Project Waterproof
Definition
The Service’s black-prison programme: a way of deporting “undesirables” without going through the legal process, used for years while Parliament was told the UK did not do such things. The denials were the point — a person who has never been charged has no sentence to serve and no parole hearing to attend.
Book 3 — Real Tigers
- C16 — Diana Taverner lays it out to Jackson Lamb on a bench near Paddington: Waterproof is what Alison Dunn learned about in New York, from a delegate from one of the former Soviet republics, and what she was killed for. Taverner also repeats the rumour that Ingrid Tearney has used Waterproof to vanish people for personal reasons.
Why it matters
Waterproof is the book’s explanation of why the tiger team exists: not money, not ideology, but a death that had to be covered and a programme that could not be admitted. It also completes the series’ portrait of the Service — the Grey Books show an institution that keeps paranoid fantasy on file, and Waterproof shows what it does when the fantasy is true.
Open questions
Which states were paid to hold prisoners, how many people went through the programme, and whether the PM’s protection of Tearney (or Judd’s ambitions) ever required it to be used again.