Simon Conway's Blog

Simon Conway
Jude Lyon, an officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service, more commonly known as MI6, stands, straight-backed and martial, before an expanse of raw canvas at least four meters on each side, in a high-ceilinged room in the National Gallery of Scotland. He is holding a rolled exhibition brochure in his right hand that he taps unselfconsciously against his thigh. The brochure has a quote from Robert Louis Stevenson’s honeymoon memoir The Silverado Squatters on the flyleaf: “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.”
Jude finds the paintings strangely unsettling: they have the foreboding quality of a dream or a memory. The artist is internationally famous but, if you believe the brochure, notoriously difficult to pin down - a man without borders. He was born in Edinburgh but his childhood was in the USA, Jamaica and India. His family moved frequently. He went to nine different schools. Now he divides his time between Jamaica and Canada, where he has a teaching post. There is a quote from him that says: “I’m always foreign. But then who’s from anywhere?”
Jude’s immigrant provenance is equally exotic and fragmentary, shot through with competing veins of conformity and criminality, from a cigar-chomping bank robber for a grandfather to a General given to eccentricity and dark moods for a father.
For all that he is clubbable and well groomed, his curriculum vitae a whistle-stop tour of the establishment, there is something solitary and non-conformist about Jude. His desire for service is tempered by an increasing distrust of those in authority. And he carries within himself a reckless desire for truth that operates regardless of a quieter voice that struggles to plead caution.


The painting that he has been standing in front of for the last ten minutes is the most disturbing and, because Jude has reached a cross roads in his life and has an unquiet mind, he has been struggling to understand why.
It’s a huge oil painting with, according to the blurb, the power of an ancient symbol. It shows a spindly-legged man with raised almost transparent wings standing on a darkened foreshore with untold depths behind him. The receding tide is lambent with foam and the sky is a deep mauve with only a narrow strip of lighter blue on the horizon, hinting at the approach of dawn.
Abruptly Jude realises what it is that the painting reminds him of. Abu Ghraib. It’s as if the painting is a negative, or an x-ray, of the infamous image of a hooded figure-on-a box in a black poncho with his arms raised like bat wings. One of the cache of amateur digital snapshots of anonymous hooded prisoners, and US military policemen mugging and grinning for the camera, that marked the moment when the ideals of Eighteenth Century America foundered in the sand. When the public began to accept what they already knew, that all the pretty talk of freedom and modernisation in Iraq disguised naked aggression and deep-seated cultural contempt; the realisation that the west was now mired in a hellish conflict with no end in sight; a conflict that, more than a decade later, continues to grow and mutate, infecting entire regions of the globe.
A leather-gloved hand cups Jude’s right buttock and gently squeezes.
‘A penny for your thoughts?’
Yulia is a head shorter than him, even in her beloved Louboutins, but her copper-flecked eyes are lit with fire, her smile is voracious and her voice is husky and low.
‘Daydreaming,’ he says.
‘Come to bed.’

In 2012, I found myself stranded in Kabul during a ferocious snowstorm and the idea came to me of telling a story with classic Cold War espionage tropes knocked about and re-worked in a contemporary setting - Moscow Rules in the Hindu Kush - with the Durand line, the border that divides Pakistan and Afghanistan, as arbitrary a division as the Berlin Wall, and the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), Pakistan’s shadowy hydra-headed spying agency, as duplicitous a foe as the KGB.

There was a fad around the time the Soviet Union collapsed to assert that the spy novel as we understood it was over. The enemy that emerged from the cauldron of Afghanistan over the next decade was too alien and asymmetric, and its adherents too unlike us, frankly too Stone Age, for it to be portrayed as a game of chess between equals. But a look behind them to who is working the levers of the terrorist groups reveals a much more recognisable adversary. The ISI is an organisation born of the partition of India, run by a three-star general in a uniform with crowns and pips that would not look out of place in our own Ministry of Defence.

The Cold War may not have turned hot and scorched the plains of Western Europe, but elsewhere across the globe it burned brightly and with the utmost savagery. I know this because I have spent much of my professional career as a deminer clearing the debris of other people’s largely pointless wars. Few have had more devastating consequences than the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. In the eighties and early nineties, American and Saudi money was funnelled through the ISI to any Mujahideen group willing to kill Russian conscripts. Insufficient oversight was maintained over the Pakistani distribution of American largesse and the most radicalised and ill-disciplined Islamopaths received the lion’s share of the money. We live with the blowback, from the plunging planes on 9/11 to the inexorable rise of Islamic State.

The story of my novel The Agent Runner centres on an attempt by MI6 to discredit a Pakistani spymaster – Javid Aslam Khan, also know as the Hidden Hand – who is one of the key members of Pakistan’s Invisible Government, a cabal of “retired” military officers that form a much more powerful counterpart to Pakistan’s democratically elected one. In the book, Downing Street believes that Khan is standing in the way of a smooth exit from Afghanistan and in its wisdom decides that a nudge is required.

The means of Khan’s downfall will be Edward Henry Malik a disgraced former MI6 Agent Runner. British by birth, Asian and Muslim by descent and agnostic by conviction, Ed Malik finds it difficult to explain why he feels such a strong allegiance to Britain, perhaps because he finds it difficult to define what it means to be British. Dismissed from MI6 for assaulting Kabul’s CIA station chief following the death of a key informant, Ed returns to his roots in the immigrant enclave of Whitechapel in London’s East End. From there he embarks on a vengeful journey to Pakistan that takes him to the teeming city of Lahore and the anarchic tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

I believe that Pakistan, with its out-of-control intelligence services and nuclear weapons, its radicalised madrassas and failing civil institutions, its terrorist training camps and unregulated arms markets is a viable candidate for the most dangerous country on earth. The Agent Runner carves a violent arc across its landscape. I wanted to write a book that lifted the veil on the pretence that Pakistan is our ally in the war on terror, to reveal the duplicity and betrayal at the heart of the relationship between Pakistan and the west. Until we better understand the true nature of our relationship with Pakistan, we will never comprehend why our hopes for Afghanistan could not be fulfilled.

Britain’s most recent intervention in Afghanistan will not end as badly as the First Afghan War of 1842, with eighteen thousand slaughtered in the winter snow during the disastrous retreat from Kabul, but it is becoming clear that Britain’s fourth war in Afghanistan will end with as few political gains as the first three. After more than a decade of questionable conflicts in the name of homeland security modern scepticism of interventionism is stronger than ever. We no longer accept the bold claims of governments and we have come to realise that dirty tactics often underlie the quest for security. There is a moral vacancy on all sides. Even our own intelligence services seem to have morphed into a dodgy-dossier producing propaganda arm of mediocre modern government. In such circumstances, there is plenty of room for the morally compromised world of spy fiction.


I wanted to write an espionage novel about revenge and betrayal, about a friendship stretched to breaking point against the battered landscapes of Afghanistan and post-7/7 Britain.
I had the idea of setting the novel at a very specific time, the summer of 2005, when Iraq was on the brink of all out civil war and the city of New Orleans lay in ruins. When it seemed that we were all vulnerable to sudden and violent acts. I was also mindful of the four hundred year anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, the bungled assassination attempt on King James I, and the parallels that it raised. It seems likely that the conspiracy was infiltrated from the very beginning, and the Seventeenth Century intelligence services used the unraveling of the plot as a pretext to consolidate their grip on the country. Terror was used as pretext for a power grab.
The genesis of the plot of A Loyal Spy came out of research trips that I took to Peshawar and the tribal areas of Pakistan in 2005 and to Afghanistan in the following year. I was interested in the intelligence failures that had led to 9/11 and the conduct of the so called War on Terror. In Bajaur in the tribal areas, the Government Agent Pir Wazir, whose brother had recently been killed by the Pakistan Army for sheltering Al Qaeda members, told me to pass a message to President George W Bush and Pope John Paul II - "stop bombing us with your drones". In Kabul I stayed with Chris Alexander the former Canadian Ambassador to Afghanistan, then serving as the Deputy Special Representative to the UN Secretary General, and his wife Hedvig Boserup, an old friend from my landmine clearing days in Abkhazia. I stayed in their house in the Wazir Akhbar Khan neighbourhood. In my conversations with Afghans and expatriates I was struck by the extent to which Pakistan, in particular it's shadowy intelligence service the ISI, was blamed for Afghanistan's past and current woes.
The ISI was responsible for channeling billions of dollars of Saudi and American funds to the most unsavoury and extremist elements of the mujahedin during the Soviet occupation, including Gulbuddin Hekmatyr (blowback abounds in Afghanistan - Hekmatyr now runs the fastest growing insurgent group in the country). After the Soviet withdrawal, the mujahedin groups turned their ISI provided weapons on each other, unleashing a devastating civil war. They fought over the rubble of Kabul. They seeded the city with mines. Eventually the ISI abandoned them for a new, even more extreme Islamist movement rising in the south: The Taliban.
To reflect this I created the character Brigadier Javid Aslam Khan, known as ‘The Hidden Hand’, and made him head of the Afghan Bureau of the ISI. It was Khan who backed the 'islamopath' Hekmatyr against the Soviets, it was Khan who facilitated the carnage of the civil war, and it was Khan who created and nurtured the Taliban.
Gathering material and conducting interviews, I was surprised to learn of a rift between Mullah Omar and Osama Bin Laden in late 1998. Early the next year the Taliban confiscated Bin Laden's satellite phone and there was a shoot out between Bin Laden's bodyguards and the Taliban squad assigned to watch over them. Mullah Omar gave an interview with Newsweek in which he said of Bin Laden that 'contact with him has been broken.' It seemed possible that the Taliban were open to somebody ridding them of their embarrassing guest. I thought what if the British had a go? I learned that at that time Bin Laden was in eastern Afghanistan, scouting the location of a new home for his family and followers at an old Soviet Collective farm.
In a Loyal Spy, a British military intelligence unit known as the Afghan Guides ambush a vehicle convoy in the Kabul River Gorge that they believe is Bin Laden’s. In the aftermath of the attack it becomes clear that they have been double-crossed. Instead they have killed a senior CIA officer. It was easy to imagine the cover-up that would follow and the lengths those who perpetrated it would have to go to keep it secret.
Trips to Liberia, Guinea Bissau and the ‘liberated zone’ of Western Sahara added further material and settings. I learned from Greg Campbell’s excellent book Blood Diamonds that al-Qaeda bought several million dollars worth of diamonds in Sierra Leone in the months leading up to 9/11. I had the location for the reunion of my central characters the British spy Jonah Said and the former school friend who betrayed him, the Jordanian double agent, Nor ed-Din. (There are interesting real-life parallels here – the double agent Human al-Balawi who killed 7 CIA agents in Afghanistan in December 2009 was, like Nor ed-Din, from Zarqa a small industrial town in Jordon).
Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s book Hubris provided details about the Anabasis Programme, a secret project based in the Nevada desert to train Iraqi defectors and eventually insert them behind enemy lines in the build up to the Iraq War. I imagined a secret buried within a secret – Eschatos - an elaborate charade by Nor to rob al-Qaeda of diamonds with Jonah as an unwitting dupe. The headlong rush towards war in Iraq was fertile ground for conspiracy theorists and millenarians - my villain, Richard Winthrop, is a classic American ‘neo-con’ with a grand vision for the world matched only by his rapacious greed.
The first chapters of A Loyal Spy that I wrote were in the section called Hijra:flight. It was July 2005 and I was stranded by the monsoon in the Sudanese town of Damazin in Blue Nile State. I began writing about Miranda. She was the woman that Jonah gave up spying for and had now abandoned. She is living on a remote Scottish island. When the police come looking for Jonah and it becomes clear that he is being framed as a terrorist she is prompted to go after him. I knew that the conspirators in the 1605 Gunpowder plot had been sheltered by several strong willed Catholic women as they travelled across Britain and I imagined a similar journey for Miranda. She seeks shelter on the Isle of Barra with Flora, the daughter of the spymaster Monteith, and in London with the journalist Saira, a former lover and Somali exile. I imagined the arc of her journey running parallel to Jonah’s and that their stories would converge and meet at the end in the Thames Estuary.
Nor’s trip to Peshawar and the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan is loosely based on my own experiences there in 2005. For the chapter set in Iraq I relied heavily on John Robb’s brilliant book Brave New War, which describes the terrorist “market place” and how the same technology that has enabled globalization also allows terrorists to join forces and carry out small, inexpensive actions – like sabotaging an oil pipeline – that generate a huge return.
The story of the SS Richard Montgomery, the second world war era freighter that is lying in shallow water in the Thames Estuary, with a couple of thousand tons of bombs on board was first told to me by a friend who was part of the dive crew contracted by the Ministry of Defence to conduct a survey of the wreck. Experts do not know what the size of the tidal wave would be if the explosives on the Montgomery mass-detonated at high tide during a storm surge but it would likely be catastrophic. As Winthrop says in A Loyal Spy, ‘Up to now the only thing that has stood between London and total annihilation is a failure of imagination on the part of the terrorists.’
In A Loyal Spy I have sought to highlight the current and historical vulnerability of modern cities to acts of mass destruction, and the increasing sophistication of modern terrorist cells, whilst at the same time warning that as long as the burgeoning security industry and their partners in the intelligence services are the main beneficiaries of the War on Terror there will be little incentive for it to come to an end.

In the 1920s, Stalin was on a crusade to turn the whole world upside down, to build it anew from the ashes of Imperial Russia. He said: "I want a living war machine, a new and invincible human being, insensitive to pain and indifferent to the quality of food". The scientist tasked with achieving this goal was Professor Ilya Ivanov, a specialist in artificial insemination. He set out to create human-ape hybrids by fusing the sperm of chimpanzees with the eggs of teenage girls from the Soviet Pioneers. The attempt failed and in 1930 Ivanov was exiled to the barren steppes of Kazakhstan.

In 1995, 65 years later, Western intelligence analysts got their first look inside the Soviet biological weapons facility at Stepnogorsk in Kazakhstan, and what they found there astonished them. Stepnogorsk was the largest in a network of secret cities, production plants and centres that developed germs as weapons. It was a huge complex with forty thousand staff but it wasn't listed on any map. It was the Soviet equivalent of the Manhattan project--the American program that produced the atomic bomb--but by the mid-90s the base was in a terrible state of disrepair. However, inspectors did see evidence of a top-secret KGB programme called "Progress" that had been hidden within the bio-weapons program, like a doll within a doll.

The man responsible for "Progress" was Alexander Ilyanovich Markoff, grandson of the disgraced scientist Ilya Ivanov. The grandson had succeeded where his ancestor had failed, using specially adapted viruses to insert combinations of human genes into ape embryos. He had created baboon-human variants by mixing human genes with those of the Hamadryas baboon, the most violent of all the primates, and created bonobo-humans variants using the genes of the bonobo chimpanzee, the most sexually promiscuous of the apes. Markoff's vision was of thousands of cloned bonobo variants for the People's Pleasure Palaces and hundreds of thousands of cloned baboon variants for the People's Army.

"Progress" did not survive the anarchy that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Markoff and a few of his test subjects fled to the Caucasus Mountains, where they remained hidden until the 2008 Russian/Georgia war.

Threatened by the Russian military and the Russian mob, Markoff turned in desperation to the Americans and offered his services to the Department of Defense. He became the chief scientist for the Pentagon's three billion dollar "metabolically dominant soldier" programme.

As a huge snowstorm engulfs Washington DC in early 2010, a late night jogger in Rock Creek Park discovers the brutally beaten body of a once beautiful young woman. She is lying just yards from the palatial home of Senator John Cannon--one of the most powerful and wealthy men in America.

There is something not right about the dead woman.

Uncovering the answer to her identity will lead homicide detective Michael Freeman into a nightmarish realm where big business, organised crime and the hidden parts of government vie for control...

Hurry. Grab the reader by the throat and force feed. Use good ingredients, a strong plot and true-to-life characters. Be original. Bear in mind that the best lies are sandwiched between truths: lurch between believable calamities. Keep hurrying. Punish your characters in unusual ways. Write interesting words rather than dull ones. Keep your chapters short. Now and then ignore your own rules. Remember Von Moltke - 'no plan survives contact with the enemy.' Improvise! Finally, as with all lying, do it with bravado. It's a leap of faith. You might just get away with it.

Human beings that feel no pain and can do without food and sleep for days on end. Sounds improbable? Not to the people at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency who already gave us Arpanet, the network of networks that we known of as the Internet. Their priority is to prevent human performance from becoming the weakest link on the future battlefield and they are likely to create super-humans in the process.

Until recently, Dr Joe Bielitzski, the manager of DARPA’s multi-billion dollar Metabolically Dominant Soldier program, measured the potential worth of his projects on whether or not the International Olympic Committee would ban them. Mitochondria for instance, they produce energy to power cells. He believed that by modifying the thirty-seven genes of cellular mitochondria and increasing their efficiency at creating energy, he could create soldiers with the endurance of sled dogs who could run as fast as Usain Bolt for fifteen minutes on one breath.

The mixture of bad press, post-crash budget cuts and hard reality on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan did for the Metabolically Dominant Soldier program. Approximately $4billion in annual research funding was shifted away from blue-sky projects to better drones and defenses against roadside bombs. But the consensus amongst military futurists is that this is a temporary hiatus and we are kidding ourselves if we think that the military has lost its interest in human enhancement just because its been re-labeled as “optimization”.

Some projects continue but under different names: Regenesis is now Restorative Injury Repair. Ask yourself why it is that if you cut off the tail of a tadpole it will re-grow but if you cut off the leg of an adult frog it won’t? The answer is because certain genetic signals have been switched off. The challenge for scientists is to switch them back on – to reactivate a mass of undifferentiated cells called a blastema, also called a regeneration bud – and re-grow blown-off arms and legs. It shouldn’t be that difficult - after all we build human beings from a few cells in wombs all the time. The Paralympics may have to be cancelled.

When it comes to creating genetically enhanced humans, animals offer the clearest way ahead. As Dr Markoff, the DARPA funded scientist in my novel Rock Creek Park, says in his strangled syntax: “How come whales and dolphins don't sleep? If they sleep they drown. They switch off parts of their brain is answer. How come? What about infrared and ultraviolet vision of spiders and snakes, detection of magnetism of birds, sonar of bats and acute smell of dogs. How come? It's all because of genes.”

The long-term objective of genetic enhancement is germ-line engineering (the modification of egg or sperm) and the arrival of safe, reliable Germline technology will signal the beginning of human self-design. Pioneering work in in-vitro fertilization (IVF) is already paving the way. Procedures that influence the germline are routine in labs working on small mammals; we now have “super-muscled "Schwarzenegger rats”, that live longer and recover from injuries quicker. And mice aren’t so different to us; eighty-five per cent of their gene sequence is the same as ours. It’s only a matter of time before such technology is utilized by the military and inevitably it will then seep into the world of sport.

It’s not only DARPA that is at the forefront of such research; there are more than forty state-of-the-art IVF clinics in China, most of them built with military assistance – some have begun to wonder why China, with its teeming population and its aggressive control of family size, its eugenics and sterilization laws, is so concerned about human fertility. Are they putting in place the infrastructure of widespread genetic enhancement? The raised eyebrows over Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen’s stunning final lap in the 400m medley will be as nothing compared to what may be coming.

Sir Roger Bannister, who broke the four-minute-mile in 1954, has been sharply criticized for observing that: “black splinters and black athletes in general all seem to have certain anatomical advantages”. It is a fact that all of world’s best hundred-meter sprinters and evrey world record holder since 1968 are of West African ancestry. If, as seems likely, a genetic link is established then it is only a matter of time before someone isolates the genes and then cuts and pastes them into an alternative germline. One day we may see Chinese sprinters enhanced with West African genes. As James Watson, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA, famously put it: "No one really has the guts to say it, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we?"

In future games genetic testing may become as prevalent as drug testing and if the Olympics are to survive we may have to make some difficult decisions about what it means to be human.

Their eyes shine like night predators in the cramped confines of the stealth helicopter. Among their many genetic enhancements, each soldier has an additional tissue layer at the back of the eye, giving them the night vision of a fox.

There are ten units in the squad: eight metabolically dominant humans that can go without sleep for a week and two non-Asimov compliant robots. The soldiers wear lightweight composite armour, their chest webbing packed with high-powered mini hydrogen cartridges for powering their weapons and comms. They are armed with long-range rifle systems fitted with ballistic computers and recoil-less submachine guns, as well as non-lethal weaponry that uses electromagnetic radiation waves to create a burning sensation in the target.

The officer in tactical charge of the operation is connected to the action via a firewall-protected laser link that relays instant information to her directly from each soldier’s goggles. She is situated on the command and control platform, a modified Boeing 747 circling at 10,000 feet. Onboard software programs integrate data into patterns that allow her to make rapid decisions. The Generals at Central Command in in Tampa Florida also watch in real-time; edited footage is relayed to the White House situation room.

The drone swarm confirms that the location is secure; the chopper hones in on the infrared beacon put out by the Pashtun guide. As the soldiers exit through the loading ramp, a ripple moves the length of the squad, the colour changing fibers in their camouflage clothing adapting to local conditions. They fan out as the robots take point position – each one fitted with UV and infrared sensors, chemical and biological detection systems, and a chain gun capable of firing thousands of rounds a second from multiple barrels. Twenty years ago over 50% of battlefield casualties were sustained on first contact with the enemy. The point position was the most unpopular, but now, thankfully, it is a job for robots.

They begin the long march to the target. Remote physiological status monitoring allows the tactical officer to measure the exact physical status of her soldiers, including the rate at which they burn their fat. Sustaining a 24/7 soldier requires 12, 00 calories a day, the equivalent to forty-six power bars. There is no way of getting that much food into a soldier, nor for them to carry it. Rather their cellular mitochondria has been tweaked to improve its efficiency at converting fat into energy.

The decision to deploy a Special Forces team rather than simply using a thermo-baric bomb had been taken to minimize the risk of civilian casualties. The cave complex that houses the target, a suspected bio-weapons factory, is located beneath a Pashtun village in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. The decision to initiate the raid was taken after a National Security Agency computer trolling communications networks in South Waziristan picked up a conversation between two enemy commanders in which one of them had used the Pashto term Kewai, meaning “smallpox”. The advisers were overheard discussing an ethical dilemma that had recently come to the fore. Was it permissible under the laws of Islam to use a Kewai device?

As they approach the target, the airspace above the squad rapidly stacks up. In addition to the tiny surveillance drones, there are now larger unmanned weapons platforms carrying precision-guided missiles, as well as two stealth fighters providing top cover. Further security is provided by a lumbering 70 year old B52 bomber packed with the latest JDAM smart-bombs equipped with artificial intelligence, said to be capable of beating a Grand Master at chess.

The tactical officer orders the assault. Breaching explosions and zips of tracer stain the night-vision images captured overhead. The squad moves room to room throughout the pitch-black cave complex, killing enemy combatants. A soldiers is hit by an enemy bullet, but escapes unharmed: in response to the rapid drop in blood pressure, his FRAMR (Feedback Regulated Automatic Molecular Release) implant delivers therapeutic drugs directly to his bloodstream.

It is all over in minutes. It is now time for Sensitive Site Exploitation, the squad moving through the cave complex looking for items of intelligence value. They cannot afford to miss anything. Technology is a double-edged sword. On one hand it ensures the US military retains full spectrum dominance on the battlefield, but on the other it empowers the destructive ideologies of those ranged against them. A self-replicating pathogen built in a laboratory like this could destroy civilization in weeks.