Anything to Declare?

by Jon Frost

  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.

  The UK’s secret services – MI5 for domestic security and MI6 for overseas intelligence gathering – are very good. They’ve been going in one form or another since the reign of Elizabeth I so they should know what’s what by now. But, as in any organization, they are only as good as their individual officers and so we had many of the MI5 spooks join us on our training courses and exercises. It is fair to say that you can get rusty, so the exercises got everyone up to speed in both car and foot surveillance. As one would expect, the secret service plays its training very close to its chest. We would only become involved when the prospective field officers were nearly ready for the outside world. It was a sign of how Customs surveillance and undercover work was highly valued that we were used to test and fine-tune the UK’s secret service agents. And it wasn’t just British officers that the Customs Investigation Division trained: they also taught some overseas agency officers as well. This was a clever ploy as we would learn how these agencies worked abroad, but it didn’t go both ways as the foreign officers were never trained alongside British officers – an extra-vigilant way of protecting their anonymity and security – and the full workings of the British service were not revealed to them. The training and testing of secret service surveillance officers helped us to sharpen up our own skills as well, especially when we would run counter-operations against the trainees. And it was also a great way of training recently recruited Investigation officers like myself.

  Once the secret service agents had been trained and had played about with their new tradecraft with their instructors, they were placed in the real world with real surveillance officers against them. One at a time, the new officer would be given a number of tasks. These usually started with a meet and handover o
f intelligence. The officer would then have to make two drops and eventually make it to a railway station. This was bread-and-butter tradecraft. They were to deploy their anti-surveillance skills and if they couldn’t do it then they were out. And, remember, this final exercise was at the end of their training so it would be a bloody great shame to fail at this stage. On our side of the exercise, we would pick up the target at the meet and stay with them to identify the two drops and the final destination. We could use whatever equipment and skills that we liked but, mainly, we were there to try to make them fail. Because, when they started doing this for real, their opposition would be out to kill them, not just give them bad feedback on poor performance.

  One of our exercises was against three trainees that MI6 were trying to establish as overseas agents. These exercises were enjoyable because most of the work area was in central London so it was easy for us to change vehicles and outfits quickly. All we were told by the MI6 instructors was where the meet was and at what time. On this occasion, the target, Romeo One, was due to have a meet outside a pub near Oxford Street. I was positioned in a phone box opposite and as such would give the agent’s full description and the time of ‘lift off’ – the start of the op. One Middle Eastern-looking chap was sitting at a table reading a newspaper. Surely this couldn’t be our target, I thought, as he was wearing a bright-yellow jumper and green trousers. But then these trainees were to be overseas agents so would likely be of foreign extraction and varying ethnicity, depending on where they would be stationed. I broadcasted his description over the net. Seconds later, one of the MI6 trainers appeared on the scene and passed Mr Yellow-Green two packages and his instructions, and then the trainer was off. So he was our man, after all.

  The agent then did what most visitors do and whipped out his London A–Z. My colleague, Sam, was the closest officer to him other than me, and he decided to start the day with an early victory. He did a quick wander past the target and then sat down next to him. ‘Hello, mate,’ Sam said. ‘You lost?’ But the target was totally unfazed and opened up his instructions. Sam had a look at the addresses and started to flick through the guy’s A–Z. He made sure he kept the ‘transmit’ button pressed down on his radio as he found each address and slowly read it off the sheet. After five minutes of explaining and pointing, the target shook Sam’s hand and was off to his first drop-off totally unaware that we were already there waiting to nab him. One-nil! That was an easy one and showed that surveillance isn’t always a matter of complex plans – sometimes the simplest line of attack worked. So, that was one trainee MI6 agent down, two more to go.

  The next agent, after his initial meet, was off like a whippet . . . but in the wrong direction. We followed at a distance and ten minutes later he was standing by the side of the road looking at a map. Out of the blue, a private hire car pulled up next to him. ‘Hello, mate, want a lift? I’m just packing up for the day.’ The agent, not believing his luck, jumped into the back of the car and told the driver his first address. Two drop-offs later, the agent and the driver then went off to Liverpool Street Station. Having dropped the agent off at the station, the driver – who was actually our officer, Paul – parked the car back up at our garage and grabbed a surveillance van to complete the pick-up of the now busted MI6 trainee. The trainee agent had obviously never expected us to be running our own private hire cars as a surveillance vehicle. But really he should have known that a taxi driver would never voluntarily offer a free lift to anyone, anywhere! That earth-shattering occurrence would make the first ‘bong’ on the News at Ten.

  So, that was two agents down with one to go. Our ground commander for the day said that we should let the next operation run more fully, and he also told us to stop being so bloody clever. So it was back to tradecraft. The ‘pick-up’, or spotting, of Target No. 3 was easy: he was bald as a coot and wearing a bright-red jacket. MI6 must have been planning an Arab Nations infiltration as this trainee was another Middle Eastern national. His first stop was rather a shock to both us and his trainers. He went against all his instructions and went straight into his hotel – which was an act of professional suicide. Five minutes later, he emerged back on the street but this time wearing a bright-orange jacket. He had tried to be clever by changing clothes but had now made himself more visible and also given away his safe house.

  Our vehicle-bound officers parked their cars and joined us on the ground. As we now had fourteen officers on foot, our handovers were fast and smooth, each officer taking over the tracking duties from the other, with the covert surveillance baton being passed along from one to the other. In these numbers, there was little chance of being spotted, though there was a slight hiccup on a very busy Oxford Street when we lost him for a few minutes – easily done on one of the busiest streets in the world.

  However, Target 3 unknowingly helped us find him quicker than we might have done by the fact that he was constantly munching on a large packet of monkey nuts that he scoffed as he walked, leaving a Hansel and Gretel-like trail of peanut shells everywhere he went. The commander was on the radio: ‘Right, no bother, Tango 3’s been relocated.’ The target then did as he had been instructed and carried out both of his letter drops. On the Edgware Road, he decided to check out some TVs and disappeared into an electrical shop. By now, his MI6 trainers were pulling their hair out at how bad he had been performing so they told us to end the exercise. We agreed, but had our own ideas about how to do it.

  Sam and I followed him into the shop and sidled up next to him. ‘Hello, son, how you doing?’

  This got his attention and, rather worriedly, he looked around between me and Sam and then looked towards the door to make an exit.

  ‘Well, well, Dog,’ Sam said, using my old Mad Dog nickname rather than identifying me, ‘it looks as if our friend here has never met Mossad officers before.’

  At the mention of the Israeli Secret Service agency, our man drew in a sharp intake of breath . . . and fainted on the spot. I looked down at him on the floor. Sam looked down at him on the floor. We both looked up at each other, shrugged and then walked out, leaving failed MI6 agent No. 3 passed out in the middle of the shop with staff and customers slowly forming a ring around his body.

  But things weren’t always that much fun. There were many trainee agents that had their act together and really made us work for our supper. In one way, it was actually a relief to come up against trainee agents that really pushed us – it meant that we knew our overseas intelligence agency was at last finding some good recruits instead of monkey-nut-munching pass-out merchants. Although, sometimes, even the good recruits let the tension and nerves of surveillance get the better of them.

  We were on the south coast, a bit out of our urban comfort zone. This time we were up against a few MI5 British agents, and the first two of the day had succeeded in escaping our surveillance net. The last agent of the day that we were tracking was apparently the star pupil of the group, and right from the off he had us on our toes. He was good. After his initial meet with his handler, he jumped straight on a bus and sat in a position where he could watch who got on and who got off, in doing so ‘burning’ (negating) our officers. Or so he hoped. But we had played the bus game for real in London and so we had officers on and off at every stop. From the bus, he went into a shopping centre, stopping now and again to watch reflections in shop windows or turn back on himself to catch out anyone tracking him. He actually managed his two drops without any of us knowing where they were and then he headed off to his final rendezvous. By now, his trainers were very impressed with him, and we were very pissed off. We didn’t like losing. So we decided to really turn up the heat.

  His final meet was to be at a car that was parked on the top level of a multistorey car park. We boxed off the whole area and pumped eight officers into the car park. No one was going in or out without our knowing. Half an hour later, the agent entered, and then, just as fast, we lost him. He remained lost for another two hours. His trainers couldn’t contact him and we were sure
that he hadn’t left in a car. Everyone was puzzled to the extent that a full sweep of the car park was carried out and we eventually found him on the third level, huddled between two cars and crying his eyes out. So what had happened?

  He had done everything right; he had entered after doing a sweep of the area, having already identified a few of our officers so he knew that we were about. Once in the car park, he had managed to spot nearly all of the rest of our men but at this point he realized that there was no way that he would ever get to his meeting point. So next he destroyed any ID that he had on him and destroyed his mobile phone (which was never found). Then suddenly he became overwhelmed by the pressure and the expectation and the failure, so he broke down. He had been top student in all disciplines, but not managing to do this task had broken him. Unfortunately, it meant him being thrown off the course.

  In the undercover game, theory and practice were two very different things – and sometimes it wasn’t until you were put under severe pressure that it was discovered whether or not you had the one thing that training could not create – the nerve.

  When it comes to surveillance, people tend to think of agencies such as the CIA or MI6 and expect their surveillance, with satellites and other electric gizmos, to lead the world. But the crux of the matter is that down on the ground, running real-world operations, we have to put people away and that means a court case and concrete evidence. Without solid evidence of the crime, you have wasted time and taxpayers’ money and, worse than that, the criminal’s back on the street and wiser than ever.