Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police

by Lewis, Paul

  That past included a messy divorce. Jacobs told his friends that his ex-wife, a woman called Sam, used to beat him up. There must have been a real person called Sam in the police officer’s life because he had the name tattooed on his lower back. His other tattoo was a Celtic knotwork on his shoulder that he claimed to have acquired when he was an 18-year-old member of a biker gang. When his friends joked that it was strange he still had the name of an ex-wife on his body, Jacobs visited a tattoo parlour to have it covered up with a black star. It meant the undercover police officer now had the traditional symbol of anarchism permanently etched above his backside.

  Jacobs rented a first-floor apartment near Roath Park, on the fringe of the student area in Cardiff. Janine describes that flat as ‘entirely without personality’. It was virtually empty except for a small amount of furniture and a heavy metal CD collection on the floor. ‘There were no photographs or anything else that you would have by the time you were in your 40s,’ she adds. But on the whole Jacobs appears to have gone to great lengths in his commitment to his undercover role.

  He was always keen for example to talk in detail about his supposed work as a truck driver, hauling boxes of shopping catalogues around the country. He would spend hours explaining how he had executed complicated reversing manoeuvres, parking HGV trucks in parking bays ‘designed for Tonka cars’. He had a permanently suntanned right forearm, which friends noticed was noticeably browner than the left, even during the winter. It was, he said, the result of having one arm constantly rested on the truck door by the window. Tom Fowler, a 26-year-old then at the centre of Cardiff activism, says Jacobs talked so much about truck driving he became annoying. ‘I would be like, “I don’t care, Marco!”’ he says. ‘He always had anecdotes from roadside cafés. We would be going down the motorway and pass somewhere and he would announce, “Worst cup of coffee on the M4, that place.”’

  When Fowler and some other Welsh activists were contacted by friends in Brighton, and told to be wary of Jacobs, they thought the suggestion he could be a mole was unfair. Cardiff activists did not want to fall victim to the paranoia they felt had hampered protest groups elsewhere. ‘We used to be suspicious of people who used to only come to a couple of meetings then not be seen again,’ says Fowler. ‘We never really thought that someone living permanently among us, one of the core, if you like, would be a spy.’

  If there was one thing that really enamoured Jacobs to his friends in Cardiff it was his humour. ‘He just had so many jokes, constantly,’ says Fowler. ‘His catchphrases were just endless.’ One of his most frequently used catchphrases was: ‘Strong European lager is my drug of choice.’ It was like he was parodying the idea of a lonely middle-aged man and his tomfoolery could make people cringe. One day he put on some elbow pads and told Fowler he would use them in a ruck against the police. ‘I laughed and said: “What the fuck, you idiot! That is ridiculous!” But that was Marco: an affable prat.’ Another day, when deciding which takeaway to order, Jacobs opted for Chinese by saying he liked ‘Chinky, chanky, chonk’. ‘Everyone sort of went quiet,’ says Fowler. ‘He just said, “Oh, sorry, that wasn’t funny.” Apart from that incident his comedy was pretty right on.’

  When people arrived late to meetings, Jacobs would take a look at his watch and say: ‘We’re on anarchist time, are we?’ When discussions dragged on too long, he would quietly text message others in the room suggesting a delegation should head to the bar. He always took the minutes and his reports of meetings were works of satire. ‘Hardened anarchists, sickened by the oppression offered by the states and governments, met in the quiet nice surroundings of The Oasis Club in Cwmbran,’ the spy wrote in a typical dispatch.

  After another get-together in a pub, Jacobs recorded that they had met in ‘an atmosphere of revolution and soft lighting’. Part of the discussion turned to a forthcoming protest over the aviation industry. ‘It is about planes, but a lot of the time the planes are involved in military-type scenarios. All at the meeting thought this was absolutely negative,’ he wrote. ‘Food for thought innit?’ He finished that report: ‘All agreed the meeting was successful. There were new people there. There were no fights. We had a pint afterwards. People had actually volunteered to do things. We are the future. The future is now.’

  Most Cardiff activists could laugh at themselves and appreciated the light touch. But others detected a sinister tone in his mockery. They say the NPOIU spy sowed discord within the group, emphasising differences between people and making others feel self-conscious. One friend who joined him on protests recalls: ‘He would always stand at the back and if I said I wanted to get more involved, he acted as though I was being really childish. He made it all seem stupid and pointless.’ It was like Jacobs had been instructed to hold up a distorting mirror to anarchists in Cardiff, to dig away at their spirit. ‘He basically trivialised what we were doing to the point that I started to question why we were even bothering,’ says another friend.

  The NPOIU was aware that there was a lot going on in south Wales at the time. Jacobs joined protests against an oil pipeline and the proposed construction of a nearby military academy. He took part in campaigns against immigration and asylum policy and showed an interest in animal rights. His gateway into many of these worlds was the dreadlocked Fowler, one of the best-connected anarchists in the country. There was almost a twenty-year age difference between the two men but they became close friends. They went to gigs together and watched rugby in Newport.

  ‘For a while, Marco was privy to all of my decision-making around activism and personal relationships to a really deep level,’ says Fowler. ‘He was like my best mate. He was the most reliable person in my life.’

  It was in 2008, three years into his Cardiff deployment, that the undercover policeman began secretly courting Fowler’s girlfriend behind his back. Deborah was 29 and a social worker from Cardiff. At the time her father was in hospital, terminally ill with cancer. Fowler was dealing with his own personal tragedy, having lost his beloved grandmother. ‘Neither of us were able to cope very well or treat each other as we perhaps should have,’ Fowler says of his relationship with Deborah around that time. ‘Marco very much put himself in the middle of that. He acted as a father-like figure to her. My relationship was breaking down and I confided in him about that. Perhaps I should have been more aware of his intentions. But I wasn’t.’

  When Deborah’s father died, Jacobs attended his funeral and offered her a shoulder to cry on. Later, he tried to seduce her. Initially Deborah resisted the sexual advances. She only gave in when the undercover police officer said he loved her. The relationship was a brief but traumatising affair. The pair slept with each other a few times, before Jacobs suddenly lost interest. By then it was too late. Deborah had already broken up with Fowler, believing she was about to begin a serious relationship with the truck driver.

  She was the second woman Jacobs slept with while undercover. The first was Sarah, a 26-year-old. ‘He always said he could not tell his family or friends about us because of the age difference,’ she said. ‘If it had been anyone else I would have thought that was strange, but because he had been such a good friend for so long it really did not enter my mind that he was anything but a stand-up honest man.’

  At the time the NPIOU was keen for its spies to travel to the anti-G8 summit protests in Heiligendamm in Germany. Exchanges of covert operatives between European countries was becoming far more common than in the days of the SDS, but it was important that they travelled with the right people. Sarah was friends with some particularly well-connected activists who were forming their own delegation.

  Two months before the summit took place, Jacobs told Sarah that he wanted to take their relationship further. She agreed and they travelled together to Germany. A week after their return to the UK, the relationship became sexual. They continued to see each other for a few weeks, before Sarah decided she did not want to continue. Years later, when Jacobs’ role as an undercover policeman was revealed by the G
uardian newspaper, Sarah was aghast. ‘I was doing nothing wrong, I was not breaking the law at all,’ she said. ‘For him to come along and lie to us and get that deep into our lives was a colossal, colossal betrayal.’

  Another Cardiff resident used by Jacobs – but in a very different way – was a 50-year-old vegan cake baker called Fran Ryan. She met the undercover police officer through Fowler, although she was not herself politically active. Her energies mostly went into Eat Out Vegan Wales, a group that promoted alternatives to animal food products. On the weekends, she ran a vegan stall in the Cardiff, giving out free homemade cakes and leaflets about where to buy vegan food.

  She quickly formed a rapport with the undercover police officer. ‘I like The Archers on Radio 4, and I can’t talk to anyone about it because they don’t know about it,’ she says. ‘But he knew about it and was quite knowledgeable about a lot of things.’ One day, Jacobs approached Ryan to see if she wanted to accompany him to a meeting of European animal rights activists in Vienna.

  Ryan was shocked by the proposal: ‘I said, “What would I want to be going there for?” I won’t even go to a protest gathering in this country, never mind Vienna.’ Jacobs suggested an alternative: a similar gathering of animal rights campaigners in the south of England. ‘I wasn’t into animal rights activism, I was more just promoting veganism,’ she says. ‘But he made it sound quite exciting, and he was always good company, so I agreed to go.’

  When they approached the field in Essex where the gathering was being held, something happened to make Ryan suspicious about her companion. His car was stopped by police for a routine check-up. When it emerged that his insurance was out of date, she says Jacobs appeared nervous. ‘He explained that he had changed his insurance recently and he did not remember which one it was. The police were checking this out and Marco was getting more and more upset.’

  There was a tense standoff over the next few minutes. A frustrated Jacobs repeatedly walked away from his car to make telephone calls, ostensibly to his insurers. Eventually, the traffic police officer lost his patience and said he would need to seize the vehicle. ‘Then I heard Marco tell the officer: “Do you mind if we just walk away from the car please?”’ Ryan says. ‘I just thought: why would he do that?’ When Jacobs finally returned to the car he said the situation had been resolved and they drove off.

  In turning to someone like Ryan, who was not particularly interested in activism, Jacobs was behaving like an operative who was running out of options. By now, the NPOIU would have wanted him to have infiltrated some national protest groups, to have done more to befriend prominent campaigners outside of Cardiff. As it was, there was not much going on in Cardiff for police to spy on.

  Fowler, for so long a linchpin in the city, had lost his enthusiasm following his break-up with Deborah. Like many in Cardiff, he was losing his passion for activism. Some would end up blaming Jacobs for driving apart what would otherwise have been a cohesive group. The last CAN meeting Jacobs took minutes for was in June 2009. It was one of his typical reports, full of remarks that trivialised the meeting. He concluded with a description of how the meeting ended, which read like he was saying goodbye. ‘Some went home for an early minibus to catch, some went for a takeaway, and I did my usual trick of continuing to support brewers and distillers around the world. We then all went our separate ways.’ A few months later, anarchist meetings in Cardiff stopped happening altogether.

  Jacobs’ leaving party at the Mango House curry restaurant in August that year was a sedate affair. He had told friends he was going to Corfu where he had been offered a job maintaining holiday villas. Fowler still had no idea that Jacobs had slept with his girlfriend, and the men remained close. The 26-year-old recalls joking to his older friend: ‘If you disappear in a few months, you do realise that means you’re a cop, don’t you?’

  Jacobs kept in touch with his friends for just a few months. The very last communication was a text message, sent to a friend toward the end of the year from a Greek mobile number.

  ‘Never, ever, ever, get in contact again!’ it said. ‘Never, ever, ever, text me!’

  It is unsurprising that Jacobs ended his deployment with a difficult to understand joke. ‘It sounds ridiculous, but it was the kind of message he would text us all the time,’ Fowler says. ‘He always texted things like, “Ignore me! I don’t mean shit to you!” You know, he was just taking the piss. That one was his last text message. After that, his Greek phone number was dead.’

  *

  There is one fear that keeps undercover cops awake at night. It can happen to any spy, anywhere, from the moment their deployment ends. There is not a whole lot former covert operatives can do to prevent it from happening. Some will just be unlucky.

  It was an unseasonably cool day in July 2010, but the sun was shining on the Dorset coast. The SDS had ceased to exist two years earlier. The NPOIU however was still going strong. It had a new array of spies in the field and had overseen the departure of officers who had done their time. Marco Jacobs had been missing for a year. Lynn Watson had been gone for two.

  Matilda, one of the undercover policewoman’s friends from Leeds, was walking a coastal route with her family when they decided to stop for a pint at the Square and Compass, a Dorset pub overlooking the sea. She was squeezed by the bar waiting to be served when she glanced to her left and saw a ghost from the past.

  “Lynn! How the fuck are you?!’ she said. ‘We’ve all been really worried about you!’

  Matilda can still remember Watson’s facial expression. ‘Her face dropped. She just looked really shocked, horrified almost, to see me. Then she just switched and said, “I need to go to the loo.”’

  One can only imagine the thoughts that were racing through Watson’s mind. In an instant, she had to resume her alter ego, an identity she had tried to put behind her. She too was on a coastal walk with friends and family who could now easily give away her real identity. Her decision to head to the bathroom was quick thinking. It should have given her time to think up an excuse for why she was in England and not Lithuania, the place where she had ceased contact with her friends.

  Back in the pub, Watson briefly introduced Matilda to her walking companions and took her outside. The two women sat on a bench outside the pub, the sound of seagulls overhead. Matilda still remembers how the conversation unfolded.

  ‘To be honest, Lynn, we had just assumed you were an undercover cop,’ she said. ‘We hadn’t heard from you. It was like you dropped off the radar.’

  ‘No, it isn’t that, I’ve just been really depressed.’

  ‘So have you got a phone on you now?’

  ‘No. I haven’t been in the country long enough to get one.’

  Moments later, there was a ringing sound. Watson pulled two phones out of her pockets and hung up the call. ‘She just looked and me and said, “These are not my phones, they belong to my family,”’ Matilda says.

  Watson started to explain what she was doing in England without her boyfriend Paul. She said her father had recently died and she had returned for the funeral. Paul was in Iowa in the United States, where the couple had been living for some time.

  ‘Iowa?’ Matilda said. ‘My God. Why there?’

  The reply was a little convoluted. Watson said their initial move to Lithuania had been an attempt to escape some ‘dodgy’ individuals Paul had been in business with. ‘The implication was that it had something to do with a criminal gang or perhaps drugs,’ says Matilda. ‘Paul owed someone a lot of money and he was in trouble.’

  Watson said the couple were tracked down to eastern Europe and then had to move suddenly again. They had hoped Iowa, a remote midwestern state, would make a more suitable hiding place, but they were still on the move. In three days, Watson said she was flying to New York, where the couple were now relocating.

  The story did not seem to add up. If Watson was in serious trouble, then why had she not told her friends? If the trip to Lithuania had all been some desperate escape from a
drug gang, then why were they so open about where they were going? And how would the British couple now live in New York without visas?

  Mid-conversation, a man from Watson’s walking party emerged from the pub. He introduced himself as Chris.

  ‘He was coming to check on her,’ says Matilda. ‘He said, “Lynn, are you OK?” She said, “Don’t worry. Just go back inside.”’

  That was just one of several incidents during the hour-long conversation that left Matilda feeling suspicious. She began asking more questions, pushing her friend to explain why she had not confided in her, and insisting she should not disappear again. Matilda asked for a postal address for Watson’s family, so there would always be a way of keeping in touch. Watson refused.

  ‘Lynn, I’m not being funny, but where do your family live?’ Matilda said.

  ‘In Hampshire.’

  ‘Where in Hampshire?’

  ‘Farnborough.’

  ‘Where in Farnborough? Can you tell me?’

  ‘No.’

  That was the point at which Matilda says she decided her friend must be lying. ‘I must have asked her more than five times to give me her family’s address. She just refused flat out. I was like, “Look, to be honest, we thought you were an undercover cop and now you can’t even tell me where your family live.” Lynn just said, “I’m sorry. I’m really upset. I don’t want contact with anyone and I feel a bit weird about all of this.”’

  Before they said goodbye, Watson assured her friend that she would call her before she left for New York. She never did. Instead, exactly a week after their chance encounter in the pub, Watson sent Matilda an email.