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The spying game that suddenly turned real

Just my luck," I thought, as the tall blonde sat down. For the first time in my life I get to sit next to somebody interesting on the plane, and I'm stuck with an alias name and a fictional background.

"Probably a trick anyway," I thought. Dell and Long, my training officers, had no doubt arranged for undercover women to sit next to all of us on our flights, hoping that one of us would let something about our real lives slip out.

The girl smiled: "I'm Rebecca. Are you staying long in Rome?"

"I'm Dan . . . I'm a historian, writing a thesis on the contrasting approaches to urban reconstruction after the second world war in the UK and Italy."

I took out a book on post-war redevelopment. We sat in silence for the rest of the flight from Heathrow to Fiumicino airport.

I was on the last test of our training programme, an exercise hosted by Sismi, the Italian secret service.

Dell had briefed us that we were to imagine that we were employed in the section which works against IRA operations outside the United Kingdom. Our imaginary mission was to go to Italy and debrief Apocalypse, a mole within the IRA. We were to write up the CX, then pass it to Eric, a courier, who would hand us further instructions.

My destination was Velletri, 20 miles southeast of Rome. It had not been easy to devise a cover story for visiting such an unremarkable town. The only reference to it in the Italian tourist office was of heavy bombing in the war.

Every piece of paper in my briefcase, every dry-cleaning slip or receipt in my wallet, every item of clothing matched the legend that I was a Daniel Noonan, a post-doctoral history student.

Once in Velletri I tried to immerse myself completely in my false identity. My research had revealed where some of the bombs had landed, so I inspected the repairs and reconstruction, noting everything in copious detail.

I arrived at the Bar Venezia to meet Apocalypse 10 minutes before he was due, ordered a cappuccino and sat down at the furthest table from the bar, my back to the wall. The only other customer, an old man, sipped a brandy at the bar. I pulled out The Economist, the all-clear sign for Apocalypse.

I spotted him just before he entered the cafe. In his mid-forties, thick-set, neat short hair, dressed in a fleece jacket, jeans and Timberland boots. The clothing gave him away as a Brit.

He brought his coffee over to my table. "Do you mind if I take a seat?" he greeted me cautiously.

Dell had trained us to build a rapport with an agent. "Nice boots," I said. "Did you buy them here?"

"Aye, excellent piece of kit these, can't fault 'em."

Apocalypse briefed me that a contact in the Italian mafia had access to Soviet weaponry through the Libyan government. Apocalypse had negotiated the purchase of 20 SA-14 anti-aircraft missiles which would be shipped in a tramp steamer to the Irish coast.

Apocalypse promised to get the name of the ship, its departure date and the exact date it would arrive in Ireland. We arranged to meet again two days later.

I scurried back to my hotel where, using a Pentel pen, I wrote up the intelligence in block capitals in the standard format of a CX report. At the top, a brief one-line summary of the intelligence. Next, the date of the meeting at which the information had been acquired. Then a brief description of the source. Then the text of the intelligence. It all fitted onto one page of A4 water-soluble paper.

Putting the sheet face up on the bedside locker, I laid a sheet of ordinary paper over it, then The Theory of Post-War Urban Redevelopment. Five minutes was enough for the imprint transfer. The water-soluble paper went into the toilet.

I folded the A4 sheet into a manila envelope, taped this into a copy of the Gazzetta dello Sport and hurried off to meet Eric, the courier.

He was sitting at the Cafe Leoni's crowded bar in a pre-arranged dark jacket and red tie. In front of him was a nearly finished glass of beer and a folded copy of the Gazzetta dello Sport. Squeezing into a gap between him and another customer, I placed my own copy next to his and ordered a coffee. Wordlessly, Eric picked up my paper and left. I left 15 minutes later with his newspaper under my arm. Only the most acute observer would have noticed the contact.

Eric was waiting for me the following morning in a third cafe, just off the town square. There was an envelope for me in his copy of Gazetta dello Sport.

It contained a plain sheet of A4 paper and a wodge of £50 notes, £1,000 in total. I moistened a ball of cotton wool with the doctored Polo aftershave and applied it to the blank sheet. Script appeared, darkening to a deep purple. It was a message from the Rome station ordering me to accompany Apocalypse to Milan, where his mafia contact wanted to meet him.

I folded the instructions, concertina fashion, into four and stood it in the bathroom sink. Lit at the top, it would burn downwards and make much less smoke than when lit from the bottom. I swilled the ashes down the plughole.

I met Apocalypse again later that afternoon in a cafe behind the church. He handed me three photocopies of specifications for the SA-14s. He also dictated the arrangements for the shipment. I wrote them on a scrap of paper and hid it in my right sock. I guessed that he was loading me with documentation. It reeked of a trap, but the directing staff (DS) of the exercise clearly wanted me to fall for it.

Minutes later we were speeding towards Rome in Apocalypse's hired Fiat Panda. Near the centre of the capital he pulled into a petrol station and left the car to "call his girlfriend".

Using a 500 lire coin, I unscrewed the trim panel from the side of the passenger footwell and stuffed the sheets of information on the SA-14s down the gap.

We had not gone much further when we came upon a carabinieri roadblock. "Shit," exclaimed Apocalypse a little too vehemently. "Documenti," snapped a policeman. Apocalypse shrugged.

The policeman ordered us out of the car. Two other carabinieri started searching the boot. I was not sure if this was a mock arrest or a genuine traffic control. Surely the DS would not plan a mock arrest to this level of detail?

A senior officer snapped: "There are some irregularities . . . You must come with us to the station." They bundled us into the back of separate Alfa-Romeos, carabinieri clambering in either side cradling submachineguns. We hurtled down the autostrada to a carabinieri station where my captors wordlessly dragged me out of the car, escorted me into a large room and pushed me into a chair in front of a substantial steel desk. Four armed guards stood over me.

Another officer walked in wearing civilian clothes. He spoke impeccable English: "I'm sorry to treat you like this, but we have had intelligence that two mafia contacts were making their way up to Milan in a car like yours."

This captain politely questioned me for the next hour, checking through the minutiae of my cover story. He was starting to run out of justification for holding me when a policeman appeared clutching the photocopies I had hidden in the car. The captain turned to me: "They appear to be detailed descriptions of a weapon the mafia have just acquired from Libya."

"I've never seen them before," I said. "They must have been left in the car by the previous hirer."

He snapped his fingers. Two guards frogmarched me back outside. Their grip was vice-like. If these guys were acting, they were doing a good job. One of them gave my head a stealthy bash as he bundled me into a car.

Armed carabinieri climbed in on either side. One blindfolded me, then thrust my head down between my knees, viciously tightening the handcuffs so they bit into my wrists. They dragged me from the car 40 minutes later. I didn't know it, but I was at the carabinieri HQ. The blindfold was pulled away and I found myself in a cell with a bed.

One of the guards released the handcuffs and ordered me to strip. The scrap of paper bearing the details of the arms shipment was still in my right sock.

Leaning on the mattress, I pulled off the sock while hiding the paper between thumb and palm and slipping it under the pillow.

I was handed a pair of grey overalls a size too small, blindfolded and handcuffed face downwards to the bed. I waited for five minutes before moving. There wasn't much slack on the chain of the handcuffs, but by sliding them along the rail of the bedstead I managed to grope for the scrap of paper under the pillow and swallowed it.

It seemed like hours before the door opened again. The guards manhandled me down a corridor, out into welcome fresh air and into another building. I got a whiff of the strong unmistakable smell of stale cigarettes and whisky, indicating that Dell was nearby. The guards forced me into a chair, handcuffed my wrists behind me and pulled the blindfold away.

I was in a room big enough to be an army drill hall. Twenty feet or so in front of me, three interrogators sat behind a long desk on a low stage. In the middle sat an athletic-looking man with jet black hair and a symmetrical handlebar moustache. To his right sat the captain who had interviewed me earlier. To his left sat a dark-haired woman whose heavy wrinkles were explained by the foul-smelling cigarette she was holding.

The three stared at me disdainfully and it felt like minutes before the moustache spoke: "We have intelligence that you are involved in an operation to smuggle weapons from Sicily to the IRA. What have you got to say for yourself?"

"Rubbish. Your intelligence is wrong and you've arrested the wrong person."

The moustache questioned me for 20 minutes or so, cross-examining me on details of my cover. Then it was the wrinkly's turn. It was not going well for them.

The moustache snapped his fingers and the guards dragged me back to my cell. They gave me a glass of water and slice of bread before shackling me onto the bed again. It seemed like four or five hours before they took me back before my interrogators.

"Do you know who I am?" the moustache asked. Without waiting for a reply, he continued: "I am Major Claudio Pagalucca of the airborne carabinieri." He puffed out his chest with pride. "I have three medals won for bravery. Do you know what that means?"

"No, I've not a clue. I'm just an academic - that sort of thing's got nothing to do with me."

Pagalucca looked deflated. The airborne carabinieri are Italy's equivalent of the SAS. Their role is to work against the mafia and they are parachute-trained in order to launch surprise attacks against mafia hideouts in Sicilian valleys.

(I discovered later that Andy Mare had replied to the same question: "Some sort of parachuting aerial traffic warden, is it?" Pagalucca held him in detention for four hours longer than the rest of us.)

By my third session my interrogators had not prised open my story. Pagalucca gave up and only the wrinkly asked a few easy questions. The session lasted less than 10 minutes, so I guessed that they were close to releasing me.

I had not been in my cell for long when the door opened again. The guards pulled off my blindfold, released my handcuffs and handed over the bag containing my clothes. I fumbled for my watch. It showed 5pm, just over 24 hours since the arrest. Once I was dressed, the guards led me out into the evening darkness over to another building and with a friendly smile and a handshake indicated that I should go inside.

Dell, Long, Eric and Apocalypse were all waiting to shake my hand inside the room. "Congratulations," said Dell. "We had to let you out early. We just couldn't pin anything on you." He ushered me over to a trestle table laden with food, beer and wine.

One by one the other students emerged from their captivity to join us round the buffet table and to tell their stories.

Spender had pretended to be a priest. This cover story unravelled when he was asked to say a few prayers and had been unable to recite even the Lord's Prayer in full. Andrew Markham had panicked when he saw the roadblock and threw the papers and the £1,000 out of the moving car, causing chaos on the autostrada.

Terry Forton's cover was as a chorister on a tour of churches in Rome. When Pagalucca asked him to prove his singing prowess, Forton started and did not stop, to Pagalucca's irritation.

Something was still puzzling me about the exercise. Dell was standing on his own in the corner, as ever with a cigarette in one hand and a whisky in the other, rocking gently backwards and forwards with a satisfied smile on his face.

"Jonathan," I said, "where's that pretty blonde you put next to me on the plane? Is she not coming tonight?"

"What girl?" he said, genuinely bemused.

"The girl you put next to me on the plane to test my cover story."

"Nothing to do with us," Dell assured me. "You missed an opportunity there."