'DRUGS, CONTRACT KILLINGS . . . THAT KIND OF THING'

Alasdair Palmer was the first journalist to

interview an undercover policewoman. He discovers that in her profession moral purity and effective policing do not always mix

'IT IS NO different to everyday life. Some men fancy you. Some don't. You just deal with it in the normal way.' Catherine, sit- ting opposite me, is utterly unruffled by sexual advances from her workmates, which is surprising — because if the men who take a fancy to her in her line of work find out who she really is they will probably kill her.

Catherine works as an undercover police officer. She pretends to be a criminal in order to acquire evidence which will ensure that real criminals will spend a decade or so in prison. She is 33, married and not very popular with the men whom she befriends before betray- ing. 'The problem with this particular kind of betrayal,' she explains calmly, 'is that the criminals feel they have been let down.' Feeling they have been let down does not quite do justice to the inten- sity of what these men feel about Catherine. Her one protection is that every pro- fessional criminal is ashamed to admit that he has been shopped by an undercover cop, and a female one at that. It is too damaging to his self- respect.

Secrecy is essential to the effectiveness of any under- cover police work. It is also a critical factor in the sur- vival prospects for undercover police offi- cers. That explains the most notable fact about them, which is that you only ever hear about them when they fail. When undercover police officers emerge from the protective shell of secrecy which is carefully maintained around them, it is usually to face a cascade of abuse, frequently from a High Court judge. Undercover police offi- cers have suffered some very public humili- ations at the hands of judges in recent years, most famously following the opera- tion against Colin Stagg. The police believed Mr Stagg had murdered Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common. A woman police officer, pretending to be interested in sex of a violent, sado-masochistic kind, entered into an intimate correspondence with Mr Stagg in the hope of extracting admissions from him. She did not tease out any directly relating to Rachel Nickell's murder, despite suggesting that she might be prepared to let Mr Stagg do some very unpleasant things to her if he would explain what he had done to Miss Nickell. Nevertheless, Mr Stagg went on trial for Miss Nickell's murder. Ordering Mr Stagg's acquittal, Mr Justice Ognall expressed the view that the police's techniques betrayed 'not merely an excess of zeal, but a blatant attempt to incriminate a suspect by positive and deceptive conduct of the grossest kind'. Police investigations into the Nickell case are still continuing, this week in New Zeal- nad; Colin Stagg has since married a social worker.

Even in the very bad wig she insisted on The anonymous Chief Inspector was eager to point out that the vast majority of undercover operations do not involve an attempt to secure a confession from someone the police suspect of hav- ing committed a murder. Rather, they involve infil- trating a criminal conspira- cy before the crime has actually happened. In essence, the work is that of gathering intelligence, on the basis of which the police can arrest and charge the men they suspect of committing crimes, or at least arrange to be on the spot when a crime takes place. It's that kind of work which Catherine specialises in: 'Drugs, contract killings, terrorism . . . that kind of thing,' she says, sounding for all the world as if she was a check-out girl itemis- ing the contents of your trolley. She has an enviable record for providing evidence which leads to conviction. She succeeds by gaining the confidence of her targets, who then talk quite freely to her about their plans to, for example, have someone killed. 'I always wanted to be a social worker,' she told me. 'I left college after A-levels and joined the police as the first step to that end, since if you don't go to university, it is one way to gain the required qualifications. But once I'd joined the police, I knew that undercover work was what I really wanted to do.'

It is difficult, dangerous work. Catherine obviously loves it. Her husband is not quite so keen. 'He accepts it, but it would be wrong to say he wasn't concerned about it. He likes to get a phone call when I'm fin- ished, whatever time of the night that is, just to know I'm OK.' He knows the risks of Catherine's job, but so does she. 'I'm very much aware of my own safety,' she explained to me, 'and I try to cut the risks as much as possible.' Like every undercov- er officer, she is accompanied — at a suit- able distance — by a couple of supporting officers listening in, ready to move if she starts to get into serious trouble. But they cannot always be close enough or quick enough, and Catherine has feared for her life more than once. She remembers with a shudder how she was detailed to help track Michael Samms, who is now serving life imprisonment for kidnap and murder. While refusing to enter into details of how that operation worked, she would tell me that 'he could see me, but I could not see him. I was told to keep in touch with him by phone. He said he had a gun trained on me wherever I went. He had said he was going to kill the person I was pretending to be.'

Catherine has to deal with men who are frequently both extremely violent and unusually ruthless. Nevertheless, she main- tains that 'some of them are very likable people. They are kind to their mothers and they love their kids. It's just that their morals are different. They are trying to break the law, to rob banks or supply drugs.' It may seem as if Catherine regards that as a small difference. She does not. She is adamant that she never has any sense of regret about betraying a criminal's confidence, no matter how likable an indi- vidual rogue may be.

But what about the effect on her of assuming so many different roles? Cather- ine is almost blasé about them. Being a drug-dealer is 'not difficult: most police know a lot about drugs'. Acting as a con- tract killer is more challenging, because 'contract killings are so sordid. Money is the issue. People want to kill their business partners more often than their wives or husbands. The going rate is between £2,000 and £25,000, depending on the kind of ser- vice you want.' The role she most prides herself on is that of art dealer: when on the trail of a group who were stealing works of art from country houses and then reselling them, she provided the evidence which convicted them. 'I particularly enjoyed that one,' she explained to me, 'because I like art and know something about it.' Her belief in the efficacy of her false identities is strong. It has to be: it is all that stands between her and a life spent permanently looking over her shoulder. 'You have to be scared,' she said to me. 'If you stop feeling scared, you'll get caught.'

That sounds like something an experi- enced bank robber might say to a tyro on his first job — and it is exactly that similari- ty which causes many judges to take a very dim view of many undercover operations.

Fascinating and varied though it evidently is, Catherine's work necessarily involves her in lying and deception — if not 'of the grossest kind', then certainly on a titanic scale. Indeed, it could be said that lying is what she does for a living. Does it bother her? 'It's a means to an end. I don't have any particular problem with it. You have to believe what you're saying whilst you are playing a particular role. But' — the quali- fication visibly relieved the anonymous Chief Inspector — 'I wouldn't lie under oath.'

Senior police officers justify ordering undercover officers to tell elaborate lies to suspects on the straightforward grounds that lies are effective. 'And frankly, without them we're not going to catch anybody who isn't an idiot,' one chief constable explained to me. The people who say we shouldn't ever use deception are living in cloud-cuckoo-land. Professional criminals are not vulnerable, weak people. They are tough, ruthless and thoroughly immoral. If we have to treat them as if we were dealing with Mother Teresa, they'd run rings round us. And whilst that would be in the crimi- nal's interest, and maybe in the interest of their lawyers, I cannot believe that that would be in the public interest.'

That argument is powerful, particularly to anyone who has been the victim of a serious crime. But the fact that deception is effective cannot dispel the moral problems inherent in using it, or the qualms felt by judges or law-makers in allowing it. And that is why the law on undercover police work is so confused.

Man using hosepipe in the Yorkshire Water region. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act (Pace) was introduced in 1984 precisely in order to ensure that the police could not use force, fraud, deception or indeed any other morally ambivalent method to exact admissions from suspects. In the police interview-room, the suspect must be cau- tioned, he must have a solicitor and the conversation must be taped. Senior police- men make no secret of the fact that the result of that Act has been to make it more or less impossible for the police to per- suade organised, professional criminals to confess to anything. Even the average guilty suspect — not a professional crimi- nal, just a man who has committed a seri- ous crime — is invulnerable provided his lawyer persuades him he can tough it out. To every question, they all simply answer, as they are still entitled to do, 'No com- ment.' In their franker moments, some older policemen will admit that the dearth of confessions is a straightforward conse- quence of the restrictions Pace has placed on the police's use of violence in the inter- view room.

Without confessions, convictions can only be secured with forensic evidence. But tough criminals guilty of serious offences are frequently smart enough not to leave anything for the forensic scientists. So the guilty, even more than the innocent, know that if they are careful and they employ a smart lawyer the police cannot touch them.

Enter undercover operations. If you can- not get the suspect to make an admission in the police interview-room, get him to make one, either in words or deeds, in front of an undercover police officer who is taping the proceedings. That may sound like a deliberate attempt to circumvent the provisions of Pace, to allow the police to use methods which that Act outlawed. But the issue is complicated. If an individual were to make identical admissions to a member of the public, who recorded them on his answering machine, the issue of admissibility would not arise. Every judge in the land would rule that a jury could hear such a confession.

This is precisely what puzzles the police. A suspect who is successfully duped by an undercover officer believes he is talking to a member of the public. The fact that he is actually chatting to a policewoman cannot affect what he says or how he says it. So why, exactly, is it unfair for the prosecution to use a confession made to an ordinary member of the public who also happens to be a police officer?

There is a straightforward conflict between the aspiration to have a morally pure police force and the need to catch criminals. The judiciary seems to have resolved that conflict by permitting under- cover operations and the deception they involve when evidence is being acquired to convict career criminals; and ruling them out when they are used to exact confessions from ordinary citizens. But the truth is that the principles underpinning this area of law have not been coherently or definitively stated. The confusion means that no one — certainly not the police and apparently not the judges — is quite sure where exactly the boundaries of the permissible lie.

Some judges seem to take the extreme view that almost all undercover operations amount to a deliberate attempt to circum- vent the provisions of the Police and Crimi- nal Evidence Act, and therefore any evidence gathered from them must be madtnissible. That leaves the police in the unenviable position of never knowing exactly how undercover evidence will be received: will it secure the conviction of the suspect, or will it blow up in their faces?

With Cohn Stagg, until recently the only suspect in the murder of Rachel Nickell, the undercover evidence blew up in their faces — as it should have done, since Mr Stagg made no confession of any sort. But the case of Keith Hall is more complex, and it illustrates more clearly why the law in this area stands in urgent need of clarifi- cation. Mr Hall was suspected of murder- ing his wife, who had mysteriously disappeared. Neighbours reported that the couple had been arguing on the days prior to her vanishing. Her car was found close to the family home. Police wanted to com- mit him for trial, but prosecution lawyers pointed out that they had no evidence which would survive scrutiny in court. The case might have languished had not a woman informed the police that Mr Hall had answered her lonely hearts advertise- ment. She wanted advice on whether she should meet him. The police cautioned against it, and suggested that one of their undercover officers pretend to be her, and go and meet Mr Hall instead. The opera- tion was sanctioned by the Crown Prosecu- tion Service.

Mr Hall seemed to be entranced by 'Liz', a police officer every bit as attractive and charming as Catherine. He eventually con- fessed to her that he had strangled his wife, then disposed of her body by dropping it into an incinerator. West Yorkshire Police, unclear about whether the confession would be admissible, consulted a highly experienced QC prior to trial proceedings.

He thought the evidence was well within the boundaries of the permissible and would be admitted as evidence. But at the trial last year, Judge Whitehouse was the official in charge. He cited precisely the same decisions by the Lord Chief Justice and the Court of Appeal, which the prose- cution claimed demonstrated that the con- fession was admissible. But he reached exactly the opposite conclusion, ruling that the undercover operation amounted to a deliberate attempt to subvert the rules designed to ensure that vulnerable suspects were not 'undermined or intimidated'. He decided that Mr Hall should have been cautioned, told he was being tape-record- ed, and asked if he wanted a solicitor. Only then would his confession have been acceptable in court. The trial went ahead, but in the absence of the confession there was little evidence against Mr Hall. Mr Hall is not a career criminal. But he had been advised of his right to stay silent during interviews with the police, and he chose to exercise it. He was acquitted. The result was a great deal of abuse — and this time the attacks were directed at the judge and Keith Hall, not the police. The judge allowed the press to print extracts from Mr Hall's confession, which tabloid opinion quickly decided was as sincere as it is possible for a confession to be.

Was it? I met Keith Hall last week. As we waited to join his solicitor, Mr Hall made the surprising claim that, far from being 'undermined and intimidated', he had known all along that 'Liz' was an undercover police officer: he 'confessed' to his wife's murder merely to make the police look foolish. His solicitor, Mr Rod- ney Lester, took, and still takes, a different view: Mr Hall had been in love with a woman he hoped to make his wife; he was psychologically vulnerable and had been manipulated into making a confession which had no foundation in truth. With Mr Lester present, Mr Hall agreed to that sce- nario, seeming to confirm Mr Lester's claim that his client could be easily manip- ulated. Mr Hall then added, with a large smile, 'It were a great result for me, though, weren't it?' — which of course it was.

Rodney Lester emphasises that although the admissibility of his client's confession, and thus his freedom, turned on a technical point of law, 'that technicality identifies the boundaries of legitimate policing in a free society. The state should not lie, trick, manipulate or deceive its citizens, and nor should the police, who are the state's rep- resentatives. There should be an absolute prohibition on that. Confessions obtained through subterfuge cannot be reliable. All our liberties depend on recognising that fact.'

That is certainly one side of the argu- ment. The other side is perfectly expressed by Detective Inspector Jim Bancroft, who led the investigation into Keith Hall: 'Mur- der is the most serious crime I know. Prop- erly conducted undercover police operations are not a threat to anyone's lib- erty. A trained undercover officer does not entice anyone into committing a robbery or admitting a murder. They simply listen to what suspects tell them. They are trained to act like normal members of the public. They ask only the questions that any ordi- nary person would ask. That's all Liz did in Keith Hall's case.'

As the divergence between lawyers' opin- ions shows, the law can be interpreted both ways. Which side of the argument you sup- port depends on what you care about most: the extent to which a system of justice pro- tects vulnerable suspects who may be 'undermined or intimidated'; or its effec- tiveness in securing convictions. Every sys- tem has to achieve some balance between the two. There is not much doubt that most people now think that the balance has tipped too far in the direction of protecting suspects. But then most people are not defence lawyers or suspects accused of seri- ous crimes.

The police will fight every attempt to smother the use of undercover techniques: the success of undercover officers like Liz and Catherine in gathering evidence has been too striking for them to acquiesce in an attempt to force them to give up under- cover operatives altogether. Sir Paul Con- don, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, told me that there had been a 30 per cent reduction in bank robberies last year. He attributed that almost entirely to undercover police work. Catherine won't get to be part of a team planning a bank raid — robbers practise very strict sexual segregation, with no women allowed on bank jobs — but Sir Paul was certain that other forms of serious crime were being effectively contained by the work of offi- cers like her. 'Pound for pound,' he enthused, 'you won't get better value any- where in the police than the undercover officers.' Catherine is less enthusiastic than the Metropolitan Police Commissioner about how little she costs. She's paid £.35,000 a year, including overtime. 'You couldn't include in your article a plea to increase my wages, could you?' she asked sweetly, manipulating me quite blatantly and entirely successfully.

Economics will not settle the issue of the acceptability of undercover operations, nor should it. The debate between the police and the defence lawyers can only be defini- tively settled by legislation. Despite the importance of the issue to the police, undercover policing was not mentioned in the Criminal Justice Act — that was con- cerned with the crucial issue of how to pre- vent people from organising open-air parties — and there are no plans to include it in any future bill. So for the foreseeable future Catherine will continue to risk her life with absolutely no guarantee that, how- ever damning the evidence she gathers, it will prove usable in court.

Alasdair Palmer is home affairs editor of The Spectator.