The Spy Who Was Mince*

Of course we weren’t. Spies, I mean. Hometown friends got the wrong end of the stick, that’s all. Positive Vetting. PV. That’s what it was called then. After “they” had checked back three generations for Reds Under The Bed or secret Oswald Mosley fans, people going into “sensitive” jobs had to give two character referees, sometimes three. Those sensitive jobs could be at Cheltenham, Scarborough or perhaps Harrogate, if you were going into the Civil Service. Going into the RAF was quite different. If you were wise – or just plain lucky – you chose people who knew you well enough to know which lies to commit by omission. I did. I chose rugby people.

Just 18 months after those lies were told, I was in West Berlin. You couldn’t tell anyone, not even your parents, what you were doing. My dad had served 31 years, from Palestine to Catterick and lots of stops in between. “They” liked “service issue”, I always used to say. It made them think they knew what they were getting.

An officer in charge of one of the shifts – just before they decided we only needed one between two of four shift teams – once said we were all a bunch of oddball and misfit “phraseologists”, which example of management insight only proved that we didn’t need officers at all, at least not on shift. Which fact they caught on to quite quickly – for officers – and thereafter we only saw them on our two day shifts in the rota.

We worked in a listening post. You may have heard of it (Boom! Boom!) It was called Teufelsberg – Devil’s Mountain – although it wasn’t much more than a hill. The Americans had bulldozed a load of bombed-out Berlin rubble into a hill just after the war. I suppose for a few years it was just a hut and an antenna.

Our little unit was nested like a Russian doll inside Field Station Berlin, the official name for Teufelsberg. I think there might have been 300 UK personnel in total, in ‘85 or so. About 200 would have been linguists, like me. Back on the RAF station that was our parent unit, there was a large former Hangar where the other signals and telemetry were collected. When I first stepped through the doors into the set-room “up the hill” a couple of years earlier, these men and women worked there too.

There was a shift bus from RAF Gatow to T’Berg (and yeah, we did have fun, fun, fun ‘til the baddies took our T’berg away, thanks). However, almost everyone drove up in the tax-free car we each bought when we finally realised our only money problem was how to spend it all. I used to get the shift bus if I’d had a heavy night between evenings and days, or days and days, or if I happened to forget to stop drinking early enough before the night shift.

So all the intelligence collected – nobody called it intel then, not even the Yanks – was sifted and analysed and reported on right up until sometime in ‘92, not long after I left. Of course, it turned out that the Soviet weaponry was not quite so efficient as some of the reports might have indicated. Even so, ‘probable’ indicates only a >50% likelihood of something happening and that, my friends, is a 49.99999*% likelihood of something not happening. Think Iraqi chemical weapons and you’ll figure out the culprits for that lie and  the duration of the Cold War. The wheel of fortune has turned again. I have a few former colleagues who must be very busy now.

Call me a spy if you like, but none of us were mince, not really.

*Mince: Scottish vernacular for really not very good.