In 1980, journalist John Fullerton sat down for lunch in London with members of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), better known as MI6. The spooks asked the restless reporter to name five cities where he would like to work. He scrawled the answers unhesitatingly on a paper napkin.
“The top one was Peshawar in Pakistan,” he told Declassified, explaining his desire to move near the turbulent Afghan border. “The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan but I couldn’t find ways to be a freelancer out there. There were no journalists covering it. Everyone had left Kabul. So I wanted to cover the war and that’s how SIS employed me.”
He had been on good terms with SIS for many years already, after a chance encounter with Nicholas Elliott, one of the agency’s high fliers. Elliott, who famously confronted the KGB double agent Kim Philby, had just retired as an SIS director when he spotted an article by Fullerton exposing a power struggle between the police and military in apartheid South Africa.
Fullerton grew up in Cape Town, rising to night news editor on the Cape Times before migrating back to the UK, the country of his birth. After checking he was not a mole for the apartheid regime’s Bureau of State Security, British intelligence eventually took him on as a “contract labourer”, a cheaper option than a permanent SIS officer position.
“They employed quite a lot of these contract labourers, many from military backgrounds,” Fullerton commented. “SIS had gone through a period of retrenchment in the 1970s and early 80s and it had shrunk. From having three fully staffed stations in Latin America it went to having none.”
This all changed under Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who received informal advice on espionage from Elliott. “She took a great interest in foreign affairs and intelligence and she tried to beef it all up,” Fullerton remarked, adding that her Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington was eager to get “scenes of Afghans fighting communists onto television screens.”
Hellbound and Down 