Anything to Declare? (21 page)

Now that I was out of the airports, going to work in the mornings was a sheer pleasure. I had rented a studio flat in Tobacco Dock, which was a mile away from Custom House. The walk took me past Wapping Steps, under Tower Bridge and through the Tower of London. I even got on nodding terms with the Yeoman warders. The walk back from work was even better with three good pubs that just happened to be on my route. The worst problem with Custom House was that, as it was sitting on Lower Thames Street, we had the embankment in one direction and the Tower Bridge crossroads in the other. So, no matter what time of day it was, the traffic on Thames Street was like slow-moving treacle, which was no good when some port or airport Customs had discovered a large drugs importation and we had to try to get to them ASAP.

Some jobs involved tracking someone through the city, like the Tango 16 one, which were exciting because of the challenges they posed; these jobs called for a certain kind of surveillance work. First, there was the Underground to contend with. Over the years, there had been lots of films made showing people doing surveillance on the tube, but it was all mostly bollocks. For one thing, underground our radios became totally ineffective when it came to contacting our car team above ground, and so they were always trying to second-guess where you might be heading. One way around this was to sacrifice an officer. They would watch the team and target disappear on to a train then leg it to the surface to radio the cars. The cars would then attempt to race the train to the next station. It was usually utter madness. Then there was the question of radio usage between the officers on the tube. This was next to useless as the electrified lines played merry hell with our earpieces, so it ended up sounding like someone dragging their fingernails down a blackboard, at high volume, right in the middle of your head. The only sure-fire way to keep your team together was to make sure that everybody could see each other, which was just impossible at rush hour.

The next problem was security – both the police and store guards. Places like Harrods had metal detectors at the entrance doors and security officers to do rub downs and searches. This was somewhat of a bugger when you were either wearing your radio in a body rig or, like I did, on your leg; both places being areas where bombers would strap their explosives. None of us wanted to risk being mistakenly shot as a suicide bomber. Getting shot would kind of ruin your day. Especially if you were shot dead. That’s always the worst kind. So, to avoid this possibility, if I followed someone into a store, it would usually involve a bit of whispering out of the corner of my mouth and a very brief flash of my badge to the security guards to prevent having my head jumped up and down on for being a suspected terrorist.

The other national security matter that pissed us off was the so-called ‘ring of steel’ – this was the name for the security and surveillance cordon around the City of London. It was originally installed to deter the IRA’s mainland bombing campaign when they started targeting the capital. (In fact, ‘ring of steel’ was the phrase used in Northern Ireland during the Troubles to describe a fortified circle around the centre of Belfast.) In the British version set up by the Metropolitan Police, roads entering central London were narrowed into small chicanes that made drivers slow down and also enabled them to be filmed by CCTV cameras. The roads also had a concrete median barrier with a sentry box and, to begin with, they were manned by armed police.

Our surveillance cars would spin through the ring of steel without any problems but our observation vans often got stopped. There would then be lots of flashing of badges and bad-tempered police officers demanding that we open up the rear of the van. This always had the same result: the copper would open the back of the van to find a couple of surveillance officers with headsets on, surrounded by technical kit and who, within two seconds of the doors being opened, would start shouting at the police officer, ‘Shut the fucking door, you twat!’ (Seeing this particular scene played out firsthand was priceless. Especially the looks on the faces of any members of the public passing by who would just see a police officer open the back door of a van and then from the depths of the vehicle immediately hear ‘Shut the fucking door, you twat!’ I often wondered who they thought must be in there to get away with speaking like that to the police . . . the Duke of Edinburgh, perhaps.)

One day while at Charlie Hotel, I was surprised to get a visit from one of our Queen’s Warehouse officers from below stairs. These non-investigators rarely seemed to emerge out from their underground lair and, if they did, it was usually to bollock an officer for getting his paperwork wrong or for having the affront to fill up his nice clean warehouse with dirty drugs. But this time it was different, the Queen’s Warehouse officer wanted to be fully briefed on a job that I had been involved in a week before, a nice little job in which 30 kg of heroin had been picked up. It was all now sitting underground with all the other mountains of powders and pills in the cellars of the Queen’s Warehouse.

I was curious. ‘So why do you want a briefing from me?’ I asked.

The officer looked a bit sheepish. ‘Well, I need to know everything about the job,’ he said, ‘so that I can brief a visiting VIP we’re expecting.’

What a bloody cheek, I thought: it was my job and yet some Custom House admin cave-dweller was going to try to get the kudos for all my team’s hard work. I looked over to my senior officer who had been listening in, and he looked as surprised and disgusted as I was.

‘OK,’ I said to the Queen’s Warehouse officer, ‘take this down – G.F.Y.S. That’s gee eff why ess.’

The officer grabbed his notepad and pen, thinking that this was the start of the briefing. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘and what does that mean?’

Before I could say anymore, the senior officer leaned over and very slowly and very clearly enunciated, ‘Go. Fuck. Your. Self. And, if I were you, sunshine, I’d leave while you can still walk out of here without a boot toecap parked in your arse.’

Welcome to the fun factory, indeed.

If you ever get the feeling that you are being watched or followed, the chances are that . . . you’re not. Surveillance is expensive and time consuming and it’s usually only employed when the cost of the resources (and the overtime) can be justified by either an achievable result – a conviction – or to avert a serious crime. So it’s unlikely any of us are big enough fishes for the authorities to try to land us.

It also comes as a great surprise to most people to find out what the full range of HM Customs work could entail. To the general public, it was just uniformed officers standing at the blue/red/green channels in airports trying to catch students with spliffs in their socks and nuns with gin in their water bottles. Well, as we’ve seen, that’s part of it. But, beyond that, they also cover the areas of intelligence info-gathering on smuggling ops being run through all UK ports. And, even further beyond that, to full-blown undercover investigative work following drugs gangs around the country – and even overseas – and gathering intel on and busting large-scale smuggling operations. I’d been through the first two incarnations of Customs work – uniform and Intelligence – and was eager to really experience the third.

It was in the Investigation Division that I met a fellow officer, Darren, who had been nicknamed ‘Dangerous D.’ because – as is the way with service nicknames – he was anything but. Dangerous wasn’t dangerous in himself, far from it – if there were any geese near his house I could guarantee not one of them had heard the word ‘boo’. It was his ideas and his atrocious timing when telling you these ideas that were dangerous.

Dangerous was the most unlikely-looking investigator that I’d ever seen. He could have been the poster boy for timid accountants and computer geeks. With his slicked-down black hair and thick jam-jar-bottom glasses, he would have made a pin-up in any admin office in the Civil Service. He had transferred from the Ministry of Defence into the London Investigation Division at the same time as me. The only genuinely dangerous thing about D. was his driving – it was abysmal – and as such he had never gained his surveillance driving ticket and spent all of his time as a co-driver. But this deficiency, combined with the fact that he didn’t drink (rare among us), meant that he was happy to be the designated driver whenever we all went out on the booze. But he was good at his job and that was the main thing; in this arena you only wanted to work alongside people you could rely on.

HM Customs Investigation Division was very accomplished at surveillance (and, in the years that I was involved in surveillance, not once did the target have any idea that they had been under scrutiny, even when sometimes it had been for years). We were even more successful at it than our police colleagues because of the unique system of surveillance that we operated. This was just one of the differences between the two services, and one of the reasons for the love/hate relationship between Customs and the police. They called us the Church (because the initials of Customs and Excise were also the ‘C of E’ of the Church of England) and we called them the Martians. Each side considered themselves somewhat superior to the other; on our side, we thought that was true because our powers were very draconian and wide ranging, and we also had history on our side – HM Customs being the oldest law enforcement agency in the UK with a history going back over 1,200 years. We were also the world’s first law enforcement agency. The heavy powers the service had acquired had been collected over its lifetime and police powers were weak in comparison. For example, up to about 1974, Customs officers had a licence to kill – that is to say (in legal terms), a Customs officer could never be prosecuted for taking a human life in the protection of the Crown revenue. Alongside that, a Customs officer could deputize anyone on the spot, could outrank any military or police officer in the performance of their duties, and could enter any premises in any way we chose. For these reasons, we sometimes seemed to be the target of resentments from other enforcers – like the police and Army – whose public image was of being the ultimate in law enforcement when actually, in truth, their powers were secondary to ours.

And, in terms of historic precedence, Customs officers were armed (and would remain so until prior to the First World War) before the police were even a Robert Peel wet dream. And we could be armed again if necessary at any time today with just a single signature from the Home Office (and this has been done).

So, all in all, though Customs and the police did some great joint jobs together, the prevailing feeling from both sides – and especially ours – was that we were best kept apart.

Unlike the police, our force had changed its surveillance tradecraft in the early 1990s when Army surveillance teams in Northern Ireland discovered that the IRA had worked out how the old system worked. It happened while the British Army specialist surveillance teams – operated by the Intel Corps – were still using the standard form of surveillance that you may now see in TV dramas, with a chain of officers following the target. But, while following a major IRA target, a surveillance team caught the attention of a covert observation position operated by the special forces. The operatives watched the Intel Corps team all wander past in standard surveillance mode. What was earth shattering was that they were followed by an IRA surveillance team using exactly the same surveillance procedures as the Army specialists. So the myth of the surveillance technique had been blown wide open. Consequently, a new method had to be designed as soon as possible, every bit of it from foot to mobile surveillance, from equipment to a new language. And if the game was blown in Ireland then it was bound to carry through to the UK.

What came out of the total surveillance rethink was a new system adopted by the Customs ID called the Enhanced Surveillance Technique (EST). Even if you knew how the system worked, it was still hard to spot it in action. The secret services were impressed, and they decided that they had to know how EST worked so they could change their field officer training to try to counter it when their agents were out on duties and might be followed themselves.

The best form of surveillance kit will always be the most complicated and irreplaceable piece of equipment available – the human eyeball. But there were other aids that were very useful and that we were trained to use.

Covert body set: this was a type of radio system called the Racal Cougar kit used by all good surveillance organizations. Specially designed for the job, it came in three different forms: car kits – big and powerful; field kits – for CROPs operations only (Covert Rural Observation Positions – more on this later); and the everyday body kits that could be worn on most parts of the body, which weighed about half a pound and were a half-inch thick. The body kit was great but limited in the distance that it could transmit. On big operations that used both footmen and cars, the nearest car to a footman would often have to retransmit the footman’s radio calls so that everyone knew what was going on. The body kits also had another small drawback, which was that when you transmitted it was the same as turning on a 700-watt microwave. It may have only been for a few seconds at a time but some long-serving officers ended up with deep vein damage thanks to the radio waves.

Earpieces: fortunately, we didn’t have to wear radio-connected earpieces, as some services did, with the giveaway of a visible wire, which was quite a good way to advertise yourself to the bad guys. We used earpieces that were specially and individually made for each officer. These would fit deep into the ear canal and, because of that, were a real bugger to get out.

Tracking systems: the system we used at the time was perfectly operational but also had its limitations because it was the less expensive of the two systems on the market at that point. For example, Europol, the European Union law enforcement agency (and who, believe it or not, chased things like olive oil smugglers), could put a tracker on a target lorry in Italy and watch its progress on a computer screen in Paris. They had the expensive option. We, on the other hand, had the less expensive kit and so had to stay within a certain distance from our targets so that the car tracking system could maintain a signal with the transmitter. (And, after all, we were only following heroin smugglers or gun runners, so why give us the expensive kit?) The tracking screen was like a small laptop and displayed a constantly moving map that could be zoomed in and out. The screen would display the best-estimated position of the target vehicle and your own tracking vehicle. I say ‘estimated’ because the signal could be affected by anything from power lines to electronic ‘noise’ in built-up inner-city areas. This tracking system was used to cut down on the chances of our being spotted but it had its limitations. It could not, of course, tell you who was in the car or who got in or out. Which is why, as I say, the best bit of hightech surveillance kit has always been the human eye.