’s seemed to us a refined and kindly old lady.
‘Have you thought,’ she asks, ‘of the wider consequences of the war in Afghanistan and how much we will all be affected by it? You are both seeking something out of the ordinary. Perhaps today is the day to explore it.’
We are entering a new era, she says, in which the real threat facing the West is not a military one. The Western powers will no longer fight conventional wars because the enemy of the future will be more diffuse. It will, in part, grow out of the disaffected peoples of the Islamic world, she tells us. We have meddled in and manipulated their countries for far too long. Now Afghanistan has shown that a poor but determined people can successfully resist impossible odds, and the ten-year-long war against the Soviets has served as a rallying call throughout the Muslim world. But the Afghans’ hard-fought victory is being exploited by extremists, who have begun to gather in the country with the intention of spreading their violent agendas ever further afield. It is from these loosely allied militant groups that the threat is really incubating, she says, and there is a small organisation, to which the Baroness belongs, that takes an interest in such things. If we agree to speak nothing of it, she will tell us more. Manny and I are spellbound.
She calls it only the Network, and says she was introduced through a friend and former SOE agent called Freya. The Network’s original goal was to establish a structure, to be activated in times of need, to penetrate key groups relevant to British interests in the Middle East and gather information on their activities. It operated independently of the more conventional intelligence services, with which its relationship was collaborative when necessary, but for the sake of secrecy never shared operational details. Being much smaller, and not limited by the approval of ministers or the political agendas of the time, it functioned with both greater freedom and greater risk. It was successfully brought into play several times over the past few decades, but the loss of British influence in Middle Eastern affairs led to its suspension.
Now the world is again facing a crisis of new proportions, and the Network has been resurrected across several continents. The Baroness’s role is to address the emerging need for intelligence from Afghanistan, and this, she confesses, is why she has chosen to speak to us on the matter.
Napoleon’s dictum that a single spy in the enemy’s camp is more valuable