FOUR

The UNIT Dossier

The United Nations Intelligence Taskforce is a covert paramilitary organisation which operates in plain view of the public, yet seems to arouse no suspicion. It is funded in the United Kingdom by the British taxpayer, yet is directly linked to the United Nations. It draws its troops from the regular British armed forces, yet seems to have no liaison with NATO or the objectives of NATO. And it has been involved with most of the great crises to face Britain in the past five years while remaining virtually anonymous.

You will rarely, if ever, see the name UNIT published in any newspaper report, nor hear it broadcast by any radio station or television network. This intelligence taskforce seems to operate from the shadows of British society, while the repercussions of its actions have affected every man, woman and child in the country.

Origins: the Intrusion Counter Measures Group

UNIT has its roots in the Intrusion Counter Measures Group, which was formed in 1961. The ICMG was charged with the task of protecting the UK from covert actions by hostile powers, and with mounting intelligence operations against such a threat. The person given the job of making this role a realistic and attainable goal was Group Captain Ian 'Chunky' Gilmore, seconded from the newly formed Royal Air Force Regiment.

A no-nonsense forces man, Gilmore had spent the war flying missions over enemy territories. He had witnessed the obliteration bombing of Dresden and tried to push it to the back of his mind. Those who served with him say he believed in Queen and country, and in doing what was right. A stiff upper lip and a trusty service revolver could see you through most crises. An authority figure and pure Establishment, he was sometimes a figure of fun amongst his men who christened him 'Chunky' for no reason that was apparent to Gilmore himself. Tall and upright, he maintained a well-trimmed flyer's moustache and was never to be found with a button out of place or unpolished on his uniform.

Gilmore spent most of 1962 and 1963 preparing his troops for the unknown and drafting in certain specialists to assist the ICMG, using the Peacetime Emergency Powers Act when necessary. Among those he hand-picked to aid him was Professor Rachel Jensen. Hardly known outside the scientific community, Jensen is only now being recognised as one of the leading figures of her time.

Part of the Cambridge Group, she worked with Turing on code breaking and ciphers during the Second World War. Later she moved to the British Rocket Group where pioneering work was being done on propulsion systems and rocket guidance arrays. Then, in November 1963, Jensen was pulled out of Cambridge and forced to travel to London to join the ICMG as senior scientific adviser.

Her autobiography, The Electrical Dreamer, makes plain her dislike for all things military, so it is doubtful she went to the ICMG without protest. But the same volume makes no mention of her time with Gilmore's group and is curiously vague about her reasons for retiring in 1964 while still in her early forties.

The Shoreditch Incident

A major factor in her decision seems to have been an event called the Shoreditch Incident in the few declassified secret documents that even mention it. This crisis is one of the few events in recent history that can be traced directly to the formation of UNIT.

The Shoreditch Incident took place just one week after the assassination of America's President John F. Kennedy. As a bullet blew open his head in Dallas, Texas, it was 12.30 p.m. on Friday 22 November 1963. Thousands of miles away at that moment in England, it was a dark, foggy evening with winter drawing in fast. In the Shoreditch suburb of East London, two school teachers left the local Coal Hill School together.

They told a colleague they were going to visit one of their pupils, Susan Foreman, at her home address of 76 Totters Lane. The pair subsequently disappeared, as did the fifteen-year-old girl. Police investigations at the time showed the address at Totters Lane to be an abandoned junkyard. Later checks found that the girl's references and reports from previous schools were all clever forgeries. There was doubt that Foreman was even her true surname. The police suspected that she had adopted the name from the junkyard she claimed as her home address. Susan had only been at the school a few months and seemed to have had difficulty making friends. Those other pupils she did talk to described her afterwards as strange, but remembered she had mentioned living with her grandfather.