The SSD
Definition
North Korea’s State Security Department: the service that planted the cell, furnished the van and the flat above a lock-up garage on the outskirts of Preston, and issues instructions nightly. C08 has Shin reporting to The Supreme Leader and receiving his orders the same way, while his companions sleep; C10 has Emma Flyte establish that the crew were students planted years earlier, working on the SSD’s instructions for the Watering Hole Paper.
The SSD is deliberately kept off the page — an address, a leader, a phrase about the snake eating its own tail — because the book’s subject is the British end of it: a service that wrote the template and then failed to notice it being used.
Book 5 — London Rules
- C08 — The cell’s history: selected, trained, planted, and reporting to The Supreme Leader.
- C11 — Flyte’s account of the students and their instructions; Whelan tells Taverner the attacks are North Korean.
- C13 — Kim Park, of North Korean descent, held at the Park while the SSD’s people drive north.
Open questions
When the SSD obtained the Watering Hole Paper, and through whom — Kim is the route to Ho, but the paper is nineteen years old and the operation is older than she is.