AVT024 - AUD020 Mai Davies & Oliver Hides presenting ‘Good Morning Wales’ on BBC Radio Wales, 6 November 2013. ▪ GMW homepage: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0074hk3 ▪ Related BBC News story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales24831728 ▪ Audio source: http://tombfowler.tumblr.com/post/67042517085/i-was-interviewedabout-the-undercover-police Speakers: MD = Mai Davies OH = Oliver Hides AG = Professor Anthony Glees TF = Tom Fowler === OH: Good morning, the main stories today: Welsh protesters criticise the decision to hear a case against undercover police behind closed doors. Members of a Welsh protest group have been told that the case they are bringing against undercover police will be heard in secret. Three members of the Cardiff Anarchist Network are among several protesters bringing the case against the police. === MD: Protesters in Wales have been told their case against undercover police will have to be heard in secret. People from activist organisations including three from Cardiff are bringing the case against the police officers whom they allege formed sexual relationships with women as part of their jobs. Yesterday the Court of Appeal told them their case would be held behind closed doors at an Investigatory Powers Tribunal. OH: We spoke to Professor Anthony Glees, the director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham, who explained what that meant. Prof AG: Well, basically this is a way of hearing evidence, not necessarily from the people directly involved, where that evidence is evidence that is either secret because it has been obtained in particular way, which government don’t want to disclose, or if to do so would not be in the national interest. We’re talking about very small number of cases that would be dealt with in this way, and of course everybody knows justice to be done must be seen to be done. And that is very much a core principal of our democracy. But there are a small number of cases where that is simply not possible.
OH: Tom Fowler was part of the Cardiff group that was spied on. I spoke to him earlier in his first broadcast interview and asked him about his involvement. TF: I was involved for many years, in anarchist activism, in Cardiff that was Cardiff Anarchist Network. I actually live in Newport, so I was involved with South Wales Anarchists, but in Cardiff a lot, so I was involved in that. We did all sorts of things, campaigns around environmental destruction, against the deportation of asylum seekers, all sorts of things - against the G8, against various injustices which we thought were important. OH: And you were infiltrated? TF: Yeah, yeah. Somebody joined our group, not long after the G8 in Scotland in 2005, who became a very close friend of mine, became more than a close friend of some members of our group, hang [sic] around for about, nearly five years, just under, then disappeared, almost suddenly. I mean there was a bit of build up about how he left, but, yep, more recently we have strong reason to believe he was a police officer. OH: And how did he arrive? And what did he present himself as? TF: Well he… Initially he - it was very strange for an anarchist activists [sic], who moved to Cardiff. He claimed to be from Northampton, but first he moved to Brighton, and got involved in the scene down there, of which there is a significant scene for this sort of thing. But he found that he didn’t really fit in there because he was a normal working class bloke and the activist scene in Brighton was maybe not fitting in for him, whereas in Cardiff, in South Wales, much more that sort of person involved in anarchism, so he befriended people from the area, around the country at different protests and demonstrations and events, and decided he was going to move here to get involved more and because he’d made friends. OH: So, when he arrived here with you, could you - it was a small group? TF: Pretty small group, yeah, yeah. Maybe like ten, twelve of us most of the time, but there was a wider network of people. OH: But he built up a pretty convincing backstory. I guess you’d have to, to, to win the trust of a group that small? TF: ?Yeah, but to be honest we weren’t - maybe naïvely, now we know the full extent of the undercover policing of protests and protest movements - but we weren’t necessarily looking for police officers in the ranks. It was a fair, a convincing enough story, had no reason to not believe it. He was quite natural, he appeared, you know… He was certainly a ‘type’, if you know what I mean. There were other people just like him I knew, and still know, and are real people. OH: And you believe that his, he took his role to an extent where he formed relationships with two of the women in the group.
TF: Well, yeah, we know for a fact he did. Very personal relationships, sexual relationships, yeah. OH: And is that… How did that happen? TF: Well, as you could imagine, you’re doing fairly stressful things sometimes when you’re involved in a protest group, you’re coming into confrontation with police officers sometimes. In stressful environments you end up getting quite close to people you are doing activism with. OH: Mmm. Was it in any sense justifiable? Understandable? TF: I wouldn’t have said so, no. I think that a key part of his infiltration technique was to be chasing after women. I think when we look at other undercover officers whose stories have come to light recently there is certainly a lot of foreknowledge of the lives and situations of the women they were targeting, and that they particularly went after women who maybe were in a vulnerable position at that time, and the chasing of those women became a key part of their undercover story. It’s what they were doing when they weren’t involved in activism. And by being in relationships with these women they gained a level of trust in the wider group because of those people being trusted. OH: Mmm. It’s an ancient technique, isn’t it? When it comes to spying and infiltration? TF: Absolutely. I was - a bit of a digression - I was watching ‘The Sandbaggers’, the old 1970s spy show… OH: Right… TF: …From long ago, which is fantastic, and they always refer to that as a rape, as a, you know, it’s a technique which undercover officers use to ingratiate themselves into movements. OH: Yep, Mata Hari, pillow talk, all the rest of it. TF: Quite. OH: And so, the end of this story, as you say, this gentleman vanished? TF: Yeah, umm… He foreshadowed it, he claimed to have worked in Corfu, years previously, doing a bit of building work. He went out to Corfu for somebody’s 50th birthday party, he came back, he said he’d been offered another job out in Corfu and he was seriously considering taking it. Couple of months went by, and he was definitely going, he had a leaving do at the Mango House on Westgate Street. He went - he stayed in contact for a couple of months via text message, to some
members of the group - not myself, particularly. And then that was it - gone. OH: And at what point did one of you say, ‘Hold on…’ TF: Well, there was a story in the Guardian [sic] maybe six months, maybe longer, later. And Peter Black, who was a police officer in the Youth against Racism in Europe in the 1990s in London, who came forward and told his story to a journalist. And there was so many parallels, and there was a bit of, ‘What happened to Marco?’ He’d gone to Corfu, and there was no contact. People had gone on some ex-pat forums trying to find out was he okay? There was a genuine concern that maybe he’d fallen ill, or was in trouble, or something. But then when we read this newspaper article, and people showed it to us, it was very clear that this was very similar, very similar situation. OH: But you can’t be certain, can you? TF: Well, somebody made a complaint, an official complaint, about a [sic] incident that happened, to the Metropolitan Police, where they accused him of being an undercover officer indirectly, and the paperwork came back from the Metropolitan Police referred to him as ‘Officer Jacobs’. So we do have a paper trail that says he is an officer. OH: And of course that is what this tribunal will determine, as to whether he was, certainly, a police officer, and you would rather it was in open court? TF: And, as it stands, there will be some in open court. The ruling yesterday gave us, from that tribunal, gave us the go ahead to go to, to take the common law elements of our claim to open court. However the human rights elements, it’s been decided, that Parliament must have assumed, must have realised, that they were, when they passed the Regulatory Investigative [sic] Powers Act, they were overriding people’s fundamental human rights, and therefore it has to go to the IPT, which is a truly Kafkaesque… OH: The Investigatory Powers Tribunal… TF: Yeah, that’s right. OH: Not happy with that? TF: Well, I think the existence of the Investigative [sic] Powers Tribunal in the case should make any fair thinking person quite concerned about the nature of democracy and justice in this country. They refer to it as ‘Britain’s most secret court’. I find it quite disturbing that in the appeal that we just had, which was seen over by Lord Dyson, second most senior judge in the country; he was completely unaware of the workings of the IPT or the extent of their powers. OH: As many people would be, but I guess what we all have to understand is that in this country where our, where a battle is fought on a daily basis against those who
are wishing to do our country harm, certain things have to remain secret, and certain identities have to remain secret. TF: There is a case for that, I wouldn’t want to get into that now but I would say that when we are talking about things like MI5 and MI6, that is a world away from what the Regulatory Investigative [sic] Powers Act gives the power for very, very low level officials in a myriad of public authorities to authorise the use of sexual, sex by deceit, as an infiltration tactic to gather information against ordinary members of the public. This isn’t about terrorism. I do have a cr… I’ve been arrested many times, the most serious thing has been blocking the public highway. We’re not talking about terrorism here, we are talking about some very basic democratic protest. OH: That’s Tom Fowler speaking to me a little bit earlier