Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (23 page)

The answer is that the NPOIU has become adept at drawing in intelligence from dozens of different streams. Police chiefs insist that some of their information is sourced publicly, from
internet
websites, pamphlets and open email lists. Since the 1990s, police have also deployed overt surveillance teams equipped with cameras to float around demonstrations or stand outside
meetings
to openly record everything that happens. These small teams of officers, usually numbering two or three, are not used quite as frequently as they once used to be. But for around a decade
these Forward Intelligence Teams were notorious for tracking activists wherever they went during a protest. These cops with cameras stick to their targets like flies. There have been occasions when FIT officers have pursued protesters, travelling with them on buses and trains to film their every move. A number of
activists
have even left their homes in the morning to find groups of FIT officers waiting for them on the pavement. One was once followed as he walked his children to school. Another recalls being tracked all the way to the supermarket.

Occasionally the police cameras have even turned on
journalists
covering protests. A surveillance video shot by police at a demonstration against a power station in Kent in 2008, and later obtained by protesters, reveals quite how interested police appeared in reporters.

‘A lot of press officers aren’t there,’ an officer says as he zooms into a group of TV journalists. ‘Just think they can bloody wander in and out of the field. It’s wrong, I think. I trust them less than the protesters.’

Moments later, the camera pans to two photographers across the road.

‘Inquisitive, ain’t they – these two, by the pole,’ the officer says. ‘He don’t like having his photograph taken – that one there with the bald head.’

Incidents like these have caused consternation among civil libertarians. But the truth is that FIT teams form only a small fraction of the intelligence picture collated on the domestic extremism database. For a long time, they were a useful
distraction
for police. It is covert surveillance – true spying – that is most intrusive, and most useful for the authorities.

One source of covert information has always come from paid informants. It is impossible to know how many activists have been persuaded to grass on their comrades, although lots
say they have been offered money in exchange for information at least once by police, usually after arrest. Quite a few activists had been unable to live with the guilt and confessed to their friends that they have been speaking with police. Usually they have ended up expelled from the group or frozen out of
important
meetings. One informant who spied on climate activists says police threatened to prosecute him for possession of
cannabis
if he did not agree to the deal. He met plain-clothes police down a country lane once a day and was paid just £30 for each report.

It is a murky world, but one that was laid bare thanks to the cunning of an environmental activist. Tilly Gifford was a member of Plane Stupid, an anti-airport expansion collective that
occupied
runways. In 2009 she was approached by two plain-clothes detectives in Glasgow and asked to inform on her friends. At the time she was on bail for vandalism and breach of the peace. A few weeks earlier she and her friends had barricaded themselves onto the runway at Aberdeen airport dressed as the American tycoon Donald Trump.

Gifford had an idea. The 24-year-old decided to play the cops at their own game. She would pretend she was open to selling information about Plane Stupid, but secretly record the
discussions
with the handlers. She sewed a secret recording device into her tweed jacket. Gifford ended up recording three conversations with two plain-clothes cops from Strathclyde police, a detective constable and his assistant.

‘There’s no one on this earth, and there’s no one certainly in this room, who is going to condemn you for your – if you want, your ideologies, for what Plane Stupid are trying to achieve,’ the detective said during their first encounter. But he warned that involvement in protest could leave her with a criminal record and even a prison sentence.

His assistant – adopting the ‘bad cop’ role – warned Gifford there were ‘hard, evil’ people in Scotland’s women’s prison, Cornton Vale. ‘And they would make your life a misery.’

‘All we’re here for today, Tilly, is simply to ask you: is there some way we can work together in this?’ said the more
conciliatory
detective. ‘We have a responsibility to the people of the country to look at groups like Plane Stupid, like other groupings who appear out of nowhere.’

The men hinted at the kinds of questions they wanted answered.

‘Who is the leader? Who is the head honcho?’ the detective asked. ‘In a nutshell, Tilly, look: we basically have a
responsibility
to the people of Scotland – to their safety. How we go about that – there are ways and means. And as in any, shall we say, big groupings, there’s always people within those groupings willing to speak to us.’

He explained more explicitly what these informants were doing. ‘Feeding to us what’s going on in the groupings – the actual dynamics of the groupings, who’s saying what, who’s doing what, who’s running it, who’s not running it.’

‘Why would they do that?’ she asked.

‘People would sell their soul to the devil,’ the assistant said.

The detective suggested other motives. ‘Moralistic. Financial gain. Cos they’ve been in bother with the police…’

‘They don’t want to get in further bother with the police,’ the assistant said.

‘You’re caught up in the whole wishy-washy ideology of it,’ the detective said. ‘You don’t see the bigger picture. Look at the big picture – we work with hundreds of people, believe me,
ranging
from terrorist organisations right through to whatever … We have people who give us information on environmentalism,
left-wing
extremism, right-wing – you name it, we have the whole spectrum of reporting. The point we’re making is: they come to us with the concerns, because within the organisations for which they have strong ideologies and beliefs they are happy to go along with that, but what they will not get involved in is maybe where it’s gonna impact someone else. That’s when they come to us and say, “By the way, so and so – in my opinion – is maybe getting a wee bit too hotheaded.”’

That was the opening gambit. By the second meeting the police officers were themselves growing a little suspicious. One asked if Gifford was covertly recording their conversations.

‘Ha!’ she laughed. ‘Quite possibly!’

‘We’re just asking you to consider a proposal,’ the detective said. ‘It is effectively entering into a business contract. Let’s not use the word “work” – you would assist us. But equally we would be assisting you – be it financially or whatever.’

He told her she could use the money for her university fees or donate it to charity. ‘Cancer Research, Save the Whale, whatever.’ She would become one of thousands of informants secretly working for police.

‘They then go home to their families,’ he added. ‘They go home to husbands, wives, children. We are way, way down. That would be exactly the same with you. You would still have your life, Tilly.’

He added: ‘You wouldn’t pay any tax on it. So you could do with it what you want.’

Finally Gifford asked the important question. How much would she be paid?

‘Oh, you’d be surprised, Tilly,’ said the detective.

She said she would be unlikely to help them for a mere ‘20 quid’.

‘UK plc can afford more than 20 quid,’ the assistant said. ‘Years gone by, people have been paid tens of thousands of pounds.’

For the NPOIU, paid informants are undoubtedly an essential source of intelligence. The same was always true of the Special Branch. The problem is they can never be fully trusted. The
information
supplied by activists is patchy and can be unreliable – and occasionally it is deliberately misleading. When Conrad Dixon came up with the idea of using SDS spies in 1968, he did so
explicitly
because the senior ranks in Scotland Yard felt that informants were not providing the calibre of intelligence that was required. And that central belief – that undercover operatives were needed to provide sufficiently reliable intelligence – was what led to the further proliferation of police spies since 2000.

By 2005, both the SDS and NPOIU had full fleets of spies planted in protest organisations. With two rival units, it was sometimes impossible to work out who exactly a police spy was working for.

One undercover officer for example was caught out when a conversation was accidentally recorded on an answerphone. It was 2005 and the spy, who used the fake identity Simon Wellings, was infiltrating the anti-capitalist group Global Resistance. He worked as the group’s unofficial photographer, a useful excuse for documenting their activities.

One day he accidentally called an activist friend on his mobile phone and was diverted to answerphone. The two-minute recorded message was in large parts inaudible although the sound of bleeping police radios could be heard in the background. It captured the infiltrator in discussions with a police officer,
presumably
his handler. Wellings could be heard discussing photographs of protesters, and it seemed the pair had the images spread out in
front of them as Wellings was asked to put names to faces – a key role fulfilled by all undercover cops.

‘She’s Hannah’s girlfriend, they are very overtly lesbian,’ Wellings told his colleague. ‘Last time I saw her, her hair was about that long, it was bright blonde, week before it was black, so you get the picture. She’s definitely her girlfriend, they have been together for a long time.’

‘Thing is, we’ve got the CO11s. They’re like, “Who are these people?”’ said the other officer. He was referring to the Met’s public order branch who regularly like to identify
prominent
activists at protests. ‘Do you know who they are?’ the officer asked. ‘Have you just photographed them?’

Wellings seemed unsure. He identified one protester as ‘in the Socialist Workers Party, I don’t know his name’. He said another ‘sort of flirts with the anarchist side’. He described a third as a ‘central bloke’.

It was the tiniest snippet of dialogue. But the recording was sufficient for his friends in Global Resistance to realise he must be an infiltrator. Leaving the answerphone message was an amateur error to have made, and one that resulted in the immediate end of his deployment. By then Wellings had been in the group for four years and managed to get himself onto the main committee of around 20 activists who ran the group. He had originally turned up in 2001, claiming to have a job installing security systems. His friends described him as amenable, considerate and caring. Over the years he joined them on demonstrations in the United States, France, Switzerland and Spain. The fact he was based in London suggests he may have been one of the last spies to serve under the SDS.

A short, rotund man with a brown goatee, Wellings appears to have been satisfied lingering on the fringes of serious protest. He
never immersed himself in activism. He was always at
demonstrations
, but never did much. In SDS speak, he paddled in shallow waters. He told friends he had been travelling for a long time and was separated from his wife and son, who were living in Australia. Looking back, there was never that much suspicion about
Wellings
. He stands apart from fellow undercover cops infiltrating protest groups for one reason alone: he is the only known spy who did not have sex with activists. That may not have been for want of trying; according to a friend, Wellings moaned that he ‘wasn’t getting any’.

When Wellings was confronted by his friends over the recorded answerphone message, he spent 10 minutes trying to deny he was an infiltrator and then disappeared. He has not been seen since.

Lynn Watson was one of the more professional undercover
operatives
to work for the National Public Order Intelligence Unit. She was also the only known police spy who was a woman and, by one measure at least, the unluckiest.

It was a warm day in Leeds in July 2004. Watson was deep undercover. She had large red dots painted on her cheeks and a green feather duster in her hand. Dressed in military trousers and jacket, she was festooned with bright strips of pink and orange cloth. The outfit was all in the name of duty. She was at the
frontline
of a covert police war on domestic extremism.

The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army was one of the most harmless protest groups to campaign against the invasion of Iraq. They used street theatre and comedy as a tool of dissent. ‘We are clowns because what else can one be in such a stupid world?’ the group declared. ‘Because inside everyone is a lawless clown trying to escape. Because nothing undermines authority like holding it up to ridicule.’ Cringeworthy it may have been, but proponents of clowning argued it was a light, refreshing
alternative
to earnest banner waving.

This particular excursion in Leeds – supposedly a mock ‘
invasion
and liberation’ of the city – was recorded on a video camera. It began in a church hall, where around a dozen clown recruits
stood in a circle and introduced themselves. Watson was one of the more awkward members of the group who, when it came to unveiling her clown character, was stuck.

‘I am Lynn,’ she said. ‘And I don’t have a clown name either.’ She made a sad face.

‘Let’s play Tango!’ said another clown. Watson and the others lifted their arms in the air and huddled together. Moments later, they were marching out of the hall, banging drums and blowing kazoos. Watson ran up to the person holding the video camera.

‘We’re checking for clowns,’ she said, staring into the lens. ‘We need more clowns in this country! More clowns! Bla!’

Their first destination was the constituency office of the pro-war Labour MP Hilary Benn. ‘Can we go in and clean the office?’ one clown asked an office employee.

‘Please, please, please!’ shouted the other clowns.

By the time uniformed police arrived, workers in the
constituency
office assured them it was a peaceful demonstration and nothing to be worried about. The constables laughed when the clowns ran outside, stood in a line and bent forward, wiggling their bums at the building. Of course, the police had no idea that one of the clowns was a fellow officer of the law.

Next, the clowns went to a recruitment centre for the armed forces. Watson took part in a game of cricket outside, using a feather duster as a bat, and then sat down in the street and sucked a lollipop. Later, the invasion of Leeds finished with the clowns sat beside a tree in a park.

One clown played guitar. ‘Where is my mind?’ he sang. ‘Where is? My mind?’

Watson had climbed the tree and was wearing a steel colander on her head. She looked down at her friends and said in a squeaky voice: ‘Tickle the tree! Tickle the tree!’

Life for undercover cops in the NPOIU could be quite different to the adventures of the Special Demonstration Squad. Veterans from the SDS might have winced at the idea of clowning around in the street, but the NPOIU’s determination to monitor all kinds of protest activity meant this kind of surveillance was on the rise.

Watson was one of the first in a team of 15 spies who would be sent undercover in one six-year period. She initially appeared in May 2002, attending a local campaign to conserve a patch of woodland near Worthing on the south coast. Watson introduced herself as a care-home worker from Bournemouth, doing shifts at care homes for the elderly. She slipped one of the campaign organisers a piece of paper containing her email address, but was never seen there again.

It was a full year before Watson made her second appearance, this time at the Aldermaston women’s peace camp, which had been running a sustained campaign against nuclear weaponry since the mid-1980s. She quickly befriended Kate Holcombe, who was another novice showing an interest in the monthly camping events outside the atomic weapons establishment.

‘She sort of appeared from nowhere one day and said she had been very bothered about the war and nuclear stuff and she could not sit by and do nothing any more,’ she says of Watson. ‘She felt she had to get up and start protesting about it.’

Watson was an intelligent woman with an acerbic wit and she quickly made friends with the feminist protesters. She joined in some of the attempts to blockade the weapons site and showed she was up for causing a stir. ‘There was a big giggle one day when a Ministry of Defence policeman ended up chasing her about three-quarters of a mile down the road,’ Holcombe adds. ‘She’s very, very fit, and a runner, and everybody thought it was hilarious that she’d been chased by a policeman and she’d
basically
outrun him. He ended up pulling a muscle in his leg.’

In 2004, after a few appearances at other anti-war protests and peace events, Watson told friends that she needed to get away from an ex-boyfriend. The spy was never explicit about it, but some friends were given the impression she may have had an abusive partner. ‘The story was the relationship had ended badly and she didn’t want to talk about it,’ says one friend. Watson said the agency she worked for had a number of promising placements in care homes up north. She was moving to Leeds, a city that would become her home for three years.

Despite its rich protest history, Leeds at the time lacked an epicentre for radical campaigning. There were some squats and meetings were occasionally held in community halls and school gyms, but no space dedicated to activism. Watson quickly became involved in a group planning to create a new hub for activism in the city. Action for Radical Change had received a £10,000 grant to rent a space that would be used to organise protests. When they decided to convert a former pork factory into a
community
centre called the Common Place, Watson offered to become its founding director and treasurer. Her name still adorns the company documents. An activist who helped set up the centre recalls the police spy sitting through boring meetings about whether stocking cow’s milk would offend vegans. ‘It was all of this tedious, dull stuff,’ he says. ‘There was a two-hour discussion about whether we wanted to call ourselves “The Common Place” or just “Common Place”.’

From the outset, there were reservations among some Leeds activists about the newcomer. Watson said she was 35 and from an upmarket town in Hampshire, although her parents were Scottish and she often joked around in an authentic Glaswegian accent. She looked a little different to other activists; she sported big hoop earrings and a baseball cap and always wore a lot of make-up. For a little while, behind her back, some people in the
Common Place started calling her ‘Lynn the cop’, but it was not a nickname that stuck.

The Common Place was attracting a broad range of people interested in effecting social change. It hosted meals for homeless people and English classes for asylum seekers. At the weekends, there were free bicycle maintenance workshops. The premises had an entertainment licence from the council, and campaigners quickly discovered that hosting musical events could provide a much-needed source of revenue. Local police, however, started clamping down on the parties. During one of several raids on the premises, police burst in to find a handful of people listening to 1920s piano and watching a Czech surrealist cartoon being projected on the wall.

Despite the money these events brought in, Watson made it clear she disapproved of using the space for anything other than activism. ‘She was arguing for keeping the focus far more political,’ says a co-founder of the Common Place. ‘She felt that music was side-tracking us into becoming more of a
performance
venue.’

Another activist wonders whether Watson had ulterior motives. ‘We had a licence, and I imagine that would have been quite a problem for her professionally,’ he says. ‘She would need to be investigating something at least vaguely dodgy.’

The main purpose of the Common Place did however remain overtly political. It was used to mobilise support for a huge
demonstration
against the G8 summit in Scotland in 2005. The protests around Gleneagles, where Tony Blair, George Bush and other world leaders were holding their meeting, were among the largest of their kind in a decade. Watson attached herself to a group of first-aiders who volunteered to look after injured protesters. The Action Medics Collective was a fringe group and not the best of roles for an undercover police officer who wanted to be at the
centre of action. Certainly, it was not the kind of position an SDS operative would have chosen. But it gave Watson the opportunity to meet a wider group of protesters in and around Leeds.

‘We met over the
Guardian
crossword,’ says Catriona, one of the city’s most radical activists. ‘I instantly liked her because she was cynical and sharp.’ She and others who got to know Watson recall how dismissive she could be about the more farcical aspects of protesting. Disparaging the stereotype of activism would become something of a trait for NPOIU spies. Counter-intuitively, it often worked, with many activists finding the dose of realism refreshing. ‘Those remarks can be lacking sometimes in the sort of dreary, hippy end of the activist scene,’ Catriona explains.

John, a part-time bouncer who also became a close friend of the undercover police officer, says he was also attracted to her ‘irreverence and sarcasm’. He often visited Watson in her two-bedroom terraced house in the Hyde Park area of the city. ‘She kept quite a neat, tidy and well-ordered house,’ he says. ‘It was fairly plain, vaguely tasteful, cheaply done up.’

John, like almost everyone else who visited Watson at home, was struck by two things that were odd about her house. The first was the fact that she always kept one upstairs room locked, never allowing anyone to peek inside. The second was the artwork on her wall. Beside a photograph of Watson in clown costume there were two clip-framed 1980s posters from the anarchist collective, Class War. One glorified police being attacked on the street, and the other advocated the death of the Queen Mother, who was shown with a punk haircut.

The posters seemed incongruous. Watson was a straight, matter-of-fact person with a dry sense of humour. She would not hesitate to tell friends to ‘fuck off’ if they were getting on her nerves. She also liked to tell heartless jokes about the elderly patients she was supposedly looking after at care homes. The
outdated protest art on the wall did not seem to fit her image. ‘It felt a bit like something a teenager would put on the wall to
represent
who they are,’ says Catriona. ‘People did comment on the pictures quite a lot because it all felt a little naïve for Lynn.
Everyone
took the piss out of her about it. She was quite defensive.’

The focus of Watson’s deployment was the infiltration of the first two protest gatherings called Climate Camp. This was around the time concern about global warming was gaining
traction
across the country. The Conservative party leader, David Cameron, travelled to Svalbard in Norway to be towed by
huskies
and witness first-hand the effects of glacial ice melt. Nicholas Stern, the economist, was in the process of writing his landmark report into the economic consequences of climate change. It was fast becoming a mainstream cause.

Climate Camp was an attempt by radical activists to exploit the shift in sentiment with a peaceful, open demonstration that might appeal to the wider public. Overnight, activists would occupy a patch of land near a major carbon emitter and construct a completely self-sustaining village with tents and marquees. There were five major Climate Camp protests in total; they defined an era in environmental protest and presented a new challenge for police. The first camp was held beside Drax power station, the UK’s single biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. The second was based near Heathrow airport, in protest at plans to build a third runway. These were large gatherings, attracting hundreds and even thousands of people, many of them curious locals who came to attend workshops about sustainability and climate science. There was always at least one collective attempt of civil
disobedience
– such as entering the grounds of the power station – but they tended to be largely symbolic gestures.

Because the camps were at the peaceful end of the protest spectrum, organisers felt they could be open about their plans,
although there was some need for security, particularly around the reconnaissance visits to select a suitable site and, on the eve of the protest, the carefully planned swoops on the land under the cover of darkness. Anyone could join the organisation but the more secretive tasks were restricted to cells of trusted
activists
. Watson managed to get onto these groups during both of the first camps, providing a fruitful source of intelligence for her NPOIU handlers.

During the first gathering, and when camping near the huge cooling towers of Drax power station, Watson had her first and only sexual encounter with an activist. It was a one-night stand and instigated, according to the man who slept with Watson, at the insistence of the undercover police officer. He says the pair had been flirting for some time but their dalliance in a tent was ‘nothing meaningful’.

That night was also an aberration for Watson, who abstained from intimate relationships for the rest of her deployment. On the whole, her behaviour was less morally dubious than that of her male counterparts in both the NPOIU and SDS. Indeed, her infiltration in Leeds provides a useful example of exactly how undercover police can thrive without the need to sleep with the people they are spying on.

For her first 18 months in the city, Watson used the excuse of her recent break-up, saying she was not ready for any new
relationships
. One day at the start of 2007, she surprised her friends by announcing that she had a new man in her life. He was not a political campaigner. Instead she said she had met him randomly during the 40th birthday party of an old friend.