A Security Breach Waiting to Happen: Serving Officers as Consultants

Last week, Sam Hallam was acquitted by the Court of Appeal, after serving eight years in prison for a murder he couldn't have committed. Counsel for the Crown seems only to have read the full case files about halfway through the hearing, because that was the point where the Crown suddenly withdrew its opposition to the appeal without any public explanation. Interestingly, Mr Hallam uses his first major interview, with the Mail on Sunday, to express, not merely his indignation at the way he was treated by an inquiry team led by then-Chief-Inspector Michael Broster, but also his concern that the conduct of the now-Superintendent Broster in the Gareth Williams case may have fatally compromised what is now and always should have been, a murder inquiry. See several articles in this blog about the Williams case, below.

Mr Hallam rightly observes that the Gareth Williams case was "really important" and mistakes were unacceptable, let alone near duplicates of the kind of mistake which led to his own wrongful conviction and the escape from justice of the real killer. (Broster and his team ignored compelling evidence against one Tyrone Isaacs even as they ignored compelling evidence supporting Mr Hallam's claim to innocence.)

Above all, Broster failed to keep a  "policy book" which is a document designed to allow their superiors or any future inquiry team, or those working on a parallel case, to understand their reasons for taking specific actions, interpreting evidence in a particular way or why they should have pursued one line of inquiry whilst abandoning others. Without a policy book, other records reveal almost nothing about why an investigation went wrong. The only time anyone benefits from a policy book not being kept, is when the reason why an investigation went wrong is itself unacceptable: i.e: something more sinister than a mistake.

The action which, above all others, cries out for explanation, is why Broster's team actually gave back a stick that had been taken from Tyrone Isaacs as a potential murder weapon. It's simply impossible to see why an essentially valueless possession should be returned when it might still have yielded forensic evidence of value if subjected to the most modern techniques. It's almost as if Mr Isaacs had a kindly sponsor.

Medawar isn't going to draw the reader's attention to the ways in which all of this is an exact parallel with the ways in which Superintendent Broster and his SO15 colleagues systematically derailed the murder investigation in the Williams case, because they are quite obvious to anyone comparing the details of the two cases.

Medawar would like, instead, to draw the reader's attention to the ways in which Superintendent Broster's career trajectory parallels that of two former executives of "News Data Services", a News Corporation company which has been thoroughly implicated in a global hacking fraud designed to drive competitors to News Corp broadcasters, (On Digital, for example) out of business, causing News Corp to profit by billions of pounds and gain considerable global political power for its principals.

Superintendent (latterly "Commander") Ray Adams was the head of Scotland Yard's Criminal Intelligence Branch, SO11, and Reuven Hasak was a former deputy Chairman of the Shin Bet, Israel's security service. Like SO15, SO11 officers have a very high security clearance, which the unscrupulous can exploit to prevent other officers questioning or even knowing about, their activities, whether properly sanctioned or not. Especially not. The same goes for Shin Bet officers in general, let alone the deputy chairman.

In recent years, the high security clearance of SO11 and SO15 officers has led to their being given exclusive access to classified material, so that any senior investigating officer needing access to classified material, secure premises or military and intelligence personnel in order to solve a murder (or multi-billion pound fraud), have to channel all their requests via SO15 and simply accept whatever they are given or told, without question. Somewhere in the mind of successive Home Secretaries, this arrangement "serves national security". In practice, of course, it does the opposite:

Exclusive access to privileged information gives officers a very high market value. And being effectively beyond being questioned by their colleagues gives those officers the opportunity to exploit that market value for all it's worth.

Both Ray Adams and Reuven Hasak had top jobs at NDS within weeks of leaving public service, and it's simply impossible for them to have been up and running so quickly without overlap: they must have been briefed into their new roles, and had an idea of the (criminal, as it happens) large-scale enterprise they would be engaged in, even while between them they still had access to the most secret and sensitive files of both the UK's police and security services and those of Israel.

And since neither of them is exactly an ace programmer or experienced financier, what was it that made them ideal candidates for senior roles in News Corp's software arm, if it wasn't their security clearances and unfettered access to national secrets?

Now we learn that Superintendent Broster is due to leave the Metropolitan Police, later this year. But he is already advertising and presumably selling, his services as a "security consultant". This is precisely the same highly questionable overlap, which does not so much open the door to corruption as send hawkers round the streets, seeking out corruption and issuing invitations.

How in the world is this system more secure than simply allowing a senior investigating officer, whose investigation touches on military or intelligence matters, to go and talk to the relevant agencies and their officers on her or his own account? They would be in a much better position than SO15 or SO11 to judge what evidence was actually pertinent, and they would almost certainly occupy the attention of military and intelligence officers for less time in consequence. Not having a privileged "elite" position, their conduct could be scrutinised and any "mistakes" rectified. They could also benefit from the advice of peers and superiors in a way that "elite" officers never seem to.

Moreover, it wouldn't be possible for a foreign power or major criminal gang to predict which officers would end up having access to classified material, and when they did have access, it would indeed be limited to that pertinent to a single inquiry at a time. By reducing both the opportunity and the payoff for anyone corrupting an officer, in whatever way, national security -and the rule of law- would be strengthened.

Above all, allowing serving officers, with high security clearances, to enter private practice and advertise their services, is a suicidal practice in terms of national security and should be replaced with something like the quarantine period imposed on former ministers. Senior police officers have generous pensions, precisely to compensate them for all the opportunities for personal enrichment which they supposedly forgo in the public interest. So how come they need to be allowed to flaunt their security clearances on the internet and around City boardrooms -as if they were standing in a doorway in Soho with a set of  doorkeys in their hands and a look of bored acceptance, if not enticement, on their faces?

What Was the True Purpose of the STASI?

These days, the STASI is forgotten by most people, conveniently so by many German politicians and the British ones who negotiate treaties with them that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people, but the STASI hasn't really gone away. It has transformed itself into something that certain investigative journalists in Germany (an endangered species, really) refer to as the "Deutschland-Clan".

This is an organized crime network, carrying a lot of clout within the German criminal justice system as former STASI personnel forge new careers in the Federal Police and public prosecutor's offices. It also appears to have both the management and trades unions in its pocket in two areas of strategic communications: German Railways and German Telecommunications. -It also played a role in German and Austrian companies getting impressive contracts from American Railroad companies for signalling and communications gear. (Always less emotive and less publicized than surrendering rolling stock to foreign suppliers, although Railtrack has been happy to do this in the UK.)

Now, it seems very unlikely that the new organised crime network, based on the STASI infrastructure of terror, would be seeking a return of the old communist German state, which would be pointless, or communist world revolution, which would be over-ambitious. But what was the STASI's purpose in the first place: could this provide a clue as to what, apart from make money and terrorize people, the Deutschland Clan is likely to do?

The STASI was formed by negotiation between Gestapo officers and agents captured by the Russians, and NKVD officers tasked with creating a functional communist state from the social chaos left by the Red Army's officially-sanctioned orgy of organized rape, which was Stalin's deliberate punishment for the German people for having turned against him. Essentially, the NKVD offered to let the Gestapo off for war crimes, provided that they agreed to ignore the massive war crime of organized rape, and to make East Germany run for the communists. The deal was struck, and the released Gestapo duly started to enforce order, repair the country's social structure (always, only to a limited extent) and enforce obedience to the new Communist puppets. (But never the same widespread belief that the Nazis had enjoyed.)

So, the STASI, to begin with at least, was a sub-set of the Gestapo, minus the ones who chose to go to the West and do a deal, or Argentina and do no deal. (This depended on whether their "nest egg" was information, which MI6 or the American OSS actually wanted, or whether they already had money. If they had money, they went to Argentina or Paraguay without delay or a single thought to any deal with Western Intelligence, if they had information, they traded that -and then went to Argentina without much in the way of backward glances.) In a sense, the STASI was the Gestapo in purer form, free of the pro-western element or those who had successfully feathered their own nests. Far from being communists, these were the NAZI Taliban, the utter hard core of true believers.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in practice, East Germany functioned like the Nazi state, not as it had been during the Holocaust (there wasn't an ethnic minority of any size available in any case!) but as it was between 1933 and 1939. Towards the end, they even had new death-camps built, although the Russians pulled the plug before these could be used. They weren't big enough to "process" a whole ethnic group, just political dissidents, which is precisely what the original NAZI camps were designed to do, before successful territorial conquests left them with more Jews corralled into ghettos than they knew what to do with.

Faced with the chaos and ruined state left behind by Stalin's rapine and revenge, the NKVD had done a deal with the devil and created a survival capsule for Nazism.

Which brings us to the much neglected question of what the NAZI party itself was supposed to be -and for whom?

In 1919, after the Armistice and the punishment of Germany via the Treaty of Versailles, there were several odd little political parties like the NAZIs, all testing out the waters with different bits of the political spectrum. Adolf Hitler, upon his release from hospital, was recruited by German Military intelligence, based on very positive comments about his courage that were on file from his (Jewish) former Commanding Officer, as an agent who would go and infiltrate these subversives. Strangely, for a spy, he ended up as figurehead of the worker's party that he'd been sent to infiltrate. Stranger still, they originally tried out a version of Marxist class warfare, before finding that this found no favour with their potential supporters (bottles were thrown at Himmler when he made a speech saying the Party's ideology was close to Lenin's) and racial politics only emerged as plan B after this riot.

The Nazis engaged in street scuffles and political trials of strength with several other broadly similar parties, (for all we know, German Military intelligence had agents like Hitler in all of these parties) and eventually, after some farcical false starts, the NAZIs got going and started to emerge as the strongest of all the radical new parties. At which point, they suddenly came into the money, from all the industrial combines and big banks that had backed Lubendorf's regime under the Kaiser's rule for the consolidation of Germany and the attempted empire-building that led to the Great War.

Germany seems to us like a fixture, but when the Nazi party started, it hadn't been a united nation all that long and there was still a fond memory of the smaller states that had been there, so much more peacefully, before. There was a distinct possibility in the air, that defeat and austerity would transform German nationalism back into Bavarian and Prussian nationalism, and that the whole thing would revert to its pre-Bismark condition. In those circumstances, the NAZI party acted as a survival capsule, not just for German Imperialism and the industrial combines behind that imperialism (they wanted a worldwide market for their goods, simple as that!) -but for the whole concept of Germany as a nation, rather than as a group of nations sharing a language with Austria and parts of Switzerland and odd bits of other neighbouring states. But Germany as a nation was as much a marketing concept for the big industrial combines as it was a political concept.

The Nazi party was a survival capsule for the global ambitions of German Industrialists, just as Imperial Germany had been their first, overt expression of global ambition. The political ideology of the Nazis was chosen by a mixture of competition and experiment: the party tried different ideologies before it settled on the "Nazi" one that we can recognize -and it competed with other "radical" groups with a suspiciously similar provenance, all based around disgruntled ex-soldiers. (Not something Germany was short of after 1918!) It was a brilliant marketing man's exercise in determining how to sell industrial ambition once more to the rustically-inclined German people, even immediately after that ambition had brought the ringing disaster of military defeat upon them, and the even worse disaster of the punitive Versailles treaty.

All the STASI ever was, was a temporary vehicle for the same seed of ambition that the Nazis had carried. It was only ever waiting for the Soviet ruler to depart, but in the meantime, it was so rooted in the mechanism of social coercion that the Soviets needed in order to rule their part of Germany, that there was no prospect of the NKVD and the KGB routing it out, because that would have yielded control of East Germany to the West. In return for propping up a puppet communist regime, the STASI could keep the embers of NAZIsm alive -and there was nothing Moscow could do about it, although the KGB must have known the nature of the deal which their NKVD predecessors had struck.

Now the Deutschland Clan has spread out from East Germany, to the whole of a united Germany, has tendrils in Austria and in the ethnic German communities of the United States, Canada and Argentina. Being a Mafia organization, it has contact with the Russian and Polish Mafias, but the master servant relationship that appeared to exist between the KGB and the STASI, is reversed between the Deutschland Clan and the Russian Mafia. Tail wags dog.

The Deutschland Clan represents a direct threat to democracy, not just in Germany and Austria, but also in the United States, Canada and Argentina. The danger here is very real and very great. It may also be very imminent, but this is harder to gauge.