Avt012 ts vid001:2:3 true spies ken day v1

TRUE SPIES 1. SUBVERSIVE MY ARSE Ken Day: We had no training at all for demonstrations. We were just bussed in a coach, didn't know what we were going to do, No preparation for it whatsoever.

KEN DAY Metropolitan Police Special Branch, 1969-98 Ken Day: The extreme left were getting the upper hand and were dictating the policy of the unions to some great extent, then we found ourselves actually going to unions and talking to top union officials about what was actually going on.

Interviewer: Top union officials?

Ken Day: People at the very top.

Alan: One of them would be Joe Gormley in the National Union of Mineworkers. Certainly he was in a position of power and was in a position to furnish us with what we were looking for.

TRUE SPIES 2. SOMETHING BETTER CHANGE NOTHING

TRUE SPIES 3. IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU Ken Day: And to all intents and purposes the routine inquiry work on so called subversive groups really ended round about 1990. By 1991 it was virtually moribund.

Commentary: Any subversion there now was became the preserve of Special Branch. MI5 was thus left free to concentrate its resources and well honed skills on countering the IRA. But the Cold War left a legacy. What was to happen to the mountain of files so painstakingly compiled over the years?

Ken Day: I took the opportunity to weed out lots of old historical records in Special Branch so we concentrated on the current issues, and I was able to get rid of many thousands of records in Special Branch.

Interviewer: You destroyed the files?

Ken Day: Thousands of them.

Ken Day

Metropolitan Police Special Branch 1969-98 Interviewer: But this is years of work.

Ken Day: Years.. it broke people’s hearts, I know it broke people’s hearts, there were these old files going back to the dark ages, but it wasn’t providing us with the intelligence about tomorrow.

Ken Day: It was regarded as being very useful if we could switch these agents from Communist Party, Socialist Workers’ Party, to report on the potential for public disorder and criminal activities that these groups were carrying out. So they weren’t.. a lot of them didn’t go to waste, they still work today.

Interviewer: They were realigned.

Ken Day: Realigned.

Interviewer: And still working today?

Ken Day: And still working today Ken Day Metropolitan Police Special Branch 1969-98 Ken Day: There were 1 or 2 that were on the payroll earning quite considerable sums, probably up to £10000 a year, £10000 I would be wanting 22 carat gold information from them, intelligence from them.

Interviewer: Did you get any intelligence of that quality?

Ken Day: Tremendous intelligence the whole time we were getting it.

Interviewer: Worth the money?

Ken Day: Every penny. We were running approaching a hundred agents if not more within the animal rights field.

Interviewer: A hundred?

Ken Day: A hundred.

Commentary: Since there weren’t that many militant animal rights activists Special Branch had most of them covered.

Interviewer: Robin Webb, how was he regarded?

Ken Day: Seemed, as far as we were concerned, to know too much about what was happening. Whenever events.. the real animal activist had carried out an operation, he was the first one to be

told about it.

Interviewer: Was he targeted?

Ken Day: He was targeted very much so, yes, we had agents running against him.

Interviewer: Agents running against him?

Ken Day: We ran agents against him, yes.

Interviewer: That you were handling?

Ken Day: Yes. Interviewer:

And how close to him were they?

Ken Day: Very close, he wouldn’t.. I think he would be quite surprised if he realised just how close they were.

Interviewer: And what information were the agents giving you?

What kind of information about Mr Webb?

Ken Day: Well in the end they gave us information that he may have been in possession of a shotgun…

Interviewer:

And what action did you take?

Ken Day: We kept surveillance on him and waited for him to pick the shotgun up.

Commentary: Webb maintained that he’d been given an article in wrapping and didn’t know what it was.

Robin Webb: I was aware of what I thought was in the package.

Interviewer:

Which was?

Robin Webb: It was equipment which was going to be passed on to be used by somebody else to help animals.

Ken Day: He was arrested in possession of a shotgun and without a certificate and he was taken to a local police station and charged.

Interviewer:

Did you bug his car?

Ken Day: I wouldn’t wish to comment on that.

Commentary: Whatever the truth, a shotgun was found in the car.

The Secret State never got its man – but lessons were learned.

Ken Day

Met Special Branch 1969-98 Ken Day: He was strongly, very strongly, suspected of causing many hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of damage to stores in Cambridge and on the Isle of Wight, very strongly suspected of that, but unfortunately there was no evidence to bring him before the court.

Commentary: Horne was so security conscious that initially Special Branch failed to recruit a spy.

But eventually indications received in Special Branch that he was about to start another bombing campaign...

Interviewer: How did you know he was about to start another bombing campaign?

Ken Day: We had an agent who was reporting on Barry Horne.

Interviewer:

Was he close to Barry Horne?

Ken Day: The man was very close, yes.

Interviewer: Why would a man like that who was close and a friend of Barry Horne, be prepared to betray him?

Ken Day: I wouldn’t say it was a question of betraying him, it was a question of possibly looking at it in a way of saving human life.

Commentary: Acting on information from the spy, Horne was tracked around the country for six weeks by National Crime Squad surveillance teams.

Finally he drove into Bristol. As he went round the shops, a team followed him. Then they pounced. This time there was no lack of evidence.

Ken Day: Barry Horne was actually caught in the act of putting three significant fire bombs down in three stores in Bristol and actually being caught doing it, and they were defused there and then. Saved a lot of damage and possibly saved peoples’ lives, so yes we were delighted.

Interviewer: Caught red handed.

Ken Day: Caught red handed.

Interviewer: Could you have done it without the agent?

Ken Day: No. Commentary: Horne was sentenced to 18 years for a fire bombing

campaign that caused £3 million worth of damage.

In gaol he embarked on a series of hunger strikes in protest against the government’s failure to introduce a Royal Commission on Vivisection.

He died last year, weakened by his protests.

By now terrorist threats were appearing once again in the ranks of the Far Right.

Although the Far Left threat had largely disappeared there was a growing menace from offshoots of extreme right wing groups like the British National Party – the BNP. Ken Day: There certainly seemed to be a growing attacks and the excuse for those racial attacks that this is what the BNP would support, and so growing at quite a considerable pace on the one breakaway groups in the British National Party, Combat 18...

number of racial was quite clearly we had that hand, then we had particularly

Commentary: But Combat 18 was on the lookout too. By the mid-90s, it suspected Special Branch agents might be close.

Ken Day: We had people reporting to us on Combat 18 for several years.

Interviewer: But those agents would have been running serious personal risks given the nature of the people they were working with.

Ken Day: Absolutely.

Commentary: C18 also established links with the Far Right in Europe. They were equally unlovely. Aided by the European fascists, C18 planned a violent campaign.

Ken Day Metropolitan Police Special Branch 1969-97 Interviewer: Were they designed to kill?

Ken Day: They were designed to kill, there’s no two ways about that. The damage that those things caused when they were detonated, they were massive explosions.

Commentary: One of C18’s targets was the Olympic athlete, Sharron Davies.

Interviewer: Why Sharon Davis?

Ken Day: Because she had married a black athlete. You can’t

understand it, the mentality, you just cannot understand.

Interviewer: And what was the quality of the agent that enabled you to stop these attacks?

Ken Day: Well obviously to be able to pre-empt an attack like that they were absolutely first class.

Interviewer: So was the group destroyed from within?

Richard: Yeah, the seeds of destruction were sewn there, yes. It then declined from there onwards.

Ken Day: Knowing that the operation that we had against the extreme right saved peoples’ lives, there’s no greater reward that I can have.

Commentary: We can now reveal for the first time that the police recruited a top grade agent to infiltrate the protestors. And controversially he came from a private security company. The police normally keep such firms at arms length.

Ken Day Metropolitan Police Special Branch 1969-98 Ken Day: One’s got to remember that these types of organisations are in it commercially, they need to gather intelligence, they need companies to buy that intelligence, so there’s always a big problem with looking at that.

Ken Day Metropolitan Police Special Branch 1969-98 Ken Day: We’d be prepared to fund somebody for a long period of time until they got to, if you like, a management position within these organisations and were able to report directly on what the plans were for the future.

Interviewer:

How long?

Ken Day: Sometimes years.

Interviewer:

Years?

Ken Day: Years.

Interviewer:

To get to the top?

Ken Day: To get to that position where we knew that they were reporting what was going to happen tomorrow and not what happened yesterday.