Unauthorised Disclosures

Confessions of an anti-corruption investigator

Leaking intelligence for cash? Sometimes, but the truth’s far more intriguing.

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‘Prince’ Andrew, like herpes, is the gift that keeps on giving. Emails from 2011 reveal he asked his police protection officer to carry out checks on Virginia Giuffre. Giuffre, who died earlier this year, made damning sexual allegations against the artist formerly known as Prince Andrew. Despite his denials - and his proven relationship with the disgusting Jeffrey Epstein - Giuffre nonetheless received a substantial out of court settlement.

As for the police bodyguard story, I wrote about it for UnHerd here.

Personally, I find the unlikeliest part of the story the idea of a Royalty protection officer retaining his login for a police intelligence system (without stereotyping too much, you don’t join to become a sleuth). Hopefully Andrew’s bodyguard will have quietly ignored his principal’s request for info, but we’ll see. The police will know, unless the check was on PNC (which has a comparatively short audit window).

As regular readers might know, I worked in the Met’s anti-corruption department for five years. Before that, I investigated breaches of the Official Secrets Act and dealt with a few naughty spies. Then I worked on the occasionally ham-fisted News International investigation, involving more dodgy coppers and equally dodgy journos. Which is to say I’ve a fair bit of experience of leaks, leakers and their motives. And, of course, how to catch them. Or try to catch them, as it’s a surprisingly tricky business. They sometimes involve ‘inchoate offences’, with which juries occasionally struggle.

This is an area of law enforcement rife with misconceptions, cliches and - yes - prejudice. Police critics assume the Job’s a mosh-pit of corruption, a Line of Duty fan’s wet dream. In fact, it isn’t. Given the sheer amount of data held by the Metropolitan Police, I can say from experience the Service tries hard to protect classified material. It has nearly fifty thousand employees. Most of them have varying degrees of systems access. The majority earn meagre salaries. The real surprise? There isn’t more intelligence leakage.

So, as part of my ongoing mission to explain, demystify and occasionally amuse, here’s the skinny on the whole police-leaking-information business.

Oh fuck, what’s he gone and done now?

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First of all, I’ll mention the ‘democratization’ of corruption. Back in the day, before networked IT systems, secrets were locked in safes. Only a select few knew the really juicy stuff - detectives on elite squads, senior officers or people working in close-knit intelligence units. You couldn’t send simply stuff via email, or take a screenshot with your mobile phone. These were the days of classic police corruption; beer-bellied ‘tecs accepting envelopes stuffed with cash in exchange for case papers. Those are, more or less, gone. I broadly attribute the Democratization of Corruption to two things:

1. Information technology. Everyone’s now encouraged to know stuff, because Sharing is Good. Suddenly, information known to few was viewed by many. The Manning / Wikileaks affair is a classic example, whereby a lowly army intelligence clerk had access to reams of highly classified reporting).

2. Management Culture. ‘Dare to Share’ replaced ‘Need to Know’, partly due to the arse-covering tendencies of senior officers. If everyone knows, you can’t blame us when things go wrong! Then, on the other hand, there are perfectly valid reasons too - for example the Soham murders, where poor police-intelligence sharing ended in disaster.

What does this mean for an anti-corruption investigator? Well, you’ve exponentially increased the number of suspects for any potential breach. This occasionally leads investigators into what I call the ‘army storeman’ mindset - ‘stores are for storing things.’ Which is to say, you risk forgetting the point of having information in the first place - to protect people and lock up bad guys, right? Occasionally, though, the police doesn’t help itself. Something guaranteed to wind-up professional standards officers was the bizarre practice of posting officers on ‘restricted duties’ for misconduct to… intelligence units, to keep them off the street and away from the public.

Duh.

Now, there’s a whole book to be written on information access protocols, systems audit techniques, covert flagging and trigger reports, intelligence-sharing, sanitation of product, parallel-sourcing and other tricks the trade. The problem is, it would be quite boring to anyone except nerds who set-up and run intelligence (and counter-intelligence) shops. Suffice it to say - officers on restricted duties aside - a great deal of time and effort goes into ensuring the right people have the appropriate level of access to sensitive information.

And yet…

Much information leaked by police isn’t particularly sexy. In fact, most of it’s startlingly mundane. For example, an officer’s girlfriend is buying a car. So he runs a moody PNC check to see if everything’s kosher. This is a straight-up offence, both criminal and misconduct. It’s easily one of the most common I saw during my time on anti-corruption, along with PNC checks on Pc Snooks’s niece’s dodgy new boyfriend he doesn’t like the look of. I saw more than a few officers sacked for such silliness.

PNC is a universal database. All police officers enjoy access. It stands to reason - for reasons of volume - it’s the single most abused. I discuss this in more detail here, in my article on digital ID and why it sucks.

A classic example: 25 year-old Natalie Mottram, a police staff member with a regional organised crime unit, leaked intelligence to gangsters. Why? They were, quite simply, simply mates of hers. Vetting failures are a peeve of mine - they happen far too often.

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Now, then, onto the varieties of leaks and leakers I encountered during my adventures;

Gawkers, show-offs and nosy bastards

Apart from our PNC abusers, some police officers and staff are simply bored and / or curious. As a PCSO we dealt with once said of our criminal intelligence system, ‘it’s like Google, innit?’ Then, they find something really interesting and end up gobbing off with their mates down the pub. I recall a test-purchase operation (involving undercover officers buying drugs to gather evidence) being thus compromised. Given TP ops are especially hazardous for the officers concerned, this really was a case of ‘loose lips sinking ships.’

It’s worth remembering police officers don’t have carte blanche to view material simply because they can. They require a ‘policing purpose’ to justify their systems use. After Amy Winehouse was arrested, back in the early 2010s, several officers were disciplined for viewing her custody photos on the central imaging system. They were merely gawking.

These, I suppose, are the minor traffic offences of the anti-corruption world, committed by the gormless and the careless. They’re also the most common, and could easily be avoided if the police (a) vetted people properly and (b) supervised them effectively. The can also, as we shall see, escalate.

‘On Lock’

I was introduced to this term by an Afro-Caribbean drug dealer who’d several corrupt police contacts. The term ‘on lock’ simply meant they were locked down - vulnerable to blackmail. A typical scenario would be a young officer introduced to drugs at a nightclub, or more commonly, at a gym (most drug squad types will tell you steroids and cocaine are like beef and mustard for gym-bunnies). Then, once they’ve taken the bait? They’re on lock. From this point onward, the police officer will begin his (and it’s usually a he) descent into a corrupt relationship with a criminal. And, eventually, a prison sentence. Served in a seg wing with paedos and child murderers.

Greed

This one sounds obvious, but worth mentioning nonetheless. Officers with significant financial problems are, in my experience, the single biggest risk to a police service. How their offending manifests itself differs, so this is more of a motivation than a modus operandi, but it’s a constant. Sometimes, the sums of money are trifling. Sometimes it’s dinner and a night at a lap-dancing joint. It might be part of a grooming process. Whatever. The primary issue is the same - the cop concerned is a greedy bastard who should fuck off and get a better paid job elsewhere.

Bad Romance

As HM Prison Service is discovering, this is increasingly common among female officers and staff. In fact, easily the most egregious intelligence leaks I witnessed were courtesy of women manipulated by villainous boyfriends. This was at every level, from humble researchers in local police stations, all the way to detectives serving on elite central squads. On one job, we bugged a car and captured a young female officer, off-duty, parked up with her gangster boyfriend. They were listening to her police radio, giving his mates the all-clear to burgle a shop. On another operation, we listened to a female detective sharing sensitive surveillance and comms interception methodology with her partner’s friends - who happened to be top-tier drug dealers.

The issues around protecting female staff from this kind of exploitation was taboo, primarily for reasons of ‘sexism.’ As we slowly emerge from a generational moratorium on honest discussion around human differences, perhaps the police will think more carefully of employing attractive, immature, early-twentysomething party girls with champagne lifestyles (as per their social media accounts) in highly-sensitive intelligence roles.

Imagine this is a police researcher earning 25K a year. Her Instagram is full of Gucci and Louboutin. She drinks Cristal champers at top end nightclubs every weekend. Is it sexist to consider her an operational security risk? Discuss.

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Revenge & Whistle-blowing

The occasionally resembles the male version of Bad Romance. A copper’s going through a messy divorce. His wife knows he’s done naughty stuff at work. So she informs on him, and we get involved. Then, it’s all off at Haydock as she decides to spill the beans on his mates too. We used to call this ‘shooting the golden goose’, especially when the cop’s not far off retirement. The missus wants her husband’s generous police pension as part of the divorce settlement, right? Well, she ain’t getting much if he’s sacked for corruption. Hell might have no fury, but sometimes it ain’t got much brains, either.

Then there’s professional jealousy, feuds and spite. This stuff’s brilliant for anti-corruption investigators. Some squads turn into rats-in-a-sack, indulging in an arms-race of grassing each other up. Just like villains, really. Whistleblowers? That’s different. Many people blow whistles for perfectly good reasons. A few, though, have naughtily leaked other stuff first. Then, when they think we’re onto them? Cue the tactical whistle-blow! Suddenly the supervisor the officer was mates with for years was in fact sexually harassing them (etc). No wonder I’m so cynical. I spent far too long around this stuff.

Cultural (from Bermondsey to Bangladesh)

This was always a don’t-mention-the-war type topic in the police, because Racism, right? Which misses a broader issue - Corruption is cultural. The sort of corruption we’re most familiar with, not least from popular culture? Dodgy (white) coppers? Brinks Matt robberies? Freemasons? That’s a consequence of specific geographic and socio-cultural factors - i.e. the working class diaspora from south and east London to Kent and Essex. Which is to say, lots of detectives went to school with bank robbers. They, occasionally, dated each other’s sisters (etc). They were part of the same community.

Now, try to map that to Tower Hamlets or Southall? Scary monsters, involving as it does the cultural mores of subcontinental Asia. As a detective I knew from an Indian background told me, in his community doing ‘favours’ for family is a duty, not corruption.

There’s a bitter irony to this. When I served on DPS, the Met commissioned an internal affairs audit. Part of the metrics involved what we now call ‘protected characteristics’ like gender and ethnicity (this was before the 2010 Equalities Act). The results? The most honest and reliable employees - statistically speaking - were black, male police officers. Yay! That’s one we should be singing from the rooftops, right?

Wrong.

Why? The subgroup most prone to dropping themselves in it were younger black, female employees - especially police staff (as opposed to sworn officers). Boo! This was terribly inconvenient. The data suggested the causes involved the party-girl / bad romance factor I mentioned earlier. The upshot? You’ll be astonished to learn the report was quietly buried (by a white senior management team, naturally), much to the chagrin of the people who sweated blood compiling the data. I subsequently indulged in my own orgy of data leakage, occasionally informing black male officers of the results.

Investigations hampered by squeamishness around observable facts become flawed. I give you, for example, the entire Pakistani grooming-gang scandal.

Big Potatoes

From hot potatoes to big potatoes. I use the term Big Potato for the highest level leaks and leakers - the networked insider, either recruited from within or deliberately parachuted into a force by a crime group. This spy will be well-placed and have access to the really sexy stuff - intelligence concerning current operations, targeting and even informants (some OCGs are capable of surprisingly professional mole-hunts).

Happily, cases such as these are unusual. Yet they still occur. The reasons for this - and how to prevent them - are beyond the scope of this article. I might write about it another time.

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I haven’t yet mentioned the gravest kind of intelligence leakage. Which is the sort routinely indulged in by the Government. They do so wearing the armour of officialdom and obfuscation. Have I seen such shenanigans? Yes, I’ve been privy to the occasional skeleton being ushered into a closet. I defy anyone who worked in my world to say they haven’t. Sometimes, there’s even a half-decent reason for it.

But too often, there isn’t.

And there’s one place you’ll seldom see a police anti-corruption gumshoe, and that’s the bloody Cabinet Office at No. 10 Downing Street.

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Thanks for reading. I’ll be back soon.

Dom