BBC2 running a series at the moment called “True Spies”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/true_spies/default.stm
The last two weeks programs, covered the use of the Security Services to infiltrate and seek information on ‘leftys’, Trade Union and Student Union activities. The miners Strike. Political protest etc etc …. Much of this was know, or, suspected. but the programs are eye-openers’ because of the detail and depth described. This weeks show though at 9.pm on the 10 November BBC2 is likely to be even more scary for some of us though. The idea that to have a care and to be ‘active’ for the environment, has also attracted the ‘spooks’ attention.
Here is an example of their work:
Hired spy stopped Newbury protest
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/true_spies/2405325.stm
Newbury protesters were removed from the trees
By Peter Taylor True Spies reporter
In the mid-90s environmental activists took to treetops and hid in tunnels to stop the Newbury bypass being built. The protesters looked like they were winning, until Special Branch hired a freelance spy.
Today motorists zooming along the A34 dual-carriageway from Oxford to the south barely see the once grid-locked Newbury as they swing around the Berkshire market town via its nine-mile bypass. The bypass eventually opened in 1998
As the countryside flashes by, perhaps few remember the fierce battles fought by environmental protestors as they desperately tried to preserve this stretch of wooded landscape.
“To see an area of such beauty ripped apart by machines and tarmaced over so that people can take a few minutes off a journey time is devastating,” says one of the Newbury protestors, Paul Gill.
In 1996, hundreds of protestors flocked to Newbury. They camped in the woods and took to the trees believing the authorities would not cut them down with people in their branches.
But they were wrong. The protesters were brought down by a specialist army with chainsaws and tree-climbing skills.
To Sir Charles Pollard, then Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police, the protesters could not be allowed to win once the government had approved the building of the bypass the previous year. Newbury was a line in the sand.
“The ones who were planning and tried to carry out seriously illegal acts are very subversive in a sense of subversive to democracy,” he says.
But the protesters devised another way to thwart the contractors. They dug underground tunnels and lived in them in the belief that lorries and heavy machinery would not drive over them in case the tunnels collapsed and lives were lost.
Special Branch resorted to their usual methods of gaining information on the opposition’s plans. Protesters had not reckoned on chainsaws
They recruited informers and paid them anything from £25 to larger sums of money – even up to £1,000 a week.
Such sums may seem breathtaking but they’re a drop in the ocean compared to the cost of policing such a protest. A piece of vital intelligence might, for example, save tens of thousands of pounds.
Despite this, stalemate still loomed and costs were rising, Thames Valley took the unprecedented step of recruiting an agent outside normal procedures.
They’d heard of a particular individual who worked for a private security company with unique skills and a perfect pedigree to infiltrate the protesters.
The police normally keep such private security companies at arm’s length as they’re in the business of making money from intelligence they gain.
Despite these reservations, Thames Valley decided to bite the bullet and hire the agent.
The Chief Constable gave the go-ahead for a contract to be drawn up with the individual and the security company for which he worked, calculating that the value of his intelligence would far outweigh the cost of hiring him.
With the contract agreed, the agent’s main task was to get as close as possible to the leaders and in particular to let his handlers know of the best time to take the main tunnel that was holding up the contractors’ operations.
It was 10 feet deep, 90 feet long and becoming increasingly unstable because of the heavy winter rains. The tunnel had to be taken before it collapsed and young lives were lost.
In the dead of night, the agent phoned his handlers, saying that the entrance to the main tunnel was only guarded by two protestors – a man and a woman – in a shelter covering the entrance and a third protestor asleep in the main shaft.
“It was obvious there’d been a good deal of drinking and discarded cans of Tenants Super were all around the camp,” says Mervyn Edwards, one of the police officers involved in the intelligence gathering operation.
In the early hours of the morning, the man guarding the entrance went off to relieve himself, whereupon he was promptly detained by officers hiding in the bushes.
When her companion did not return, the woman went off in search of him. She too was then detained.
The police then approached the entrance to the tunnel and made noises. The person in the entrance shaft woke up and emerged to see what was happening. He too was detained and the tunnel was taken.
“It was a big blow and demoralising,” says Paul Gill. “A lot of hopes and a lot of effort had gone into it.”
He had no idea how the tunnel was finally taken and that it was entirely due to the agent.
“He’d have to be paid a lot of money, because if anybody had found out, I should imagine it would have been quite dangerous for him.”
Mervyn Edwards was delighted. The gamble over hiring the agent had paid off: “We couldn’t have done it so successfully, so quickly and so safely without him.”
The bypass was finally completed and Sir Charles Pollard felt vindicated: “If the protestors had succeeded, it would have been a serious precedent not just for road building but for democracy.”
And what of the Newbury agent? His cover was so good and his information so accurate, that Special Branch then directed him to infiltrate the animal rights movement.
He might still be there today, or inside some other protest movement. Perhaps he has retired. We simply don’t know. Nor do the protestors.
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True Spies: It Could Happen To You will be broadcast in the UK on BBC Two on Sunday 10 November at 2100 GMT.
Photo-Jounalist ‘Hassle’ list: http://tash.gn.apc.org/journo_hassle.htm
Some of my ‘assorted legal hassles’ : http://tash.gn.apc.org/legal_assortment.htm
On being Watched: http://tash.gn.apc.org/watched1.htm
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Intelligence Services Reveal Their: True Levels Of Intelligence
Life could have been easier for the producers of Undercurrents when we investigated the shadowy world of phone tapping and secret files compilation by Britain’s security agencies. Finding the entrance to the headquarters of the intelligence agency, MI5 would have proven easier if we had thought about asking at the local council office.
A national newspaper revealed that the so called intelligence services had placed the entire blueprints for the MI5 and the MI6 buildings in their local Westminster and Lambeth council planning permission office which are open for public perusal.
A report in the Sunday Times revealed that ‘Not only do the plans clearly mark the entrances and exits in the building but also all the fire escapes, personnel and service lifts, stairways and air conditioning shafts….Documents accompanying the maps reveal the names of senior MI5 officials and provide technical descriptions of counter terrorist measures designed to protect the building’.
After being tracked by CCTV cameras and a helicopter along the banks of the river Thames a cheeky Undercurrents investigator succeeded in gaining entry to the Millbank HQ of MI5 under the pretext of applying for a job. With a video camera rolling he managed to confront two agents of the notorious covert agency about the 250,000 files suspects compiled by MI5 which include many on environmental activists.
An undercurrents spokesperson said today ” During our investigations we revealed the massive resources which the nations secret agents are applying in order to gather information on people whose supposed threat to the nations security has been to sit in a tree or wave a banner. It is difficult to see how the assumptions of these so called ‘intelligence’ agents, who spend £240million on the security of their own head quarters and then leave details of how to bypass all their security measures in the local council office, can be relied upon
Our investigations during the production of ‘BUGGER OFF’ also revealed British Telecoms links with M15 during phone tapping procedures. In another investigation ,’PIG BROTHER’ ,we also expose the faces of the special squad of police officers involved in compiling files on the growing number of environmental activists. Based at Scotland yard the Forward Intelligence Team (FIT) have appeared at protests up and down the country with video cameras. Civilian photographers are also employed by the FIT to record people attending protests. One civilian photographer who normally works on forensic photographic work spoke on a hidden camera about her role in photographing people attending protests.
“I normally do work that benefits people you know but these people (protesters) are harmless” She was later sacked according to a police source who works with the FIT.
Our undercover investigations revealed that the FIT are also willing to pay for any information on activists. Evidence of regular phone tapping and email interceptions are exposed. Scotland yard later tried to dismiss the investigative documentary PIG BROTHER by undercurrents as being “heavily edited”.
Check out at Undercurrents http://www.undercurrents.org
