Organising MINEVAL injects gave much scope for creativity! One of my best was to brief an Ops Cpl to play the part of a disaffected JNCO.... In those days, everyone brought their NBC kit along to war in a variety of 'sports bags', there being no official bag provided except for the S10 case.
So my Cpl took a 'bomb' into the main Ops room, then acted in a dull, lethargic manner. Trouble was, he was normally such a miserable sod that it took people a while to recognise that he was an inject..... Standby Ops weren't expecting to take over at 10 min after Startex, but the Stn Cdr thought it was an excellent ploy!
I also arranged for the Reds to overfly at 10:30, some 30 min after a 'defector' Canberra incident was supposed to have ended. But the Stn made such a bolleaux of the Canberra incident ("No, sorry, we can't get Mrs Thatcher on the phone!") that it was still going on when the Reds rotted up the place from various directions, trailing red white and blue smoke. The Canberra mates ad-libbed superbly, one of them pinching an S10 from one of their 'guards' who was watching the Reds, while another started twitching and writhing about in pretend nerve gas poisoned agony... Down in the COC, the Stn Cdr turned to his minions and asked for the Chemical Attack section of the Station War Plan.
"Err, can't find it, sir"...
"FIND IT!"
"Isn't one, sir. No chemical threat against the UK.....apparently"
"SO...I...SEE!"
Of course there wasn't anything in the Stn War Plan! As I well knew when plotting the inject - but I also knew that the following WINTEX would certainly include a chemical attack.... But some of the ex-RAFG folk masked up correctly, other people hadn't a clue.... I had to close the incident fairly quickly, because things were turning to rat$hit and we needed to get on with launching the jets for some pre-planned targets. But what fun it was!
What was rather more worrying was that I'd told Neatishead exactly when and from which direction the Reds were coming - they'd been in RAFG over the weekend. But they weren't seen, even though I'd made sure that a suitable CAP had been manned....
