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Subject: Cryptome, Romeo Spy autobiography


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Chapter I


Encounter in Morocco

My first encounter with the KGB required a detailed account of my background, and I took several days to prepare a document that set out my career thus far. It began with my birth in Peterborough in 1935, and ended with my hasty exit from London in 1972. In between were the events that had shaped my two unexpectedly short experiences as a police officer.


I was educated at Rougemont, a private prep school in Newport, south Wales, and then went to St Julian’s, a good grammar school where I took I joined the Boy Scouts and took an interest in the church. As someone who was later to be accused of being a professional perjurer, this may seem odd, but my scout troop met in the church hall and I had contemplated taking holy orders. I had started and edited our troop magazine, Contact, and had badgered the local mayor and the bishop into contributing articles. When the wartime air aces ‘Cats Eyes’ Cunningham and Group Captain Leonard Cheshire had visited our church I had persuaded them to submit to interviews, and when I sent them courtesy copies of the published version I was invited to attend a Christian summer camp. This consisted of plenty of bible classes and prayer meetings, and brought me into contact with the children of many senior churchmen. Eventually my preoccupation petered out, but the enthusiasm I showed for religion was typical of the way I threw myself into particular interests.
I also excelled rugby, boxing and water polo, but these were physical achievements, not signs of any academic accomplishments, so I did not complete the sixth form before I joined the army at the age of seventeen for the Officer Training Corps. This was a career choice encouraged by my father, then still a serving officer based at the Royal College of Military Science, despite lost a part of his left hand in an explosion at the Woolwich Arsenal during the Second World War while conducting secret experimental proof work. He always had good connections, and one of my godfathers was his former commanding officer, later to sponsor my application for a commission to the War Office Selection Board, while another was a senior Special Branch officer, Commander Flood, who was to give me sound advice about how to get on in the Met. My father had met Flood when the latter had been sent to investigate a mysterious explosion in 1940 which was suspected to have been an act of sabotage by Nazi spies. Flood concluded the incident had been an accidental detonation, and the two men had remained in touch with each other after the war, when he had been based at Fort Halstead.
I was posted to the British Army of the Rhine at Munster, to join my Royal Artillery regiment, as a private soldier, on being commissioned in 1953 and came to command Y (Survey) Troop, 94th Locating Regiment. Although I had volunteered for combat in Korea, I was sent on an Officer’s Gunnery Course at Larkhill in Wiltshire, where I acquired some knowledge of 25-pounders and counter-bombardment skills.
Apart from my encyclopaedic grasp of field artillery, my other lasting asset from the army was an invitation in 1956 to join the army lodge of the Freemasons. I was assured that being ‘on the square’ would help my career, and it certainly did me no harm when I later joined the police and found that the local lodge played an important part in gaining promotions. I knew the lodge exercised great influence in the military because, shortly before leaving the army I recommended that my younger, middle brother Leonard, then a lowly REME corporal, should join. Promotion to Quarter-Master followed soon afterwards, and he later received a commission and was transferred to Middle Wallop where he spent much of his career developing computer systems and avionics for helicopters of the Army Air Corps. He was to become master of his lodge, eloquent proof of the influence exercised by the Brethren.
After nearly three years in the army I was persuaded to join the Metropolitan Police in what would now be described as a fast-track with the promise of swift promotion to the rank of inspector, the objective being the creation of an officer corps within the force, a concept that had been abandoned before the war, following Lord Trenchard’s reforms which had created the training school at Hendon. There were about two dozen of us, all from a similar background, who had been approached to help transform the Met into a professional organisation based on military lines, and I recall particularly an ex-Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm pilot, and another army officer, who held views similar to mine. Within a year we had all left the police in disgust, most appalled by the standards of discipline and the pervasive culture of mild corruption. My first encounter with the Met’s hidden management occurred when Hendon’s Commandant invited me to a meeting which was attended exclusively by Freemans. As well as the Commandant, who was later to be appointed Chief of the City of London force, there were some elderly members of the permanent staff, and a group of the cadets. It was here that I learned of the flying start enjoyed by those of us ‘on the square’ who would be joining one of the many police lodges. We would have advance access to exam papers, the names of contacts to help with interviews and numerous other advantages. No wonder so many inappropriate accelerated promotions occur in the police, and no wonder there is such resentment among those who have seen how the Brethren help each other.
Another good example was my arrest while on the ‘Queer Patrol’ in the Covent Garden urinals, of Tom Driberg, the Labour MP whom I had caught engaged in buggery with another man. A notorious, predatory homosexual, I marched him off to Bow Street, having angrily rejected his offer of £5 to forget the matter, but soon afterwards he had telephoned another Labour MP, and future prime minister, who arrived at the police station and demanded to see Chief Superintendent ‘Bones’ Jones who lived in quarters directly over the station. Obviously this was not a total surprise to some officers, and all involved seemed confident of the procedure. Soon afterwards both MPs left the building in high spirits, my pocketbook was confiscated and I had been warned that the incident never occurred. A month later, still furious at how I had been humiliated by someone I had learned was a notorious, repeat, offender, I handed in my warrant card. In the years that followed I watched as Driberg manoeuvred, or maybe blackmailed, his way to the top of British politics, was elected chairman of the Labour Party, and was ennobled as Baron Bradwell of Bradwell juxta Mare shortly before his death in 1976. This was my first bad experience in the Met, and it was to prove a lasting one. It reflected not only on Driberg, not only on the willingness of another MP to conspire with him, but the Met’s institutionalised collusion. Curiously, if there was a victim of this all-too-frequent encounter in a public convenience, I felt it had been me.
Many of the other ex-officers opted for police service overseas with Commonwealth forces, and I also went for an interview at the Colonial Office, but although I passed the scrutiny with flying colours, I failed the medical because of an injury to my legs I had sustained while in the army. With that avenue closed to me I accepted a post in the City, working for Rickards, an import-export company in Watling Street.
My experience of the City of London was almost as disappointing as mine in the police. Whereas small backhanders and bribes were the norm in the Met, with sergeants accepting £5 notes to look the other way when a minor charge was dropped, I soon learned that my managing director routinely inflated invoices and issued false receipts in much the same way that the company buyer demanded £500 to place a large purchase. Despite this disagreeable atmosphere I survived for a year, but when the promised company car failed to materialise I jumped ship, and joined another venture, Lamson Paragon Business Systems, which more suited my limited business talents.
LPBS was a pioneer in the new field of electronic automation and computerisation, and I was selected to spend a year mastering this new management tool that promised to transform the way business was conducted. Some of my training was undertaken abroad, and my specialist area of expertise turned out to be retail entertainment, and soon I was cultivating my designated territory, the owners of West End night clubs, in the hope of persuading them to invest in electronic systems that would enable them to exercise greater control in a trade notorious for ‘stock shrinkage’ and the mishandling of cash. I undertook surveys of the needs of the prospective clients, designed a suitable system for them and then supervised its installation. My task at LPBS was to promote the use of automated tills and other equipment that allowed them to keep track of where their money was going and monitor the performance of their managers and transactions, and in doing so I found myself working mainly in the evenings and at night. However, at the weekends I usually stayed with my parents in Hampshire, and it was on one of these occasions that I met June Price, a nursing sister working at the nearby Farnborough Hospital. After a long courtship I found myself under pressure from my father to marry her as our first child, Nicholas, was on the way. Over the following three years that our marriage survived Lisette and Joanna followed quickly. June’s family were landowners in Shropshire, with a large estate outside Shrewsbury, so there was plenty of support for June when we decided to part, perhaps victims of a City of London life that really suited neither of us, or maybe because I was the wrong husband. It was only after we had married that I had discovered she had been engaged previously to no less than three doctors at the hospital, and had something of a reputation for wanting to find a husband.
Inevitably, as a young man with a flat in Hampstead and instant access to London’s most popular nightspots where I could expect plenty of hospitality and entertainment, I was to discover much about the seamier side of Soho, including the fact that almost all my clients had developed a corrupt relationship with the Clubs Office, the C Division uniformed branch unit at West End Central Police Station in Saville Row, responsible for licensing the many private clubs in the area. Quite simply, the clubs needed to operate without police interference, and the best way to guarantee cooperation was to pay off the police in much the same way that some of the East End gangs extorted protection money from the pubs and snooker halls. Regular weekly payments to the appointed bagman ensured no late night raids, no harassment of customers and no official objections when the liquor license was renewed by the City of Westminster magistrates in Marlborough Street. It was during this period, while I was courting my future wife, that I became friendly with Gilbert Kelland, the head of the Clubs Office, who was later to be appointed Assistant Commissioner, Crime (ACC), and established his reputation by investigating and arresting the Scotland Yard detectives who had developed a relationship with a criminal named Naccacio and some of Soho’s most notorious pornographers. I also came to know the Club Office bagman, a young detective sergeant, John Smith, who much later was to be promoted Deputy Commissioner and receive knighthood.
Perhaps surprisingly, in view of what I had learned in the West End, I decided in 1959 to rejoin the police, whose minor corruption seemed tame compared to what I had witnessed among businessmen and traders in the City. I needed a regular income and as a newly married husband and an expectant father the Met offered security, and I found myself posted to P Division in Beckenham where I was assigned a pleasant police flat overlooking the golf course. Soon I was accepted by the CID and was offered a transfer to the Special Branch at the Yard and to royal protection duties, but I preferred honest coppering in the suburbs. Later I was posted to Z Division in Croydon, and then to M Division in Camberwell with a promotion to the rank of detective sergeant. By now I was a single, disciplined, effective plain-clothes man with a reputation of getting results. I had also passed my sergeant’s exam without any artificial assistance, although I knew that it was perfectly possible, especially if you were ‘on the square’, of sailing through the papers if you had the right contacts. The Met set only two promotion exams, and the papers for both could be obtained in advance through friends or the lodge, and this state of affairs had been in existence for years. It was part of the culture, and the justification was that some people worked so hard they needed some help, and that no harm was done because there was a merit element in the competitive nature of the results. Only the top examinees achieved their promotions, but it did no harm to have influential sponsors. In my case I had the benefit of advice from Commander Flood, who had explained how every ambitious police officer needed a career strategy and good contacts. I had been adopted by a mentor, Sam Goddard, who had been a detective superintendent at Catford and, I suspected, wanted to match me up with his daughter, then a law student. He had been part of Lord Trenchard’s ill-fated, fast-track scheme to introduce an officer corps into the Met, and when his grade had been abolished he had languished in his rank for many years, which had given him a particular perspective on the police greasy pole. He was the first of many to warn me that while there were plenty of colleagues willing to back you while you were perceived to be on the way up, the very same people would stab you in the back if they thought you had become a loser. He was a wise man. Always old school, Goddard had urged me to cultivate potentially useful contacts, keeping in touch with anyone who might later become a source, and I possessed plenty of those through my experience in the City. I renewed friendships I had made at Bow Street, and re-established contact with some of the club and casino operators I had met while working for Lampson Paragon. Everyone knows that it is ‘not what you know, but who you know’ and, as the lawyers say, ‘you do not have to read every book, you only have to know where to look’.
While working in Camberwell I gained a reasonable reputation as an active thief-taker, and I was awaiting a further posting, to C8, the Flying Squad at New Scotland Yard when, on Saturday 29 November 1969 The Times printed a front-page article by Gary Lloyd and Julian D’Arcy Mounter, and an editorial written by the editor, William Rees-Mogg, headlined ‘London Policemen in Bribe Allegations. Tapes Reveal Planted Evidence’ identifying me as one of a group of supposedly corrupt CID officers who had been entrapped by undercover journalists. The newspaper asserted that the other detectives had been taking money in exchange for dropping charges, for being lenient with evidence in court, and for ‘allowing a criminal to work unhindered’. I was identified by name as having admitted on tape to having accepted £150 from a criminal, who was protected by the pseudonym ‘Michael Smith’ and two Yard officers, DI Bernard Robson and Gordon Harris, were said to have received more than £400 in one month from the same man. This one newspaper story, about which I had received no warning, was to influence the rest of my life. Overnight, my life as an ambitious CID officer who was going places, was lost forever, and I would be marked out as a man who had brought shame and embarrassment to an elite force. My world simply crumbled, and instead of making decisions and taking the initiative, I was to go onto the defensive, almost permanently.
I had spent years dealing with the underworld, nicking professional criminals and making good arrests, but overnight I had been accused, judged and condemned. I had been a rising star in an organisation that, thanks to numerous television series, enjoyed one of the best public relations images in the world, but now everything had been turned upside-down. I had made hundreds of good arrests, my evidence had helped convict many criminals and I had received several commendations, but all this had been achieved courtesy of the corrupt firm running London’s CID. To some, the more positive my achievements, the worse their implications.
If the background to The Times’ story was even remotely true, it was obvious the evidence to back the allegations had been obtained illegally, and would have been rejected in any CID office which doubtless would have used it as a basis for a further investigation. While The Times may not have been a down-market tabloid, it had no God-given right to ignore the rules of criminal evidence, and in professional terms this was an unprecedented, very public execution.
The result of this bombshell was my immediate suspension from duty while Commander Roy Yorke ordered an enquiry to be conducted by Detective Chief Superintendent Freddie Lambert. Upon reflection, having recovered from the initial shock, I thought I had little to fear from Lambert’s investigation, but as he was preparing his final report in May 1970, which I had learned was set to clear me of all the allegations, he was taken off the case by Yorke’s replacement, Wallace Virgo. This was a devastating blow as I had absolutely no confidence in Virgo, who was himself later convicted of corruption, and not much more in his close associates the two Ernies, Bond and Millen, and his reputation within the Met was that he had developed too close a relationship with Lord Thomson, the Canadian-born proprietor of The Times. This extraordinarily improbable friendship had started when Virgo had been appointed to investigate the Belfast Telegraph scandal, a case in which Roy Thomson, who had inherited a barony from his father in 1951, had been accused of using improper methods to gain control of Northern Ireland’s principal regional newspaper. Virgo had begun by calling for a copy of Thomson’s RCMP file from Canada, and using that background as justification for a telephone intercept warrant which enabled the lines at his home in Kensington Palace Gardens and his business in Long Acre to be recorded by ‘Tinkerbell’, the Yard’s secret intercept facility in Ebury Bridge Road. Then, as now, such taps cannot be used as evidence in any criminal trial, but the leads they offer can prove invaluable, and this was what had happened with Thomson who had built his expanding business empire by taking control of investment trusts through offers of future lucrative directorships to compliant trustees. This had been his ruthless methodology in Canada where rumours were rife of his approaches to influential shareholders so he could take over nearly fifty provincial newspapers. The precise details of what happened over the Belfast Telegraph, which was owned by a trust where the beneficiary was rumoured to be a five year-old child, are locked away in the High Court where there had been furious litigation in the Court of Protection, but in the end Virgo had cleared Thomson of any misconduct, who had gone on to take control of The Times, then a failing but prestigious title in financial trouble. With Wally Virgo in charge of the decision to accept or reject the claims of a pair of young Times journalists, both still in their twenties, who had only been on the paper for four years, I knew the likely outcome, and my worst fears were realised.
In the West End it was clearly understood that Commander Virgo had carved up the vice scene and licensed all three major players, Bernie Silver, James Humphreys and Jeff Phillips. All had led long criminal careers, but counted senior police officers among their closest friends, dining with them regularly, attending the same Lodge meetings and even going on holiday together. Humphreys’ own criminal record dated back to the end of the war when, aged fifteen, he was convicted of house-breaking and theft of a car, and sent to an Approved School. Since then he had served two prison sentences, for receiving and for theft, and in March 1958 had been described by a judge as ‘a hardened and dangerous criminal’. Upon his release from Dartmoor he had opened his first club, in Old Compton Street, and asserted that he had started to pay off his local CID officer, DS Harry Challoner, who was later to be tried for planting bricks on demonstrators protesting against a visit to London in July1963 by King Paul and Queen Frederika of Greece, and be declared insane.
By chance I had myself encountered Harry Challoner, because the mental hospital to which he had been sent was Cane Hill, a large establishment on our manor. We were under instructions to drop in on him from time to time to see he was all right, but I never thought there was anything wrong with him. Known as ‘Tanky’, Challenor had served with the Commandos and the SAS during the war, and had been decorated with the Military Medal while operating far behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied France. At his trial at the Old Bailey in June 1964 the jury had taken less than a minute to declare that he was unfit to plead, but found three other young detectives guilty of perverting the course of justice. Two received four years, and the youngest received three years, but Challenor spent just two years at the Netherne Hospital, in Surrey, and Leavesden. Upon his release he went on a tour of the battlefields in Italy where he had fought during the war, found a job with a firm of solicitors in Norbury and in 1990 wrote his memoirs. According to the Masonic gossip in the Met, Challonor had been given the benefit of advice from Edward Clarke QC, a future Old Bailey judge and leading member of the Sir Edward Clarke Lodge, to which Challenor happened to belong. Whenever Clarke defended police officers, it was noticeable that their pocketbooks always went missing and were unavailable for inspection, which is precisely what happened to Challenor and his subordinates.
The point about Challenor was that he represented my most prolonged contact with a supposedly corrupt officer, and he had achieved considerable notoriety because his case was the first real proof of a problem within the CID, or at least within West End Central.
Challenor had been in a different league to Virgo and his immediate subordinate Bill Moody, and his offence, of planting evidence on a demonstrator, was quite different to taking money off criminals like Humphreys, but I knew that the Met had found a breakdown through overwork a convenient explanation for the lack of any forensic evidence in the suspect’s clothes to support Challoner’s claim that he had found a brick in his pocket. In the aftermath of the demonstrator’s acquittal at Bow Street, on a complete lack of any forensic evidence to show any brick had been anywhere near the defendant’s clothing, Challenor was prosecuted, and an enquiry had been set up by the Home Secretary , conducted by Arthur Evan James QC, at which several of the detective’s earlier arrests had proclaimed their innocence, but in fact only five convictions were quashed as unsafe, and all allegations of assault and taking bribes were rejected.
Challenor’s conviction was a milestone and served to undermine public confidence in the police. It also confirmed rumours, that had circulated for years, that the Met did not quite live up to its reputation. Fortunately Challenor was an eccentric, colourful figure who could easily be portrayed as a war hero who had succumbed to the strain of massive overwork, and had suffered a breakdown. In other words, Challenor had been a one-off, and no wider conclusions could be drawn for an unfortunate lapse. Some of us suspected there was rather more to what had been happening in Soho, the patch covered by West End Central in Savile Row.
Humphreys and his wife Rusty ran the strip clubs in Soho while his rival, Bernie Silver, organised the prostitutes and maintained a string of dirty book shops, and Phillips distributed blue movies. Bill Moody had joined the OPS in 1965, and when he had been appointed its head in February 1969 he had institutionalised the arrangement and extorted protection money from all the key players. Regular, weekly retainers were paid, together with an annual Christmas bonus and a lump sum of £1,000 for each new site opened. Managers that made their contributions were never raided; those that fell behind in their payments had their stock confiscated, which was then ‘recycled’ back into the trade. Humphreys, Phillips and Silver were not only free to expand their vice empires, but were even considered suitable guests for the Flying Squad’s annual dinner, as was another colourful character known as ‘Ron the dustbin’.
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