INTRODUCTION
The following document was found, physically printed on A4 paper in a brown envelope, on the back seat of a taxi in Millbank, London. The taxi driver, by fortunate coincidence, a regular informant of mine, discovered the envelope immediately after dropping off a middle-aged gentleman outside Thames House but, despite driving around for a few minutes, was unable to locate the passenger and decided to see if there was any address on the paperwork for forwarding purposes. Upon realizing there was not, and bearing in mind the potentially sensitive nature of the material, the taxi driver called me and asked if I could help to reunite the document with its owner.
As an intelligence correspondent for one of the national newspapers, I was just leaving a meeting at the Press Association on Vauxhall Bridge Road at the time and was able to arrange to meet up my informant almost immediately. The document was therefore in my possession within less than half an hour of its discovery. My contact was unable to give more than a cursory description of the passenger, the ride from Whitehall to Millbank having been short in duration during which no conversation took place and few glances were made at the passenger by the driver in the rear-view mirror. Apparently, he had few distinguishing features, being neither tall nor short, fat nor thin, hirsute nor bald. He was just an average, if rather ‘old school’, middle-aged, professional-person wearing a gray suit and a sober tie. He paid for his fare with a ten-pound note and asked the cabby to keep the change disclosing no particular accent.
As the envelope had no address on it, the only clues as to the identity of the sender or that of the intended recipient lay solely within the text. The title, “Report to MI5” was singularly unrevealing. Furthermore, the term ‘Director’ is used very loosely within MI5 and in a variety of contexts. Identifying a member of staff by this appellation is impossible.
I, therefore, decided to focus on identification of the author. My first line of inquiry was to seek out Bailey and Benfield Accountancy and establish whether there was a Norman Smith on their payroll. There is no such accountancy firm based in London but I did manage to find an accountancy firm named Benfield Smith, based in Horsham, West Sussex. The only name close to Norman Smith was George Rupert Smith, a senior and founding partner who had recently deceased at the age of ninety-three. The electoral roll for Reigate in Surrey contains one Norman R Smith. He turned out to be a twenty-six -year old plumber.
I was not surprised. In such circumstances, I would not expect the author to use his real name for security reasons, so my next line of approach was with MI5, a notoriously secretive organization. As a well-known and reputable reporter, I do have access to some senior staff and eventually managed to arrange a brief and confidential conversation about the Report with one of these, as in a well-worn cliché, on a bench in Green Park. After a cursory glance through the contents, I was advised that there was very little likelihood of the document being of any significance and that it looked like the ramblings of a fantasist. However, a copy was taken away for further investigation.
In the public interest, following that internal investigation, I asked for a formal response to be sent to me so that I may be assured that there was no need for me to investigate the scandalous possibility of confidential MI5 files, containing no cipher or other security, being discovered in a public place.
The next day I received an encrypted email from MI5 with the following statement:
“Having analyzed the document presented to us we can assure the public that it bears absolutely no relationship to any work being carried out by MI5 either now or in the past. It contains allusions to working methods that we do not adopt and does not comply with our policies for either international operational activities or the reporting of these. MI5 has a robust security methodology and it is impossible that any communication of this kind would ever be transmitted in physical paper format or without secure encryption. The public may rest assured that there has been no leak of classified information. This is quite clearly a hoax, and a poor one at that.”
Following the MI5 statement, I decided that the Report had no news value and that a serious article based on such uncorroborated and obscure information would bring my newspaper into disrepute and invite ridicule, let alone damage my professional career.
However, in a private capacity, I could not help continuing to dwell on the Report and found myself re-reading it on several times during the following weeks. What if there were some important information hidden within the text? What if the apparently extraneous descriptions and humorous anecdotes were merely paddings, protecting more sinister underlying truths? What if MI5 was trying to cover up a mission so bungled in its concept and execution as to be almost laughable?
I, therefore, decided to forward a copy of the text to a publisher, in order to gage independent reaction in the hope that, even if it had no intelligence value, it may be of some literary interest.
The publisher wrote back asking me how I had managed to write such obscure, fantastical fiction in between my activities as a serious reporter. The author, whom he assumed to be me, was clearly intending not to exposing state secrets, but to make a mockery of the whole process of intelligence gathering, not to mention social conventions.
From that point onwards I felt sure that this was, rather than a mislaid intelligence report, a piece of literary fiction with some value, and have since managed, with some difficulty, to arrange for its publication in that category.
I do, however, still harbor some suspicions about the way in which the papers came so readily into my possession, which I now believe to have been the result of a deliberate plan rather than pure coincidence. I do not suspect my informant, though it is not impossible that he is party to the plot, though I do suspect that the documents were left in his cab on purpose, rather than by accident. I have no proof to corroborate this theory. However, had I not been the primary recipient, who knows what would have happened to the package?
I am still no wiser as to the true identity of the author or their intentions, but I hope that he (or she) will be gratified, and even perhaps amused, rather than angry to find that their ramblings have eventually made it into the public domain. It is fortunate that the time between writing and publication has been relatively short, otherwise, the context of political and social conditions in South Africa may have lost relevance and have been overtaken quickly by events. Most intelligence stories have a notoriously short shelf-life, one of the reasons why my day-job is so challenging.
Despite my continued desire to unearth the author, I expect that their continued anonymity is the best means of avoiding backlash in the event of anything contained in this document having any veracity at all. I will continue my inquiries but am decreasingly optimistic about the chances of positive identification as time goes by.
I have absolutely no intention of commenting publically on any aspect of the Report, having professionally designated it as a work of fiction, so I will leave the reader to draw his or her own conclusions.
Finally, I trust that you will also find it within yourself to forgive the author for any insults or insinuations that may appear to be directed at real persons living or dead, organizations existent or defunct, nations complacent or humiliated, and social mores revered or abhorred, whether or not these are intended or inadvertent.
I hope you enjoy the read as much as I did.
Donald Osman (nom de plume)
Newspaper reporter and public relations consultant
