Chapters (58)
- Cover
- Also by Oliver Harris
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- FORTY-THREE
- FORTY-FOUR
- FORTY-FIVE
- FORTY-SIX
- FORTY-SEVEN
- FORTY-EIGHT
- FORTY-NINE
- FIFTY
- FIFTY-ONE
- FIFTY-TWO
- FIFTY-THREE
- FIFTY-FOUR
- FIFTY-FIVE
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
‘I can make a call. I know a guy building retail units, big box. Tesco’s moving in.’
‘Is it politically stable?’
‘It’s a dictatorship. You don’t get much more stable than that.’
SEVEN
I picked up a Zipcar Audi from Finsbury Circus, bought a black baseball cap from the Runners Need store beside it, curved the brim and pulled it down towards my eyes. The last address I had for Joanna would take me into dangerous territory, though you wouldn’t know it to look at it.
In a sleepy corner of south-east England, a few miles north of Luton and south of Bedford, you find the village of Shefford. There are flower baskets, a winding road past a Norman church, tea shops with white tablecloths, B&Bs with ivy on the walls. Drive out of the village, past fields of barley, and you get to tall fences and razor wire, with cameras every couple of hundred metres. Signs stuck into the ground behind the chain-link warn No Trespassing, but they don’t tell you it’s government property.
Shefford Park was one of the most classified sites in the UK. It housed the experimental wing of the intelligence services. That included technology, but also psychological research. Since 2002 it has housed the Psychological Operations Group, which drew on MI6, GCHQ and the British Army. After the first Gulf war, analysis revealed that a large number of Iraqi surrenders and desertions could be attributed to coalition psyops activity – leaflet campaigns, loudspeaker teams, even a radio station. This success led the UK to create a permanent capability. They took over an old airbase at the back of Shefford previously used by the US Air Force.
The facility was positioned off high-speed roads that didn’t let you get much of a look – at what looked, anyway, like any technology campus: modern blocks of beige brick and turquoise glass, arranged around the original seventeenth-century manor house.
It had been acquired by the Foreign Office after the Second World War in order to establish what it described as a ‘listening post’, a phrase that usually concealed more than it revealed. The radomes and radio masts had gone, replaced by less visible technology. While Bletchley, a few miles away, eventually gained the plaudits, Shefford was happy to stay in the shadows. Which was how you knew somewhere was still important.
It made sense combining technological research and psychological operations. The world moved on from leaflets and loudspeakers at breakneck speed. More recent work included jihadi DVDs that placed trackers on users’ computers, and cyberattacks on Islamic State websites, replacing bomb-making instructions with cupcake recipes. Joanna was proud of that one. But that kind of operation barely scratched the surface of what went on at Shefford. There was more to it – sides I didn’t hear about – so I was never quite sure what Joanna was working on.