Kell reveals that his American colleagues eventually became ‘aggressive’. But he makes it clear that there was no breach of protocol on the British side: ‘Did I physically touch him? No. Did I push him around? No, absolutely not. Did I threaten to get to his family in Leeds? At no point.’

This moral dilemma is at the heart of the book. How should British intelligence officers behave when they find themselves in a room with allies and colleagues from a liaison service who may have different methods and different ideas about how best to extract information from a suspect? More to the point, could Witness B, or the fictional Thomas Kell, have behaved any differently, given the circumstances in which they found themselves? From the book:

‘The problem is the relationship with the Americans, the problem is the press and the problem is the law. Somewhere between those three points you have spies trying to do their job with one hand tied behind their backs.’

It’s clear to Kell that the media in London took the line that Yassin was a British national, innocent until proven guilty, who was tortured by Bush and Cheney. ‘They charged that MI6 turned a blind eye to what went on.’ And Kell certainly acknowledges his own failings with regard to the Gharani interrogation and its aftermath.

‘He remembered the stink and the sweat of the room, the wretchedness of Yassin’s face, his own lust for information and his contempt for everything that Yassin stood for. Kell’s zeal had obscured even the slight possibility that the young man in front of him, starved of sleep and care, was anything other than a brainwashed jihadi… As far as I was concerned, here was a young British man whose sole purpose in life was to murder innocent civilians… I thought he was a coward and a fool, and the truth is I was glad to see him in custody. That was my sin. I forgot to care for a man who wanted to destroy everything that it was my job to protect.’

Kell’s sins, such as they are, far exceed those of Witness B, or indeed of any other British intelligence officer accused of aiding and abetting torture. This is Binyan Mohamed’s account of his meeting with a British intelligence officer, shortly after his arrest. It is taken from Stafford-Smith’s book, Bad Men:

‘The British talked to me in Pakistan. They said they were from MI6 and one called himself “John”… [They] had checked out my story and said they knew I was a nobody. But they gave me a cup of tea with a lot of sugar in it. I initially only took one [sugar]. “No, you need a lot more. Where you’re going, you need a lot of sugar.”’

Now how does that sound to you? Sinister? Or a concerned individual trying to do his best for a man – it’s worth remembering that Binyam Mohamed was not a British citizen – whose fate had already been decided in Washington. And yet the glee with which certain media outlets in the UK greeted the news that British spies had allegedly colluded in torture left a very strange taste in my mouth. It was as though we wanted to believe that our spooks were venal and corrupt, that we wanted to see men and women who were doing an almost impossibly difficult job in vastly complicated political and moral circumstances, as heartless and depraved. And why? To find a scapegoat for our own guilt? Or to reassure ourselves of our own unimpeachable moral conduct?

This is a story that isn’t going to go away. The former MI6 officer Sir Mark Allen faces prosecution for his role in a joint 2002 MI6 operation with Gaddafi's intelligence chief, Moussa Koussa, which brought the Libyan exiles Abdul Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi, to Tripoli, where they were brutally treated by the Gadaffi regime. At the time, MI6 had succeeded in stripping Libya of its WMD, one of the great intelligence coups of the past 20 years, and regarded Belhaj and al-Saadi as terrorist threats to the West. But that no longer matters. Allen got himself on the wrong side of history and now faces judgment in the skewed court of liberal public opinion.

There is a larger point to make about all this. The constant stream of court cases raining down on MI5 and MI6 is making the job of spying infinitely more difficult. That is not to say that our spooks should not be governed by strict protocols and abide by the letter of the law. But they should also be free to do their jobs without the threat of litigation and journalistic bias freezing up the system. Intelligence officers, on both sides of the Atlantic, now have to think twice before questioning suspects on foreign soil, because of the threat of legal blowback. As The Economist pointed out in an article on the subject: ‘Western spies inevitably have to work with the secret police of Pakistan, Egypt and others who often abuse prisoners, but also have more access to jihadists than the West ever could… For the West to refuse to deal with such countries would be as wrong as for it to put its agents in rooms where electrodes touch flesh.’

Thomas Kell wouldn’t argue with that.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to: Julia Wisdom, Anne O’Brien, Emad Akhtar, Oliver Malcolm, Lucy Upton, Roger Cazalet, Kate Elton, Elinor Fewster, Hannah Gamon, Tanya Brennand-Roper, Jot Davies, Kate Stephenson, and all the team at HarperCollins in London. To Will Francis, Rebecca Folland, Claire Paterson, Tim Glister, Kirsty Gordon and Jessie Botterill at Janklow and Nesbit UK and to Luke Janklow, Claire Dippel and Stefanie Lieberman in New York. To Keith Kahla, Hannah Braaten, Dori Weintraub, Matthew Baldacci, Sally Richardson and everybody at St Martin’s Press. To Jon, Jeremy, Caz, Kerin and Alanna at The Week – thank you for the office. To Marwa Che Hata, Theo Tait and Noomane Fehri for Tunisian expertise. To Liss, Stanley and Iris, Sarah Brown, Ian Cumming, Tony Omosun, William Fiennes, Jeremy Duns, Joe Finder, Natalie Cohen, Caroline Pilkington, Siobhan Loughran-Mareuse, Mark Pilkington, Christopher and Arabella Elwes, Jeff Abbott, Bard Wilkinson and the eagle-eyed Sarah Gabriel (www.sarahgabriel.eu).

About the Author

Charles Cumming has been described as ‘the man who most successfully gets under the skin of Britain’s intelligence agencies’ (The Times). In the summer of 1995, he was approached for recruitment by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). A year later he moved to Montreal where he began working on a novel based on his experiences with MI6. A Spy By Nature was published in the UK in 2001.

He was born in Scotland in 1971. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1994 with First Class Honours in English Literature. A Foreign Country is his sixth novel.

www.charlescumming.co.uk

By the same author

A Spy By Nature

The Hidden Man

The Spanish Game

Typhoon

The Trinity Six

Copyright

Published by Harper

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First Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2012

Copyright © Charles Cumming 2012

Charles Cumming asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Extract from The Spirit Level copyright © Seamus Heaney

Published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber 2001

Reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber

Extract from The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley © 1953 Hamish

Hamilton reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd

Extract from Ashenden by W. Somerset Maugham © 1928 William Heinemann reproduced by kind permission of A P Watt on behalf of the Royal Literary Fund

EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 978 0 00 734644 8