22 March 2018
Undercover Sex
Instructions revealed.
By John Watson
Sometimes life is just too exhausting, and the report in The Times of evidence at the enquiry into undercover policing about the instruction given on romantic entanglements with those they were watching, makes one lose the will to live. Of course undercover officers need instruction on this as on every other part of their covert existence. Of course they need to reflect on the effect on their own personal lives and of the need to strike a balance between the harm which their deception will do and the good which it will achieve, a balance that must be struck on each deception they use. Suppose they ask someone to confide in them as a friend? How let down will that someone feel when he or she discovers that they were nothing of the sort? Suppose they pretend to like someone who they really detest? How desolate will that person be on discovering that actually no one likes them at all? The focus is only placed on romantic attachment (and it is the instructions of that type of entanglement which made Tuesday’s Times) because people like stories about sex and because there is a whole industry of people whose careers depend on their ability to pounce on anything with a sexual content and weaponise it into an instrument for their own self-aggrandisement.
And pounce they duly will. Prepare for endless garbage about women’s rights and the iniquity of sexual exploitation. Down they will come, down from their eyries in Hampstead and Highgate, motor mouths agape, talking as if sexual betrayal was fundamentally different from other sorts of betrayal, as if Victoria was still the Great White Queen, as if women prized their honour more than their lives, as if women were dependent on their patronising activist politics rather than being free, independent-minded British citizens leading our society forward. And as they do this, each of them creaming off their little percentage to burnish their activist CVs, they will miss the real point which is one of price and proportionality. So let’s pounce first and discuss this before the baying starts.
Even Kim Philby, that icon of double agency had some reservations about betrayal. “I don’t like deceiving people” he said in an interview with Phillip Knightly in 1988, “especially friends, and, contrary to what others think, I feel very badly about it.” Whether that was genuine in his case or not, it must be so in others; so what price justifies conduct which the average citizen would regard with revulsion? Well, if it is a question of price, let us look at the market. But let us look at it fairly. We are not just talking about betrayal of the guilty here. The whole point of covert work is to discover things you do not know. Inevitably then the people who are duped will often turn out to be innocent of any sinister designs. With that in mind we will take a couple of examples.
Begin with the use of nerve poison in Salisbury. How much betrayal would be justified in order to reveal the full truth about that and to avert the risk of future attacks? Quite a lot, you might think, and if the truth of that bizarre incident is that the Russians have let their supply of nerve agents get out of control, betrayal is the least of the techniques the GRU will be employing to discover where it has gone to.
Then let us go to the other end of the spectrum – VAT fraud. It is anti-social as well as illegal in that it deprives the Government of the wherewithal to carry out important functions; but should Customs inspectors be sleeping their way through the business community in search of breaches of the Sixth Directive? Perhaps not, although a lesser deception designed to get a photograph of a football manager receiving a brown envelope might well be appropriate.
There are lots of cases in between and, as views on them differ widely, there is no point trying to sort them out. In the end, as with so much of our policing, much has to be left to the discretion of the officer concerned. Hopefully there is lots of support, but as he or she (yes, it could be “she”) is inevitably closer to the ground than any handler or writer of guidelines, they will often be the one to make the call. It is no good asking them to do that and then dissecting the decision later with the benefit of hindsight. Bear that in mind as you read the column inches criticising the police in this area.
Perhaps too we should look at this from a consumer’s point of view. There are serious threats from which we expect others to shelter us at the risk of their lives. Our soldiers are expected to risk theirs of course, as, on occasion, are the police and the security services; but other emergency workers are expected to do so, too – the fire service, the lifeboatmen, those who treat highly infectious diseases. If we are content to rely on their sacrifice surely we must be prepared to make some sacrifices as well and the risk of being deceived – whether romantically or otherwise – sounds quite a modest contribution.
