The repair job
I had planned to use modern (for those days) technology, meaning Apple IIe machines to reprint the reset papers, but the Assistant Director determined that everything was Top Secret. The Government Printing Office was toxic, so we could not print there, nor could we typeset there, but the papers produced had to look just like the normal issue. We must not let anybody know which papers had been reset.
It would be another year before an old hand outed Ted McHugh as The Leech, the one my father had booted out, so keep that in mind in what followed because Ted was a treacherous mole in our midst. While we knew he was sabotaging us, we thought it was stupidity, not malice. It was malice, but my pirates were smarter.
Still, when he declared that he had arranged a cell of “Gov” workers, I let it go. I learned later that it was Union activism that had prevented modern methods of production in “the Gov”: hot metal required typesetters and compositors, but modern systems had no need of “comps”. The system we were lumbered with involved strips of print being waxed down by a comp, and the wax was weak, so we kept losing bits. I don’t believe that Ted planned that part, but the two workers they sent us were as thick as a load of bricks.
All the same, we watched them like hawks, checked their output repeatedly, fixed their lost bits and got out papers that were perfect. That left us with the secrecy bit. Most of the papers were typed on an IBM Selectric, and this had a single-use carbon ribbon that could be read, so those went home with me so be slashed into small pieces and hidden away. The output from the shredder went to soak in a baby bath in my backyard.
We were told to refuse to give any information on which papers were being reset, so the Opposition were howling for answers. The Minister, who saw himself as something of an historian, commissioned a fake Modern History paper that was mostly copied from past papers but held occasional giveaways like errors in dates. We had a lot of fun with that, but nobody ever surfaced it.
Our other fear was that the media, meaning invasive TV crews, might barge in. Ted realised this, and put up signs of increasingly urgent security that basically said ‘warm’, ‘really warm’, ‘hot’ and ‘super-hot’. Each day, my pirates would, on a regular basis, rearrange these signs so they led to a broom cupboard. We thought Ted might not have been deliberate in this, but we were suspicious
Then Ted took away the casual worker whose task was to control access to the storage area where the committees were working. We realised then that his interference was deliberate, but I got a person outside of his budgetary control, a professional, to hold the fort.
Meanwhile, the twenty furious committees were picking up on the vibes (I think the pirates were leaking), but they wanted the skin of the thief, and we advised them on ways and means of laying traps, they told us their own tricks, and we shared those. So did the checkers, and there were lulus in the making. The geology committee left one question with the same diagram and wording, except to swap coal and gold. The mathematics committee changed all of the questions except the first, ten one-mark quickies and the last, always a spine-breaker. In the end, the thief got only the first and the last questions right.
The aim was to keep the thief and his friends thinking that no papers had changed, and that worked. A few of his friends, given an advance look at papers emerged, semi-hysterical, crying that it was “the wrong paper”. We scooped up the lot.
There is more to this story:
The Great HSC heist of 1985, 1. Prologue.
The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 2. A disabled number-cruncher.
The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 3. Applied anarchy and surrealism.
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