Not all agents employed by the Secret Intelligence Service in London are given a Walther PPK, a double 0 rating meaning they’re licensed to kill and issued with a customised Aston Martin, not least because of the first word in the title of the agency. ‘Secret’ means covert, and the very idea of employing a kind of ‘James Bond’ figure, a man instantly recognisable by the gadgets he possesses and the alcohol that he favours, who shags his way around the world and somehow manages to make the time to find easy and violent answers to complex problems, is simply ridiculous on every possible level.
A genuine secret agent is the man or woman nobody notices, the kind of person who can walk into a bar, buy a drink or eat a meal and then walk out an hour later, and leave so little impression upon the memories of the other patrons that they have no recollection whatsoever of what that person looked like, what they did while they were there, or ideally even whether they were there at all.
Of course, nobody can ever be completely invisible, but Salah Barzani did his best. He was Omani born and bred, and had lived in Khasab his entire life, just as his parents had done before him. He was exactly what he appeared to be, and he made sure that there was almost nothing about him or his wife or his lifestyle that could attract any form of unwelcome attention. He tried to be the man that everybody saw but nobody noticed. He had been recruited nearly a decade earlier, not primarily because of who he was or what his skills were but just because of where he lived.
The Strait of Hormuz is, in many ways, the lifeline of the world, or at least the lifeline of the developed world, because of the quantity of oil that is transported through it every day. It is also a natural choke point because it is comparatively narrow and would be fairly easy to blockade should some hostile nation wish to do so.
This might appear to be a somewhat remote possibility, because the oil producing nations need the revenue derived from their exports to pay their bills, and the oil-consuming nations need their product simply to keep everything moving and working, so both communities have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. But precisely because of the reliance of the West on oil and the somewhat volatile situation that routinely exists in much of the Middle East, many nations have always kept, and no doubt will continue to keep, a close watch on what goes on in and around the Strait of Hormuz.
Much of that surveillance is of course carried out by the so-called spy satellites which travel very quickly in low polar orbits, enabling them to photograph every part of the surface of the planet repeatedly, but all the satellite can do is provide a snapshot of one specific area at one specific time, and sometimes that’s nothing like enough. Every intelligence agency in the world is very much aware that while orbital surveillance is an essential part of their armoury of assets, along with other technical resources like SIGINT, signals intelligence, and COMINT, communications intelligence, it is only one part of it. And they all know that there is never any substitute for HUMINT, human intelligence, eyes on the ground.
Salah Barzani was one pair of those eyes on the ground. By trade he was a small-time trader with a small shop in Khasab’s town centre that was staffed by a middle-aged woman who was a long-time friend of Barzani’s wife. It wasn’t a particularly profitable enterprise, and some of his friends in the town occasionally wondered how it made enough money to support Barzani and his small family, though of course they never asked him.
And the answer was that it didn’t. Not quite. Which was why he’d taken on his second job.
Barzani owned a small apartment on the top floor of a modest block on the outskirts of the town, beyond the Khasab Fort and near the harbour. The building was only five storeys high, but that was a useful increase in height when it came to observation. The flat had a pair of unusually large windows that looked almost directly north, over part of the harbour and out towards the Strait. Every day Barzani spent a couple of hours, one in the mid-morning and the other six hours later in the afternoon, as he had been instructed to do, sitting in a comfortable chair with the windows open, a pair of powerful binoculars on a tripod in front of him and a notebook and pencil beside him. His job was to count and if possible to identify whatever tankers were within visual range at that time, to note whether they were empty or loaded and the direction they were heading, and to record the information.
Every week, he collated the data that he had obtained into an email that he prepared in draft format only every Sunday on his web-based Gmail account. He had been given simple instructions on how to do this, and what time to do it, and each week when he accessed the email account the following day he would note that the draft email had been deleted. This meant that his controller had read and copied the contents of the message.
In return for this minimal but mundane and boring assignment he received a monthly payment in Omani rials into his local bank account from an investment company based in Jordan, though the origin of the funds was some distance away from the Hashemite Kingdom. The payment was never exactly the same amount each month, because obviously the market fluctuated, but it was always within five per cent of the agreed amount and was allegedly based upon investments Barzani had made.
And that comparatively modest sum, including an annual increment based upon the Omani rate of inflation, was what made Barzani comfortably off, rather than right on the breadline. The amount had been suggested to him by the Arabic-speaking Englishmen who had met him in Muscat almost ten years earlier and who had outlined the arrangement he wished to initiate.
The man had been quite open about who he worked for – the British Secret Intelligence Service – and had explained to Barzani that, should he choose to accept the assignment, he would become a kind of support agent, in the terminology of the SIS. He would not be required to do anything illegal under Omani law and would simply be assisting the British to obtain early information of any actions likely to affect the supply of oil to the West. His job was simply to sample the oil tanker traffic. Nothing more, nothing less.
Oman and the other states that form the United Arab Emirates have a long history of friendly relations with the United Kingdom, dating back to even earlier than the Perpetual Maritime Truce with the United Kingdom that was agreed in 1853, and that gave rise to the expression ‘Trucial States.’ In a further example of this relationship, back in 1892 Dubai’s foreign relations were placed under British control in the so-called ‘Exclusive Agreement’. In 1971, when the British left the Gulf, six of these states merged to form the United Arab Emirates, and the seventh joined a year later. Despite the name ‘emirate’, none of the rulers of the constituent states are called emirs – all of them are sheikhs. The word ‘Emirates’ was included in the name of the federation by default, because the Arabic word mashyakhah or sheikhdom was already in use for the smallest Arab administrative unit, comparable to a parish or township.
Bearing this history in mind, it was an easy offer for the Englishman to make and for Barzani to accept. Implicit in his tasking was to note and describe anything the Omani saw which struck him as being unusual, whether or not it involved the tanker traffic through the Strait.
That morning, when Barzani took up his post, stared through his binoculars at the distant tankers and began jotting down notes, was unremarkable in almost every way. The level of traffic was about the same as usual and several of the vessels within visual range were ships that he had seen on numerous occasions before. Situation normal, in fact.
It was only when he sat back from the tripod-mounted binoculars and stood up to walk across to the large windows that he saw anything out of the ordinary at all. And even then it was just unusual and not apparently significant, something he hadn’t seen before.
He watched the activity, which was in the harbour over to his right-hand side rather than out in the deep waters of the Strait, for a few minutes, wondering if it was something that his controller – a man he knew only as John – would be interested in. He was doubtful, because it clearly had nothing to do with the tanker traffic, but in the end he gave a kind of mental shrug and decided to include it in his next report, due that evening.
Three hours later, when Barzani’s latest list of tanker traffic data arrived at Vauxhall Cross, the junior clerical officer responsible for entering the information into the database read the final paragraph twice before deciding what to do about it. Like Barzani himself, it didn’t seem particularly important, but the Omani was right – it was unusual. So he included it in an addendum to the weekly intelligence briefing covering the Middle East, and left it at that.