The Contract

'Good morning, take a chair please.' The Prime Minister removed his spectacles, smiled without affection, turned in his chair. The Deputy-Under-Secretary sat himself down, wondered if there would be pleasantries and preliminaries. There were none. 'We haven't seen enough of each other since I came into office. I believe that one of my predecessors instituted a fortnightly meeting between Downing Street and the Service. I'm inclined towards resurrecting that habit.'

'I'm sure you read the minutes of the monthly meeting chaired by the Permanent-Under-Secretary, the meetings of JIC.'

'I read that.'

'And it's not satisfactory?'

'If I believed that what appears in a page and a half of transcript was the sum total of what was discussed, then I'd be tempted to wind the whole apparatus up, close it down. It's a thin sketch at best. You'll not disagree with that?'

'It contains the traditional elements.'

'Then the tradition isn't good enough.'

The Deputy-Under-Secretary was impassive, his eyes taken by a soup stain on the Prime Minister's tie. 'The tradition has not been found wanting in the past.'

'If that's true then I want to be in a position to make that judgement. I don't want to be merely told there are roses in the garden behind the high wall, I want to go into that garden and see them for myself.'

'If the JIC minutes are inadequate then I'm sure the Permanent-Under-Secretary will rectify that situation.'

'I'm not concerned with a carbon sheet of paper. I want a wider picture.'

'I doubt if you could spare the time for that, Prime Minister,' the Deputy-Under-Secretary remarked evenly.

'It boils down to the primacy of policy over the instruments of policy.

Policy is in the hands of government. SIS is merely one of the instruments at its disposal.'

'I think I read that book as well, Prime Minister. A clever turn of phrase I thought at the time.'

The Prime Minister clenched his fist, caught at his temper. 'The issuing of a D notice is not a small matter. We try to keep secrecy within tightly defined limits, and I'm the one who may have to justify the imposition of such measures. I don't expect to hear of sanctions against the media days after the event.'

'The Service has not called for a new D notice in recent weeks.' There was a sweetness in the Deputy-Under-Secretary's voice.

'This East German boy, the defector, there was a D notice put on that, after he ran away

'And requested by Security, Prime Minister, not the Service. You should ask Fenton and he'll corroborate.' The Deputy-Under Secretary gazed calmly back across the room at his adversary.

'I don't have the time to waste in examining inter-depart- mental responsibilities… SIS held a defector, that defector escaped from their care. SIS called in Security and the police to recover him. A D notice was applied. Right or wrong?'

A grudging acceptance. 'Pretty much right, Prime Minister.'

'Why wasn't I told when the defector first came to us? Why wasn't I told of his escape…'

'Fairly small beer. A young fellow, a junior interpreter in the Soviet" delegation to the Geneva disarmament conference. He doesn't rate very highly. If you want the detail, I can give it you, Prime Minister. Willi Guttmann aged 24, without access to secret and sensitive material inside the

Soviet delegation, meets an English secretary attached to the World Health Organisation. Their rendezvous is a bar called the Pickwick in central Geneva. She becomes pregnant, won't consider an abortion and persuades Guttmann to make his life with her. For that reason he defects

… Is this the material you feel cheated of, Prime Minister?… The girl's family is quite well placed, I believe. Name of Forsyth. Chambers in the Inner Temple, her father… Not a vastly edifying affair…'

'Don't sidetrack me with irrelevance,' snapped the Prime Minister. 'A D notice was activated. A D notice implies a matter of national security, an issue that if revealed to public gaze would harm the interests of this country. In your own words the boy is small beer, how then does he warrant such a response?'

The Deputy-Under-Secretary was not a man to be stampeded. 'Two reasons, Prime Minister. Guttmann's method of defection has led the Soviet authorities to believe that he drowned in a boating accident, they are not aware that he is in this country and helping us, were they to have that knowledge we believe his life would be endangered and his family in Moscow would be open to reprisal. I don't think we would want that.

Secondly, the boy has provided information on the new projected Soviet anti-tank missile system…'

'And that you call small beer?'

'Information that is interesting to us because of our own preparations for the mass production of the Main Battle Tank of the late nineteen eighties. There are several thousand jobs dependent on that programme.

Many of them, I believe, to be found in the constituency of the Secretary of State for the Social Services…'