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Hearing transcripts

13 February
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2008 - Morning session
Wednesday, 13th February 2008
LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Good morning, Mr Tomlinson. Can
4 you hear us?
5 A. Good morning, yes. I can hear you very well and see you
6 well.
7 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: The jury are just being brought
8 into court.
9 A. Okay.
10 (Jury present)
11 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: I call Mr Tomlinson.
12 MR HILLIARD: Good morning, Mr Tomlinson. My name is
13 Nicholas Hilliard. I am going to ask you questions on
14 behalf of the Coroner. Then you will be asked questions
15 by others. First of all, I am going to ask you to
16 either take an oath or an affirmation. If there is
17 nobody there with you, it will be done remotely from
18 here.
19 MR RICHARD TOMLINSON (sworn)
20 Questions from MR HILLIARD
21 MR HILLIARD: Can you give us your full name first of all
22 please?
23 A. My full name is Richard John Charles Tomlinson.
24 Q. Mr Tomlinson, for a time, as we will hear, I think you
25 worked for the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6, as
it is sometimes known.
2 A. Yes, that is correct.
3 Q. As I say, I am going to ask you a bit about that, but so
4 there is no misunderstanding between us, I am going to
5 ask, please, that we proceed upon this basis, that there
6 is absolutely no question of you naming anybody who
7 worked or who is even claimed to have worked for
8 the intelligence services, unless you are expressly, for
9 some reason, asked to do that. Do you understand?
10 A. Yes, I understand. I accept that.
11 Q. I think it will arise in only one instance, when we come
12 to consider Mr Henri Paul; all right?
13 I think after graduating from Cambridge University,
14 you worked for the Secret Intelligence Service,
15 beginning, is this right, in September of 1991?
16 A. That is correct, if I recall correctly, yes.
17 Q. The period, is this right, ended with your being
18 dismissed from the service?
19 A. That is right, yes.
20 Q. Can you help us with when that was? 1995 was the year.
21 A. It is very hard to remember. I believe it was in
22 the spring. It must have been April -- April or May --
23 I think May 1995.
24 Q. The reasons for the dismissal, is this right, are
25 a source of dispute between you and your former
employers?
2 A. Yes, indeed. I have never really been given any
3 plausible reason for my dismissal.
4 Q. I am sure you appreciate, but I am afraid we will not be
5 able to resolve that dispute in these inquests.
6 A. That is understood, yes.
7 Q. Now, I think subsequently, is this right, you wrote
8 a book about your experiences with SIS.
9 A. Yes, I did. It was mostly about why I was dismissed and
10 the failings of the Government and frankly giving an
11 independent tribunal into being dismissed.
12 Q. Did the book include references to the circumstances
13 surrounding the death of the Princess of Wales and
14 others that night?
15 A. I do not think it really included any references,
16 perhaps oblique references to it, but there were no
17 direct references to it in the book, as far as I recall.
18 Q. Well, we will look at least one I think in a moment.
19 The book, is this right, was first published in
20 2001?
21 A. Yes, I believe that is approximately correct, yes.
22 Q. Where was it first published?
23 A. The very first publisher was a publisher in Russia.
24 Q. And the title of the book, was it called "The Big
25 Breach"?
A. "The Big Breach", yes.
2 Q. Why was it called that?
3 A. It was a play on words, really, because in security
4 service parlance a "breach" is a breach of security and
5 you can have a breach of security for a very minor
6 offence like leaving your wallet unattended on the desk,
7 et cetera. So it was like a small play on words. A big
8 breach was -- obviously writing a book was a very large
9 breach. Also it was a play on the fact that I went from
10 working in a very trusted position in the former Secret
11 Intelligence Services to a maximum security jail at
12 HMP Belmarsh. It was like a big breach between the two
13 positions. So that is why I called it that.
14 Q. I do not want to go into the details, but did you make
15 money from the publication of the book?
16 A. I made a little, yes, but most of it has been
17 confiscated by the Government.
18 Q. Mr Tomlinson, I am sure you will understand that I am
19 not singling you out for these questions that follow;
20 other witnesses have been asked. Do you have plans to
21 write anything in the future in connection with
22 the topics that you will be giving evidence about today?
23 A. No, I have not.
24 Q. Again, as others have been asked, do you hope or expect
25 to be paid in the future in respect of the evidence that
you are giving today?
2 A. No, not at all, no.
3 Q. Now, if we can just go back, please, to the writing of
4 the book, all right, you had acquired, is this right,
5 a lot of very sensitive information in the course of
6 your employment with SIS?
7 A. I would not say "a lot", but some.
8 Q. You had at least started writing the book, is this
9 right, in 1996, if not before?
10 A. No, it was later than that. I only started writing it
11 once I had exhausted all possible legal means to have an
12 employment tribunal and that process took a year and
13 a half to two years. When I was finally denied all
14 possible chances to take my former employee to court for
15 unfair dismissal, it was then that I started to become
16 frustrated and a little truculent, I would guess, and
17 that is what motivated me to write the book, to start
18 the book. So I do not think it was that soon. I think
19 it was after that date.
20 Q. So as you recall it, roughly when was it that you
21 started writing the book?
22 A. I would guess it was about 1997. It is very difficult
23 to remember, I am afraid now. But I went to Spain and
24 I believe I went to Spain in about 1997.
25 Q. Did you let your previous employers know that you were
writing a book?
2 A. I did not at first, but I did at a later date, yes,
3 because -- I asked permission if I could write it
4 because, you know, I felt that I was making a good case
5 and that I had a just cause. I asked for the permission
6 to write a book at one point and they said no, but
7 I thought that was unfair because other people like
8 Stella Rimington had been allowed to write books and
9 obviously are going to be a little bit critical of them,
10 and so they said no.
11 I can't remember the exact date of that, but I did
12 ask at one point.
13 Q. In the course of the writing process, is this right,
14 that civil proceedings were taken against you in
15 the course of which copies of the draft manuscript of
16 your book were seized? Is that roughly right?
17 A. Yes, that is certainly the case. I believe they
18 seized -- in fact I may have sent them a draft of it at
19 some point, but again I cannot remember the official --
20 but they certainly had a copy of it, yes.
21 Q. At that early stage, was the book called "I Spy"?
22 A. Yes, I believe it was called "I Spy".
23 Q. Did the publishing process bring you into conflict with
24 the criminal law?
25 A. I was potentially in breach of the Official Secrets Act
and I suppose that is criminal law, yes.
2 Q. Because, is this right -- I hope I have the date
3 right -- I think October of 1997, were you arrested on
4 suspicion of Official Secrets Act offences?
5 A. Yes, if that was in Milton Keynes in the United Kingdom
6 on that date, that was the case, yes.
7 Q. In due course, did you plead guilty to breaching
8 the Official Secrets Act?
9 A. Yes, I did, but the circumstances in which I pleaded
10 guilty were that I was held on remand in a maximum
11 security prison at HMP Belmarsh, and if had pleaded not
12 guilty, I would have had to wait a year for a trial,
13 whereas if I pleaded guilty, I could literally get out
14 of the remand in six months. So I decided that I would
15 rather get out of HMP Belmarsh by pleading guilty. If
16 I had been allowed out on bail, I think I would have
17 tried to plead not guilty.
18 Q. Did the proceedings relate to material that you had
19 disseminated in the course of trying to get the book
20 published? In short, was that it?
21 A. At that stage, I had not actually -- I believe that
22 I had not even written the book at that stage. What
23 I had done is I had spoken to a publisher in Australia
24 and I had given them about a six- or seven-page synopsis
25 of the book, and that is what I was in prison for, for
giving that synopsis to a publisher.
2 Q. And you were sent to prison, is this right, for twelve
3 months?
4 A. That is the sentence I received, yes.
5 Q. Of which I think you served half of the sentence; is
6 that right?
7 A. Yes, I was released for good behaviour after half of
8 the sentence under established law. Yes.
9 Q. And you were released on 1st May of 1998?
10 A. That is exactly correct. I remember that day.
11 Q. Mr Tomlinson, I am just told that -- because a verbatim
12 record is kept here -- the sound quality is a bit
13 muffled, and they are just wondering if you could move
14 the microphone a little closer to yourself.
15 A. Is that better now?
16 Q. I think it is a bit better. Thank you very much.
17 So that brings us, Mr Tomlinson to May, then, of
18 1998. I think you yourself have acknowledged that you
19 felt a considerable degree of bitterness towards your
20 former employers when you left prison.
21 A. Well, you know, it needs to be put into perspective
22 a little bit. If you, as a barrister or a lawyer, were
23 struck off by the Law Society and not given any reason
24 or warning and not allowed an appeal, and then merely by
25 complaining you were put into jail for a while, I think
most reasonable people would feel somewhat frustrated
2 and truculent towards their former employer.
3 Q. Forgive me. That is why I have been running through
4 matters really from your point of you up until now or
5 then.
6 A. I mean I lost my whole career for nothing and I was
7 given no recourse, and I have struggled to find an
8 alternative career since, yes.
9 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Could you try to speak a little
10 bit more slowly, Mr Tomlinson, because we are having
11 a little bit of difficulty with the clarity of what you
12 are saying and I suspect that speaking more slowly would
13 help.
14 A. Yes, okay. I will try my best.
15 MR HILLIARD: Mr Tomlinson, if we can take your release from
16 prison on 1st May 1998 as one date and then the next
17 date I just want to ask you about is this: do you
18 remember on 28th August 1998, did you give evidence
19 before the examining magistrate in Paris? That is the
20 magistrate who was looking into the circumstances of
21 the crash in the Alma Tunnel.
22 A. That is correct. I believe it was that date, yes.
23 Q. Is what had happened this: that between the May and
24 the August, you had watched a documentary about the
25 crash in the tunnel; is that right?
A. Yes. I happened to see a thing on television about it
2 and that made me wonder whether something that I had
3 seen in MI6 when I was working there might have been
4 relevant.
5 Q. I am going to come onto the details obviously. I just
6 want to try to take it in summary form for the moment if
7 we can.
8 Is this right, there had been a reference in
9 the documentary to a flash of light?
10 A. Yes, that is correct, yes.
11 Q. I am going to come to what you have just referred to in
12 a moment, but can you help us: as far as the documentary
13 at that time was concerned that you watched,
14 the reference, do you remember, to a flash of light, was
15 it to a camera flash, a car light at night or can you
16 not remember now?
17 A. I cannot remember that very clearly. I just remember
18 that it was -- the circumstances there made me wonder
19 whether something that I had seen in -- when I was
20 working at MI6, a document that I had seen at MI6 might
21 in some way be relevant because that was the first
22 reference that I had seen to any sort of suggestion that
23 there might have been some kind of plot or some kind of
24 plot at the time. That was the first reference that
25 I had seen to that.
Q. Right. As a result, is this right, you decided to try
2 to make contact with Mr Mohamed Al Fayed?
3 A. Yes, I believe I wrote a letter to him, yes, just to
4 say -- at that stage I remember starting to read around
5 it a little bit and I realised that he was agitating for
6 some form of inquest or inquiry into it.
7 Q. Did you know at that time that he was making allegations
8 against the Secret Intelligence Service?
9 A. I do not think I knew that he was making allegations
10 against them at the time, but I knew that he was
11 agitating for some kind of inquiry.
12 Q. So I think you wrote your letter, is this right, but
13 heard nothing in response at first?
14 A. Yes, I heard nothing from him, no.
15 Q. In due course, is this right, you were to be told that
16 your letter had never in fact been received?
17 A. Yes, I learned that quite some time later, yes.
18 Q. But no response to the letter. I think you did see, is
19 this right, Mr Al Fayed before you saw the magistrate in
20 August of that year?
21 A. Yes, all that happened was that I went to New Zealand.
22 I moved to New Zealand because I -- to try to get some
23 kind of job or some kind of career off the ground again
24 and I happened to talk to a journalist. A British
25 journalist rang me -- because the New Zealand police
gave me a lot of problems when I arrived in Auckland,
2 at the request of MI6, and I got arrested again and
3 searched and suchlike -- a British journalist rang me,
4 and it was in the course of that conversation that
5 I happened to mention something that -- you know, I had
6 seen this document and suchlike and he was astonished
7 that I had written a letter to Mr Al Fayed and that
8 I had not had a reply. He immediately realised
9 the significance of that and it was him that contacted
10 Mr Al Fayed, if I remember correctly.
11 Q. Did you then go from New Zealand to see Mr Al Fayed?
12 A. Yes, he invited me to come to see him, yes.
13 Q. Mr Tomlinson, I am just looking now at a record of an
14 interview that you had with Metropolitan Police officers
15 on, I think, 16th September of 2004. Do you have that?
16 It runs to six pages.
17 A. I have that, yes.
18 Q. It is a note, I think, that was actually prepared by
19 you, very helpfully, and signed by you. Is that right?
20 A. Could be. I cannot remember now.
21 Q. Well, it says at the beginning, about the fourth line
22 down, "Note prepared by Mr Tomlinson". Do you see that
23 on the first page? Don't take it from me.
24 A. I do not think I have got that.
25 Q. Haven't you? Let's see if we can find the note first of
all, Mr Tomlinson. It runs to six pages and it says at
2 the beginning, "Meeting with Richard Tomlinson".
3 A. Yes -- I do not have that in front of me. What is
4 the date on it?
5 Q. In the second and third lines, it says
6 "16th September 2004".
7 A. Okay. I have something here, yes, "Page 1 of 6".
8 Q. Are you all right with that?
9 A. Yes.
10 Q. It certainly appears to have your name at the bottom of
11 it. Do you see, at the bottom of each page --
12 A. Yes. I think I have the right document now.
13 Q. If you go to the last page, if you would be kind enough,
14 it says this:
15 "Read through, agreed and signed by
16 Richard Tomlinson, 6.30 pm ..."
17 There is a location given, but then "... 6.30 pm,
18 16th September 2004".
19 A. Okay.
20 Q. If you would just turn to page 5 of 6, can you see,
21 Mr Tomlinson, about nine lines down, it says this?
22 "RT states that he has only received reimbursement
23 of expenses from MAF [so Mohamed Al Fayed], for example,
24 travel from New Zealand."
25 That is what you were just telling us about, is that
right?
2 A. Yes, that is correct. He reimbursed me for that, yes.
3 Q. It goes on:
4 "Although under pressure from MAF to embellish
5 certain aspects of his information to support his own
6 views concerning his murder and conspiracy allegations,
7 RT has not varied his account and will not do so. If
8 RT's accounts over time are checked, this will be
9 verified. At the time RT first contacted MAF about
10 the Milosevic plot, part of the reason for this was
11 because of his disaffection with MI6, having also just
12 been released from prison."
13 Is that accurate, the passage that I have read out?
14 It is certainly what I think the note says, but does it
15 reflect the actuality correctly?
16 A. I think you should put it into perspective that most
17 people, when they leave MI6, remain very loyal to the
18 organisation because they are well treated by MI6, but
19 I was not and so I did not feel any loyalty to them at
20 all. Certainly probably if MI6 had treated me correctly
21 and fairly when they dismissed me and given me reasons
22 for dismissal, I might well have taken a different
23 course. I do not know for sure. But yes, it was an
24 aspect that I did not feel any loyalty to them and I did
25 not feel any need to contact MI6 first to say "Should
I bring this to public notice? Who should I write this
2 to". I think perhaps if they had treated me more kindly
3 and more fairly, I would have written to them first and
4 said "Can I have permission to release this to
5 Mr Al Fayed?", but at the time I did not feel any need
6 to ask them.
7 Q. Just one matter of correction before we go on,
8 Mr Tomlinson. I am told that this was a note that
9 Mr Hodges, one of the officers who had been present at
10 the meeting, prepared, and that is what you signed at
11 the end of it, all right. So not actually your note.
12 (Video link breaks) (Pause)
13 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Can you hear us again?
14 A. Yes, I can, yes.
15 MR HILLIARD: Mr Tomlinson, I do not know whether you heard
16 me say to you before or about the time when we got cut
17 off that the note that we are looking at at the moment,
18 I just want to correct something I said to you earlier.
19 This is not in fact a note made by you, it was made by
20 Mr Hodges, one of the police officers who had been
21 present at the meeting, and that is what you were shown
22 and signed at the end of it. All right?
23 A. Okay. Yes, that is correct.
24 Q. In the passage that we looked at, I just want to ask you
25 about one other aspect of that. It said this:
"Although under pressure from MAF to embellish
2 certain aspects of his information to support his own
3 views concerning his murder and conspiracy allegations,
4 RT has not varied his account and will not do so."
5 Can you just help the jury, please? What were
6 the aspects of your information that Mr Mohamed Al Fayed
7 was putting you under pressure to embellish concerning
8 his views about murder and conspiracy allegations? Can
9 you help us with that please?
10 A. I am not sure the word "embellish" was correct.
11 The interview was taken at the end of a very long day
12 and I just wanted to go home. He put me under a lot of
13 pressure to try to remember better the events. I think
14 that was probably a fair way of describing it. It is
15 very hard to remember these events after such a long
16 time and he really tried -- he tried to sort of
17 encourage me to remember better events and suchlike, and
18 suddenly he kept asking me to remember and to really
19 think hard about things and to try to remember exactly
20 what happened, et cetera.
21 Q. Forgive me, it goes on to say:
22 "Notwithstanding that, RT has not varied his account
23 and will not do so."
24 If you cannot remember old details, then that is
25 a question of cannot remember, isn't it?
A. Exactly, yes.
2 Q. This is put rather differently, isn't it? You have not
3 "varied your account and will not do so", almost as if
4 you were being put under pressure positively to add to
5 your account. Is that right or not?
6 A. I was being put under a lot of pressure by the police at
7 the time, yes.
8 Q. I am not really asking about that, Mr Tomlinson. It is
9 what you have said about pressure from MAF to embellish
10 certain aspects of your information. It is not to think
11 harder about the -- the words that are there -- you have
12 signed the note -- is "to embellish". I just wonder if
13 you can help the jury about that or not.
14 A. Well, at the time I was under pressure from the police,
15 as I said. It was a very, very long day and, I mean,
16 I was -- I had gone through everything with them in
17 a great deal of detail. I think the jury have to bear
18 in mind that I am trying to remember events which had
19 happened 16 or 17 years ago and it was a relatively
20 small event in the many things that I did and that
21 happened to me when I was at MI6.
22 After such a long time, there is obviously a lot of
23 stuff that has been put into the press and into
24 the internet, and it becomes increasingly difficult to
25 remember what I really do remember and what I remember
from having read elsewhere. I think that is what I am
2 trying to drive at there, that I am trying to remember
3 what I really do remember rather than what has
4 subsequently been put into the public domain, which is
5 very easy to confuse with what you remember yourself.
6 Q. All right. Now you told us that what you had seen on
7 the documentary programme in 1998 had, as it were, is
8 this right -- I am going to look at the detail of it,
9 but it had essentially caused you to make a connection
10 with something that you remembered from your time
11 working with SIS.
12 A. The principal reason that I made the connection was that
13 at the time this idea that SIS plotted to assassinate
14 people was regarded in some quarters as quite an
15 outrageous allegation, but I do know because I have seen
16 a document in which they proposed to assassinate
17 a person, which the Metropolitan Police have
18 subsequently confirmed exists. So I think the most
19 important thing there is that SIS and MI5, the sister
20 service, tried to deny at the time that it never
21 happened and that they would never get involved in
22 assassination and I know that is not true because I have
23 seen a document in which they propose to assassinate
24 someone.
25 Q. This document, Mr Tomlinson, which we are going to come
to the detail of now, you have described this in one
2 interview as the first and most crucial piece of
3 evidence that you were able to give the French judge.
4 A. Yes, again, because it was evidence that MI6/SIS,
5 whatever you wish to call them, do plot to assassinate
6 people. I think that is a crucial piece of evidence
7 because publicly they often deny that, involvement in
8 assassination plots. I have seen an assassination plot
9 at MI6.
10 Q. As you recall it, Mr Tomlinson, was the year 1992?
11 A. That is the year when I would have seen the document.
12 1992 I believe is the year I saw the document.
13 Q. The document was shown to you by a person; is that
14 right?
15 A. Yes, one of my colleagues.
16 Q. I am going to call that person "A", if you don't mind,
17 Mr Tomlinson.
18 A. Yes.
19 Q. That, is this right, was a document about a proposal or
20 a plan to assassinate someone?
21 A. That is correct, yes.
22 Q. I do not know if you have a copy of your book there.
23 A. I do not, no, but it is okay, I remember well enough.
24 Q. What you have said in your book, Mr Tomlinson -- and
25 I am just going to pick the main parts of it out; all
right?
2 You said that it was a two-page minute entitled --
3 and then you have this in quotation marks -- "A proposal
4 to assassinate Serbian President, Slobodan Milosevic".
5 A. That is correct, yes.
6 Q. Then you have said that the first page was
7 a justification for the assassination, citing his
8 destabilising plans for a greater Serbia, his illegal
9 covert support for Radovan Karadzic and his genocidal
10 plans for the Albanian population of Kosovo. You said
11 that the second page outlined the execution of the
12 assassination. You said that the document proposed
13 three alternative plans for the attempt and gave
14 advantages and disadvantages for each. Yes?
15 A. Yes, I believe so, yes.
16 Q. Again, is that as you remember it?
17 A. That is as I remember writing it when I wrote the book.
18 It is 17 years ago now. I do not remember clearly
19 what -- everything I read when I was in MI6 now.
20 Q. You explained that the first proposal was to train and
21 equip a dissident Serbian paramilitary faction to
22 assassinate him in Serbia.
23 You said that the second plan was to use a team to
24 infiltrate Serbia from outside and to kill him with
25 a bomb or sniper ambush. Then you said this:
"The third proposal was to arrange a car accident to
2 kill Milosevic, possibly while attending a peace talks
3 conference in Geneva."
4 You said:
5 "A proposed using a bright flashing strobe gun to
6 disorientate Milosevic's chauffeur while the cavalcade
7 passed through a tunnel. The advantage of a tunnel
8 crash was that there would be fewer incidental witnesses
9 and a greater chance that the ensuing accident would be
10 fatal."
11 That is what you wrote. Happy with that?
12 A. Yes, that is what I wrote, yes.
13 Q. That is what you told the magistrates about, is that
14 right?
15 A. Yes, I believe it was that that I told the magistrate,
16 yes.
17 Q. Did you learn at the time or shortly after you had seen
18 the document that the plan had gone nowhere?
19 A. No, I never -- you know, I never knew or heard anything
20 more about it, if I remember correctly. I do remember,
21 however, that it had quite a high level distribution
22 list on the document because I remember at the time
23 thinking -- being surprised at the audacity of this and
24 I remember wondering whether it was a practical joke.
25 But I do not believe it could have been because it had
a minute board on the back and a minute board means that
2 it is an accountable document, so it cannot be
3 destroyed. So it was not a practical joke.
4 But, as you say, I never heard anything more about
5 it. It was just one of these things -- and I do not
6 believe it -- well, I am sure it was never carried out
7 or anything of its nature.
8 Q. Indeed, what you said to the French magistrate,
9 Mr Tomlinson, August of 1998 -- and I am looking at
10 the last page of that. I do not know if you have that
11 available to you. I will read it out in any event.
12 Do you have it there? Others will listen here,
13 Mr Tomlinson, to make sure I read it out --
14 A. Yes, I have. I have a translation into English. I was
15 expecting it to be in French. Yes, that is fine.
16 Q. Do you mind turning to the last page of it?
17 You said this -- and you had told the magistrate
18 earlier what, in summary, I have read out to you. Can
19 you just follow with me at the top of that page? Do you
20 see, you are recorded as having said this:
21 "I have never heard any mention, either during or
22 subsequent to my service, of any plan to assassinate
23 a member of the Al Fayed family, Princess Diana or
24 anyone else for that matter, other than
25 President Milosevic. It is impossible, given the
structure of MI6, for an assassination plot of this type
2 to have been hatched by the department. It could have
3 been done independently by members of MI6, but not by
4 the service itself. This is only my assessment,
5 however, as I have never heard any mention of such
6 a plot."
7 Was that accurate at that time?
8 A. Yes, I believe so. I certainly never saw any plan to
9 assassinate the subject of this inquisition -- this
10 inquest. As I said there, at the time it would be
11 institutionally quite -- very difficult to carry out an
12 assassination. It is not completely impossible, I do
13 not believe, but it would be institutionally quite
14 difficult.
15 Q. I do not want to split hairs, Mr Tomlinson. We have
16 here "It is impossible, given the structure of MI6, for
17 an assassination plot of this type to have been hatched
18 by the department". Are you happy about that or not?
19 A. Well, you know, nothing is impossible, but it would be
20 very difficult, I would say. You know, to get
21 the necessary -- it would depend who the -- it would
22 depend also who the subject of the assassination was to
23 quite a substantial degree. Certainly to assassinate
24 someone who was universally very unpopular around
25 the world and amongst MI6 officers themselves would be
easier, institutionally, to carry out than it would be
2 to assassinate someone who was not unpopular.
3 So, for example, if MI6 had wanted at some point to
4 assassinate Saddam Hussein, institutionally I think that
5 would have been feasible and possible, and I have
6 subsequently heard, since leaving MI6, that there is
7 a credible account that they did actually plot to
8 assassinate Muammar Gaddafi of Libya --
9 Q. That is after you have left the service, is it?
10 A. I read that in the newspapers after I left the service.
11 Q. I am trying to stick, do you follow, because if we go
12 into -- not just you, but what other people have read in
13 newspapers and so on, you appreciate we will be hear
14 a long time.
15 A. Yes. What I was saying is it would be very, very
16 difficult for MI6 to assassinate a -- the popularity of
17 the subject would make a difference. So a target who
18 was very, very unpopular would be easier to assassinate
19 within MI6 than someone who was not.
20 Q. Now I want to ask you about a passage in the manuscript
21 of your book at the time it was called "I Spy". I think
22 you were asked about this by Metropolitan Police
23 officers, I think in May of 2005. Do you remember?
24 A. Yes.
25 Q. In the earlier version you again refer to being shown
a document entitled "A proposal to assassinate Serbian
2 President Slobodan Milosevic", but do you remember that
3 there was absolutely nothing in the version there about
4 a staged car accident? Do you remember that? If we can
5 just establish the basic material first.
6 A. Yes, it was a draft and so inevitably, in a draft, you
7 omit things.
8 Q. It is the draft of chapter 8, isn't it? It is pretty
9 well formed.
10 A. It -- I think it took me five years, roughly, to write
11 that book, so there were many, many drafts, many, many
12 rewrites during that period of five years that I wrote
13 it.
14 Q. What you said in this version was that the proposal was
15 for a drive-past ambush during one of Milosevic's visits
16 to Geneva for the same peace talks. Do you remember?
17 You went on to say:
18 "The attack would be carefully staged to suggest it
19 had been carried out by elements of the Bosnian emigre
20 population in Switzerland."
21 So this is not talking, is it, when he is in Geneva
22 for peace talks, about staging a car accident; it is
23 talking about a drive-past ambush. Do you agree with me
24 about that?
25 A. Yes.
Q. Mr Tomlinson, you were asked to comment about that by
2 the Metropolitan Police. Do you remember that they
3 asked you because, as it were, there you were in the
4 version of your book that was published saying that one
5 of the methods proposed had been a staged car accident
6 when he was in Geneva for peace talks, but in the
7 earlier version that they had got, you were saying that
8 it was a drive-past ambush in Geneva when he is there
9 for peace talks and not a word about a staged car
10 accident. That is what they were asking you about,
11 wasn't it, the difference?
12 If you turn please to the note of an interview with
13 them in May 2005. If you turn please to page 3 of 4.
14 Again, this is a note, is it not, that you have signed?
15 What you say -- if you look, Mr Tomlinson at 3 of 4,
16 will you follow with me?
17 "I have been asked to account for the difference
18 between the version of events in my book, 'The Big
19 Breach', and the manuscript of 'I Spy', chapter 8.
20 I would firstly like to state that MI6 do have
21 the capacity to stage accidents, whether by helicopter,
22 aeroplane or car, and also that the strobe light was
23 shown to us by the SBS at Poole during our training."
24 Then you said this:
25 "However, due to the passage of time and my deeply
felt anger towards MI6, it may be that I wrongly linked
2 this capacity to the Milosevic minute. When I came out
3 of prison, I was strongly embittered towards MI6 and
4 certainly wanted to cause them embarrassment and
5 difficulty, and this may have contributed to my mixing
6 of my knowledge of techniques with my eventual account."
7 Now that is what the note says, Mr Tomlinson. As
8 I say, it is a note that you have signed, isn't it?
9 A. Mm.
10 Q. That is what you have said in 2005. Do you still agree
11 with that today?
12 A. Yes, I mean, you know, as I have said before, trying to
13 remember the exact details from 17 years ago, to
14 distinguish that with what subsequently appeared in
15 the press is not very easy. I was under a lot of
16 pressure from the police at that time during that
17 interview and so -- you know, I can remember now
18 the interview when I agreed to that. But I think
19 the important thing is not to lose sight of the fact
20 that MI6 did write a minute to assassinate someone, and
21 I think this is the important -- you know, these
22 distractions to try to discredit this minute are
23 distractions. The important evidence is that MI6 did
24 try to assassinate someone, they wrote a plot to
25 assassinate someone, and I think that is the most
important and significant part of that statement.
2 Q. Well, that is not quite how you have put it in the past,
3 is it, Mr Tomlinson, because what you were saying, as it
4 were, before the difference was pointed out, was that
5 the first and most crucial piece of evidence that you
6 could give the magistrate was that there was an alarming
7 and very eerie similarity between the death,
8 the accident in Paris and one of the methods which was
9 proposed to kill President Milosevic of Serbia.
10 If that was the first and most important piece of
11 evidence, that is what you said in an interview --
12 A. I mean --
13 Q. If I could just finish and then by all means comment.
14 But if it was the similarity between the death in Paris
15 and the proposal to assassinate President Milosevic, if
16 that was the first and most crucial piece of evidence
17 you could give the magistrate, then, in fact, if the
18 plan was to assassinate him in a completely different
19 way, the significance of that rather falls away, doesn't
20 it?
21 A. Yes, I think you are probably right. I obviously cannot
22 remember clearly enough now the exact timeframe of these
23 various statements.
24 Q. All right. I do not know if you are aware,
25 Mr Tomlinson, but witness A has been asked about this.
Are you aware of what he says?
2 A. No, I am not.
3 Q. He says this, that he did write a document, he thinks in
4 March or April of 1993, not, he says, about
5 Mr Milosevic, but about someone else in the Balkans who
6 it was thought had been involved in genocide against
7 Muslims; that this was a contingency plan to kill him if
8 he should come to power to prevent further genocide, and
9 he says he was told it was out of the question.
10 A. Well, there you have it, that MI6 do admit to having
11 written this document to assassinate someone. It --
12 Q. Sorry, just pause. One individual, A, says he wrote
13 that and he was told it was out of the question.
14 A. He was a very serious and very, very intelligent man,
15 and I do not think he would have risked the
16 embarrassment of writing something of that nature if he
17 knew it was going to be dismissed out of hand because
18 obviously, when you write a serious document like that,
19 you invest some of your credibility into it. He was
20 a very, very ambitious and -- incredibly ambitious and
21 worthily ambitious person, and so I do not think he
22 wrote it in jest or as a practical joke. It was
23 a serious minute which appears to have been taken
24 seriously as well by his seniors.
25 Q. He says, Mr Tomlinson, that there was nothing in the
document about using a bright light to cause a car
2 crash. I think you are happy to accept that now from
3 your answers to me; is that right?
4 A. Yes, I cannot remember specifically now.
5 Q. I want to ask you next, please, about Henri Paul. All
6 right?
7 A. Yes.
8 Q. Did you ever meet him?
9 A. No.
10 Q. I just want to see if I can put to you accurately what
11 you say about him. Obviously, if I get things wrong,
12 you will say, but I am going to go through it all so one
13 question is not the end of it.
14 Is this right, that in 1992, you think, you had
15 become aware of an operation that involved smuggling
16 weaponry out of the Soviet Union?
17 A. Yes, I believe I can remember that, yes. I was not
18 directly involved in the operation, I should add.
19 It was merely because it was being done in the
20 department that I was working in and it was a very
21 interesting operation. I took the opportunity to read
22 more about it because it was educational and because
23 I was at the start of my career and I wished to learn
24 about more advanced operations. So I was not directly
25 involved in it.
Q. As you say, you read about it; is that right?
2 A. That is correct, yes.
3 Q. What you said to the police in 2004 was that you had
4 been following, out of curiosity, an operation involving
5 smuggling items out of Russia. You said that whilst
6 reading the reports, you had seen that several meetings
7 had taken place at the Paris Ritz Hotel.
8 A. Yes, I believe that is the case, yes.
9 Q. You said that a "P" reference appeared many times. You
10 went on to say -- and this is right, so that we are not
11 misled -- that "P" does not stand for Paul, does it?
12 A. No, "P" would be followed by -- it is a code name, so
13 there would be several numbers after it, but it is
14 a P file basically.
15 Q. Right. You said this, that you asked for that file
16 reference; is that right?
17 A. Yes. When you read a file, it is normal procedure
18 really if -- to understand better what is going on, to
19 ask to see the P file or the reference because it is of
20 interest to know the background of that person, what his
21 position is, what his likely access is, what his likely
22 knowledge is. So it helps to read the P file in order
23 to understand an operation better. So I -- often when
24 reading files, I would ask to see the P file, and
25 permission would not always be given because sometimes
it was too sensitive. Sometimes they said "Yes, you can
2 have a look" and other times, "No".
3 Q. So we can understand, the P reference was in respect of
4 somebody who was providing information; is that right?
5 A. Whether he was providing information, I do not know, but
6 possibly access or -- yes, you could say "information",
7 yes.
8 Q. I do not want to say it if it is wrong, but involved in
9 some way; it might have been providing information or
10 access or so on?
11 A. Yes, exactly.
12 Q. You asked for that file and this would be back in 1992;
13 is that right?
14 A. Possibly then, yes.
15 Q. Then, is this right, after you had seen the programme
16 about the crash in the tunnel in 1998, that is really,
17 is it, the first time that you would have to have been
18 thinking back to the contents of the file that you had
19 seen six years or so before?
20 A. Yes, I would guess it would be, yes.
21 Q. Presumably, in between times, you had seen a lot of
22 files about a lot of meetings, I dare say.
23 A. Yes, I would have seen a few, but, you know, I was in
24 Bosnia for quite a few years so I didn't see -- when
25 I was in Bosnia, I did not see that. So yes, it was
only would have been two years after that I left MI6.
2 Q. Is this right, that you are not able to recall
3 specifically if you saw the name of the individual or
4 whether it was even --
5 A. That is correct. I would not remember the name of an
6 individual, no.
7 Q. Is this right, that you cannot actually remember whether
8 the name was even recorded on the file at all?
9 A. I cannot specifically remember that. Normally it would
10 be, but I cannot specifically remember if it was or not.
11 But in normal procedures it would be recorded on the
12 P file.
13 Q. You mentioned this earlier, but is this the position
14 now, that as far as that person is concerned, again you
15 are not able to be certain whether or not your memory
16 has been influenced by facts that you have found out
17 subsequently? Is that what you told the police?
18 A. Yes, at this stage, I cannot be sure, no. I can
19 remember a fair amount about it, but I cannot be
20 absolutely sure.
21 Q. Again, if we take Henri Paul, for example, Mr Tomlinson,
22 over the years a considerable amount of information
23 about him has emerged, some no doubt correct, some no
24 doubt wildly wrong, but a considerable amount of
25 information about him has emerged, hasn't it?
A. Yes.
2 Q. You told the police some things that you thought were
3 the case about the person who had been mentioned in the
4 P file. Do you remember?
5 A. That is correct, yes.
6 Q. For example, that the person was French, was a security
7 officer at the Ritz and had an interest in flying.
8 A. I believe that those were the things that I remembered,
9 principally, yes, because it is quite unusual for
10 a French person to work for the British
11 Secret Intelligence Service or to be providing
12 information to the British Secret Intelligence Service.
13 I remember thinking it was odd that there was a French
14 person doing that.
15 Q. And --
16 A. I remember that he was interested in flying because that
17 is an interest of mine and so that was another thing
18 that stayed in my mind.
19 Q. Mr Tomlinson, I know that the Metropolitan Police gave
20 you some information, but I do not know whether you know
21 that the file system at SIS has been searched as far as
22 the Ritz Hotel is concerned for a period that covers the
23 last 99 years. Did you know that?
24 A. I did not know that, no.
25 Q. We will hear that the Ritz Hotel in Paris did not
feature as a meeting place in the way that you have
2 described.
3 A. Well, I find that very surprising that MI6 would claim
4 that they have no interest in the Ritz Hotel when you
5 bear in mind that people like Jonathan Aitken stayed
6 there, that Khashoggi stayed interest there. People
7 with considerable influence in the Middle East and arms
8 sales often stayed in the Ritz Hotel. So I am somewhat
9 surprised that they claimed that they never had an
10 interest in the Ritz Hotel in that fashion.
11 Q. The file that you had been looking at for the operation
12 in question has been located, and a Ritz Hotel, we will
13 hear, I anticipate, is mentioned a couple of times, but
14 not the Ritz Hotel in Paris.
15 A. I cannot remember.
16 Q. I am sorry, you cannot remember?
17 A. I cannot remember at all.
18 Q. So what you were reading about may, is this right, have
19 been a Ritz Hotel, if it was the Ritz, somewhere else?
20 A. Well, the other alternative is that the file that I was
21 looking at was a different file that has been searched
22 by the police. You know, I cannot -- I cannot remember
23 clearly enough now, after this period of time, to be
24 sure on which file I was reading at the time. There
25 were a lot of files that I was reading and it could well
be that the police have searched another one or it could
2 that it was the Ritz in London. But for sure the Ritz
3 in Paris is clearly going to be a hotel that is of
4 interest to MI6.
5 Q. According, again, Mr Tomlinson, to the results of
6 the search, there is no file on Henri Paul, and
7 according to the results he did not and never worked for
8 SIS.
9 A. Well, that is according to what the police have found
10 going through MI6 files after what they said, but, you
11 know, it is -- that is their version of events.
12 Q. I want to understand. Are you saying that now, on
13 the basis of your memory, you can positively disagree
14 with that or not?
15 A. No, I cannot positively disagree with that, no, and that
16 would be absurd after 17 years to say I can positively
17 disagree with it, but it does not surprise me that --
18 I do not think the fact that they did not manage to find
19 a file rules out anything either. There are so many
20 files there. Remember it was the 1990s. There was no
21 electronic searching, there was no intranet. Everything
22 had to be searched by hand, by reading files, and to say
23 that, "Oh we just have found it and that proves that
24 Richard Tomlinson's account is not true", I think that
25 is a very large leap of faith.
Q. Mr Tomlinson, what you said to just the police about
2 this, if it just helps you, in May of 2005, I think you
3 were really saying then very much really what you have
4 said to us today.
5 Do you have 2 of 4 there, Mr Tomlinson, just so that
6 you can follow what I am looking at?
7 A. Yes.
8 Q. Can you see a little bit of the way down the page it
9 says "Re Henri Paul"?
10 A. Yes.
11 Q. What the Metropolitan Police officers were doing was
12 relaying to you the information that they had had at
13 that time. Do you see, it says this:
14 "RT accepts, because of what we have told him, that
15 HP did not appear in the operation he referred to and
16 therefore he may be mistaken on that point."
17 Don't worry, I am going to go on and read the next
18 bit, but that is really pretty much what you have been
19 saying to us this morning, isn't it?
20 A. Well, the police were sitting there telling me that
21 I was completely wrong. I cannot remember in 1992
22 anymore. It could be that I am wrong, but it could also
23 be that the police are wrong.
24 Q. All right. You went on to say:
25 "However, because of the profile of HP [Henri Paul],
RT feels that he would certainly have been recruited by
2 some intelligence service, and the inference RT drew
3 from reading the dossier and from subsequent knowledge
4 of HP that these two were the same individual was
5 a plausible inference. He even now does not
6 definitively exclude the fact that HP worked in some way
7 for the SIS or another intelligence service because he
8 remembers mention of the Ritz and a French person
9 working there in some dossier, but he cannot be more
10 specific than that."
11 That is what it says.
12 A. Yes. What I am mentioning there is that Henri Paul, if
13 I am correct, was a security officer in the Ritz Hotel.
14 Someone of that profile in a large hotel, a hotel which
15 is used often by persons of significant intelligence
16 interest, the security officer of a hotel is one of the
17 first people intelligence officers try to recruit
18 because they have unparalleled access to which room
19 such-and-such a person may be staying in. They have
20 access to all the rooms, if they wish to install
21 microphones or listening equipment or whatever or
22 cameras, the security officer has access.
23 So they are always, in any major hotel they are
24 always people who are of interest to the intelligence
25 services and the target of intelligence services. That
is what I am mentioning there, that there is no doubt
2 that Henri Paul would have been of interest to an
3 intelligence service --
4 Q. We have heard as much, Mr Tomlinson.
5 A. Yes.
6 Q. But what I want to be clear about, before we move on
7 from this topic, is that what you were saying to
8 the police was -- because you understand we don't want
9 to make more of this than we should -- what you were
10 saying to the police was that, as far as who this person
11 was, you remembered mention of the Ritz and a French
12 person working there, but you couldn't be more specific
13 than that.
14 A. Yes, I have never been -- I have never once claimed
15 I remember the name "Henri Paul" was working for SIS,
16 but I believe that there was a French person there who
17 was working for SIS. If you wanted to recruit one
18 person within the Ritz Hotel to work for you, it would
19 be a security officer. He would be your first choice.
20 Q. Just to keep our feet on the ground about it and see
21 what you can help us with, if it comes to this, that
22 somebody was providing access or information, wherever
23 this was, and that it was something to do with
24 a Ritz Hotel and a French person working there, as
25 I understand what you are saying to us, that is what you
say we can safely take away; is that right?
2 A. Yes, I think you can -- I think I can be sure that there
3 was a French person working in the Ritz Hotel in some
4 capacity or other.
5 MR HILLIARD: I am not quite sure how we are doing for time.
6 I am moving on to another topic. Are we a bit over --
7 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: If now is a convenient moment,
8 we could break off --
9 MR HILLIARD: Oh, we can certainly go on.
10 The next matter, Mr Tomlinson, the third matter that
11 I want to ask you about, you described to the French
12 magistrate in this way -- so you dealt with the question
13 of the Milosevic assassination proposal, and we have
14 looked at that and explored whether or not now you can
15 help with the mechanism for that; all right? We have
16 looked at that this morning. You also dealt with the
17 magistrate with the question of anyone at the Ritz in
18 Paris who had had a relationship with SIS and we have
19 just looked at that now; all right?
20 Then you have said this. If you go to the fourth
21 page, I just want to see where this fits into
22 the hierarchy. Can you see, about a third of the way
23 down, Mr Tomlinson, you said, "As for the third matter,
24 that is not as clear-cut as the two I have just
25 outlined". Yes?
A. Mm.
2 Q. Have you found that passage?
3 A. Yes.
4 Q. So this, do I have it right, in your view at least, of
5 less significance than whatever the significance is of
6 the other two things that we have just looked at?
7 A. I guess that is the case. This was in 1998 I was
8 speaking, yes.
9 Q. You said this:
10 "It simply concerns something I heard in my
11 department, that there was a member of the paparazzi who
12 was an MI6 informant."
13 That is what this is about, correct?
14 A. Yes, that is right.
15 Q. Just help us, when was it, so that we can understand, in
16 the period of your service that you heard this? Can you
17 just --
18 A. Yes, I think it is probably worth putting things into
19 perspective a little bit for the jury. MI6, when
20 I worked there -- I do not know whether this is still
21 the case -- would employ various people on a sort of
22 ad hoc basis as helpers effectively. They would get
23 their expenses paid and maybe a little bit of money, but
24 they would have a full time occupation that they did
25 themselves to earn their living.
These sort of helpers were people whose background
2 or linguistic skills or their own profession gave them
3 cover and access to do small odd jobs for MI6 around
4 the globe. So, for example, you could have someone who
5 happened to speak quite an obscure language, who would
6 then perhaps help out a little bit about whatever
7 the case, or there was another person who was
8 a qualified pilot, with the same sort of situation.
9 There was indeed, if I remember correctly, someone who
10 was a barrister.
11 One of my colleagues from my training course --
12 we all kept very closely in contact with each other
13 after we graduated from the training course -- mentioned
14 at some point that he was going off with a photographer
15 somewhere and that this photographer was a sort of
16 professional photographer who earned his living as
17 a photographer. Clearly this was not of any particular
18 importance at the time.
19 Q. Again I just want to -- so somebody who you had done
20 the training course with mentioned at some point that he
21 was going off -- have I got this right -- with
22 a photographer somewhere, and that this photographer was
23 a sort of professional photographer who earned his
24 living as a photographer and, as you say, that was not
25 of any particular importance.
A. At the time. At the time it was just something that was
2 mentioned over lunch, basically, and we obviously moved
3 on to something else fairly quickly.
4 Q. If that is really as you remember it, maybe everybody
5 will understand why you put it in the order you do. But
6 that was really it, just somebody said they were going
7 off with a photographer?
8 A. Yes, and I believe he was, you know, a press
9 photographer; he worked for the tabloid press, the
10 paparazzi, if you like. There is obviously lots of
11 sorts of photographer, but this was a press
12 photographer, a tabloid press photographer.
13 Q. You said to the French magistrate that you did not know
14 the nationality or the sex of the person and,
15 presumably, not their name either.
16 A. I think he might have mentioned the name at some point.
17 We certainly met a few of the agents, if you like,
18 around the place, but I cannot specifically remember
19 meeting this gentleman. But we sat and talked about it
20 over lunch for a few minutes and we discussed various
21 things about him and what have you. It was not
22 a particularly important part of that lunch meeting, if
23 you see what I mean. We talked about other things as
24 well.
25 Q. But whenabouts would this have been? You left in 1995.
It may be that you cannot help as to when this was,
2 but --
3 A. I would guess it would have been in the early 1990s
4 because that is when I had a lot of contact with people
5 from our training course.
6 Q. As I understand it, is this right, you have no evidence
7 whatsoever to suggest that anybody, in Paris on
8 the night that we are concerned with, taking
9 photographs, was in the employ of SIS?
10 A. No. No, I don't have any, because I clearly was not in
11 MI6 when the incident happened. No.
12 Q. Right. Another topic, please, Mr Tomlinson, that I just
13 want to ask you about. I am looking at an affidavit
14 that you made I think in 1999. It is the second page of
15 it. It is paragraph 6. It says this:
16 "During my service in MI6, I also learned
17 unofficially and secondhand something of the links
18 between MI6 and the Royal Household. MI6 are frequently
19 and routinely asked by the Royal Household, usually via
20 the Foreign Office, to provide intelligence on potential
21 threats to members of the Royal Family whilst on
22 overseas trips."
23 Presumably there is nothing surprising about that,
24 being asked to provide intelligence on potential threats
25 to members of the Royal Family whilst they were abroad.
A. Well, I would not have thought so. It is a perfectly
2 normal --
3 Q. No, I just wanted to understand. There is nothing that
4 is surprising about that on the face of it, is there?
5 A. No.
6 Q. Then you go on:
7 "This service would frequently extend to asking
8 friendly intelligence services such as the CIA to place
9 members of the Royal Family under discreet surveillance,
10 ostensibly for their own protection."
11 Yes?
12 A. Well, when members of the Royal Family travel overseas,
13 I believe they have their own security, although clearly
14 the host country is going to be very closely involved in
15 their security, looking after their security as well.
16 Q. But presumably nothing surprising about that either?
17 A. No, it is normal.
18 Q. You said:
19 "This was particularly the case for the
20 Princess of Wales, who often insisted on doing without
21 overt personal protection, even on overseas trips."
22 Yes?
23 A. Well, I think that is probably something that I learned
24 after I left MI6. I don't think I knew that in MI6
25 because -- that was something that came out after I was
in MI6, yes.
2 Q. Really all that you can help us with from your own
3 knowledge, is this right -- forgive me -- is what
4 we might expect: that MI6 are routinely asked by
5 the Royal Household to provide intelligence on potential
6 threats to members of the Royal Family abroad and that
7 they might ask a friendly intelligence service to help
8 them if a member of the Royal Family was abroad and they
9 were involved in protecting the person?
10 A. Yes, those are perfectly normal circumstances,
11 I believe.
12 Q. Right. Mr Tomlinson, I want to go back to one matter to
13 see if you can help me about this. I was asking about,
14 can you remember, the photographer?
15 A. Yes.
16 Q. What you said to the French magistrate was this:
17 "This paparazzo regularly followed the Royal Family
18 and was sometimes paid for overseas operations. He had
19 been following Diana on a regular basis for several
20 years."
21 Is that what the person told you over lunch or not?
22 A. Look, I quite simply cannot remember now. It is a long
23 time ago and I can only remember what I have written
24 subsequently. I cannot remember the exact circumstances
25 when I was in MI6 now.
Q. Right.
2 MR HILLIARD: Mr Tomlinson, I think that is all I was going
3 to ask you, but as I see it is the break now, I will
4 make sure.
5 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Mr Tomlinson, we always have
6 a break in the morning. I hope you can find a cup of
7 coffee there. We will resume in a quarter of an hour.
8 (11.00 am)
9 (A short break)
10 (11.15 am)
11 (Jury present)
12 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Yes, Mr Hilliard, have you
13 finished?
14 MR HILLIARD: Yes, I have. Thank you.
15 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Mr Mansfield?
16 Questions from MR MANSFIELD
17 MR MANSFIELD: Good morning. My name is Michael Mansfield
18 and I represent Mohamed Al Fayed. I have a few
19 questions for you as well.
20 We do appreciate that this is a long time ago and
21 you have been asked a number of questions about events
22 that are well over ten years ago or more. In my case
23 I am going to ask you to look at documents which
24 normally would be put to a witness to refresh their
25 memory of what they remembered at the time or nearer
the time.
2 Firstly, in principle, would it be right that
3 material that you produced in the 1990s is more likely
4 to be accurate as a memory recollection than your memory
5 now as a general principle?
6 A. I think that is a fair and logical assumption, yes.
7 Q. We have heard the difficulties about memory now, so I am
8 going to, as it were, do it through documents that are
9 yours from the past, as it were, in order to make some
10 progress.
11 We know the dates that you have already indicated of
12 your employment with MI6 and when you left. I want to
13 deal with, without compromising anyone -- I am not going
14 to deal with names and, if possible, obviously, I do not
15 want to give away any state secrets through you or put
16 you to any difficulty or embarrassment; do you
17 understand?
18 A. I understand, yes.
19 Q. Just a little about yourself: when you were recruited to
20 MI6, as far as you were concerned, was this a career
21 prospect for you; in other words, something you really
22 wanted to commit yourself to and remain in?
23 A. Yes, to me it was a career for life. I was expecting to
24 spend the rest of my career in MI6 until retirement.
25 Q. We heard that you graduated from Cambridge. Were you in
fact put on some form of fast-track, as it were, within
2 MI6 in order to progress within it?
3 A. You could put it that way. There are two tiers of
4 entering into MI6, rather similar to two ways of
5 entering the military. You can enter as a soldier or as
6 an officer and it was the same in MI6; you could enter
7 as a clerical or more administrative level or you could
8 enter as an officer, which was my case.
9 Q. You entered as an officer.
10 Now you obviously had to have training somewhere
11 near the beginning of that career, is that right?
12 A. That is correct. There was a period of intensive
13 training from the start of my career with MI6.
14 Q. That training you have described in some detail in your
15 book, "The Big Breach", have you not?
16 A. That is correct, yes.
17 Q. Now I want to deal with it in principle: fundamentally,
18 what you were being trained to do -- and I suggest this
19 is perfectly obvious in one sense -- you were being
20 trained to operate under cover, were you not?
21 A. Principally we operated under cover, either under cover
22 as a businessman or under cover as a normal diplomat on
23 overseas missions, that is correct, yes.
24 Q. You were given practical tests of how under cover in
25 the United Kingdom you might pretend to be somebody
other than you are in order to obtain information; is
2 that right?
3 A. That is correct, yes.
4 Q. In other words, the description I used the other day to
5 another witness, effectively you were being authorised
6 to deceive people into providing you with material
7 information, is that right?
8 A. You could certainly put it in those terms, yes. It was
9 not put to us in those terms when we were training. We,
10 at the time, believed that we were doing it for a good
11 cause, but -- yes, I suppose, you could use that word,
12 exact word, yes.
13 Q. In other words, if it is considered to be in the
14 national interest, it was permissible to deceive?
15 A. Yes.
16 Q. Now during the time you had training, were you shown
17 various types of equipment? Please understand, I am not
18 going it to go through all of it. There is just one
19 thing I want to ask you about. Were you shown types of
20 equipment that was used by --
21 A. Yes, we had training with both the SAS and SBS.
22 We went to visit them in their headquarters.
23 We were shown various bits of equipment by them which
24 they used on operations. We were shown all sorts of
25 other equipment as well in other parts of -- that the
British Government use on various occasions. It was
2 a very educative, formative training course that we were
3 put through.
4 Q. Now MI6 or SIS, could it be described in this way in
5 terms of its general role? Part of it was the
6 acquisition and collation of information from a variety
7 of sources. That is one role. The other role was to
8 oversee objectives which might be carried out by others?
9 A. Yes, that is the case, yes. I can think of examples of
10 that, yes.
11 Q. I am not going to ask you to give examples, but in
12 relation to the tasks that might be carried out by
13 others, is that generally termed "the increment"?
14 A. Yes, okay -- obviously I do not want to say too much on
15 this subject, but I agree, yes.
16 Q. That covers -- it may cover more -- two of the
17 organisations you have already mentioned, the SAS,
18 Special Air Service -- is that right?
19 A. That is correct, yes.
20 Q. -- and SBS, Special Boat Service?
21 A. Yes.
22 Q. Because MI6 itself does not contain operatives with
23 the relevant skills to carry out particular practical
24 tasks abroad?
25 A. That is exactly the case, yes.
Q. The one item I do want to ask you about, and you have
2 been asked about it before, is the question -- not just
3 the question but also the item -- a strobe or
4 flashlight. Now, were you, during training, ever shown
5 such an item?
6 A. I believe that I was when I went to Poole, to a visit to
7 the SBS, and they had a number of special weapons which
8 they used such as -- as weapons that could be used in
9 water. For example, they had a number of specialist
10 breathing apparatus; all sorts of very interesting and
11 specialist equipment.
12 One piece of equipment there that I remember was
13 a very bright -- a piece of equipment that could give
14 a very bright flashing light. I was told at the time
15 that this was used for -- in the case of if they wished
16 to disorient, for example a helicopter pilot, on landing
17 for example. Because clearly at night or suchlike,
18 a helicopter pilot might have been landing with night
19 vision goggles or even, at night, just using the naked
20 eye and a very, very bright flashing light would lead to
21 disorientation and being unable even to see outside
22 references and to likely being unable to control
23 the helicopter.
24 Q. Now, I am going to ask you this in the light of some
25 information which we have been provided with at this
end. Can you describe -- and I know it is a long time
2 ago and I am sorry to ask. If at any stage it is too
3 difficult, please say -- but can you describe the light
4 in any way at all that you saw in your training, which
5 would be obviously near the beginning of the period of
6 your employment?
7 A. No, I cannot remember with any clarity that anymore.
8 It was just a piece of equipment amongst several.
9 Q. But is there any doubt in your mind that you saw such
10 a thing?
11 A. I am sure I saw it, yes.
12 Q. Although perhaps you cannot remember the detail of it,
13 was it something that was portable?
14 A. Yes, I believe it was portable, yes. It was small
15 enough -- if it was not portable, I am sure I would
16 remember that it was not portable. It must have been
17 small enough to be carried quite easily.
18 Q. All right. This may be a bridge too far, but the sort
19 of size, can you remember even that, now?
20 A. There was a large table and there were several items on
21 it, so it must have been small enough to fit within
22 a small portion of the table.
23 Q. Right. Now, during training, did you become aware that
24 obviously operating abroad, as MI6 did most of the time,
25 that MI6 or SIS became involved in theatres of war
abroad where there was armed conflict between factions
2 within a country?
3 A. Yes, indeed. I was involved in one myself, yes.
4 Q. We may just come to the one you were involved in
5 yourself, but I want to ask -- and please understand,
6 it is a question that is carefully phrased and I am not
7 asking for detail -- were you at any time aware, whilst
8 you were working in this period of the early to
9 mid-1990s, of any SIS or MI6 involvement in the war that
10 was being waged within Angola?
11 A. Yes, I can say -- yes, there was --
12 Q. Don't give me the detail for the moment --
13 A. Yes.
14 Q. -- because there may be objection. I do not know.
15 A. That is what I am hesitating for, yes.
16 Q. I am not asking for the detail from you, but you
17 remember.
18 A. Mm.
19 Q. Thank you.
20 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Is the relevance of this
21 landmines?
22 MR MANSFIELD: It is. Sir, I am pausing because, of course,
23 what he has to say may be of importance in relation to
24 this. In view of who is coming next week, I would ask
25 permission to ask what he remembers about that in fact.
LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Is that going to get into
2 the detail?
3 MR MANSFIELD: Well, there is a risk of it. I am happy to
4 leave it for the moment, for consideration to be given
5 to that.
6 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: We will see what Mr Tam says
7 about this.
8 MR TAM: Sir, I was listening to see what the next question
9 was going to be, but if there is a risk of detail being
10 given, then that detail may well be detail which should
11 not be given.
12 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: The trouble is, once the detail
13 is given, it is then too late. That is the problem.
14 MR TAM: That is why I was listening to the question to see
15 exactly sort of answer might be --
16 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Mr Mansfield is content to leave
17 this until next week, anyway, so that may be the way out
18 of this.
19 MR MANSFIELD: I think there may be time today to consider
20 how to deal with this because, obviously, as you have
21 rightly pointed out, it bears absolutely on what
22 Princess Diana was doing in 1997. I would want to ask
23 this witness, so that everyone knows what the question
24 is, what the role of MI6 was in Angola -- when he was
25 obviously part of MI6, what he learned to be that role.
That is all.
2 MR TAM: Can we take instructions on that and return to it?
3 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Yes.
4 MR MANSFIELD: I am sorry, Mr Tomlinson, we are obviously --
5 as I said at the beginning, I am not intending to put
6 you in a difficult position or anyone else for that
7 matter.
8 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: You appreciate, Mr Tomlinson, we
9 are in delicate territory here and we all have to tread
10 rather carefully, including you.
11 A. Of course. I understand completely.
12 MR MANSFIELD: I hope that the path that I am treading with
13 you is a fairly obvious one so that you can see what is
14 coming in plenty of time and we can avoid any
15 difficulties.
16 Now I want to move on to what you remembered, not
17 today, but at a much earlier time, about obviously --
18 arising out of your work in the Balkans section; all
19 right?
20 Now, the position is this, is it not, that you were,
21 as you have indicated, dismissed? You served a prison
22 sentence -- you have explained all of that -- and then
23 you were released.
24 Now I want to ask you a little bit about what
25 happened after your release and before you reached
the doors of the juge in France in order to give an
2 account to that juge. All right?
3 It is that period of time. What I want to ask you
4 about is really matters that you have put in a statement
5 before, and, in particular, what happened at the hands
6 of the authorities during this period. Do you follow?
7 So we are dealing with the period after the spring
8 of 1995, after you have been released, but before
9 September 1998, when you see the juge. So it is that
10 period. First of all, were you arrested or detained
11 during that period?
12 A. No, after I was released from prison on May 1st, I was
13 on probation, and I had three months' probation, which
14 was the law at the time. That probation was extremely
15 strictly observed.
16 I mean throughout my prison sentence, I was made --
17 all the regulations in my case were followed
18 exceptionally hard. For example, what somebody who has
19 never been to jail before who has never committed any
20 offence, if they were sent to jail for a white collar
21 offence, they would not be held as a category A
22 prisoner. I was held as a category A prisoner in
23 Belmarsh. After I was released, I was given probation
24 and I had to go to every single probation meeting --
25 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Do you in fact mean "probation"
or do you mean that you were on licence?
2 A. I am sorry, that is the word, "licence". I am sorry,
3 licence. I had to observe it very, very strictly.
4 During that time, I was aware that I was under
5 surveillance. On one particular occasion that I was
6 actually followed -- because I had to go and hand my
7 passport in to a police station and I remember being
8 followed down when I went to the police station.
9 At the end of that three months, I was very
10 concerned about being re-arrested. In fact I absolutely
11 believed that I was going to be re-arrested and put back
12 into Belmarsh because I could not understand why -- if
13 that was not the case, why MI6 had not made any attempts
14 at conciliation towards me.
15 Clearly they were putting me under surveillance,
16 they were putting me under a lot of pressure, and
17 I realised at that point that the only option for me
18 really, if I wanted to try and establish some form of
19 career and to get my life back on track, was to leave
20 Britain. So at the end of my probation I left Britain.
21 MR MANSFIELD: I am looking at -- if you have the document
22 in front of you, it is an affidavit. It is headed
23 "Affidavit of Richard Tomlinson". It is not dated in
24 fact, or at least -- I have two copies of it -- neither
25 of them are dated, although they are both exactly
the same. I do not know whether you can help now,
2 perhaps you cannot, whether it was 1998 or 1999 that
3 this one was written.
4 A. No, I cannot remember.
5 Q. Very well. If you look at paragraph 9 in there, it is
6 prefaced by indicating to the juge -- because this is
7 a document that you produced for the juge in France, is
8 it not?
9 A. I believe so, yes.
10 Q. It is headed that, "Affidavit of Richard Tomlinson to
11 Judge Herve Stephan". Then, at the top of this page,
12 just before paragraph 9, what you are doing is
13 indicating in your view the lengths to which MI6,
14 the CIA and the DST have taken to deter you from giving
15 this evidence -- and I will come to what this evidence
16 was -- and "... subsequently to stop me talking about
17 it. It suggests that they have something to hide".
18 Now, do you stand you by that?
19 A. I do not -- I think that is an inference that you have
20 made. I do not know whether what they did to me was
21 because they felt that I had something to hide. I do
22 not know, but I stand by the fact that they arrested me
23 in a very violent fashion when I had not done anything
24 and I -- quite what they were afraid of that I might
25 reveal, I do not know. That is for them to answer.
Q. I understand that. I am only using your words "suggest
2 they have something to hide". It is not my suggestion.
3 It is your suggestion there.
4 Now I want to go through what has happened to you.
5 On Friday 31st July, do you see, 1998, shortly before --
6 well, your appointment was in September, I believe --
7 you were arrested by the DST -- what were the DST?
8 A. That is the Direction Surveillance Territoire, which
9 is -- I would guess the nearest equivalent in Britain is
10 the Special Branch.
11 Q. -- in your Paris hotel room. You indicate that although
12 you have no record of violent conduct, you were arrested
13 with such ferocity and at gunpoint that you received
14 a broken rib. You were taken to the headquarters of
15 the DST and interrogated for 38 hours. Is that correct?
16 A. That is correct, yes.
17 Q. What were they asking about, can you remember?
18 A. No. Principally they wanted to take my computers off me
19 and my PDA, the Psion organiser. Most of my questions
20 were who I had been talking to, who I had contact with,
21 why I had left Britain, what I was intending to do,
22 where I was intending to live and I answered them as
23 best I could. I believe the principal reason for it was
24 to take my computers off me, which they did.
25 Q. Where did these computer end up, do you know?
A. They took them back to the UK.
2 Q. They took them back to UK. In this you indicate:
3 "Despite my repeated requests, I was never given any
4 justification for the arrest, was not shown the arrest
5 warrant. Even though I was released without charge,
6 the DST confiscated from me my laptop computer and my
7 organiser. They illegally gave these to MI6 who took
8 them back to the UK. They were not returned for
9 six months, which is illegal and caused me great
10 inconvenience and financial cost."
11 At that time, were you interviewed by anyone from
12 MI6 in Paris while you were detained?
13 A. Not by MI6, but by Special Branch officers, police
14 Special Branch officers, who were in Paris, and they
15 interviewed me.
16 Q. They interviewed you. What were they wanting to know,
17 do you remember?
18 A. It was them that had requested that the French arrest
19 me, so it was the Special Branch officers who were
20 questioning me via the French officers because
21 the Special Branch could not make questions to me
22 directly on French territory. So the Special Branch
23 officers would make questions to the French officers and
24 then the French officers would make the questions to me.
25 So both French and British officers were present at
the interviews.
2 Q. Now had you in fact been doing anything illegal in
3 France?
4 A. Not at all, no. Not at all, no.
5 Q. Now, the next paragraph, 10, in the affidavit you
6 provided, you say that on Friday 7th August 1998,
7 you boarded a Qantas flight at Auckland International
8 Airport, New Zealand, for a flight to Sydney, where you
9 were due to give a television interview to an Australian
10 television company. You were in your seat awaiting
11 take-off when an official boarded the plane and told you
12 to get off.
13 "At the air bridge he told me that the airline had
14 received a fax from Canberra saying there was a problem
15 with my papers. I immediately asked to see the fax, but
16 was told it was not possible. I believe that this is
17 because it did not exist. This action was a ploy to
18 keep me in New Zealand so that the New Zealand police
19 could take further action against me. I had been back
20 in my Auckland hotel room for about half an hour when
21 the New Zealand police, the NZSIS (the New Zealand
22 Secret Intelligence Service) raided me. After being
23 detained and searched for about three hours, they
24 eventually confiscated from me all my remaining computer
25 equipment that the French DST had not succeeded from
taking from me. Again, I did not get some of these
2 items back until six months later."
3 Just dealing with that, where did the items that
4 they took from you in New Zealand end up; do you know?
5 A. Yes, they went back to the UK too.
6 Q. They went back to the UK as well.
7 Then you move to the next paragraph:
8 "Shortly after I had given this evidence to
9 Juge Stephan, I was invited to talk about this evidence
10 in a live interview on America's NBC Television. I flew
11 from Geneva to JFK Airport on Sunday 30th August to give
12 the interview in New York."
13 Can I just pause there because dates may be
14 important. Is this in 1998 or is it in 1999, this trip?
15 A. Yes, this is in 1998, I am pretty sure.
16 Q. Because was the procedure in France that you would
17 provide to the juge, before the interview, material
18 indicating what it was that you were going to tell
19 the juge?
20 A. I cannot remember now, I am sorry. I cannot remember
21 what the exact sequence was then.
22 Q. All right:
23 "Shortly after arrival at John F Kennedy Airport,
24 the captain of the Swissair flight told all passengers
25 to return to their seats. Four US Immigration Authority
officers entered the plane, came straight to my seat,
2 asked for my passport and identity, then frogmarched off
3 the plane. I was taken to the Immigration Detention
4 Centre, photographed, fingerprinted, manacled by my
5 ankle to a chair for seven hours, served with
6 deportation papers and then returned on the next
7 available plane to Geneva. I was not allowed to make
8 any telephone calls to the representatives of NBC
9 awaiting me in the airport. The US immigration
10 officers, who were all openly sympathetic to my
11 situation and apologised for treating me so badly,
12 openly admitted that they were acting under
13 the instructions of the CIA."
14 Now, again, on that occasion, was any material
15 removed or not from you or perhaps you don't remember?
16 A. No, I do not think it was. I do not think I had
17 anything left. It had all been taken from me earlier.
18 Q. There was nothing left, all right.
19 I am sorry for the interlude. We are trying to sort
20 out the date of which year --
21 A. I think -- when I said, "Moreover, shortly after I had
22 given this evidence ..." , I think that must have been
23 a letter to him by post. I had not actually been to see
24 him at that time. I think that may be what you were --
25 Q. It was what I was inferring might be the possibility.
A. That was the case, but I cannot remember --
2 Q. But --
3 A. I remember I wrote to him at some point via a lawyer in
4 France and that must have been what I was referring to
5 then.
6 Q. We know you did do that. Paragraph 12 is the one that
7 sets a slight conundrum because you say "in January of
8 this year", so the question is which year.
9 A. It must have been 1999 because I am sure I would have
10 ordered the paragraphs chronologically, so I imagine
11 that I was writing this in 1999. So on paragraph 12,
12 I was saying "In January of this year", ie 1999, and
13 that would fit with the chronological order of events as
14 well.
15 Q. Right, I think we did imagine that is what you meant.
16 You booked a chalet in the village of Samoens in the
17 French Alps for ten days snow-boarding and so forth.
18 You picked up your parents from Geneva Airport in a hire
19 car on the evening of January 8th and set off for
20 the French border. At the French Customs post, your car
21 was stopped and you were detained. Four officers from
22 the DSD held you for four hours.
23 I am going to pause there. Did they interview you?
24 A. Yes.
25 Q. What was it about this time?
A. I cannot remember. They wanted to know what I was doing
2 going to France. They did not say anything specific.
3 It was more like -- oh yes, they asked is it true that
4 I work for MI6, so I answered truthfully, and then they
5 asked me what did I do at MI6 and they asked me a lot of
6 questions about my activities in MI6, but I think that
7 was more for their personal curiosity than anything.
8 They asked me some really quite banal questions about
9 guns and weapons. But I think that the impression I had
10 was that they were -- the objective of stopping me was
11 to stop me going to France, that they were buying time
12 for someone else to come down from -- that is right,
13 because we had to wait for another officer to come down,
14 a more senior officer. So when the more senior officer
15 came down, I was served with papers telling me to get
16 out of the country and not come back again -- in fact
17 there was no time limit. I was just told I would have
18 to leave France.
19 Q. Trying to summarising the rest of what you have written
20 in paragraph 12, was it your belief at the time that
21 this resulted from MI6 activity or advice to the DST?
22 A. I am absolutely sure even now that that is the only
23 mechanism by which that would happen because I have
24 never broken any law in France, and there is no reason
25 why the French authorities would have ever intervened in
that nature if they had not been asked specifically by
2 a foreign intelligence service, and the only foreign
3 intelligence service that could be is MI6.
4 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: But does it surprise you,
5 Mr Tomlinson, that a foreign country, France or America,
6 should be nervous about your coming to their country,
7 bearing in mind that you were convicted under the
8 Official Secrets Act in this country?
9 A. It does strike me as strange because why would France be
10 worried about me breaking the Official Secrets Act of
11 Britain? I would have no access to any French secrets.
12 So that does not at all translate into any possibility
13 of me breaking a French law because, even if I had
14 the position to do so, which I do not, I do not know any
15 French secrets, so it is of no interest at all to France
16 to -- in fact I have certainly been told by the French
17 authorities on many occasions that they don't give
18 a damn about me breaking the Official Secrets Act in
19 Britain. It is an irrelevance to them.
20 So it is quite clear that both the French and
21 the Americans were -- and indeed the Australians,
22 because I have been refused visas to visit Australia on
23 numerous occasions too -- have all been acting at the
24 request or suggestion of Britain. My belief is that
25 that request or suggestion would have come from MI6
because that is the only organisation in Britain which
2 would have been motivated to do that.
3 MR MANSFIELD: I want to move to a different period, but
4 it is the same topic.
5 After the inquests were opened in the United
6 Kingdom, and inquiry was established or an investigation
7 under Lord Stevens, and you were seen by officers in
8 that squad on two occasions, once in 2004 and again in
9 2005. You have the records. I may have to come back to
10 those later. You mentioned this morning twice
11 the pressure you felt under in relation to those
12 interviews. Now, could you just describe to the jury
13 what the pressure was that you felt during those
14 interviews?
15 A. Well, first, it was a very, very long process, a very
16 long working day, and I remember it going on to a point
17 at which I, you know, was becoming very tired. So there
18 was a question of it being a long process and I just
19 wanted to bring it to an end really.
20 You know, as in any -- the police are people who are
21 experts at, how would I say, extracting the story they
22 wish to hear from someone who is in detention with them.
23 You know, they are very, very good at that and I am not
24 necessarily very good at that. It is a long
25 inquisitorial process and there are times when you
become slightly tired and you say things that later on
2 in life you slightly regret having given into. And
3 I think that was probably the case there.
4 Q. What was the story that you felt they wanted you to
5 tell?
6 A. I think principally they realised that they had a lot of
7 work in front of them to go through all the MI6 files
8 and then trying to, I suppose -- they wanted to be able
9 to exclude as much work as possible from their workload.
10 So they asked me quite a lot about me trying to remember
11 exactly where various files were, which I was not able
12 to answer with any particular clarity. They pushed
13 very, very hard on some small details and skated over
14 things which were somewhat more significant, I thought.
15 Q. Now, does that apply to both or just the one in 2004,
16 because you are seen again in 2005 where you are --
17 we don't have a record of exactly what is put to you,
18 but if you just look at the record in 2005 -- do you
19 have that one there?
20 A. Yes.
21 Q. All right, "Interview regarding issues". It is clear,
22 as you look through it, on the various topics over
23 the page -- "Henri Paul":
24 "RT accepts because of what we have told him ..."
25 This is one in which the police are putting to you
a lot of other information that they have, by then,
2 obtained from other sources. Do you follow?
3 A. That is definitely the case. When I saw them in 2004,
4 they were asking me for information in a very
5 non-confrontational manner, but in a subsequent
6 interview they had clearly gained a lot of information
7 and it was much more adversarial.
8 Q. In relation to that one, did you get an impression of
9 what it was, in the 2005 interview, they wanted you to
10 say?
11 A. I think they certainly tried to put me under a lot of
12 pressure to withdraw the statement that I had made about
13 the assassination plot against someone in MI6, but as we
14 have subsequently seen this morning, they have
15 acknowledged that that exists. They really wanted to do
16 their best for me to try and withdraw that because they
17 didn't want that knowledge being brought out into
18 the public domain. So they did try their very best to
19 try to make me withdraw all that.
20 I told them that it is absolutely the case that
21 there is a minute within MI6 in which someone proposes
22 that they assassinate someone. They then submitted,
23 "Yes, there is, but it was not Milosevic". It could
24 well be the case, I cannot deny that, but the simple
25 fact remains that there is a minute there in which they
propose to assassinate somebody and they tried to get me
2 to withdraw that.
3 Q. I want to deal with that first of all, if I may. Again,
4 I am not going to seek to put you in any difficulty
5 about names, as has already been made clear to you. You
6 have given the broad outline, but I want to follow up
7 some details. First of all, the person, the colleague
8 who showed you the document -- so, first of all, can
9 we deal with him?
10 Now, he has a hieroglyphic of "A", as far as our
11 proceedings are concerned, so I am going to call him
12 "A". Is that all right? Can you follow if I do that?
13 I want to know a little bit about him, without
14 disclosing who he is, in order to gather the
15 significance of what you saw. First of all, was he head
16 of a section or head of an operation?
17 A. He was the subhead of a section. He was sort of second
18 in charge of a section.
19 Q. How old was he, roughly speaking? Do you know?
20 A. I would guess he was about 30; in his early 30s.
21 Q. How long had he been with MI6 by this stage?
22 A. About seven years, I believe, about six or seven years.
23 He had been in for a long enough period of time to have
24 done at least one overseas posting, so he was quite an
25 experienced officer.
Q. You indicated earlier, in partly dealing with this, that
2 he was an ambitious individual.
3 A. Yes, he was a serious, hardworking and diligent person,
4 like most people in MI6 are. He would not have been
5 recruited if he was not of that nature. He was someone
6 who wanted to make a career and to get on and to impress
7 his superiors and what have you, but that is perfectly
8 normal in MI6. I think we all were like that.
9 Q. The question I want to ask you here is: it is going to
10 be suggested that this sort of thing would never even be
11 contemplated. If the policy was never to contemplate
12 even this kind of activity, have you any idea why
13 somebody of his experience and his responsibility would
14 be bothered to draft such a document?
15 MR TAM: Sir, normally I would not object to a question like
16 that but this is asking the witness to speculate about
17 somebody else's motives and I am concerned, not because
18 it is a question that is arguably not one that the
19 witness can really help with, but because, in answering
20 it, sensitive details might get revealed if he is
21 invited to speculate in this way about something which
22 he probably knows nothing about.
23 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Well, I am not sure that it goes
24 quite that far. But in a sense, it is really comment,
25 isn't it, Mr Mansfield?
MR MANSFIELD: Yes, it is bordering on that. We are dealing
2 with somebody here who is, in a sense, an expert. He
3 would normally be regarded as an expert because he has
4 had that experience within MI6.
5 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Well, you could ask him if they
6 were encouraged to think laterally.
7 MR MANSFIELD: Yes. Well, I will ask that question.
8 I think you heard the question. I think I know
9 the answer, but anyway. Were you encouraged to think
10 laterally in MI6?
11 A. Well, yes, very much so. We were always encouraged to
12 be imaginative and to think of new operations and
13 suchlike. But nevertheless, I was -- at the time I was
14 very surprised. I think I have already said this
15 already. My first reaction was: is this a practical
16 joke? Is he just winding me up? This was my absolute
17 first reaction, but then -- I am sure it is okay for me
18 to say this -- I know that it was not because it was an
19 accountable minute.
20 There are different forms of paperwork, some of
21 which are held accountable and some which are not in MI6
22 at the time, and this was a document that was
23 accountable, ie it was going to be held on record. So
24 you wouldn't -- no one would write a joke memo on an
25 accountable memo because that would go into your
personal record. It is something that you do not mess
2 around with, basically.
3 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Mr Mansfield, I think there is
4 a question that might be asked here, if Mr Tam does not
5 see any dangers in it: what I was proposing to ask was,
6 when you were trained by MI6, were you instructed that
7 MI6 agents were required to operate within the
8 restraints of the criminal law?
9 A. Yes, we were. We were advised that, yes, but at
10 the same time there are various facets to that because
11 when you are overseas, whether that is the case or not,
12 which legal system you come under when you are overseas,
13 and there was definitely, during our training,
14 a sufficient amount of speculation within the group of
15 officers who were training together that we would talk
16 about it amongst ourselves, and we were never entirely
17 sure if what we were being told was always strictly held
18 to and accounted to.
19 I do remember during my training programme another
20 trainee specifically asked a question to a senior
21 officer about whether MI6 do break the law or do kill
22 people. The senior officer -- and this was in one of
23 the training talks that we were given -- and the senior
24 officer evaded the question and did not answer directly.
25 His entire countenance and bearing towards this question
was such that he did not want to answer it in any more
2 detail.
3 This led to a lot of speculation amongst us
4 afterwards: well, what is the case, do we keep always
5 within the law or do we not?"
6 I think you also have to bear in mind that we are
7 talking about 1992, which was at the time when MI6 was
8 avowed and became completely accountable, and I think
9 that prior to 1992, there was a lot less accountability
10 to the law.
11 After a period, after 1992, MI6 became more
12 accountable, but during that period there was no doubt
13 a transition period where a lot of new restrictions and
14 laws were being discussed and sored out and drafted and
15 discussed with the Government. So there was
16 a transition period and I was in MI6 during that
17 transitionary period.
18 There were other occasions I can remember talking to
19 another senior officer and asking them about the death
20 of someone in circumstances which were slightly odd.
21 Again the answer was not direct -- was not a direct,
22 "Absolutely no way do we get involved in that sort of
23 thing". It was an obfuscated answer.
24 So I think it is fair to say -- I am sure now, and
25 we are now in 2008, that MI6 is probably very, very
accountable because the laws in accountability have been
2 tightened and that is the case with the American
3 intelligence agencies and other intelligence agencies,
4 but I was there when there was a period of transition
5 and I think there was a lack of clarity at the time.
6 MR MANSFIELD: I will have a little more to ask you on that
7 in light of a letter that you wrote. Still dealing with
8 A and his background and so on in relation to this
9 proposal -- I have two more questions on this.
10 The remembrance that you had much nearer the time,
11 in other words -- I think you said you began writing
12 about this plan for the purposes of a book -- I think
13 you said "1997". Is that when you think you started
14 writing it?
15 A. I honestly just cannot remember anymore. I started
16 writing it when I moved to Spain. I would have to dig
17 around to know what date I moved to Spain, but it was
18 when I moved to Spain.
19 Q. Yes. Very well. At that time, whatever time it was,
20 either 1996/1997/1998, somewhere in that region, those
21 years, the person who was the target of the proposal was
22 Milosevic; is that how you remember it?
23 A. That is how I remember it. Subsequently the police said
24 to me that it was not Milosevic, it was someone else,
25 but I cannot dispute that because I cannot specifically
remember now and it may well be that it was someone
2 else, but the fact is, they did propose to assassinate
3 someone.
4 Q. The reason I ask you is this: Milosevic is obviously and
5 was at that time a well-known figure, particularly in
6 the theatre that you were operating in and a significant
7 name, was he not?
8 A. Yes.
9 Q. What I am trying to get to is whether, you see, what you
10 saw was a proposal that did relate to Milosevic and
11 there was yet another one relating to the person that
12 Mr A says he did write. Now is that a possibility?
13 A. It is a possibility, yes. You know, I did not have
14 access to everything there at the time and I cannot
15 remember the dates exactly now.
16 MR MANSFIELD: Sir, what I would like to do -- it is
17 the only question in relation to a name. I am not going
18 to do it publicly. Our copies are redacted in any
19 event -- is, if it is permissible, for him to see
20 the name of the target in private, as suggested by A, to
21 see whether in fact there was any possibility that what
22 he saw originally was that. I do not know whether he
23 has ever been told that.
24 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Mr Tam?
25 MR TAM: Again, that is something on which we will have to
take instructions. Apart from anything else, with the
2 technical difficulties or possible technical
3 difficulties --
4 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Yes, well, I do not think you are
5 concerned about the technical difficulties. You are
6 concerned about rather more wide-ranging difficulties.
7 MR TAM: Those as well, yes.
8 MR MANSFIELD: Well, I am wondering if therefore I can leave
9 that until it can be resolved because I would ask that
10 he is allowed to see the name that A suggests.
11 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Maybe it can be resolved over
12 the midday adjournment.
13 Can I put one other thing? I do not know if it has
14 been put to you. I think you don't know what A may say
15 when he comes here, but this is what he says in relation
16 to you. He says:
17 "Before shredding my copy of the memo, I showed it
18 to Tomlinson and explained the content and the reaction
19 that it had received."
20 Now, did he ever, first of all, tell you that he was
21 shredding that document?
22 A. No, he gave no indication that he was going to do that,
23 and I am very, very surprised that he did it because
24 we were not allowed to shred things like that. That is
25 like -- in parlance at the time, that would be regarded
as a hanging offence. You just don't shred accountable
2 documents and I am astonished at that claim that it was
3 shredded.
4 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Was it an accountable document
5 because of the minute reference you say that it had
6 attached to it?
7 A. Yes, indeed.
8 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: If it had not had that, then it
9 would not have been an accountable document, is that
10 right?
11 A. Yes, if it had been what is called a "memo slip", which
12 is like a pink document which quite often would be
13 handwritten and just passed around, those could be
14 destroyed. They generally were not, but they could be.
15 But this was a minute and I do distinctly remember that
16 it was a minute because that is what made me think that
17 he was not joking, because if it had just been a memo,
18 I could have accepted it was a practical joke, but
19 it was a minute board.
20 It was detachable -- the way it worked was you had
21 little squares that you could take off this minute
22 board. Every time you passed the minute board, the
23 minute, to another colleague you took off a little
24 square and put this in your out-tray. This was how
25 the documents were traced around MI6 at the time. So
this was where -- every document was accountable.
2 The centralised clerical system would know where each
3 accountable document particularly was in the office.
4 So the fact that it had a --
5 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: So just to be --
6 A. No, sorry -- the fact that it had a minute board on the
7 back meant that it was an accountable document and it
8 could not be shredded, because every minute board had an
9 individual number or was sequentially numbered.
10 So as soon as you asked for a minute board, that
11 meant that you were preparing an accountable document
12 and there would be a gap in the minute boards if it was
13 destroyed. It is just not permissible; it is just
14 a hanging offence, as we used to call it.
15 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: In short does it come to this:
16 documents with a minute board attached could not be
17 shredded and documents that didn't have a minute board
18 attached could be shredded?
19 A. You know, at the time I never heard of things being
20 shredded at all. We didn't shred things at all at the
21 time. But potentially something that did not have a
22 minute board could be shredded, but something that did
23 have a minute board on the back could not be and would
24 never be. To be honest I am really surprised at anyone
25 saying that they shredded anything at MI6 because, in
general terms, we did not, and anything that was
2 shredded -- if it was destroyed, it went through
3 a vetting process before it was destroyed as well. So
4 I find that quite a surprising claim.
5 MR MANSFIELD: I want you to look -- I think you have it
6 there. I mentioned it a moment ago. You not only wrote
7 to the magistrate or juge in France before you actually
8 spoke to the juge, do you recall you also wrote at the
9 time to the head of a British organisation called
10 Liberty in South London, and a man called John Wadham,
11 who was then in charge. Do you remember doing that?
12 A. Look, I wrote many letters to him because he was my
13 solicitor who represented me at my trial, so I had a lot
14 of correspondence with him.
15 Q. The letter should be there amongst your bundle, with
16 this at the top; in other words, it is your initials,
17 "RJCT/6". Do you have that?
18 A. No, I am afraid we don't have it, no.
19 Q. I am sorry, because we thought at our end that all
20 the documents that related to you had been taken. This
21 was a document, this letter, that you provided in
22 fact -- you provided six documents to the police
23 earlier.
24 I am going to ask therefore, unless there is an
25 objection -- because all the sensitive parts of
the letter have been redacted, so I am just pausing to
2 make sure there is no -- sorry -- I will give the label.
3 It is RJCT/6. It was one of six documents provided.
4 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: This is one of a number of
5 documents that reached me this morning, I think from
6 those instructing you, via the inquest office.
7 MR MANSFIELD: No. This was a document that did not come
8 via us. This was a document that was originally --
9 we asked for it, a copy of it. It was originally
10 provided in fact --
11 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Well, I do not think it is in
12 bundle 12.
13 MR MANSFIELD: No, it is not. But if you look at --
14 I am sorry to do this in your presence,
15 Mr Tomlinson.
16 If you look at the very first page of divider 10,
17 you will see a statement in French from a French,
18 Nicolas Pajani.
19 In that he specifies a number of documents, 1, 2, 3,
20 4, 5 and 6. We had the others, but we did not have 6,
21 so we asked for the sixth one, which was dated
22 11th September 1998.
23 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: It has a couple of Paget stamps
24 on it, hasn't it?
25 MR MANSFIELD: Yes, it does. It came to us and it may have
come to you, sir, yesterday, from Mr Smith. So that is
2 where it has come from. There were other documents that
3 we also provided that Paget had seen, but they are much
4 the same as others. But this letter, unless there is
5 a --
6 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: I would not have thought there
7 would be any objection.
8 MR MANSFIELD: No, there is not. I am going to ask for it
9 to go on screen because -- again, I am not going to ask
10 you to try to remember something without the document.
11 It is going to go on screen and hopefully you are going
12 to be able to see it.
13 There we are. This was -- so you have the context,
14 the dates on the top are in fact dates when various
15 Metropolitan Police officers took custody of it or
16 produced it or whatever. In fact, this letter was
17 attached to a letter you sent to John Wadham on
18 11th September 1998. We have the accompanying letter.
19 I am not troubling with you that.
20 So, you can see the title, "MI6, 1992, proposal to
21 assassinate Milosevic of Serbia ..." and so on. Then
22 you write this:
23 "Dear sir, I would like to bring to your attention
24 a proposal by MI6 to assassinate President Milosevic of
25 Serbia. My motive in doing this is to draw to your
attention the casual and cavalier attitude that many MI6
2 officers have to British and international law."
3 I pause there. This may relate to the question you
4 have already been asked about attitudes to law. Did
5 that properly represent, at that time, in 1998, why you
6 were in part revealing this material?
7 A. Yes, at the time, yes.
8 Q. The officer who wrote this proposal clearly could (and
9 in my view, should) be charged with conspiracy to
10 murder. He will no doubt escape unpunished, like many
11 other MI6 officers who routinely break the law. This
12 lack of legal accountability of MI6 officers needs to be
13 addressed urgently."
14 Now, I want to ask you about those sentences. First
15 of all, in fact, consideration has been given to any
16 prosecution of him and he is not going to be. Did you
17 know that?
18 A. No, I did not know that, no.
19 Q. Does that surprise you?
20 A. No, it does not surprise me, no.
21 Q. Secondly, "... like many other MI6 officers who
22 routinely break the law ..."
23 Did you have something in mind there?
24 A. No, not really. It needs to be -- bearing -- the tone
25 of that is quite a strong statement. I had just spent
six months of my life in a maximum security jail for
2 revealing absolutely nothing at all to a New Zealand
3 citizen in Sydney, Australia, and I was pretty annoyed
4 at the fact that I had been prosecuted for doing
5 absolutely nothing at all whereby MI6 and MI5 officers
6 propose to commit very serious crimes and escape any
7 sort of legal accountability whatsoever. So I think
8 I was very angry at the double standards of the Crown
9 Prosecution Service towards MI6 and MI5 at the time.
10 Q. Right. Now, the next paragraph you indicate that from
11 March 1992 until September 1993, you worked in the East
12 European controllerate of MI6 under the staff
13 designation UKA/7:
14 "My role was to carry out natural cover operations
15 (undercover as a businessman or journalist, et cetera)
16 in Eastern Europe."
17 Pausing there, in your book you do deal with some of
18 those operations and the sort of work that you had to
19 do, do you not?
20 A. That is correct, yes.
21 Q. "The Balkan War was in its early stages at this time so
22 my responsibilities were increasingly directed to this
23 arena. My work thus involved frequent contact with
24 the officer responsible for developing and targeting
25 operations in the Balkans. At the time this was ...
[it is redacted]."
2 We assume that that is A, is it, who should be in
3 there?
4 A. I think so, yes.
5 Q. I am sorry that you don't have the original there:
6 "... who worked under the staff designation P4/OPS."
7 Does that have any particular meaning?
8 A. I hesitate to answer that because I do not think it is
9 necessary or directly relevant and perhaps the --
10 Q. Very well. I do not press you.
11 "We would frequently meet in his office on the
12 11th floor of Century House to discuss proposed and
13 ongoing operations that I was involved in and, indeed,
14 many other operations which I was not myself involved
15 in.
16 "During one such meeting in the summer of 1992 [and
17 again I am assuming it is A] casually mentioned that he
18 was working on a proposal to assassinate
19 President Milosevic of Serbia. I laughed and dismissed
20 his claim as an idle boast as I (naively) thought that
21 MI6 would never contemplate such an operation. [I am
22 inserting A on the assumption it is correct]. [A]
23 insisted that it was true and appeared somewhat offended
24 that I did not believe him."
25 Is that how you recollect it at the time, that is in
1998, when you wrote this letter?
2 A. Yes. I was a new boy there. I was a probationer and
3 there was a lot of leg pulling and practical jokes in
4 that organisation and I assumed that he was winding me
5 up.
6 Q. "However, I still presumed that he was just pulling my
7 leg and thought nothing more of the incident.
8 "A few days later, I called in again to [I assume
9 A's] office. After a few moments of conversation, he
10 triumphantly pulled out a document from a file on his
11 desk, tossed it over to me and suggested I read it. To
12 my astonishment, it was indeed a proposal to assassinate
13 President Milosevic of Serbia.
14 "The minute was approximately two pages long and had
15 a yellow minute card attached to it [and you dealt with
16 this already]which signified that it was an accountable
17 document rather than a draft proposal. It was entitled
18 'The need to assassinate President Milosevic of Serbia'.
19 In the distribution list in the margin were P4 (head of
20 Balkan operations, then ... ), SBO1/T (security officer
21 responsible for the Eastern European operations [and
22 then there is a name and I am not interested in the
23 names]) and then C/CEE (controller of East European
24 operations [and then there was the possibility of two
25 names]) and last, Modus/SO the SAS liaison officer
attached to MI6 [and then you put a name] and H/SECT
2 (the private secretary to ..."
3 Sir, I would want to suggest the status of
4 the person, not the name, but if that is objected to,
5 I will wait and see.
6 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: No objection.
7 MR MANSFIELD: This is where I might have got it wrong.
8 Again, I do not know, but I have tried to piece it
9 together. Was the person to whom he was private
10 secretary the head of MI6?
11 A. That is correct, yes.
12 Q. The first page of the document was a political
13 'justification' because there was evidence that he was
14 providing arms and so forth. We can see what that is
15 and you have touched on it before.
16 "The remainder of the document proposed three
17 methods ..."
18 These are in your book as well and I just want to
19 ask you about this.
20 "The remainder of the document proposed three
21 methods to assassinate Milosevic."
22 Before I ask you a little bit about the detail
23 without again compromising anyone, if this was not on
24 that document, where could you have possibly got this
25 from? In other words, what is the source of these
methods? I mean, have you imagined them yourself or
2 have you got it from somewhere?
3 A. It is such a long time ago that I was there at the time
4 and that I wrote that document. As I have said before,
5 it is very difficult for me now to remember what
6 I remembered at the time and what I subsequently
7 learned. I think there is -- it could well be that
8 there is -- I have to say, it strikes me now, looking at
9 that document now, that there is a lot of detail in
10 there which potentially might not have been in
11 a broad-brush appraisal. So it could be that I was
12 mixing with what I had subsequently learned there.
13 I just cannot remember. It is just too long ago for me
14 now to remember that with any great clarity.
15 Q. I appreciate that about now, but this is a document that
16 was written some time in the summer of 1998. Do you
17 follow? In other words, it is only a few years,
18 three/four/five years, since you had left the service.
19 Do you follow?
20 A. Yes.
21 Q. "The first method was to train and equip a Serbian
22 paramilitary opposition group to assassinate Milosevic
23 in Serbia."
24 I am assuming it is A:
25 "[A] argued that this method would have
the advantage of deniability ..."
2 Now, was that a concept that was discussed inside
3 MI6?
4 A. Frequently, yes, making an operation deniable was always
5 a consideration so that, if things went wrong, you could
6 plausibly demonstrate that the British Government had
7 nothing to do with it.
8 Q. So it is not just a question of operating under cover,
9 perhaps with a false cover; it is also operating in
10 a way that nobody knows this is what you are doing and
11 then, if it happens, denying that you have done it.
12 That is what it comes to, doesn't it?
13 A. Yes.
14 Q. Just continuing:
15 "... but the disadvantage that control of
16 the operation would be low and the chances of success
17 unpredictable."
18 Now, again, are these the kind of concepts --
19 control and predictability -- that you would necessarily
20 have been talking about in MI6?
21 A. Yes, indeed. All our training was -- in designing
22 operations and carrying out them, they were constant
23 considerations in our training, as you would expect
24 really.
25 Q. Yes. I am not suggesting that you would not expect all
of this.
2 "The second method was to use the increment [I have
3 already asked you about this], a small cell of the SAS
4 or SBS which is especially selected and trained to carry
5 out operations exclusively for MI5/MI6 to infiltrate
6 Serbia and attack Milosevic, either with a bomb or
7 sniper ambush. [A] argued that this plan would be
8 the most reliable, but would be undeniable if it went
9 wrong."
10 Does it follow that if it went right, it would be
11 deniable?
12 A. Well, if it went right anonymously, they would have got
13 out of the country anonymously so there would never have
14 been any question of them being caught and interrogated.
15 But clearly, if it went wrong and they were caught and
16 interrogated, it would be very difficult to deny them
17 because no British Government would really leave their
18 highly trained and very loyal soldiers to be imprisoned
19 in that fashion, so the British Government would have to
20 be involved if they were, for some reason, compromised
21 and caught.
22 Q. Then we get to the third proposal, which is A again,
23 I assume:
24 "The third proposal was to kill Milosevic in
25 a staged car crash, possibly during one of his visits to
the ICFY (International Conference on the former
2 Yugoslavia) in Geneva, Switzerland. [A] even provided
3 a suggestion about how this could be done, such as
4 disorientating Milosevic's chauffeur using a blinding
5 strobe light as the cavalcade passed through one of
6 Geneva's motorway tunnels."
7 Now, of course, it is now many years later.
8 I appreciate the difficulty of remembering. Could these
9 options have in fact been discussed with you by A, in
10 fact, but not actually written down at that point? Is
11 that a possibility?
12 A. Yes I suppose it is because I am sure we would have
13 discussed it a little bit. Normally if we were looking
14 at some something together, we would talk about it. It
15 would be normal, yes.
16 Q. "There was no doubt in my mind, when I read [A's]
17 proposal, that he was entirely serious about pursuing
18 his plan. [A] was an ambitious and serious officer who
19 would not frivolise his career by making such a proposal
20 in jest or merely to impress me. However, I heard no
21 more about the progress of this proposal and did not
22 expect to, as I was not on its distribution list.
23 "I ask you to investigate this matter fully.
24 I believe that legal action should be taken ..."
25 Now that was that letter.
I want to ask you -- it is still on that topic --
2 just a little bit more about MI6 and involvement, do you
3 follow, in the light of answers you have given today.
4 What you have said today is that a plan of this kind
5 you would not expect to have been conducted by
6 "the service". You said not impossible but very
7 difficult. All right? Institutionally difficult.
8 What you have said today and before today is that it
9 could have been done independently and it is that that
10 I want to ask you about. First of all, what did you
11 mean when you said that today and you have said it
12 before, as I have said, that it could be done
13 independently?
14 A. I think nowadays that would not be the case, but I think
15 in the olden days there could potentially -- there
16 was -- the intelligence services were not as tightly
17 controlled as I have no doubt they are nowadays.
18 I think that that has been controlled a lot more deeply.
19 There were -- as in the public domain, there was, at the
20 time of the Harold Wilson Government -- I think it was
21 quite well established now -- there was a cabal of MI5
22 officers who were interested in -- or were talking
23 loosely about a plot and there have been other
24 incidences where MI5 and MI6 officers have done things
25 independently well outside of the control of
the organisation. I don't think it is something that
2 happens regularly and I don't think it could ever happen
3 nowadays.
4 Q. In relation to those days -- and we are talking about
5 the 1990s as opposed to since 2000 -- if an MI5
6 officer -- and if there is an objection, please say --
7 if a MI5 officer or an MI6 officer felt that what was
8 happening in the United Kingdom or elsewhere was in
9 the interests of the United Kingdom and was subversive,
10 undermining the state or the Monarchy, that might
11 generate discussion about what to do about it, mightn't
12 it, then?
13 A. I think that is possibly the case, yes. I think that is
14 the case, yes.
15 Q. Once again it might range across a number of options.
16 It might not be a car crash in order to murder; it could
17 be a car crash in order to frighten. That is another
18 possibility, another option, isn't it?
19 A. Well, I think that we are getting into speculation.
20 It is a possibility but, you know, it is speculation.
21 At the time in MI6 I think there was not as strict
22 control over their activities as there is now and that
23 is all I can really say on that matter.
24 Q. Very well. What I want to ask you now, turning from
25 that issue -- that is the plan or proposal -- I want to
ask you about the issue of Henri Paul. Once again, you
2 have been asked about your present recollections in
3 relation to that. I want to summarise it so that you
4 can look at the documents if you wish, but when you were
5 first reflecting on this matter, there were certain
6 features that stood out in your mind and, as
7 I understand it, still do, about the person, whoever
8 it was, that you were reading about in a file.
9 Firstly, he was French; is that right?
10 A. That is correct, yes.
11 Q. Secondly, he worked at the Ritz in Paris; is that right?
12 A. That is correct, yes.
13 Q. Thirdly, perhaps in your case most importantly because
14 of your interests, he had an interest in flying?
15 A. That is correct, yes.
16 Q. Now, looking back, do you have any doubt about those
17 features, even now?
18 A. Now, look, I cannot remember very well at all.
19 I remember having written that. It is fixed very, very
20 strongly in my mind, so it is certainly still fixed very
21 strongly in my mind. I can say that.
22 Q. Now, just in relation to that person, you mentioned
23 today a P file. Assuming nothing has been shredded, if
24 one was trying to locate a file that might have this
25 information, what are the files that one might be
looking for? Would they be headed in a particular way
2 in the days before computerised files?
3 A. Before computerised files it was an absolute labyrinth
4 of cross-referenced files. A lot of it actually
5 depended upon the fantastic memory of the clerical staff
6 who worked in the filing cabinet system who remembered
7 which files were which and the way they were
8 cross-referenced.
9 Before the days of computers it was a phenomenally
10 difficult thing to try to keep track of all the
11 information that MI6 had on institutions, on people, on
12 operations. Nowadays of course it is all done on
13 computers so it is much easier.
14 Q. Now, what is accepted -- and we have heard quite a lot
15 of evidence here so it is not a problem -- is one would
16 expect the security services to have a relationship with
17 the head of security at a large hotel. So there is
18 nothing controversial in that, is there?
19 A. No. In our training we were -- actually, this is what
20 we were told, the security heads of hotel were people
21 we should try to target on overseas operations because
22 they were very useful people.
23 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: I think now might be a convenient
24 time for a break.
25 MR MANSFIELD: We perhaps could have the lunch break.
LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: We could have the lunch break.
2 That would be one way of dealing with it. We did start
3 at half past nine this morning. Which would be more
4 convenient from your point of view?
5 MR MANSFIELD: Either, but I think having the lunch break
6 now might be --
7 LORD JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: Very well. Mr Tomlinson, we are
8 going to break off for the lunch break now and we will
9 resume at 25 minutes to 2. I hope that is not
10 inconvenient for you.
11 A. No, that is okay.
12 (12.35 pm)
13 (The short adjournment)
14

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