The Spy Who Loved Me: An undercover surveillance operation that went too far | Hacker News Reader

The Spy Who Loved Me: An undercover surveillance operation that went too far

newyorker.com

140 pointsdanso68 comments

North Americans are probably astonished at what is 'permitted' for UK police to become involved in - there are no constitutional protections and no effective oversight and there never has been in the UK. Even today the Police actively obstruct and frustrate attempts to bring effective controls and oversight of their activities which can be in clear and blatant breach of what limited legislation exists.

This (and other related) stories rolls on with only a few days ago the Metropolitan police in London being forced by a court order to admit the identities of two officers - Jim Boyling and Bob Lambert [who the referenced article is about] - who fathered children (then disappeared leaving the mothers and babies to fend for themselves). http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/aug/15/metropolitan-...

you're correct I'm astonished. Is there some vast cultural difference with respect to government power that this is considered bearable?

Yes, it was called the Boston Tea Party.

Yep, taxing tea in the colonies was just too damn far.

Actually it was an anti-monopolistic protest against a lower tax on East India Corps tea.

Today, we celebrate monopolies or think they can't exist via deregulation.

The relevant paragraph in TFA is as follows:

""" James Olson, a former Chief of Counterintelligence at the C.I.A., who was involved in clandestine operations overseas for many years, described undercover sexual involvements as “something that we should not do in the C.I.A., absolutely not.” He went on, “Our liaison friends in other services think that we Americans are ridiculously puritanical and that we avoid using something that works.” The masters were the East Germans—particularly Markus Wolf, whose Romeo agents seduced government secretaries in the West. As for Bob Robinson, Olson said, “It’s very easy to fall into that trap—the righteousness trap. Some people are so convinced that what they’re doing is for the good of the country that they’re willing to excuse what would ordinarily be gross misconduct on their parts. They lose sight of ethical constraints.” """

I note that he doesn't say the US doesn't do this, merely that the CIA shouldn't do it, which UK authorities have also said about the UK police, while seeking to conceal the fact it happened and defend their right to do it again. I doubt the CIA actually refrains entirely from using this effective infiltration technique. If they didn't, they would lie. If it hadn't been for Mark Kennedy being outed by political activists in 2010 this probably wouldn't be widely known about in the UK either.

But on the other hand a UK police force would not be allowed to run out of control as it has in Ferguson and there are much stricter rules on entrapment and agent provocateurs.

In one case an IRA gun runner got of on a very minor technicality over a single informant ( oh they caught they guy bang to rights with the guns) compared to what the FBI seem to get past the radar in encouraging foolish young Muslim Americans

AFAIK, even water cannons have never yet been used on the UK mainland.

Whilst we're comparing police forces:

"Last year, in total, British police officers actually fired their weapons three times. The number of people fatally shot was zero. In 2012 the figure was just one. Even after adjusting for the smaller size of Britain’s population, British citizens are around 100 times less likely to be shot by a police officer than Americans. Between 2010 and 2014 the police force of one small American city, Albuquerque in New Mexico, shot and killed 23 civilians; seven times more than the number of Brits killed by all of England and Wales’s 43 forces during the same period."

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/08/ar...

Just because you're unlikely to get shot in the streets by British police, doesn't mean unlawful killings by British police are not an issue.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/dec/03/deaths-police-cust...

Law enforcement in each country have their own issues with accountability and human rights, just in different ways.

Have you read that article? It doesn't say what you think it does. It pretty much says only 13 officers in 12 years should have been convicted of foul play.

One a year.

We have 300 million guns in the USA, of course there are going to be less shootings in the UK vs the USA.

Taking guns away from average citizens is an efficient way to reduce shootings. Taking privacy away from average citizens may prove to be even more effective in reducing all forms of crime. Just think of all the children we'll save!

So privacy is just as important as guns? straw man.

I don't think it's just North Americans who are astonished. Most Brits are too. Even the most paranoid and cynical of observers seem to have been shocked by the spy cops revelations.

Interesting article. I hope that the families affected by this Met Police massive error of judgement find a way to get peace in their lives.

I imagine that many are deeply hurt by the actions of these undercover police officers. This lady was obviously deeply emotionally scarred by her failed marriage to this man.

I also feel some sympathy for the officers involved. The police are a brainwashing operation on young impressionable minds. In many ways they are also victims of the state.

It is likely that those responsible for the decisions that led to this happening are long since retired and nothing will happen to them, but it must lead to safe-guards to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Is it too much to require at least a summary reading of the article before posting comments? There was no marriage involved between the two main characters of the story.

Perhaps /u/junto is from a less liberal culture, and just assumed that if a man and a woman live together and have a baby, they are married even if the article didn't say that.

In the article, it says: "Bob claimed to be philosophically opposed to marriage; Jacqui was fine with that." so I suppose they didn't get married at all.

The people who came to my engagement party this weekend and said they don't believe in marriage as a public statement to family, friends, and everyone, about making a permanent commitment (for themselves) are the same people who are the only ones not really asking prying questions about "setting a date," which I really appreciate, since that's between me and my other half, and at the same time I feel like I can know that they are supportive of my engagement.

I'm not sure what it means to be "philosophically opposed" to marriage in and of itself. I guess it's more self-explanatory in the context of this story though, certainly always in hindsight or with perfect information.

Since you will presumably be asking these people to adjust their own plans once you do set a date, some interest seems entirely appropriate and characterising it as a purely private matter ("that's between me and my other half") uncharitable. Which is not to say that all forms of query on the topic are appropriate, or that repetition across many of even appropriate queries mightn't get annoying.

Of course. The point was not about my own situation, but to draw the nearest analogy to "don't believe in marriage" at all that I had at hand.

I am really less upset about the people who are asking the question than I may have made it out to sound. It's very important (and would conversely be missed if missing) to have family and friends who are interested, even if they are all asking the same question where it might feel like pressure that we just don't want to have right now.

Right - just trying to help keep things in perspective. Congratulations, by the way! :)

Thank you! :)

In this article, my guess is that Bob said to be "philosophically opposed" to marriage to avoid marrying Jaqui, the real reason behind that is that it would leave a trail of official papers behind him, which is not something you want to do if you're an undercover investigating agent.

Yes, clearly. I would be interested to hear such an argument from anyone who was not trying to conceal their identity as a secret agent (or anyone convincing enough who actually was still hiding this way, for that matter, but in the actual time before their outing and not in retrospect with that knowledge already revealed).

Surely there must be such an argument, maybe this is too far off topic and not the place for it here.

Pardon the user for using the term "marriage" instead of "long-term relationship involving cohabitation, shared expenses, and raising children together". How clumsy of him to use a word that means "all of the above, plus formalized by the state."

I did read the article from start to end. In the UK you can live as common law man and wife without a formal marriage. I used the term loosely. Regardless of semantics, the two lived together as partners and had a child together. My point was the partnership failed and that must have been hard. This whole process has had a profound effect on these people's lives. That was the point I was trying to make.

I typed the comment quickly. I apologise if I offended anyone for the use of the word marriage without considering that many places in the world strictly limit the use of the word marriage to the act of standing in a church with a priest and saying 'I do'.

"In the UK you can live as common law man and wife without a formal marriage."

Per Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-law_marriage#United_King...), it seems that the term is common but it does not actually convey legal rights like common law marriage in the US. Of course, since we were discussing use of terms, that fact is of only tangential interest.

Similar laws to those in the UK exist in Australia - a long-term couple that separates can, in the case of dispute when splitting common goods, be treated in a manner very similar to a divorce. Furthermore, I know that long-term relationships also bestow other rights on a couple, such as immigration rights (my brother's wife got her first long-term residency permit in Australia thanks to this, as she migrated before they were married).

English law grants very few rights to people in a common law marriage. It's really important to correct the myth that common law marriage means anything because it really doesn't in England.

Right. All of this is very jurisdiction specific (spatially and temporally). My understanding: Living together like a married couple long enough conveys actual marriage in some places in the US, various rights some other places in the US, not very much in England and Wales, and up to recently more in Scotland but that changed in 2006 and now Scotland is much like the rest of the UK.

>My understanding: Living together like a married couple long enough conveys actual marriage in some places in the US, various rights some other places in the US

Intent and agreement is a big one, not length of cohabitation. The two both must consent and intend on being married and basically tell everyone they are married. Just cohabitation for a long time isn't enough. Nobody can suddenly "find" themselves in a common law marriage they didn't intend or want to enter into, they both must intentionally agree to enter into one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-law_marriage_in_the_Unit...

Right, the "like a married couple" is stronger than that could've been read. An important point. Details still vary by jurisdiction.

> I also feel some sympathy for the officers involved. The police are a brainwashing operation on young impressionable minds. In many ways they are also victims of the state.

On that subject, after his undercover deployment Bob Lambert (the officer TFA is about) went on to run the Special Demonstration Squad, and in that capacity was the boss of Jim Boyling, who also had a number of sexual relationships with unsuspecting members of the public. Just to make the victim / perpetrator question a bit more interesting.

This reminds me of my friend, she's an activist of sort related to the anarchist movement here in my country. She was told my some of her friends her partner was a cop (she met him in a protest) she's now pregnant with his baby, he ran away and she found some emails of him reporting to his supervisors.

Is your country in Europe? If so your friend might want to look into a case along the lines of this one: http://policespiesoutoflives.org.uk/the-case-overview/

If not there might be some similar case that could be brought. From what I know, it's been a pretty major struggle though. The first step might be to try to find out if there's anybody else in a similar situation in your country.

At least equally important, judging by the way this situation has affected people here looking after your friend's mental well being ought to be a priority.

Hopefully if your friend's in "the anarchist movement" she has some support there, but feel free to get in touch with me if you'd like to hook her up with people in similar situations in the UK, or if she wants to know more about what's been happening here.

> As Rob Evans and Paul Lewis write in “Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police,” Lambert “was well versed in political theory.” A former acquaintance told them, of Bob, “He was not a cardboard activist, he had real depth to him.” (Evans and Lewis exposed many of the events in this story in a series of articles in the Guardian, for which they won a 2014 British Press Award, and in “Undercover,” which is the definitive account of the excesses of undercover policing in Britain.)

I don't tend to recommend books as books take a while to read and 2-3 days of someone's time is precious. However, this book is one of those exceptions, a must read that will change your ideas on how things really work in this world. Enlightening and extremely well researched, quite an adventure story too, covering many decades of goings on.

The thing I find most surprising is that she went from being a protesting vegan hippy-type, to a Daily Mail reader who says "I don’t read the Guardian—nobody I know reads the Guardian". That's some shift to the right.

That would be the Daily Mail whose Richard Littlejohn wrote in March:

> There are currently a number of cases in which an assortment of

> unwashed dopey birds who slept with undercover officers are seeking

> compensation, even though no force or coercion was involved.

>Oh, do grow up.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2580603/RICHARD-LI...

and in 2012:

> It sounds as if the women were well up for it.

>And, anyway, have you seen the state of some of these birds, caked in mud, looking

> as if they haven’t been near a bath in months?

> Having sex with them is nothing less than heroic, way beyond the call of duty. It’s

> a dirty job, but someone had to do it.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2081428/Abdullah-M...

What an absolutely atrocious article.

He's a pretty atrocious man.

Most people's political preferences are a more direct product of their desires (fears, etc.). The less educated a person the less "reflective stability" established between psychological tos-and-fros and their politics.

The idea that people go around with a stable set of political (, intellectual, moral, etc.) preferences is a very modern one (c. 1950s) and we'd all be better off to get rid of it.

If one is interested in unbiased reporting then it's probably a good idea to steer well clear of both the Daily Mail and The Guardian. They're both pretty rotten.

Who does provide unbiased reporting? In the UK? I have yet to see a newspaper that is unbiased. In Germany, I am quite sure, we do not have that. But saying the Guardian is as rotten as the Daily Mail seems far fetched to me.

I've no idea. I'm also not sure any news outlet is unbiased. The Guardian relentlessly spins its news in order to be palatable to its rich, middle class and liberal audience. If you're interested in rational, objective reporting then the Guardian is definitely not that ... especially in its cultural/society related opinion pieces. The Guardian is as much skewed to the left as the The Daily Mail is to the right, and once you realise this The Guardian's output can start to look at once absurd and genuinely terrifying. I don't know what the answer is, although I personally try and gather my news from a large range of sources from across the political spectrum in an attempt to gain a heuristic understanding of what might really be going on.

I'm conflicted, and I think the reason is- typically the police are not allowed to commit things which are crimes. They are not allowed to steal, or to murder, or what have you.

If Bob had been an ordinary citizen, absolutely none of it would have been illegal. Even if he was an ordinary citizen who led this woman on to get information. This kind of deception happens. Just think of the secretly gay men who have been married to women for many years, even fathered children. There are countless men who sleep with women, pretending to be someone they are not...

Are there any good examples of things any citizen may do that an officer may not, that are not as cloudy and twisted as romantic relationships?

The way I see it, if a rock falls off the edge of a cliff and hits your head that's just bad luck and you have to live with it. If the government pays somebody to throw a rock at your head, you have every reason to bear a grudge and to seek redress.

This is a situation where the government (in the form of the Metropolitan Police) trained and paid officers to infiltrate political groups using sex and long term intimate relationships. It's a quite different situation from a man telling a woman he's an airline pilot in order to sleep with her (although that is also shitty behaviour).

> Are there any good examples of things any citizen may do that an officer may not, that are not as cloudy and twisted as romantic relationships?

Assuming "may do" means "may do without it being a crime", I don't think anybody's really suggested the officers involved committed any actual crime. People are taking legal action against the Metropolitan Police, but not against the officers themselves afaik.

So establishing a false identity with fraudulent intent is not a crime?

With the amount of deception I saw from the article, I would allege at least rape and willful abrogation of parental responsibility, and name the Metro police as co-conspirators. You don't defend the public order by committing offenses against it.

Undercover police work is already on shaky ground, what with the Schrodinger's Felon in a superimposed state of crime-noncrime until the observer appears. If you watch, inflitrate, and agitate anyone long enough, you can get enough material for the eager Richelieuvian prosecutors to put someone away. But ok, that might take a while with all the pot smoke in the minibus, so let's somehow get these hippies to trust us enough to commit some real crimes with us, so we can lock them up quickly and go home to our real lives. And let's make some of them single mothers in the process. That's just monstrous.

>> There are countless men who sleep with women, pretending to be someone they are not...

I'm not a lawyer but according to this [1] deception of identity demonstrates lack of consent.

[1] http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/p_to_r/rape_and_sexual_offences/...

That seems to only document deception of gender identity, not other things. In Israel there is a much stronger law, but there was a bit of an uproar related to an Arab man who gained false consent by falsely saying that he was a Jew.

Link: http://www.jpost.com/National-News/Court-cuts-Arab-Israeli-r...

> If Bob had been an ordinary citizen, absolutely none of it would have been illegal.

Even the identity theft, and creating fraudulent government records?

British secret services still did this very recently, with one Mark Kennedy infiltrating various European leftist movement, committing and inciting crimes to be accepted and having sex with activists...

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/nov/08/mark-kennedy-accus...

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/new-twist-in-bri...

What is the status of child support in England, in a case like this?

I don't really know, but I would assume that if the father successfully disappears until the child is an adult there's no child to support anymore, and therefore no child support is due.

Having googled a bit, I still think what I wrote is correct. Judging by the downvote I guess at least one person thinks otherwise. I'd be interested to know what the situation is, if it's not that.

Downvotes can mean anything from 'You are not right' to 'I don't think you are right' or 'I wish that you weren't right' to 'I don't like you or your message' on HN. Don't be upset by it.

In addition to what jacquesm says, downvotes are sometimes accidental. The buttons are small and close together.

Can confim, have missed the upvote button more than once.

I'm not sure, and I'm most definitely not a lawyer, but I think in the US she could sue for back child support, given that he abandoned them.

Lol its ACPO becoming over mighty ACPO is effectively the senior coppers Union.

Men are victims of so-called "honeypots" all the time, but we don't weep over them. Why when it's a woman?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clandestine_HUMINT_asset_recrui...

Do you have examples where men were deceived into multi-year intimate relationships, or left to care for the children of their partners after they disappeared?

>or left to care for the children of their partners after they disappeared

About that second group: Yeah, millions. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/07/02/the-rise-of-single... http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/steps-au...

All single fathers were deceived into taking care of their children?

I am aware that some men are single parents. I was assuming readers had the ability to follow the context of the discussion.

The examples the article gives are of shocking violations as well. A good, well written account of some of them should be able to move us just as much. If we found that it did not, that would be worrysome. That they are not written (are they not ?) is worrysome as well.

(but it should not be ignored that military targets are generaly considered different, more permissible to kill and harm. Or to seduce. And I think the distintion is resonable)

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