Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (24 page)

His name was Sean and he was supposedly a locksmith from Northampton. He immediately raised eyebrows. A dishevelled and socially awkward man, Sean seemed a strange match for Watson. He instantly acquired the nickname ‘Frank Gallagher’,
after the fictional drunk on the British TV show
Shameless
. ‘Lynn also called him Frank,’ Catriona says. ‘She was quite disparaging about him.’

Sean was almost certainly another undercover police officer seconded to the NPOIU. It is not unusual for undercover
operatives
to work in pairs and sometimes that means pretending to be sexual partners or spouses, although it was never a technique used by the SDS, which always preferred its spies to have intimate relationships with real people.

The fake boyfriend deception was actually a rather clever ploy. Watson could spend days or even weeks away and claim to have been staying with Sean. But for whatever reason, the NPOIU decided to terminate the relationship after less than a year.

Watson’s second fictional boyfriend played a decisive role in her disappearance from Leeds. Toward the end of 2007, Watson had begun to tell some close friends she was depressed. They had known her as someone who was prone to mood swings, but she seemed to be deteriorating. She had always been a big drinker and now claimed she felt she had a problem with alcohol. She was also increasingly worried about a skin condition that, she said, resulted in blotchy markings on her face whenever she was exposed to sunlight. ‘I was being there for her as a friend,
listening
to her cry,’ says one close friend. ‘Being someone’s emotional support and then realising later it was all made up doesn’t feel very nice.’

At the time Watson seemed to be drifting away. She pulled out of a six-week cycle trip around Spain, despite having already bought her ferry ticket. She also spent less time socialising,
choosing
instead to meet friends at their home.

It was around this time that Watson introduced her new boyfriend, a man who appeared to improve her outlook on life. His name was Paul and he claimed to be a former bouncer at
nightclubs from Coventry who had now become a photographer. Watson said she met him during a hen party in another part of the country.

If Sean had seemed a strange partner, Paul left her friends totally dumbstruck. The general consensus was that her new lover was boring, uncouth and prone to bouts of misogyny.

‘He looked absolutely like a cop, by which I mean a beefy white male, about six foot tall, with a shaved head and a slightly intimidatory attitude,’ says one friend, Matilda. ‘He clearly had not had too many feminists in his life. Lynn told me that she had tried to introduce her friends to Paul in Leeds and no one seemed to like him.’

Catriona is even more forthright in her judgment. ‘He was a meathead and not attractive. Lynn could have done better, even for a pretend relationship. The first time I met him he managed to really fuck me off. He made a comment about my tits: “I like your eyes and I like your rack.” At the time I thought, what a dickhead!’

The introduction of a controversial boyfriend into the equation may have been a deliberate strategy by the NPOIU, driving a wedge between Watson and her friends. But it is perhaps more likely that Paul was just not particularly suited to undercover work in protest circles. Despite the reservations of her friends, Watson gave every impression of being enamoured by the photographer from Coventry. It was a whirlwind romance. He bought her a Staffordshire bull terrier puppy. She named the dog Bridget. They had only been seeing each other for a few months when Watson told her friends that her new love was helping her overcome her depression. In January 2008, Watson announced she was moving to Coventry to live with Paul and start a bookkeeping course.

It all seemed rather sudden. Watson emailed friends the details of her leaving party: ‘I am moving to Coventry for the beautiful
scenery and its highly regarded ring road,’ she wrote. ‘It’s not the back arse of nowhere (just strongly resembles it) and of course I will be back in Leeds lots and lots.’

The leaving party – a curry followed by a night in a rough pub – reinforced the opinion some friends had formed of Paul. Toward the end of the night when everyone was drunk, he started persuading Watson to kiss her female friends in front of him.

Watson and Catriona snogged a little, between giggles. But after a few seconds Catriona stopped. She felt uncomfortable about the ‘creepy’ way Paul was goading the situation. ‘It seemed like a controlling man thing to do – kind of like he was extending her lead,’ she says. ‘It was not a respectful polyamorous thing.’

Two days later, Watson’s friend John helped drive a removal van to her house in Leeds to pick up her things. The pair drove down to Coventry. When they were at Paul’s apartment he cooked them a fry-up breakfast and suggested they head over to the nearest pub.

The couple visited Leeds a few times after that to meet Watson’s old friends. Each visit left the impression that
something
was not quite right. The couple always insisted on staying in Travelodge hotels. It struck Watson’s friends as an extremely odd thing for them to do. Why shell out money for a hotel in the city when any number of friends had spare rooms? Perhaps the two undercover police officers wanted to avoid a situation in which they were forced to sleep in the same bed. But by insisting on sleeping elsewhere they were raising suspicions. During one trip to Leeds, Watson and Paul were spotted drinking tea in a branch of McDonald’s. ‘Pretty much no one else I know in that scene would ever buy something from McDonald’s,’ John says. ‘It is just alien.’

It was as though Paul was pulling Watson away from radical politics. That much was confirmed when, a few months later, she
phoned friends to say Paul was taking her to Lithuania, where he had found work. She emailed a few times, claiming to be in
eastern
Europe. Not long after, the contact dried up.

Activists in Leeds were now suspicious. ‘She seemed to have gone off the radar,’ says John. He and two friends formed a committee to start investigating Watson and her background. They explored every possible trail, beginning with her family, who Watson had always said lived in Farnborough. They telephoned every Watson household in the area but there was no trace of any Lynn Watson. Then they began looking into her boyfriends. They called every locksmith in Northampton and asked if somebody called Sean worked there. They did the same for photography
agencies
in and around Coventry, where Paul said he worked. ‘Basically, everything came back blank,’ says John. ‘My take on it was that something had to be wrong. People don’t just disappear like that.’

The friends drew up a list of scenarios that could explain her disappearance. The possibilities included that she had suffered some kind of mental breakdown or been in an abusive
relationship
with Paul. They even speculated about whether he might have killed her. In the end, however, the more plausible
explanation
was that their friend of four years had been a mole.

Around that time, there were some anarchists 200 miles away having similar doubts about a member of their group. The Cardiff Anarchist Network (CAN, for short) was a small
collective
of campaigners at the forefront of radical activism in Wales. There were around a dozen of them: lecturers, musicians, a social worker and a trade unionist. They would meet weekly in pubs around the city, campaign on a range of issues, from the Iraq war to the inequities of capitalism, and build links with networks of anarchists elsewhere in the UK and Europe. A number of them had been arrested for criminal damage after
travelling to London and forcing their way into a Coca-Cola factory. On Saturday afternoons they stood outside branches of Starbucks distributing coffee produced by revolutionary co-
operatives
in Mexico. Anyone could attend their meetings, receive their weekly email update or read the minutes of their meetings online. ‘New people were coming all the time,’ says Janine, one CAN member. ‘We were not a closed activist group that treated everyone with suspicion.’

In the summer of 2005, one of the more eccentric people to join the group was a man in his 40s calling himself Marco Jacobs, who claimed to be a truck driver. He was in fact a police officer seconded to the NPOIU, working alongside Lynn Watson and Mark Kennedy. Extremely hairy and weighing around 15 stone, Jacobs had a notorious ability to drink huge quantities of
alcohol
without becoming drunk and liked to adopt the persona of a Northern comedian. ‘Big, burly, brash and blokey,’ says Janine.

Jacobs originally surfaced in Brighton a year earlier. It is not uncommon for undercover police officers to first appear hundreds of miles from the place they are being sent to. However, in this case, it appears that Brighton was Jacobs’ first mission. It did not go to plan. Soon after he turned up at the Cowley Club – a social centre like the Common Place in Leeds – activists in Brighton say they became suspicious. Jacobs told people he worked as a landscape artist and also drove trucks. He bought lots of rounds of drinks and asked activists prying
questions
about where they lived.

‘The word was, that man is a copper, everyone knows he is a copper,’ recalls Terry, one of the spy’s few friends in Brighton. ‘It was something about his deportment that just screamed “pig” to some people.’ A meat-eating truck driver who boasted about getting into pub brawls was perhaps not the best alias to have used in Brighton, which has reputation for a bohemian, cliquey
activist scene. ‘I was telling people that we cannot say, “Oh, he isn’t a student with pink dreadlocks, therefore he must be dodgy,”’ says Terry.

Despite the apparent reservations, Jacobs was allowed into some groups, and even convinced activists to hold meetings in his house, which he assured them would be free of surveillance. One weekend, he drove a group of Brightonians to Shepton Mallet in Somerset, the site of a dispute over proposals to build a Tesco store. In the end, though, he sensed that he was being frozen out. Less than a year into his deployment he turned to his friend Terry and said: ‘Everyone thinks I’m a copper, don’t they?’

A firm rule in the SDS was that undercover officers could never be given a second chance. If an SDS spy could not win the trust of the group of activists they were infiltrating after a short while, they were pulled out and their undercover tour
terminated
. The NPOIU, however, had a different view. It chose to send Jacobs to Cardiff.

Life in Cardiff seems to have been smoother for the undercover police officer. The South Wales anarchists were a more diverse, welcoming crowd. Now on his second attempted infiltration, Jacobs had the chance to learn from mistakes in Brighton. He became a vegan and changed his appearance, growing his hair to his shoulders and dying it purple. He also put more effort into explaining his back-story. He told friends that he had once been on remand in prison, but suddenly went cold whenever they asked what for. ‘He was making out that he used to be a bit of a fighter and he had moved away to start a new life,’ says a friend. ‘I just thought he was a bit of a sad character, who had no family or had some sort of dodgy past.’

That past included a messy divorce. Jacobs told his friends that his ex-wife, a woman called Sam, used to beat him up. There
must have been a real person called Sam in the police officer’s life because he had the name tattooed on his lower back. His other tattoo was a Celtic knotwork on his shoulder that he claimed to have acquired when he was an 18-year-old member of a biker gang. When his friends joked that it was strange he still had the name of an ex-wife on his body, Jacobs visited a tattoo parlour to have it covered up with a black star. It meant the undercover police officer now had the traditional symbol of anarchism
permanently
etched above his backside.

Jacobs rented a first-floor apartment near Roath Park, on the fringe of the student area in Cardiff. Janine describes that flat as ‘entirely without personality’. It was virtually empty except for a small amount of furniture and a heavy metal CD collection on the floor. ‘There were no photographs or anything else that you would have by the time you were in your 40s,’ she adds. But on the whole Jacobs appears to have gone to great lengths in his commitment to his undercover role.

He was always keen for example to talk in detail about his supposed work as a truck driver, hauling boxes of shopping
catalogues
around the country. He would spend hours explaining how he had executed complicated reversing manoeuvres, parking HGV trucks in parking bays ‘designed for Tonka cars’. He had a permanently suntanned right forearm, which friends noticed was noticeably browner than the left, even during the winter. It was, he said, the result of having one arm constantly rested on the truck door by the window. Tom Fowler, a 26-year-old then at the centre of Cardiff activism, says Jacobs talked so much about truck driving he became annoying. ‘I would be like, “I don’t care, Marco!”’ he says. ‘He always had anecdotes from roadside cafés. We would be going down the motorway and pass
somewhere
and he would announce, “Worst cup of coffee on the M4, that place.”’

When Fowler and some other Welsh activists were contacted by friends in Brighton, and told to be wary of Jacobs, they thought the suggestion he could be a mole was unfair. Cardiff activists did not want to fall victim to the paranoia they felt had hampered protest groups elsewhere. ‘We used to be suspicious of people who used to only come to a couple of meetings then not be seen again,’ says Fowler. ‘We never really thought that
someone
living permanently among us, one of the core, if you like, would be a spy.’

If there was one thing that really enamoured Jacobs to his friends in Cardiff it was his humour. ‘He just had so many jokes, constantly,’ says Fowler. ‘His catchphrases were just endless.’ One of his most frequently used catchphrases was: ‘Strong
European
lager is my drug of choice.’ It was like he was parodying the idea of a lonely middle-aged man and his tomfoolery could make people cringe. One day he put on some elbow pads and told Fowler he would use them in a ruck against the police. ‘I laughed and said: “What the fuck, you idiot! That is ridiculous!” But that was Marco: an affable prat.’ Another day, when deciding which takeaway to order, Jacobs opted for Chinese by saying he liked ‘Chinky, chanky, chonk’. ‘Everyone sort of went quiet,’ says Fowler. ‘He just said, “Oh, sorry, that wasn’t funny.” Apart from that incident his comedy was pretty right on.’