The Firm within a Firm

 

 

1969

1969 Times Journalists  Gareth Lloyd and Julian Mounter record 3 detectives demanding money from a pretty criminal in return for not prosecuting him the detectives are:

• DI Benard Robson
• DS Gordon Harris and
• DS John Alexander Symonds

 

1972

It takes the Met a long time to investigate this case.

Robson and Harris were tried first and separately to Symonds  early in 1972, they were found guilty sentenced to & and 6 years imprisonment. Shortly afterwards he jumps bail allegedly having been paid thousands to go by a corrupt officer. He takes with him a dossier of corrupt police officers he had compiled after 12 year’s service. He used  a false passport and driving licence obtained in the way described in “Day of the Jackal”.

 

In the same year the Home Secretary Reginald Maudling is forced to resign over his corrupt relationship with Architect John Poulson.

 

1973

In Morocco Symonds is recruited to the KGB and shares his dossier of corrupt Met police  officers with his controller Viktor Georgivitch Budano. The   Inquiry regards itself as being bound be the convention grounded in nothing decreed in Parliament, Common Law or Statute of “neither confirm or deny”, to protect national security. The Irony is the from 1973 to the end of Operation Countryman at least in around 1981 (it ended with whimper not a bang) the KGB knew more about the scale of Scotland Yard corruption than the Met Commissioner, Home Secretary, Home Office, Mi5, Cabinet, Parliament. Every one of the corrupt officers who names were given to KGB by Symonds was vulnerability for state security. Yet when he did reveal his activities he was granted immunities and never properly debriefed   by MI5, MI6 and MPS.

When much of Symonds story was confirmed with the release of the “Mitrokhin Archive” a highly critical report was published into the security services by the Intelligence and Security Committee. It was presented to Parliament in June 2000.  It is still not available on any official government archive you have to access its findings with the Wayback Machine [https://web.archive.org/web/20080424110320/http://www.archive.official-documents.co.uk/document/cm47/4764/4764-02.htm ] however Professor Christopher Andrew whose evidence is already relied on by by the UCPI wrote it up.

 

1972-1977

During this period the focus on Met Corruption centred on the MPSB Obscene Publications Squad (“The Dirty Squad”). The squad, and before it the C division’s “Clubs and Vice Unit”, was based in Mayfair but operated in London’s SOHO district had be  running a protection racket targeting the serious organised criminal operating their own protection rackets in the right light district. In 1972 It was headed by DCS Bill Moody who was responsible to Commander Wally Virgo. Symonds later claimed that Moody gave him several thousand pounds to skip the country.

In 1972 a disagreement between Moody and “pornographer” James Humphreys led the later to release to the press information about regular and systematic payments he was making to Moody, who after taking his own substantial cut would pass the remnants rest down to other members of the Squad whose silence and cooperation  was vital to the operation.

In total 17 police officers were identified as being involved in  the scheme including two commanders. As the internal investigation continued and the scale and detailed organisation of the corruption became evident the The Dirty Squad was in today’s terms “defunded” and taken out of the hands of MPSB. Its members were replaced by uniform officers believed by senior officers and perhaps the home office to be untainted by the endemic corruption in the MPSB around this time described as “The Firm within A firm”.

The UCPI needs to recognise the that the endemic  corruption in the MPSB was only uncovered from the early 1970s and on throughout UCCPI tranche 1 and 2 periods and then into later tranches. It had existed, and been endemic, since at least the second half of the  mid 1950s when most of the first wave of the UCOs had joined the force.

 

1977  

“The Fall of Scotland Yard” ,by John Shirley & Martin Cox Barry Cox Published by Penguin Books Ltd

 

1978

Home Secretary,  Merlyn Rees, instructs Hampshire and Dorset Police to investigate Met Police involvement in payroll robberies at the Daily Express and Daily Mirror, and a bank robbery in central London. Operation Country Man meets opposition and in interference at all levels. They have to move their HQ out of the Met Area and most of the evidence is gathered by police officers going under cover as police officers.

 

1981

Still incomplete when its leader retires in 1980 Countryman is closed down in 1980 the investigation passed back to the met. An MP, Dale Campbell Savours. claims 250 officers had left of faced charges  at this point. The claim is neither confirmed or denied and no Home Secretary has revealed the outcomes.

Before it is closed  down Symonds returned from his life as a KGB gigolo/Romeo spy and handed himself over to M15, who were not interested in his antics and then  to Operation Countryman who were. Countryman agreed to reduce the number charges he faced and to argue for lenience when he answered his earlier corruption charges, and agreed not prosecute him for sharing what he knew about corrupt offers with the Russians.

He received a two-year sentence, but only had to serve six months of it.

 

1989

“Inside the Brotherhood”  by Martin Short is published. It is an in-depth investigation of Masonic Corruption  in public life. The corrupt masonic networks in the MPS which also included serious organised criminals is dealt with in detail. [So is a property scandal that went wrong for masonic politicians in Leeds, called by those of us in 1 in 12 publications who uncovered it “The Shire Oak Affair”]. Both of these subject were deal in three ITV investigations by Short sharing the same title as his book.

 

Context is Everything – Lessons for the UCPI and Home Office

This endemic corruption is a matter of historic record now. In 2021 Channel Four aired a series of three programmes about these stories called “Bent Coppers”. As well as including  interviews with former senior officers it  featured substantial contributions from   Short, not long before his death, and the former Observer journalist and now professor Paul Lashmar, who did much to expose the Economic League in the late 1980s when I first met him.

 

While the UCPI is not a prosecution. this does not mean that is not receiving prima facie evidence of crimes, and evidence from the victims of those crimes about how they were perpetuated and the seriousness of their impact.  Some of the “miscarriages of justice” already referred by the UCPI involve rescinding  guilty verdicts. because of MPS malpractice and are to be welcomed. There is a growing body of prima facie evidence being amassed of indictable crimes which are not subject to a statute of limitation and cannot and should not be  excused on Mitting’s authority or that of the Home Secretary. Nor can they be simply ignored without creating a far more serious miscarriage of justice than the misdirection of magistrates who passed judgement on public order offences.

 

The representatives and employer of the potential perpetrators of these potential crimes are frustrating the ability of the UCPI to deliver truth and justice for the victims by demands for anonymity on the grounds of spurious  threats of violence. The only examples of realistic threats of violence produced so far are those of Dines  and Lambert against HN109 and  a couple of unspecified threats  because of infiltration of alleged or actual terrorist organisations which should be excluded from this inquiry in the same way as Serious Organised Crime is.

 

If the interests of truth and justice are to be served by the UCPI it must able to tell whether  they are being told by the witnesses,  the truth and the whole truth.

 

The UCO's employer and representatives are however going further in the quest to undermine the search for truth and justice. They are doing this by making the case, perhaps with some success, that the inquisitorial nature of the UCPI obliges the inquiry not only to presume (not unreasonably) the innocence of those giving evidence but goes further and demands that that the inquiry has to believe everything the state witnesses tell them even when it is patentably not true.

 

The case of Trevor Morris this week is a classic example of this,  MI5 has prevented Morris’ autobiography written as "Carlton King" being used   in evidence, and the inquiry is being  pressured by state participants to accept Morris' claims of traumatic (but highly selective) memory loss are true even though his recall of detail in his autobiography and on his blog are excellent.

 

The role of the Home Secretary as  both core participant and as commissioner of the UCPI has been complicated by the recent change of government. In fact, this is only the latest complication driven by changes in government since the UCPI  was first commissioned by Teresa May in 2015. Given

that this is an inquiry into political policing since 1968 it is hardly surprising that political engagement has become an increasing  aspect of the inquiry’s attention. This is inevitably true of tranche  2 because it covers the Thatcher Years noted for her attention to the “enemies within” within the country,  while at the same time the Labour Leader, Neil Kinnocks, was concentrating Labour's attention  on rooting radical thinkers out of the  party.

The time line of political change since the commissioning of the UCPI is illustrative of the febrile nature of conservative politics during this recent period.

Month/Year.           Home Secretary.            Time in Office.                       Prime Minister

May 2010.                  Teresa May                                                                         Cameron - Clegg

May 2015                   Teresa May                         5 years                                    Cameron

July 2016                     Amber Rudd                     20 Months                               May

April 2018                   Sajid javid                         14 Months                                May

July 2019                     Priti Patel                            3 Years                                    Johnson

September 2022        Suella Braverman.             6 Weeks                                 Truss

October 2022             Grant Shapps                      6 Days                                    Truss

October 2022.             Suella Braverman              1 Year                                     Sunak

November 2023          James Cleverly                    7 Months                               Sunak

July 2024                       Yvette Cooper                                                                     Starmer

 

Most of these home secretaries will have had no time to think about the UCPI and little sympathy for. or commitment to, its objectives. That is not a particularly party political point to make. In the 24 years since the SDS was set up  there have been 27 Home secretaries, 10 of them Labour MPs.

 

All 27  would have received information from the SDS. and forwarded on to cabinet colleagues through ts op secret Cabinet Committee eventually know as Subversion (Home). Not one of the 27 Home Secretaries or the numerous junior ministers who reported to them and knew about it said or did anything about it. and that included the ten Labour ones. The  SDS itself was established under a Labour Home Secretary, the future Prime Minister James Callaghan. The mechanism by which covert human intelligence from the MPS was distributed to the top tier of government – the precursor of  Subversion (Home) had been developed by Attlee, Ernest Bevin and George  Isaacs in 1947 as part of their collaboration with President Truman to  create the cold war.

 

It is easy to forget that for Labour MPs like Bevin and Isaacs  who were trade union officers and organisers before they became Labour MPs,  the CPGB and radical trade unionism presented a much greater threat to the source of their personal power than any Conservative or Liberal politician could ever present.

 

Along with the creation of Subversion (Home) they also created a  massive state controlled blacklisting programme only part of which – the blacklist of civil servants who were members of the CPGB - was ever revealed to the public and ordinary MPs.

Of course, it must not be forgotten that since 1953, though not part of the Home Office,  the Security Service also reported directly to the Home Secretary. That has not changed since then. So that brings us to Yvette Cooper’s particularly uncomfortable position, as the current  Home Secretary,  in relation the UCPI.

 

Cooper is the commissioner of the Inquiry now, and is could well be so at its conclusion, and will need to respond to its findings, despite also being a core participant and perhaps key witness. To date the Home Office, for which she is responsible, has been a truculent and half-hearted, if not  quite hostile witness. Only she can change that. and she must, do so opening up the historic files to a diligent and inquisitive official historian.

 

However, goodness knows what she can do with the other official participant which is responsible to her -MI5. The Security Service has  been aggressive to the Met’s victims throughout and have now turned their attention on the UCPI and Chair. humiliating him by insisting that he neither confirm or deny that Trevor Morris is “Conrad King”, while insisting that he must behave as though King is not his nome de  plume.

 

These are not intractable problems for someone  who holds one of the great offices of state, but they cannot be avoided for long. If Cooper stays as home secretary until the end of the Parliament she should also get an opportunity  to put in place a  more accountable management structure for the Security Service. If the current incumbent, Ken McCallum, is still in place by the end of 2027 he will be the longest serving DG since Roger Hollis retired in 1965 after nine years’ service, so perhaps noteven that problem is intractable.