Ian Cameron
17pp + 11pp documents £2.50 incl. p&p from 10 Knox Court, Studley Road, London SW4 6SA.
I’ve got fucking A levels in fucking whacking fucking people…. Your fucking ceasefire’s going….I’ll be in touch with you fucking soon….You watch your fucking car.
On 9 February 1996 the IRA ended its cease fire by bombing Canary Wharf. In the warning period minutes before the explosion, Mickey Steele’s Essex phone rang. It was RUC Special Branch in Belfast, posing as IRA drug runners. They’d begun ringing, with threats, the day before. They pointedly told him CW had just blown, minutes after it happened…. RUC were assisting Essex police to put pressure on Steele (eventually with death threats) in the hope that he might provide information to help their (Essex) ongoing December 1995 Rettenden Triple Murders investigation. Cameron notes that Essex police admit there was no Rettenden-Irish connection. The calls were part of covert Operation Century. Only one national newspaper, The Sun, featured what its reporter called ‘the bizarre plot’. Years of studying crime and police news had not prepared Cameron for reading about a police suspect being bombarded with police death threat calls.
Century targeted two suspects – one a young mother. Those close to them were also affected. Cameron’s report draws on Century tapes, transcripts and related correspondence. He decided in 1998 to take up the blatant police abuses of suspects’ human rights with Essex Police, Police Authority, Home Office ministers (Straw, Boateng and Hoey) and the Parliamentary Ombudsman. Cameron was repeatedly stonewalled with double talk and lies – with bland claims that Century was properly authorised and supervised, and that no direct threats were made to any individuals. Cameron argues to the contrary, and holds that it was an ill-conceived shambles.
Cameron gained access to a partly unpublished Sun text citing interviews with Detective Superintendent Ivan Dibley. Dibley saw himself as Century’s star. He reportedly stated: We’re breaking new ground….when you have no evidence you have no choice….the whole purpose of the exercise was to threaten and frighten [the suspects].’ Cameron compares bullish Dibley with cocky Challenor, the most notorious policeman of the 1960s, who in 1990 bragged of murder threats he had made.(1) Dibley partly justified Century’s terror tactics by referring to a previous covert police operation, Edzell. An undercover WPC tried to seduce confessions from Colin Stagg to the Wimbledon Common murder by confessing on tape to have sadistically enjoyed murdering a young baby by slitting its throat.(2) The judge condemned police tactics as extremely gross, and stopped the case. But, said Dibley triumphantly, the judge had not ruled the police operation illegal!
This is the world of a realistic scenario (!), as the police described Century to Cameron, in writing. Edzell and Century found no evidence and achieved nothing. Cameron argues that these criminally inclined covert police operations are going to continue, and that they must be vigorously challenged.
This pamphlet is poorly printed, with mis-spellings, and Cameron’s subversive piss-taking will not be to everyone’s taste. These minor idiosyncrasies do not outweigh the report’s core concerns.
Notes
- See The Challenor Case, by Mary Grigg, (Penguin Special, 1965) and ‘Tanky’ Challenor, by himself, (Leo Cooper/Octopus Publishing Group, 1990).
- Who Really Killed Rachel? by Colin Stagg & David Kessler, 1999.