Anything to Declare? (18 page)

Of course, as a country heading for war, the last thing we needed was for the enemy to know what we had been looking at and, as such, in the short term, we played the secret-services participation down.

At the same time as the gun-parts affair was going on, we were working with the FBI, CIA and US Customs. The Americans had discovered that a military electrical company was supplying computer chips to the Iraqis for their fighter aircraft. The chips were for the aircrafts’ weapons system called the IFF – Identification: Friend or Foe. Basically, plane A sends out an automated signal to plane B. Plane B sends an automated reply to plane A. If the reply is coded correctly, then plane A’s weapon system does not deploy because plane B has identified itself as friendly. If the code is incorrect, then plane A deploys its weapons and plane B becomes toast ASAP and there’s sweet FA it can do about it. So it was rather obvious why Saddam Hussein’s air force (as small as it was) wanted to load up these chips and become untouchable by faking friendly code responses.

The rogue American company was sending the chips to the UK via the old trusty FedEx. Then the package was to be sent to the Isle of Wight. The recipient company there would repackage the chips and send them to Turkey, then on to Cyprus, then Jordan and finally by road to Iraq. The tortuous, roundabout route into Iraq could be made to mean nothing if we could intercept the chips early enough and before they began their long journey. Which British Customs, working with our stateside cousins, was able to do. The major difference between this case and that of the supergun was that all parties involved wanted the Iraq Air Force to get the chips – and to use them. And there was a very good reason for this. The plan was very simple but extremely cunning.

As they came into the country, I intercepted the chips at the FedEx base at Stansted Airport and then passed them on to an American secret service agent. He disappeared for a couple of hours and then returned with the chips, perfectly repackaged as if they had never been opened. I then got them back into the FedEx delivery system, and I did a touch of jiggery-pokery with their computer programs so that even FedEx didn’t know that the packages had been removed for a few hours or that I had ever pulled out the chips for examination.

While the chips were away, they were, so the CIA agent later told me, radiated to clear their memory and then re-programmed with a different IFF code. So when the chips finally arrived in Iraq and were installed in the fighter jets, the only good they did was to arm up Hussein’s Air Force with IFF chips that would send out the signal for ‘I am the enemy – please shoot me down’. It was one of the best examples of Britain and the United States making good bedfellows since Edward winked at Mrs Simpson. And it was a team-up I was proud to be involved in (the fighter plane one, that is). However, international cases didn’t always go that well.

Asil Nadir was the head of a company called Polly Peck, which went bust owing millions after an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO). As the evidence against him mounted, Nadir readied himself to do a runner and escape to his birthplace, the Turkish-occupied north of Cyprus. It was a clever move on his part for two reasons: one, because the UK did not recognize the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus so no extradition treaty was in place; and two, his family were involved in an airline called Noble Air that flew to Northern Cyprus.

So alerts were put out to my airport, which is where the airline operated from. We were to arrest Nadir on site. The SFO coppers that wanted him were a group of mainly deskbound number crunchers and, as you can guess, we didn’t hold these plods in high esteem. Unfortunately, the SFO had put all their eggs in one leaky basket and Nadir slipped out of the UK via another route. Nadir became front-page news and one of Britain’s most famous and most wanted fugitives. He took his exit routine right under the noses of the authorities and headed for freedom. Two days later, the SFO officers turned up at the airport. They were met by comments of ‘wankers’ from both our officers and Special Branch. Now they had to try to make up for their mistake, or, to put it more clearly, we had to pull a rabbit out of a bag for them to save face.

As it happened, the day that the SFO turned up was one of the days that Noble Air flew out of the UK. Within the hour, I was called to the surveyor’s office, as apparently my skills as a bag-cracker and lock-picker were needed. Fourteen bags had been checked in under the name of Nadir, yet there wasn’t a Nadir registered with the airline as travelling. The SFO had received intelligence that Nadir’s sister was shipping out all of her brother’s paperwork before the SFO could get their hands on it as evidence. So we all tramped down to the bowels of the airport and waited for the bags to spin around the automated baggage system before arriving at the Noble Air chute. It was quite obvious who was going to be doing the work here: the SFO officers were all suited and booted and I was in my overalls.

All fourteen bags appeared in a stream and every single one was different from the other. Some were Delsey, some were Samsonite and others were locked up with bloody great padlocks. The SFO weren’t choosy, they wanted the lot opened, so I got down to a lot of concentrated lock-picking. The SFO checked every bag that I unlocked and they discovered . . . absolutely sweet FA. Once again, Nadir had out-smarted the police. As if deliberately adding insult to injury, the bags only contained his extensive wardrobe of suits, shirts and shoes. I was only surprised he hadn’t left instructions that every bag should contain a note saying ‘Fuck You British Customs’.

Among the officers of different law enforcement agencies, it is no secret that the agencies often don’t get on. The only people who do think that we get on are the general public, who have seen too many ‘reality’ TV shows that depict the fiction that we are all best buddies working for the common good. But law enforcement departments are not in love with each other. That’s a simple fact. Working relationships were often paper thin even if we were on a joint operation. Customs and Special Branch were thrown together at ports and airports as our prey was the same – but our reasons for being in the hunt were different. In the end, we realized that our final aim was the same and any fallouts could be resolved. Sometimes to everyone’s benefit. One way we had of resolving differences was a drink-draughts match. So, for example, one time we had fallen out big time with Special Branch due to one of our junior officers saying something to the wrong SB officer. As a result of this, working relationships broke down quickly and something had to be done. My governor and I walked into the SB office to have a wee chat with their Detective Sergeant. We sat down for deep, complicated and very long negotiations.

‘So, gentlemen,’ said the DS, ‘draughts match?’

My boss and I looked at each other, nodded and said, ‘Yep.’ And that was it: negotiation over and done with.

The next night in the airport staff club, the match began: two teams of five officers for the best of three games on the giant draughts board, marked out on the dance floor. The board was 20 x 20 foot and the draught ‘pieces’ were a mixture of pints of lager, bitter, Guinness and cider placed on the squares. The rules were simple: if you took the opponent’s piece, you drank it. If a pint became a king, a double Scotch was poured into the pint. Within an hour, everyone was legless and could barely remember what the original argument was over, and we were the best of mates again. I don’t know why politicians and world leaders don’t take the example of thrashing things out over a game of drink-draughts. And it would make great TV.

We’d had a BMW 5 series sat on a trailer in our exams shed for at least three days. It wasn’t being ignored; it was just that the search team were much too busy on a couple of forty-foot containers that had been discovered to contain a ton of cannabis. I happened to be at the port sharing some intelligence with the ports Intel team and, in turn, they happened to be in the exams shed checking out the car.

The reason that the car had been pulled for examination was that not many cars turned up at the port on a trailer coming off a roll-on/roll-off ferry. It just didn’t happen, because the cost alone would make the exercise prohibitive. So it had aroused suspicion. And here we had it, a three-year-old, right-hand-drive BMW with English plates from Rotterdam. The Intel officer was giving it a once-over, collecting details such as the Vehicle Identification Number (the VIN, which could be seen through the windscreen), car tax details and trailer details. Every check that he carried out made this motor look more interesting. No trace on the car’s registration – the registration did not exist. No trace of the VIN, so the car didn’t really exist either. And on top of all this the car tax disc was fake. Not much going for the car but plenty going for this being a prime tool for a smuggling run.

A new shift arrived at the exams shed and a couple of officers were allocated to the car. Their initial problem was that the car was locked and there were no keys available. Smashing of the driver’s side window would be a last resort but, luckily, the team had a car entry kit (there are such things: a complete kitbag of every possible instrument of entry). The locks were sprung on the car and we wandered over to see if there was anything immediately apparent, such as the unmistakable smell of cannabis inside the car instead of the stench of a magic tree hanging from the rear-view mirror. I opened the driver’s door and something dropped out on to the ground and rolled under the car. We all looked at each other, and then bent down to look under the car. Cue six pairs of Customs officers’ eyes all suddenly opening very, very wide. Cue six Customs officers running for their lives as I shouted out, ‘GRENADE!’

Knowing that a live grenade had a detonation time of about six seconds, we all ran out of the shed at full belt, each one trying to beat the current 100-metre world record. We dived for cover and then . . . nothing. Which was a little embarrassing, but then you can’t actually die from embarrassment but you can from standing too near to an exploding grenade.

The police were informed and they arrived with sirens blazing, presumably to scare the grenade into submission. The Army bomb disposal boys were also called, and they turned up an hour later, also with sirens blazing. By now, the grenade must have been really worried. Two hours later, the area was cleared and we returned to the shed. We found that, apart from the grenade, the car was somewhat full of other interesting articles, such as machine guns, automatic pistols and even more grenades. This time, the anti-terrorist SWAT team boys were called and they turned up, you’ve guessed it, with sirens blazing, and took everything away.

And that’s the big trouble with being in a profession where your job is to be on the lookout for anything strange. Sometimes you find it.

Another case provides a good example of how one apparently small piece of intelligence information can lead to the unravelling of a much bigger plot. The Drug Trafficking Offences Act (DTOA) 1994 dealt with the financial proceeds of drugs crime, and it was a piece of legislation that was brought into being in rather a hurry. You could tell it was a bit of a rush job by the strange rules that we had to adhere to when we were operating under the DTOA. We could seize any amount of cash over £10,000 as long as the owner had no convincing story for having it. But the flaw in that rule was that as soon as the smugglers and criminals found out about it – which they very quickly did – they started carrying only £9,999 knowing that we couldn’t touch them.

But that didn’t last long. In fact, it lasted only as long as it took for the first Customs officer to say, ‘Right, turn out your pockets, son . . .’ They would invariably find that the loose change in the smuggler’s pockets was enough to tip the cash amount over the magic £10,000 barrier – and bingo, out come the handcuffs and off goes the money.

Many a smuggler lost the lot because of the bit of loose change in their pockets taking the total amount of money carried on their person over the limit. In for a penny, in for losing ten grand.

One passenger who was searched and fell foul of the DTOA was Martha Degal, a South American from Dutch Suriname, which is bordered by Brazil and Guyana. She was searched at outbound by BAA security and they happened to find £12,000 cash in her sports bag. A Customs officer was called and Martha was questioned under caution. She said she was on her way back to Amsterdam after visiting a friend in London. Unfortunately, she couldn’t recall her friend’s name, and she didn’t even make one up, so the money was seized under the DTOA and she was sent on her way. All her paperwork had been photocopied, including a black address book with almost 150 names in it.

After seizure, the case was split into two parts: the court case and the intelligence case. The second fed the first with the evidence that would suggest or even prove that the money was drugs related. Court was a bit of a pain as we would have to appear almost every month in front of the magistrates to show that the case was progressing and they would then award us another month to continue the investi-gation. Before every court case, I would write to Martha with the court details and it was up to her whether she appealed the case. She never did and a few months later the seizure was confirmed and the money ended up in the Treasury.

But it was the intelligence and investigation side of the case that was of real interest to both me and the department. The initial links to drugs were very weak. A number of UK addresses that I found in the address book came up with drugs links, but that was it. It was the Dutch intelligence that was the real eye-opener. Nearly every Dutch person in Martha’s address book either had a drugs record or was already under investigation. I contacted the Dutch police and soon had them onside and they said they would do anything to help further my investigation. They knew I had access to the British Airways computer and via this almost every airline in the world.

The case itself now revolved around the belief that the names in Martha’s address book were linked in some way. We currently had the grand total of £12,000 and no drugs, but my senior officer was very keen on my continuing. The major thing to do was to whittle down a long list of 146 targets to a manageable number. The Dutch assisted with this by informing me who was in prison and who was dead, and this brought the target number down to seventy-eight. Next thing was to group together families and those in a relationship. After doing this, I got the target list down to a more manageable fifty-five. The next task was to get every target registered to me on our CEDRIC system so that, if any of them should pop up at any of our seaports or airports, I would get to know about it and could take appropriate action. The forms that I had to complete to get the targets on the system were a nightmare of tedium as each target would take a couple of hours to do, as well as putting in addresses and companies. What was that I said earlier about the glamour of undercover work?