The Liar's Quartet

by Mark Thomas

  Laura says, ‘Ah, fuck him!’

  For forty-eight hours I was filled with mindless optimism and hope, that he would do the right thing. Forty-eight hours of deluded yearning, that he would tell the truth and for the first time in seventeen years he could have acted like a friend, that he would be a good guy. Because when you tell the truth you’re no longer a bad guy, you’re a whistle blower.

  SHUTS CABINET DRAWERS SL AND SR AND TURNS OFF LAMP

  You remember the picture of the club at the beginning of the show?

  You remember the people arriving to watch the show?

  Well I hired a club to put on a secret preview of this show. I bussed people in to see it. They didn’t know where they were going, and those who were driving were sworn to secrecy. The club I hired was the BAE Systems Sports and Social Club in Rochester. The audience were friends and activists some of whom I have known since I was eleven. My community gathered on BAE land to hear this story, to hear our story because nearly half of the people in that audience had been spied upon by police or corporate interests. Afterwards amidst hugs and spilt drinks and moaning about ‘the chips you promised’, I ask some of those people to come and sit in this chair and I said to them, tell them who you are.

  FILM PLAYS ON MAIN PROJECTOR

  DAVE SMITH: My name is Dave Smith and I am a blacklisted construction worker. My name is on a secret list that all the big companies did and every time I went for a job when I went for the site induction on site I used to give them my national insurance number. By the end of the induction when everyone else got taken on I never got the job and it happened time and time again and I was just out of work all the time during the time of a massive building boom and it’s not just me there are 3,200 of us on this file.

  LOIS AUSTEN: I was the National Chair of Youth Against Racism in Europe and I was spied on by Peter Francis who also spied on the Lawrence family. The reason for him spying on me, apparently, was so that a Special Branch file could be compiled on the anti-racist campaign activity I was involved in.

  GUY TAYLOR: I’m Guy Taylor, I work for Globalise Resistance and we found out our police spy when he left a message on someone’s answer machine when he was grassing people up to the cops. We kicked him out.

  SURESH GROVER: My name is Suresh Grover I am a civil rights activist and I campaign with families who have suffered racial violence and miscarriages of justice. I know I have been spied on because I made families hold the police and state authorities to account.

  MARK: Who spied on you?

  SURESH GROVER: SDS, Special Branch, MI5.

  ‘ALISON’: I am known as Alison and I had a five year relationship with undercover police officer Mark Jenner who I knew as Mark Cassady and whom I loved very much.

  JASON PARKINSON: I’m Jason Parkinson. I am a freelance video journalist and I have ended up on the domestic extremist database and I have been tracked since February 2006 for doing my job.

  CLIPS OF OTHERS FLASH UP

  ‘One of my best friends for seven years was an undercover police officer we now know as Mark Kennedy.’

  ‘I was spied on by Mark Jenner.’

  ‘I was spied upon because I was an anti-racist activist.’

  ‘Two unnamed officer tried to recruit me as a mole.’

  ‘Two of them turned out to be spies.’

  ‘I have been under surveillance since 1996 and have been on the domestic extremist database since 2000.’

  So here is the question, at what point do we say enough?

  After an old liberal gets duped?

  After 3,200 blacklisted workers are illegally denied employment?

  After undercover cops deceive women into relationships with them?

  After families see their children murdered and campaign for justice only to find those charged with finding them justice are spying on them?

  Surely when we hear that the Stephen Lawrence family was spied on all of us have to say

  ‘Enough’, don’t we?

  BLACKOUT28

  NOTES

  1 BAE Systems employ 82,500 people across forty countries with sales of nearly £18bn and profits of £1.5bn. In 2010, BAE systems was fined $400 million in the US after it admitted to defrauding the USA in ‘one of the largest criminal fines ever levied in the United States against a company for business related violations’ and reached a £30 million settlement with the Serious Fraud Office here.

  2 The video shows tanks, submarines, missiles being fired and planes roaring overhead accompanied by shit generic rock music as the soundtrack. I used this footage without seeking permission from BAE Systems or paying any license fee. I figured they have had enough off of me.

  3 Someone asked me why I decided to tell this story on stage given the passage of time and that I’d written a Guardian article about the issue in December 2007. There are several reasons. The first was that I thought it was important to show the widespread use of police and corporate surveillance on activists. I had (and still have at the time of publication) a court case going on over the Met Police collecting information about me under the ‘domestic extremist’ classification and then I found out I was also on the Construction Blacklist for my political activities. I wanted to show the emotional damage of these operations, to tell a tale of love, betrayal and uncertainty. And for me, the place to set the record straight has always been on stage. It’s where I feel I can be most honest and have my say.

  4 DSEI – Defence and Security Equipment International. It’s the world’s largest arms fair and had its debut on the morning of 11 September 2001. As the attacks on the Twin Towers unfolded and the scale of the violence became apparent, the police appealed to the peace activists outside the arms fair to cancel their demonstration as a mark of respect for the dead and suffering. The protestors replied they would be happy to just as soon as the arms fair observed the same mark of respect and shut down for the day. It is not known if the police made this request to the arms dealers.

  Two years later, at this next fair in 2003, it was reported that the organisers had to be asked if they would mind not displaying cluster bombs at the fair as it was considered ‘inappropriate for the UK market’, even though the UK had been using them in Iraq. Clearly it’s one thing using them and another showing them off …

  5 In the New York production of the show, this was changed to ‘Kentucky Derby’.

  6 Including a chemical factory – Fallujah 2. The very same factory identified by Colin Powell as a chemical weapons factory in his dossier to the UN Security Council.

  7 This is where I first really remember meeting Laura. Menwith Hill is nominally an RAF base but is operated and controlled by the National Security Agency, an intelligence arm of the US government, and run as an American enclave in total secrecy. It’s so secret, that at the time there were no flight restrictions over it (if it doesn’t exist, you can’t restrict flying over it), so for a Channel 4 series we hired a hot air balloon and flew over it, narrowly avoiding crash landing in the baseball diamond on the base.

  Laura and I were both demonstrating the ‘Star Wars’ programme at Menwith Hill, so naturally Laura turned up in full Princess Leia outfit with her boyfriend as Hans Solo. They were not the only ones; the crowd was littered with characters from the film. At one point, as the demonstration walked the sunny Yorkshire lanes around the base, some people jumped over a short wooden fence to run onto the land outside the base itself. The police promptly gave chase on quad bikes. It remains one of my favourite images of any demonstration – in the background the giant white golf-ball-like structures of the listening base and in front of them cops on quads chasing Chewbacca and Darth Vader.

  8 I first really remember Emily at a BAE Systems AGM when she came up and said hello. She was covered in fake blood after doing a ‘die-in’ during the meeting. She’d been thrown out. I remember thinking at the time the great irony in the anti-arms movement was that without army surplus half of them would be naked.

  9 I met Gid at a CAAT benef
it gig he was compering. I used to do a fair few of them in the Union Chapel in Islington and the Hackney Empire and I was perhaps less tolerant of the Quaker contingent than I am now. On stage, I said the lovely thing about working with Quakers is that if they piss you off, you can punch them and they won’t hit you back. One night someone shouted at me over this line and I used the old Bill Hicks line, ‘You’re a Christian, forgive me.’ To the audience’s delight he shouted back, ‘We do, Mark, we do.’

  10 The same can’t be said of the police officer who handled my case, Detective Sergeant Richard de Cadenet who, as it turns out, used a Met Police office credit card to pay for his holidays in Thailand and Mexico, racked up over £70,000 of personal spending and was subsequently jailed for ten months for fraud.

  11 This is absolutely true. The Green Party did indeed have a bamboo sarcophagus in the auction and there was some confusion over who had actually made the winning bid and was rightful owner of the death pod.

  12 He told us he used to work for the South African arms manufacturer, Denel.

  13 Martin started as a volunteer at CAAT in 1997, eventually becoming the paid Campaign Co-ordinator from 2000–03.

  14 It’s up on the internet somewhere. If you can find it, you can enjoy the whole thing. In that series of shows we got a credible admission of torture and the Defence Attaché to London, Colonel Halim Nawi, admitted Indonesia was using British supplied equipment in East Timor, which contravened official UK policy that weapons sold would not be used for ‘internal oppression or external aggression’ and questions were asked in parliament about it. (28 Jan 1999, Column 480, House of Commons Debate, Hansard)

  15 Hunter S Thompson once wrote, ‘The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.’ I’ve always liked that quote, but fifteen years after stopping work with Channel 4, I still keep in contact with Neil Pepin.

  16 Ann has worked at CAAT since 1985.

  17 I discovered when performing this in New York that Womble doesn’t translate. Despite Great Uncle Bulgaria’s alleged global wanderings they remain unknown, so we changed the image to Animal from The Muppets.

  18 Tennent’s doesn’t translate either, but I can’t remember what we used instead – maybe a six pack.

  19 I have a love of stone circles. I hasten to add that this is nothing to do with paganism, spirituality or religion. I just like them, they are often in beautiful places and they are part of my roots and culture.

  20 I took the skull home, cleaned it and placed it alongside a couple of others I had in the children’s bathroom. As is the nature of stuff like this, it didn’t last too long and so we had to source a new skull for the show from a junk shop and held it together with resin for the tour.

  21 Edinburgh, where this was first performed in 2014. During the tour, I’d replace this with wherever we were and whatever venue it was.

  22 The company became BAE Systems in 1999 after a merger with Marconi.

  23 Angie Zelter, Joanna Wilson, Lotta Kronlid and Andrea Needham – the Ploughshare 4.

  24 Obviously this changed from venue to venue during the tour, otherwise it wouldn’t have been accurate.

  25 Tony Lee, TLT International.

  26 I was asked by Roger Berry, the Chair. You can find the report here: www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmquad/873/87302.htm#evidence. The committee commended my actions and I sent Roger Berry a note saying if a group of MPs ever commends me again, I’ll take legal action.

  27 Some time after the show started to tour, I bumped into Hillary Benn at Oxford station. ‘Friends of mine tell me I’m in the show,’ he said, ‘I remember bumping into you on the tube.’ The look he gave me indicated that I must have come across as fairly wired at the time.

  28 Throughout the show, I refer to the Quakers with some degree of scorn. However, it is more often than not that I encounter Quakers on direct action and protests against the arms industry. I may not have any faith but to those that use their faith to give them courage to defy an inhuman world, SALUT!

  And if I ever turn religious I’m going to be a Quaker.

  A really, really noisy Quaker.

  ANN’S STORY

  This was the second time we had been told arms company BAE Systems was spying on us. In September 2003 a Sunday Times journalist turned up in the Campaign Against Arms Trade office to tell us of infiltration organised by Evelyn Le Chene. Now, in January 2007, we learned through a phone call from our solicitor that we’d been spied on again.

  The previous month Tony Blair had stopped the Serious Fraud Office’s investigation of BAE’s deals with Saudi Arabia. CAAT, together with social justice organisation The Corner House, was mounting a legal challenge to this. During the Christmas break I had sent an email containing our lawyer’s advice on the legal action to the members of CAAT’s Steering Committee. That email had ended up with BAE. Its lawyers, under a solicitors’ ethical code, had to tell CAAT’s lawyers, hence that January phone call.

  Our lawyers had to go to court to force BAE to reveal its source. It was a Paul Mercer.

  Then it was back to court to get him to say how he had got hold of the email. Over the following months the story dripped out. BAE had quite a few of our emails. In November 2007 BAE finally admitted paying both Mrs Le Chene and Paul Mercer, and promised not to spy on CAAT again.

  The second spying episode was not as traumatic as the first. In 2003 it had been devastating to find that Martin was among the eight or so people Mrs Le Chene had infiltrated into CAAT. Even for those of us who had not become a very close friend, he had still been a valued colleague. For six years we had enjoyed his involvement and company.

  We did not know Paul Mercer so this made 2007 a less painful experience. However, there were some similarities. On both occasions our legal advice was that very few people should be told what was happening while investigations took place and lawyers exchanged letters. CAAT is usually an open organisation so this caused problems both within the staff and committees, and with the wider campaigning community. Although this secrecy is probably unavoidable, it does not help rebuild trust.

  More positively, in both 2003 and 2007 many people told us we should feel flattered. A company whose deadly wares are peddled by prime ministers and royals felt worried enough by CAAT to mount spying operations. Maybe they saw that increasingly people do not want to give support to repressive regimes by selling them military equipment.

  If BAE was worried then, perhaps it is even more so today as the Middle East descends into ever greater chaos and western military intervention is questioned. Hopefully, the day will soon dawn when David Cameron and Prince Charles’ recent wooing of the autocratic Saudi Arabian royals to peddle arms will be acknowledged as unethical and misguided.

  Then the skilled workers currently making military equipment might use their ingenuity to address the need for clean renewable energy.

  Ann Feltham

  Parliamentary Co-ordinator

  Campaign Against Arms Trade

  HELEN’S STORY

  I had a two year relationship with an undercover policeman who I knew as John Barker, his real name was John Dines.

  In 1987 I got involved with an independent environmental and broadly anti-capitalist group. I met John there and over the next three years he became a close friend then we ended up in a relationship.

  He told me about his dad’s death and later asked to borrow money to go to his mum’s funeral, told me he felt alone as an only child and how he’d lost his van and all his possessions. A clever combination of both sob stories and excuses for why there was nobody around him and why he didn’t have any kind of history that you could see.

  In reality, his mum was still alive, so was his dad, and he had brothers and sisters. His stories, eeking my empathy and involvement in his life, were a d
eliberate process of emotional manipulation. He was seeking to draw me closer to him, so that he could spy on me and my friends and seek to undermine the political movements we were involved in.

  But I didn’t know that at the time, I felt like I’d met my soul mate, and after a while we rented a flat and lived together. We talked about starting a family, he said he wanted lots of kids as he was an only child – and all the kind of things you might talk about in any normal relationship.

  In the last six months of our relationship his behaviour became very erratic, he appeared to be going through some sort of breakdown. He would disappear saying he was taking himself off to sort his head out, then he would come back and declare how much he loved me – it was a very emotionally draining time.

  Then he disappeared for good. I received two letters from him posted from South Africa, saying he was sorry, but he needed to sort his head out and if he did, he might come back.

  I was extremely worried about his mental wellbeing and even worried that he might kill himself. And I was still deeply in love with him, so I spent ages trying to find out what had happened to him. But everything I investigated turned up more questions than answers and my concerns grew about who he really was and what he’d been up to. Then one day I had a sudden instinct to check death records, and found out he had been using the name of a child who’d died aged eight years old.

  That left me with this great void. I’d been living with someone for two years and I now didn’t even know what his name was. It threw all my other relationships into doubt – if you can live with someone for that length of time and think you know them so well, then you find out they don’t even exist – what does it say for everybody else that you are talking to, that you are meeting with, how can you be sure that anything going on around you is real? How could I trust my own judgement any more? And try telling people what you think happened – the reaction is that you are paranoid, that couldn’t happen here. Which makes you start to doubt your own sanity.