Observoir Dogs

Here I am, stuck in the middle with you

Another exciting observation post moment

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Surveillance isn’t glamorous. It’s usually deeply tedious, requiring Zenlike levels of patience. I imagine it’s like fishing, except you can’t drink beer. Like everything else in the police, it has a strict hierarchy. And the lowest rung on the ladder is Observation Post (OP) duty.

It takes months to train a surveillance officer; apart from the following-people-stuff, they’re qualified in advanced driving and firearms - all courses with significant attrition rates. The four-week ‘P9’ surveillance course was one of the most difficult of my service. Apparently it’s even tougher now. That’s before we even consider technical, photography, CROPs and other types of advanced sneakiness.

But Observation Posts? Can you can look out of a window? Congratulations, you’re in!

Okay, there are stated cases to learn (at this point I imagine some of us dimly recall R v Turnbull and R v Johnson) and you might occasionally have to press a button on a camera – spun out into a three-day course – but it’s not rocket science. Yet like many other unglamorous jobs, OP work’s important. Or was, as technology moves on. I imagine coppers sitting in spare bedrooms with a pair of binoculars are slightly out of fashion nowadays.

Let me take you back to when they were.

In 1996 I was part of an OP crew covering a Provisional IRA Active Service Unit. The boys sent to plant bombs on the mainland. It was a tight plot (a ‘plot’ being the stage on which the surveillance drama is set) so our mobile teams couldn’t risk getting too close. If we missed the ASU leaving the house, the team might lose them. Then we wouldn’t know where they were stashing their weapons and HME.

No pressure, eh?

I spent most of my time in Observation Post 4. OP4 existed long enough to (1) spawn its own newspaper, called The OP4 Gazette and Bugle and (2) for a friend to create a dedicated OP mixtape called Observoir Dogs. My favourite track was Stealers Wheel’s ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ –

Clowns to the left of me
Jokers to the right
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you

This alluded to our three-officer OP model – we took turns watching, writing the surveillance log and resting. Most of us, newly-recruited Special Branch officers deployed as OP-fodder, were strangers. That changed after weeks cooped up in a stifling room, twelve-hour shifts looking out of a window or watching a CCTV monitor. The boredom was incredible, until our suspects appeared for a fleeting moment:

Standby, Standby. OP4 has the eye. Subject CHERRY RED out of target address. He’s wearing a black jacket and blue jeans. He’s turned LEFT, LEFT, LEFT along Acacia Avenue… Subject is now a LOSS, LOSS, LOSS to OP4.

Surveillance commentary dictated you repeated important information three times because our encrypted COUGAR radios were notoriously patchy. It meant you’d most likely hear the salient word at least once.

A mobile unit replied. 1/7. Contact, contact CHERRY RED. I have the eye.

That was it for OP4. Job done. We still had to stay put in case the suspect had only popped out for a packet of cigarettes. These moments of tension were like Das Boot but without the torpedoes and chunky sweaters. The blokes all ended up growing ‘OP beards’ though.

Such incarceration leads to surreal conversations, the sort you only have in OPs. If you know, you know. Police trash-talk makes ‘Derek and Clive’ look workplace-friendly. Or we’d obsessively ruminate on when the brass would ‘go executive’ and send in the Ninjas to nick the suspects. That meant ENDEX and a beer. We knew shit was getting real when they sent an SO19 rifleman to one of the other OPs. Sitting next to a sniper with his eye glued to a Schmidt and Bender scope was a clue the stakes were raised.

Some ex-OP4 people are now my closest friends. I saw two of them last week for a beer. Two OP4 inmates ended up getting married. It’s the best thing about the Job; the people you meet on the way. Even those you didn’t get on with at the time, like the guy who kept the OP’s only transistor radio tuned to Radio 3. I subsequently worked with him many years later, when I’d grown up a bit. He was an alright bloke.

I suspect the IRA men felt the same about their colleagues, although I’m told our pension scheme is significantly better.

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Now for the science bit. I’m not giving away any secrets. This stuff is all over the internet.

Observation posts usually fulfil four main functions;

·         To provide a ‘trigger’ for a mobile surveillance team, allowing them to deploy (or ‘plot up’) a safe distance from the suspects;

·         To provide Pattern-of-Life surveillance on subjects of interest. There’s no point deploying a mobile team at 0700 on someone who doesn’t routinely leave their house until 1400. Surveillance, like war, is expensive. Every hour on the clock costs a small fortune;

·         To house technical equipment (I’ll leave it at that);

And

·         To gather photographic and / or video evidence, for example a crack house or a shop handling stolen goods. This might involve police photographers, who can be as exacting as any David Bailey.

If you’re of my vintage and career field, you’ll probably have spent far too much time in OPs. That wasn’t all we did; the average OP grunt had a day job besides looking out of windows. In 1997, for example, I was a Special Branch desk officer. Nowadays they call them Field Intelligence Officers. You’ll see me compare police operations to movie sets - I don’t think it’s a bad analogy. Desk officers were the production assistants, helping set the stage for filming. Quite literally, as many OPs had video cameras.

My first ‘obbo van’ was a Bedford Rascal. It had a wooden stool to sit on and a lemonade bottle to piss in. That was in 1994 when I was a divisional Pc, watching a burglary suspect on a council estate. My last was circa 2009. That was also a surveillance van, keeping tabs on an old-school gangster linked to police corruption. That was a very Gucci vehicle; 360 degree digital cameras, a kettle, padded seats and moisture-absorbent piss-bags. The years in-between I watched Animal Liberation Front arsonists, Neo-Nazis, more IRA men, bent coppers, international malcontents and of course Jihadists.

Sometimes I was allowed to play with technical kit I’m not allowed to talk about, our van parked in a forest like Monty’s field HQ. All around us, very serious people crept about with guns. I’d monitor my box of tricks, drink tea and eat sandwiches.

That was fun.

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Next to making friends, earning overtime and ruining horrible people’s days, the best thing about OPs were the hardy souls who let us invade their homes.

Of course, we never went in blind. Our due diligence, checking if premises were suitable, was enabled by intelligence gathered by local officers doing bread-and-butter policing. And being from the same force, we all knew someone who knew someone who could get stuff done. You don’t site an OP in a house with a history of domestic violence or drug-dealing, right? We might be in situ for months. We knew which properties were suitable because neighbourhood cop Pc Miggins had taken the time – had the time – to investigate and report back competently. Their work, even if they didn’t know it, informed ours.

The Met’s local policing model was solid. For specialist operations, it was an example of the aggregation of marginal gains. Then a bunch of know-nothings swapped neighbourhood intelligence for monitoring Twitter feeds.

Sorry, that was a grumpy retired cop moment, although of course that might apply to most of my Substack.

Anyway, one member of the public was a famous actor. A household name. I sat in his loft for a fortnight watching a notorious paedophile. The actor told me a brilliant story about going on the piss with Brian Blessed. He made toast and marmalade every morning - we’d sit eating together as he itched to have a go on my crappy Storno police radio. I wasn’t allowed to tell him why I was there, but eventually he said, “Dom, I think that fellow across the street’s a bloody nonce.”

Despite being an epic luvvie, he held agreeably medieval views on what we should do with the bastard if we caught him. After the operation I took the actor a bottle of whisky to say thanks. I won’t name him, even though he’s no longer with us. We take this confidentiality stuff seriously. If you ever let the police use your house as an OP, we’ll keep it secret even after you’ve popped your clogs.

Then there was the young lady who was a high-flier in the world of patisserie. Her spare bedroom, in which we established our OP, was packed to the rafters with high-quality panettone. We literally had to eat our way in. She seemed delighted to feed us and how the days flew by! Stuffing ourselves with cake, washed down with flat whites from her Gaggia. Occasionally we’d even spot the IRA man we were watching. Seasoned operators, we told nobody about how cushy the OP was.

Then MI5’s technical bods turned up and kicked us out. How they found out about the panettone remains a (probably classified) mystery.

On the other hand, I remember an OP provided by a local authority. They were usually the worst. It was in an empty council flat where the only room with a view of the target address was the loo. I spent two weeks balancing on an avocado toilet seat, peering out of a letterbox-sized window. Old factories were crappy too. It was like camping indoors. And I hate camping.

A colleague and I once sited an OP on top of a half-built office block. We were spying on a ritzy address half a mile away, using a camera lens the size of a bazooka. For static surveillance, height and distance are your friends. There was no roof on the place and it wouldn’t stop raining. We built a hide, but I still spent most of the job worrying about getting a 1200mm Nikon lens wet. They cost a bloody fortune. The pictures, though, were epic.

You’d meet all sorts. I was a London copper and London’s a World City. People from across the globe come to The Smoke and often their political dramas follow. I’ve sat in OPs watching wrong ‘uns from Tunis, Lahore, Delhi, Bogota and Tehran. Even Romford. There was a Middle-Eastern gentleman who provided a luxurious OP, but all the chairs were covered in protective wrapping. We weren’t allowed to sit on them because it would piss off his extremely house-proud wife. A standing-only OP, although she was unbothered when her husband invited us to smoke his shisha pipe. The place also sported a bidet with gold fittings. Even better, the owner’s sons brought us a twelve-course mezze. Shukran!

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The zenith of my OP hi-jinks came in 2006. I was a temporary sergeant and my team was in charge of acquiring OPs for an operation called OVERT. If big counterterrorism operations are cinematic productions, OVERT was Titanic, Ben-Hur and Star Wars combined. The largest UK surveillance operation ever mounted, hundreds of officers from the police and Security Service spent weeks tracking a team of Al-Qaeda-inspired terrorists.

Virtually every force in England and Wales sent assets. Senior counterterrorism officers began using surveillance like Soviet generals use artillery - in volume and not too subtly. Their rationale was simple - the risks were too high to lose suspects. They demanded we covered multiple subjects and premises 24/7. Rotating surveillance teams around suspects - who know they might be under suspicion - is a sort of shadow play, one where the stars of the show are unaware they’re surrounded by extras.

The OVERT terrorists were going full-spectrum Doctor Evil, planning to blow up multiple transatlantic airliners using ingenious liquid explosive IEDs. The Job ended when the Americans decided we were taking too long to make arrests, eventually forcing the Pakistani authorities detain a key figure overseas. That alerted the UK-based terrorists the game was up. I was in the ops room when the arrest order came through - if the Americans gave any warning, we certainly weren’t told.

The operation demanded a lot of OPs. Sharpish. My team were the movie’s location scouts, if you like. None of it would have been possible without the Londoners who allowed us use their homes. We were asking a lot, especially in tight-knit Asian communities around east London where the terrorists were based. Yet people were prepared to help. Asking someone to host an OP is like being a salesman with absolutely nothing to offer in return except gratitude.

OVERT was a tremendous success. All of the suspects were arrested without a shot being fired (although a colleague had to make a few alterations to one of their cars with his asp).

Looking back on it, why was our little corner of the job successful? I’m biased, as my team (which included many newly-recruited officers) were very good. More than a few of them moved on to have successful careers - both in terms of promotion and lateral development - in the Met and beyond.

• We had experienced people (one Dc could find an OP in the middle of the Gobi desert. He knows who he is). We also had a gnarly former surveillance DS who’d pissed someone off and was banished to our team as a result. He was a game-changer. I can’t begin to stress how important experience is. It allows you to hit the ground running.

• We had excellent local intelligence, allowing us to move quickly as soon as a location was identified.

• We were well-motivated. We worked eighteen-hour days without complaint, as did our inspectors and seniors.

I cancelled my family holiday because there was nobody to replace me. How I laughed when I read a very senior officer’s rather sensational account of OVERT, where he bemoaned having to take telephone calls on leave. And they wonder why we don’t rate the General Melchett-types at the top.

When OVERT was done, a triumph for the Met and MI5, one of the first things Commissioner Sir Ian Blair did was disband Special Branch. It was replaced by the SO15 Counter-Terrorism Command in October 2006.

The politics behind that decision – involving a toxic blood feud inside the Met, is a story for another time. I might share what I remember of the episode, as I had an unlikely front seat. You’ll enjoy it if you like the idea of Machiavelli directing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

You see, it doesn’t matter how well you improve or perform. When the machine comes for you all it remembers are tragedies like Stockwell, not successes like Overt. Mistakes oils its gears and what the machine wants, the machine gets. God help anyone who gets in its way.

It’s why, looking back on it, I was probably happier looking out of windows.