<
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jul/26/how-the-met-police-spent-25m-hiding-spycop-from-former-partner>
"At 2pm on 14 December 2002, Helen Steel, a well-known leftwing campaigner, and
her parents landed at Auckland airport for a family holiday. It had been a
tiring journey, so they were irritated when they were delayed leaving the
airport for an hour.
What they did not know until recently is the reason for that delay. Their
arrival had triggered a secret warning on Steel that had been put in place by
police three weeks earlier. It prompted customs to carry out a discreet search
of her luggage.
Steel’s sister collected the family and drove them to her home 90 minutes away.
Again, none of them knew surveillance officers employed by New Zealand police
were tailing them.
Nor did they know that over the next few weeks, police officers tracked their
movements and took photographs of them. One picture was of them leaving her
sister’s home.
Details of this extraordinary operation came in yet another damning disclosure
to the spycops public inquiry, which is examining the conduct of undercover
police officers who spied on more than 1,000 political groups between 1968 and
at least 2010.
The inquiry has heard in recent weeks how senior Scotland Yard officers
arranged for the police force of a country 11,000 miles away to covertly
monitor Steel on two of her trips there as part of a calculated plan to protect
a secret.
They feared that Steel was about to expose one of their undercover officers.
The spy, John Dines, had had a sexual relationship with Steel for two years
without disclosing his real identity to her. When he mysteriously vanished from
her life, she set about tracking him down.
As well as the surveillance, the senior officers authorised the expenditure of
£2.5m of public funds to relocate Dines to ensure that Steel did not find him.
This included helping him buy a new house.
On Friday, Steel, giving evidence to the inquiry, said the surveillance and use
of taxpayers’ money was an abuse of state powers to prevent her discovering how
a police officer had “deceived and sexually exploited” her.
She was “really angry” that the Metropolitan police had put her and her family
under surveillance, adding the police also wanted to protect an “illegitimate
and undemocratic” operation, in which undercover officers such as Dines spied
on tens of thousands of political campaigners across four decades.
On Tuesday, Paul Condon, the former Met commissioner, admitted at the inquiry
that Scotland Yard had failed to control the officers and their managers who
committed “horrendous abuses”.
These included monitoring grieving families such as the parents of murdered
teenager Stephen Lawrence, who were campaigning about police wrongdoing,
stealing the identities of dead children, and lying in court."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
