Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (22 page)

Tenaciously, Laura pressed on. Boyling had emailed her to say that he still loved her, but had been forced to leave her against his wishes. He claimed that he was not coping very well, but hoped that he could go back to her. Another email led her to believe that he was working in a vineyard in South Africa. In the summer of 2001, she travelled there and spent three months searching for him. As months passed by, Laura became exhausted and the strain was showing. She returned to London, but with nowhere to live. ‘I used all my savings trying to find him and I was very thin, down to 6 stone 12 lb. I stayed for a while in a backpackers’ hostel on Gray’s Inn Road and on a stranger’s sofa.’

What happened next was extraordinary. Although enfeebled, Laura managed to track down one of the squad’s secret safe houses. The trail began some months before with a list of all the phone numbers Boyling had rung while he was living with her. Laura sifted through the list of telephone numbers for clues, and found two she did not recognise. She dialled the first number and said she
wanted to speak to Jim Sutton. The man who answered sounded panicked and demanded to know how she had got the number. Later she called the second number; another voice answered and said he did not know anyone called Jim Sutton, but offered to help and took down all of Laura’s details. He never called back.

With the help of a private detective, Laura traced the two numbers to a rundown office block on Camberwell New Road in south London. In November 2001, more than a year after
Boyling
had melted away, Laura sat in a pub opposite the block and watched who came in and out. She noted down the registration numbers of the cars parked nearby. She could not have known that she was conducting surveillance on what was at the time the clandestine headquarters of the SDS, situated above the
nondescript
City Office Superstore stationers.

She had however previously discovered that the phone numbers belonged to a government agency. By now she was ‘very, very scared’ that she had stumbled upon some sort of malevolent secret state. She did not know if Boyling was part of this state or running away from it.

It was a low point in her search but, two days later, she saw him again. Her detective work had yielded several leads about his real identity. Part of this information had come by tracing the locations of the computers he had used to send his recent emails. She believed that she had found out his real name, his relatives and the school he had attended. In one of his emails, he had appeared to encourage her to believe that he was in England. She had come to suspect that he was living in Kingston in Surrey and had started to spend a lot of time in the area. She took a job in a local bookshop. ‘I remember thinking it was the kind of place Jim would go,’ she says.

On the first day in her new job, Boyling walked in. It was more than a year since he had disappeared. ‘He said: “Don’t be angry,”
and I said I wasn’t,’ Laura recalls. ‘He asked for a hug, and he smelt the same, which was weird.’ She urgently needed him to explain what he had been doing. ‘I needed answers,’ she says.

Later that day, in a café near Kingston Bridge, Boyling made a confession of sorts. He admitted he had been a police spy and disclosed his real name, but claimed that his experience
undercover
had changed him. He said he regretted what he had done. ‘He said he’d got involved when he was young, and had no idea about politics, that he’d been sucked in, that he had always cared about Friends of the Earth and done his recycling,’ says Laura. He told her that he was very much in love with her and wanted to continue the relationship.

She has come to believe that he was fabricating a story to make her forgive his betrayal and entrap her deeper into a
relationship
that she would never have started in the first place if she had known the truth. At the time she was desperately vulnerable, fearful and traumatised – a state of mind, she believes, that he exploited. She believes that he manipulated her as her long search had left her unable to work out what was real and what was not.

She says Boyling repeatedly promised her that he would leave the police and start a new life, saying that he was opposed to the work of the spies. But he claimed that he was worried about the consequences if he left the police and cited another case in which an undercover operative was ‘hounded’ after abandoning the squad.

In hindsight Laura no longer believes Boyling’s justification for staying in the police. ‘He just morphs for his own self-interest with no moral basis or grounding,’ she says. ‘He has no loyalty to anyone or anything – not to the police, not to activists, not to his own family. He finds out what people psychologically want and then he gives it to them. He’s exceptionally talented at portraying compassion in himself. You genuinely feel that you’re looking into a man’s soul.’

Soon there was another factor to consider. Within two weeks of the meeting in the bookshop, she became pregnant with his child. They has started living together. However, Laura believes that he deliberately began to isolate her from her life in the environmental movement. Now living in a gated community in Surrey, he insisted that she get rid of the telephone numbers of her political friends. He encouraged her, she says, to believe the police were able to monitor everything that was going on and would spot her if she tried to contact other activists.

Boyling also appeared to be desperate to conceal their
relationship
from his police bosses. Laura says he even made her change her name by deed poll to diminish the chances of anyone discovering their relationship before they could start their new life. It is a claim he disputes, saying that she made the change ‘out of her own volition’. The change of name took place in January 2002 – after, Laura says, her boyfriend told her that there was a danger their address could be discovered and their child – then unborn – put at risk.

Boyling was far less risk-averse when it came to preserving the secrets of the Met police, she says. Some time after coming off his undercover deployment, he was transferred to the Muslim Contact Unit, which was run by his old SDS boss, Bob Lambert. Laura says her boyfriend boasted about his access to
confidential
information and sometimes divulged secrets. ‘He would oscillate between being open about his activities and those of his colleagues in the police,’ she says. ‘He only told me things when they were unsolicited by me.’

She says her boyfriend told her that spies were permitted to have sex with activists because it was considered a ‘necessary tool’. ‘Jim complained one day that his superiors said there was to be no more sexual relations with activists – the implicit suggestion was
that they were fully aware of this before and that it had not been restricted in the past,’ she says. ‘He was scoffing at it, saying that it was impossible not to expect people to have sexual relations. He said people going in had “needs” and I felt really insulted.’ He is known to have had relationships with at least three activists while he was undercover.

Boyling also revealed classified details from confidential police files on activists, according to Laura. He told her about phone messages her old activist friends were receiving and the contents of Helen Steel’s luggage when it was searched at the airport. He even gave his girlfriend a glimpse into the modus operandi of trained SDS men, which she found repugnant. ‘He said the trick was to have a whole and detailed story but not tell too much of it. He said if you’re lying, it’s tempting to tell too much of your cover story, but that’s the mistake.’ Laura recalls her boyfriend saying he missed his covert work. ‘He said it was great because it was like being God. He knew everyone’s secrets on both sides and got to decide what to tell who and decide upon people’s fate.’

However, the worst breach of security was the way in which Laura describes her boyfriend disclosing the identities of other SDS spies. In an ordinary relationship, it might not be considered
problematic
for a police officer to share details of his confidential work with a partner. But Laura was an activist, one of the very people he had been spying on. Still, he talked to her about Lambert, the legendary SDS spy and his mentor, as well as John Dines, the SDS officer who had a relationship with Steel. On another
occasion
, during a local fair to promote sustainable living, they nearly bumped into a bearded, stocky man with black wavy hair in a
ponytail
. Boyling insisted she hid. He told Laura that the man was a police officer, and the spy who replaced him in the SDS. Previously, Boyling had told Laura that he had been the last SDS officer to
infiltrate environmental protesters. Boyling feared his SDS
replacement
might recognise them and report their relationship to senior officers at Scotland Yard. The SDS officer who replaced Boyling appears to have had a relatively uneventful deployment before disappearing to Holland around 2005.

That was the year that Laura and Boyling married and shortly afterwards moved out of London with their two children. Laura says she wed at a time when he was volatile. She hoped that marriage would bring him stability and the courage to leave the police. But it did not work. Soon after, the relationship entered a period of what Laura calls ‘darkness and destruction’; she says Boyling was ‘increasingly controlling, erratic and abusive’. In February 2007, she entered a women’s refuge, after receiving help from the organisation for more than eight months. ‘I was concentrating on looking after my two children and getting us through day to day in a situation of emotional and psychological trauma,’ she says. ‘I was in a state of post-traumatic stress – I remember gripping my own face in the mirror because I couldn’t recognise my own reflection – it never worked.’ Eventually, after periods living apart, the couple divorced in 2008.

Laura was left alone and in an unenviable position. Boyling was still a police officer, despite what she says were his many promises to leave the force. She desperately wanted to reach out to her old friends in environmental groups, to tell them what had happened. But she had no way of knowing who she could trust. If her own boyfriend turned out to be a police officer, how could she know who was a real protester and who was an informer? Boyling had left her deeply fearful about the power of the police.

In total, Laura and Boyling’s time together had spanned nearly a decade, with a gap of around a year when he vanished. She now feels she was treated ‘like an unknowing and unpaid prostitute’.

‘You don’t expect the one person you trust most in the world not to exist,’ she says. ‘You don’t expect it, especially when you are really not that important. I don’t think the Metropolitan police consider us at all. The abuse of people in this way is just seen as realistic cover to get what they want, to win other people’s trust because they are having a relationship. To make them more credible. You are a head to be trodden on, on the way up the ladder of credibility.’

For his part, Boyling says that he ‘never behaved abusively’ towards Laura. He says they were ‘no longer together as a couple’ when she went to the refuge. He adds: ‘Not withstanding our
separation
, I have always tried to support her. I have always supported the children financially and continue to do so. Despite everything I don’t wish to be critical of Laura, who has always been a loving mother to our children. Life has been difficult enough.’

Two years after her divorce, when still seeking help for the trauma of the relationship, Laura plucked up the courage to contact one of her activist friends. She sent a message to Helen Steel, asking to meet her. When they met, Laura told Steel that Jim Boyling had been a spy. She also revealed how Boyling had claimed he felt sorry for Steel as the London Greenpeace campaigner had been spied on by three undercover officers – himself, Lambert and John Dines.

Steel had been waiting more than 18 years for confirmation. Dealing with it has been an emotional ordeal. ‘Although it was massively painful, there was a sense of relief that I finally knew the truth. I didn’t have to keep wondering,’ she says.

For nearly two decades, Steel hoped that, despite his betrayal, Dines may have genuinely loved her. It was only recently that she decided his love was also fake. ‘I got out all the old letters that he sent me and read them again, with the knowledge he was an
undercover police officer and that his parents were still alive,’ she says. ‘What had once seemed like heart-wrenching stories in these letters, disclosures that made me really worried about his
well-being
, were completely false. That is manipulation. It is abuse.’

At the turn of the century, three years after Tony Blair’s New Labour government came to power, there was an unprecedented increase in the undercover infiltration of political activists. There was no apparent rise in the threat from radical politics to explain the change in gear. The nature of protest was, as ever, changing. The kind of confrontational street demonstrations that Pete Black and Mark Jenner had taken part in were giving way to more
imaginative
direct action protests, increasingly facilitated by the use of the internet. The 1990s had seen the emergence of the anti-road protests, in which activists organised bold civil resistance –
climbing
trees and digging tunnels – to oppose road expansion plans. There was a growing international trend toward organising large anti-capitalist mobilisations against summits of global leaders. But protest was no more or less threatening than it had been in previous years.

The Special Demonstration Squad was still going strong. The unit created by Conrad Dixon 30 years previously had proved to be a durable beast. There had been a few occasions when it looked like it would come apart. Mike Chitty, who had been found wandering around Worthing, very nearly blew the lid on the whole spy programme. Others had also threatened to expose the operation. But the Special Demonstration Squad had survived these and other scrapes and it was continuing to plant
undercover cops at the heart of protest groups. Police chiefs, however, thought it was time for more. In 1999, a second squad of police spies came into existence that would rival and
eventually
replace the SDS. It went by the unwieldy name of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit.

Undercover police officers working for the NPOIU had much the same job as their counterparts in the SDS. For nearly a decade, the two squads would run in tandem. Effectively, senior officers doubled their spying resources. The spies were
occasionally
deployed in the same groups and would come across each other in the field – there were some supervisors who worked for both units. But for the most part they were separate and
independent
teams of officers with their own distinct identities, until the SDS was quietly disbanded in 2008.

For the nine years the units were working alongside each other they had had separate turfs. The SDS belonged to Special Branch, the elite department in the Metropolitan police. When the branch in the capital merged with another unit to form the Counter Terrorism Command, or SO15, in 2006, the SDS remained a London-based squad, although by then, with the war on terror consuming most senior police resources, its days were numbered. But for the four decades the SDS was in existence its spies were almost always deployed in London.

Undercover operatives working for the NPOIU, in contrast, were peppered in towns and cities across England and Wales. Operatives were often seconded to the unit from regional police forces. They had some previous experience in covert policing and were granted permission to do other kinds of undercover work, such as catching drug dealers. Successful NPOIU recruits were placed on nationally accredited training schemes and given a short introduction into the world of protest. One former NPOIU spy describes one such course, which lasted five days, involving
role-play at an abandoned warehouse that had been modified to look like an anarchist squat.

It was a quite a different set-up to the SDS, which liked to give the impression its officers were cut from a different cloth. Just as it had done in 1968, the squad still operated like an old boys’ club. Recruits had rarely applied to join the SDS – it was a privilege that came by invitation only, and the squad prided itself on only ever selecting from the cream of Special Branch. Its
operatives
had little contact with other parts of the police services and were trained exclusively in-house, often learning first-hand from seasoned mentors such as Bob Lambert. They saw themselves as an elite who were considerably more professional than the young pretenders in the NPOIU. One former SDS man disparagingly calls the rival squad a ‘Mickey Mouse’ unit.

The reality was more complex. Certainly, the NPOIU did not have the benefit of the tradecraft perfected by the SDS over decades, and there is evidence to suggest its spies were less convincing in their undercover roles. But it appears that the NPOIU could draw on far more resources and successfully saw its reach expand over the years. Part of the funding for the newly formed NPOIU was supplied by the Home Office under the then home secretary, Jack Straw. Over time, more than £30m of public money would be channelled into the NPOIU. The unit would eventually expand to a staff of 70, dwarfing their counterparts in the SDS.

The two units also had subtly different mandates. From its inception, the SDS had always been about monitoring political ‘subversives’. By the late 1990s, ‘subversion’ was considered an archaic term, unsuitable for the targets of the NPOIU. Police chiefs such as the unit’s first head, Barry Moss, went about inventing a whole new vernacular at secret meetings in hotels including the Miskin Manor outside Cardiff and the Blunsdon country house
in Wiltshire. They eventually settled on a new mission statement and definition of the people they would be spying upon.

It was an Orwellian phrase, as meaningless as it was useful to police who advocated a catch-all term: ‘domestic
extremism
’. With no legal basis or agreed definition, the phrase could be applied to anyone police wanted to keep an eye on. In the most general terms it was taken to refer to political activity
involving
‘criminal acts of direct action in furtherance of a single issue campaign’, but would not be restricted to criminal conduct. Domestic extremists, police decided, were those who wanted to ‘prevent something from happening or to change legislation or domestic policy’, often doing so ‘outside of the normal
democratic
process’.

It is a natural tendency of state bureaucracies to expand their empire. And the domestic extremism apparatus that grew under the Labour government was no different. In the first decade of the 21st century, funding for policing domestic extremists doubled. The breadth of activity being targeted by police also expanded. Documents that chronicle the birth of the NPOIU reveal it was initially intended to focus upon two groups: hard-core animal rights activists behind sometimes nasty campaigns against
vivisectionists
and a group defined as ‘environmental extremists’, taken to be a loose reference to the anti-roads movement.

The animal rights surveillance took the lion’s share of resources. Some police chiefs argued they had fought and won a covert war against sinister and often violent protest campaigns targeting, for instance, universities involved in animal
experimentation
. But they also claimed it made sense to now broaden the scope, applying the same methods to the green movement and widening the remit of the NPOIU. The unit’s targets multiplied to encompass groups of every political hue, from socialists through to far-right activists, covering the turf
traditionally occupied by the SDS. Domestic extremists now included campaigners against war, nuclear weapons, racism, genetically modified crops, globalisation, tax evasion, airport expansion and asylum law, as well as those calling for reform of prisons and peace in the Middle East.

By widening the surveillance net, police found themselves having to justify some unusual catches. There was one
defining
case that underlined quite how wide the trawl for domestic extremists had become. A 69-year-old retired physicist, Peter Harbour, discovered his name listed as a domestic extremist in legal papers published by police online. Dr Harbour had never been convicted of any offence and had always passed the
security
checks when he worked in government laboratories. He was stunned. It turned out his ‘crime’ stemmed from his involvement in a campaign to protect a beauty spot – Thrupp Lake – where locals used to walk, swim and picnic and watch otters dive into the water. RWE npower, which owns the nearby Didcot power station, wanted to empty the lake and fill it with ash. Wildlife enthusiasts marched, wrote letters and signed petitions. A small number stood in the way of the company when it tried to cut down some trees. The campaign was never anything other than entirely peaceful.

With domestic extremism defined widely enough to include the likes of Dr Harbour, it was necessary to build an even larger apparatus of surveillance. The NPOIU was the first, and largest, unit to be created. A second branch was set up in 2004 following lobbying by big corporations. The National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit, based in Cambridgeshire, was tasked with giving security advice to hundreds of companies in aviation, energy, research and retail who were the targets of protest. Its one-time head, superintendent Steve Pearl, said the unit was established by the Home Office after ministers were ‘getting
really pressurised by big business – pharmaceuticals in particular, and the banks – that they were not able to go about their lawful business because of the extreme criminal behaviour of some people within the animal rights movement’. Many if not most of the companies it advised, however, turned out to be the targets of very different forms of protest.

The third part in the triumvirate of units was the National Domestic Extremism Team, formed in 2005 to co-ordinate
investigations
conducted by forces across the country. The following year all three units were merged and brought under the auspices of one particular body that would mean their covert activities would escape proper scrutiny. To many people, the Association of Chief Police Officers will sound like a club of top cops. It used to be exactly that. But in recent decades ACPO has morphed into something new, taking a leading role in influencing government policy in policing. It has no statutory power, is not accountable to parliament and for a long time was not subject to freedom of information laws. ACPO is a company, with an annual income of £18m, and a surprising amount of power.

When it took responsibility for the management of domestic extremism – including the NPOIU and its spies – the company found itself at the helm of a national police operation. There was no public consultation before the power grab, which effectively placed the NPOIU in a place it could not be held properly to account. It all happened in secret.

The result was that ACPO was empowered to manage a national database of domestic extremists, housed in an office block near Westminster. In effect, the SDS paper files on
subversives
, still locked in an archive, were being replaced with a digital library of modern-day campaigners. If the SDS was a unit suited to an analogue age, the NPOIU and its sister organisations now exploit the vast possibilities of digital surveillance. According to
the most recent figure, the database contains confidential details of 8,931 political campaigners.

Names, pseudonyms, photographs and dates of birth are kept on the database, as well as information about telephone calls and email activity. The files record CCTV video and, if an activist has a car registration number, can detail logs of their journeys via number plate reading traffic cameras. Particular attention is paid to any political activity: attendance at
demonstrations
and meetings, political pamphlets, comments on blogposts. In at least two lawsuits, police have been found by judges to have been storing information illegally and forced to remove certain files. Yet they have continued the process of accumulation unperturbed.

Senior police admit many protesters they keep files on have no criminal record, but they say they are justified in storing their information because they may associate with individuals police deem to be extremists – or even, perhaps, one day become extremists themselves. ‘Just because you have no criminal record does not mean that you are not of interest to the police,’ explains Anton Setchell, the senior officer in charge of the domestic extremism machinery for six years until 2010. ‘Everyone who has got a criminal record did not have one once.’

Only a small number of so-called ‘domestic extremists’ have succeeded in obtaining their files. They give an alarming glimpse into the types of people being spied upon by police – and the breadth of information being stored. The first to get his hands on his file was John Catt. He is an 88-year-old peace campaigner from Brighton with no criminal record, known among local activists for his tendency to arrive at protests with a sketch pad to draw the scene. His file revealed police were taking a surprising interest in his artwork. ‘John Catt sat on a folding chair by the southernmost gate of EDO MBM and appeared
to be sketching,’ said one log, from a protest outside an arms factory. Another noted the pensioner was ‘using his drawing pad to sketch a picture of the protest and police presence’. In total, Catt’s attendance at 55 demonstrations between 2005 and 2009 was assiduously recorded by police. They did not just note his participation in these protests but recorded details such as the slogans on his T-shirt and whether or not he had shaved that morning. In 2013, Catt won a landmark ruling against the police, after the court of appeal ruled his details were being held without lawful justification.

Another ‘domestic extremist’ who managed to see his file was Guy Taylor, a 45-year-old campaigner in an anti-capitalist group, Globalise Resistance. Police logged his activities at 27 separate protests between 2006 and 2011, ranging from
demonstrations
against the Iraq War and racism. They even managed to monitor him at the Glastonbury music festival and report that between listening to music, he had worked on a stall selling ‘political publications and merchandise of an extreme left-wing anti-capitalist nature’. Other activists discovered that police had been recording meetings they organised, people they were seen speaking to and even the precise brand of bike they were riding when cycling to demonstrations. Where does all of this
information
come from?