Tilly Gifford, 14 November 2011

Lying under oath. Infiltration of protest groups. Concerns about policing going off-piste are justified. But what about the many coppers dropping off the radar entirely into the lucrative, private security industry? Recent events also throw up cause for concern over what ex-police working for private firms are up to for their corporate paymasters.

Former head of Special Branch, now security director

"Gordon Irving, Scottish Power’s Security Director, has close links and a very good working relationship with the police, having been in the force himself", boasts Scottish Power’s own website.

Irving joined Scottish Power after 30 years in Strathclyde Police where he was head of Special Branch. Irving’s position is symptomatic of the disturbingly ‘close’ relations between the police, Special Branch, big business and the private security firms operating for profit.
 

 
Earlier this year Scottish Power was revealed as a client of Vericola, a private security firm exposed by the Guardian for infiltrating green protest groups. No isolated incident however, but set against the backdrop of an organised and lucrative industry that transfers policing expertise and knowledge from the public to private sector. That ex-coppers cash in on their surveillance skills for private firms is not only ethically questionable, but represents a worrying interference with our democratic right as civilians to voice dissent.

Rent-a Cop

Many existing ‘rent-a-spy’ firms offering their services to big business are run by ex-special branch. This is no coincidence. There is a clear ‘revolving door’ pattern of ushering coppers straight from the station onto the payroll of security firms.

Examples abound: The Inkerman Group, a company monitoring protestors, employs former Met commissioner Peter Imbert as a strategic adviser. Russ Corn now works for Diligence, a global business intelligence firm, after a career in the UK Special Forces. Peter Bleksley, running a business intelligence company, was a founder member of Scotland Yard's undercover unit in the 1980s.

Mark Kennedy, the infamous undercover NPOIU officer who infiltrated the climate movement, controversially set up his own private security firm Tokra immediately after he left the police. As a civilian, he also continued to use the same fake alias he’d used undercover. Rod Leeming, hired by E.on, recently got tangled in contradictory statements about Kennedy's connection to his firm security firm Global Open. Leeming is a former head of the Animal Rights National Index, a covert Metropolitan police unit monitoring activists. He left the police in 2001.

These recruitments are not ad hoc, but form part of a lucrative industry that matches ex-coppers with the private companies. EPIC, the professional association for Ex-Police in Industry and Commerce does exactly that. Claiming to have more than 200 members, it ‘liaises with government, other industrial and commercial associations and the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO)’.

By the time they retire or leave the service, many ex-coppers have well-honed intelligence-gathering skills. Cashing-in on such skills for the various companies that target protesters raises questions about the alliances and sympathies between the private sector and police forces. Security firms spying on campaigns often collect, collate and condense information into ‘briefings’. These briefings, perfectly legal, can be passed on to their clients. Such tactics are not illegal, but as in the Vericola case, they may rely on deceit and infiltration to supply information - information that is presumably valuable, given that the energy companies are buying it.

Another recently exposed infiltrator, former undercover officer Bob Lambert admitted to having infiltrated London Greenpeace for up to five years back in the 1980s. His Special Branch career included supervising other undercovers who continued this operation and spied on many other peaceful activist groups as well. While Special Branch was undercover in London Greenpeace, private spies hired by McDonald’s also infiltrated the group - as was discovered in the McLibel court case. The hamburger giant had hired two separate private investigation agencies. McDonald’s head of security was an ex-copper with a 30-year police career, who told the court about his close contacts with Special Branch in dealing with London Greenpeace. Intelligence gathered was shared between private spies and their corporate clients on the one hand and Special Branch on the other. This kind of cooperation continued until very recently – and may still be happening.

As SpinWatch wrote in a statement, Lambert’s past with Special Branch helps to confirm that the recently exposed police spies (such as Mark Kennedy) were not 'rogue officers'. They were part of an unacceptable pattern of infiltration of environmental and other activist groups, which seems to have been condoned at the highest level.

Weighing up the risks - why spy?

It may make financial sense for companies to invest in infiltration activities to prevent damage to company image. But why would energy companies risk associating themselves with such vilifying tactics as spying on campaign groups?

When outsourcing dirty work, ‘accountability’ becomes a conveniently slippery notion. By hiring a ‘business intelligence’ firm, the risk factor in spying on campaigners is reduced for the company. A company can distance itself from the ‘intelligence-gathering’, divesting itself of responsibility. The Vericola exposure did not prise any satisfactory explanations from energy giants about their arrangements with private intelligence-gathering agents. In the public glare the companies declined to comment, saying only that the agents operated “under their own steam”.

At least now public pressure is unravelling the tapestry of police infiltration, for all to see, and calling for changes in policing powers to be made. Ironically, when the same infiltration tactics are used for commercial purposes, there is no future hope for such clarity.

Corporate policing – a far-fetched allegation?

In one of the police documents relating to Kennedy's deployment marked "restricted" and "confidential", police chiefs laid out what they believed to be the legal justification for Kennedy's surveillance operation. The environmental campaigners could cause ‘severe economic loss to the United Kingdom’ and an ‘adverse effect on the public's feeling of safety and security’.

That this is about potential economic loss to large corporate interests who have massive social and environmental impacts on our future, urges the question as to who the police here to serve - the general public, or corporate interests? That ex-policemen change ranks to do uncannily similar work for corporate interests as they did for the state, is in itself quite revealing.

From enforcement to prevention

The police operate within a constraining legal framework, which - as we are currently seeing with the thrashing out of various public enquiries - is far from effective but at least in theory demands accountability. The report on the infiltration of protest groups was delayed last month because Hogan-Howe, the Met police commissioner, was confronted with the news that police have even testified under their fake identities – under oath.

The private sector is exempt from accountability. Exempt from either regulations or mechanisms to provide transparency, the monitoring is left to the public, to groups such as Fitwatch, Spinwatch and CorporateWatch.

We have our concerns about active police members going astray within the existing framework of accountability. The current police inquiries into infiltration (counting no less than 12 separate ones at the time of writing) might shed some light. But what about the many ex-police officers who now sit in the offices of the very corporate bodies that protest groups are peacefully campaigning against? We need an independent inquiry into the cooperation between the police and corporate spies, gathering and exchanging intelligence on the activist movement and their joint operations to undermine protest.