Avt025 ts aud021 r4t harriet wistrich & helen steel v1

AVT025 - AUD021 Evan Davis talks to Harriet Wistrich and Helen Steel about undercover police on the Today programme, BBC Radio 4, 15 August 2014.

▪ Programme page: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p024tqjc ▪ Audio source: http://youtu.be/zpPDoHOzfFg Speakers: ED = Evan Davis HW = Harriet Wistrich HS = Helen Steel === HW: Well, the case that I am bringing - there are altogether five undercover officers, there’s eight women, five undercover officers - and in the court hearing that, where the judge required the police to confirm the identities of two of the officers, that involved involved a case of five women and four officers.

ED: So let’s just go through the police’s defence, their first line of defence is, or was, ‘we neither confirm nor deny who these people are, or whether they served as undercover officers’, and that’s the one they’ve struggled to uphold.

HW: Yes, and since we commenced this claim, although it was at a time when there was a lot of publicity, particularly around an undercover officer named Mark Kennedy, and the police have been saying in public ‘look, this is wrong, it shouldn’t happen’.

But when we sought to push this and find out more - for some of these women have lived for over twenty years without knowing and without having it confirmed - the police have had a very obstructive approach and refused to engage in the litigation.

And it’s taken this very long struggle so far to get to a point where there is actually a significant development, a confirmation in relation to just two of the officers so far.

ED: And of the other officers that are said to be involved, two I believe have actually said ‘yes, we were undercover officers’ - is that right? They’ve..?

HW: Yes, in fact the two that have now been confirmed by the police had already self-disclosed!

ED: Oh right, they had self-disclosed themselves?

HW: Yes, and that I think is what led the judge to say in these circumstances you can confirm their identity. It’s all a bit…

ED: Not such a historic moment if people who’ve said, who’ve admitted…

HW: Well, you would think so, but the reality is all of this is very much os out in the public domain. We know, we know from so many different sources that these men were undercover officers, but it’s highly significant that the police have actually had

to move forward in this way, and what we are now pushing for is to get them to actually acknowledge the harm that was caused. The problem that we’ve got now is that they are saying that these relationships were based on “genuine feelings”.

ED: Which I suppose is their second line of defence, that this wasn’t manipulation or deception.

HW: But I mean how can you possibly have a genuine relationship when you know you’re somebody else, and you’re spying on that person and their friends? I mean it’s completely nonsense.

ED: Let me bring Helen Steel in this case - Helen, you were an anti-capitalist protester in the eighties and nineties with this group called London Greenpeace, who are nothing to do with the other Greenpeace I believe.

HS: That’s right.

ED: And you were involved in the McLibel case.

HS. Yes. ED: And you met not one of these ones who have been named, but a chap called John, and it was really a very deep relationship you had with him.

HS: Yes, I mean he… I got to know him over the course of about three years. We began a relationship. We moved into a flat together, he met my family, he met my friends. You know, I believed he was a real person. And then…

ED: And he was living the full life? I mean he…

HS: Oh totally. Totally.

ED: …Come back each evening, and…

HS: Yes, yes. We talked about having children together, you know, we talked about spending the rest of our life, lives together. And then he disappeared.

ED: And this must have been the most traumatic of all…

HS: It was extremely traumatic, he just completely disappeared. Before he’d gone he’d seemed a bit, sort of, unstable, so I became really worried that actually he might even kill himself. So I was desperate to find out what had happened to him. I spent years searching, eventually… Eventually I found that actually he’d been using the identity of a child who had died when they were eight years old, and at that part my, at that point my world really, kind of, fell apart, because this person who I’d known and loved suddenly… I didn’t know who they were, I didn’t know who their name was.

ED: But you must have suspected something, to have been investigating the birth certificate and things like that, though… Or not? I mean it was… Obviously he

disappeared and…

HS: When he disappeared, what happened was I tried to, I tried to track him down through any kind of clue that I had, and then everything that I investigated turned to dust, and so…

ED: This is before…

HS: …It created suspicion about who he really was, so that’s why…

ED: Before Facebook, before mobile phones, so…

HS: Oh, long before that, yes, yes.

ED: …So tracing people’s identity much harder. If the police offered a defence in your case - and it hasn’t come up yet - but if they had, saying ‘this was a genuine relationship’, what would you say to that?

HS: I’d say it was a load of rubbish, I mean how can you have a genuine relationship that’s based on a complete web of lies. You know, these guys were saying that they loved us, that they wanted to be in our lives for the, you know, rest of our lives, and yet they knew that their posting was going to be ending in just a few years’ time, and that they were going to disappear from our lives and leave us bereft. That’s not, you know, that is not love, that is abuse.

AD: And you’re convinced that it was just his reposting that led to the end of the relationship with you?

HS: Well, we know that they were all in for time-limited periods, generally of about five years, and in fact actually what I know is that since I’ve spent all this time trying to track him down, what I’ve found out is that actually when the police realised I was coming close to finding him, they actually moved him to another country in order to prevent me from finding out the truth, and so prolonged all the, you know, harm and distress.

ED: We did actually ask to speak to the police, but they’ve chosen not to speak on this case yet. But they are obviously always very reticent to talk about their undercover operations.

Well, Helen Steel and Harriet Wistrich, thank you both for coming in. === Transcript by BristleKRS from scratch, 2014