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THE cul-de-sac on the outskirts of Gravesend, a
Thames-side town in north Kent, is lined with spacious bungalows. The
elderly owner of number 27, Evelyn Le Chene, was not at home on Friday.
The man who answered her door described her as “a woman of secrets”.
Secrets, indeed: despite her age, Le Chene has been named as the
mastermind of a vast private intelligence-gathering network that collated
the identities and confidential details of nearly 150,000 left-wing
activists and offered them at a price to British industrial companies.
Among her clients was the defense giant British Aerospace, now known as
BAE Systems, according to a source intimate with the company’s security
operations.
BAE, which has close links to Whitehall, paid Le Chene for at least four
years to spy on opponents of the arms trade, according to the source.
Insight has seen computer files and thousands of pages of reports from the
widespread spying operation carried out for BAE. Bank accounts were
accessed, computer files downloaded and private correspondence with
members of parliament and ministers secretly copied and passed on.
When samples were shown last week to members of the Campaign Against the
Arms Trade (CAAT), a key target, one of them collapsed with shock at the
extent of the personal detail they contained.
BAE said yesterday it was unable to comment on the specific allegations
but would never encourage anyone to do anything illegal.
Le Chene did not respond to requests for an interview about her
activities. So who is she, and how did an elegant 67-year-old living in
Kent get into such business? She is certainly no Melita Norwood, the
elderly widow in nearby Bexleyheath, unmasked in 1999 as a former Soviet
spy. On the contrary, Le Chene is a member of the exclusive Special Forces
Club and has campaigned as a dedicated anti-communist. She was previously
the director of an organization called the West European Defense
Association, which warned of Soviet infiltration during the cold war.
She is now on the board of Threat Response International, a company that
advises corporations on security threats. Also on the board is Barrie Gane,
who has been identified in the media as a former deputy head of MI6.
As a young woman, she married Pierre Le Chene, a former British agent in
Nazi-occupied France who survived the Mauthausen concentration camp and
was awarded the Legion d’Honneur and MBE. She wrote books about his life.
In the past she has not avoided publicity. In 1987, eight years after her
husband’s death, she attracted news headlines by confronting his former
torturer, Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyons”, who was on trial.
Nine years ago she wrote an acclaimed book about animal “heroes” of
warfare, including a cat called Simon and a pigeon called Winkie. But it
was at about this time that she was also developing her hidden life as a
“woman of secrets”.
She was first approached by the security office at BAE to carry out
surveillance work in the mid-1990s, according to a source. At the time,
she had been running a company innocuously named R&CA Publications from an
office in an industrial estate in Rochester, Kent. Both the company and
the office have since closed. Le Chene was chosen by BAE because she
specialized in “human” intelligence. “She wasn’t very good at tapping
phones or doing dustbins, but she was very good at running agents,” one
source close to BAE said last week.
At the time CAAT, a respected Quaker and Christian-based pacifist group
which believes in non-violent protest, was stepping up a campaign against
the £500m sale of BAE jets to Indonesia. The campaigners protested that
the aircraft would be used to crush resistance in East Timor, which was
seeking independence.
Le Chene recruited at least half a dozen agents to infiltrate CAAT’s
headquarters at Finsbury Park, north London, and a number of regional
offices.
She was to become an expert on the burgeoning pressure group sector.
Documents seen by The Sunday Times indicate that she ran an agent in the
World Development Movement, an anti-poverty charity which campaigns
against the arms trade to third world countries, and targeted more
hard-line groups such as Earth First and Reclaim the Streets.
The close connections and mixed membership of such groups meant she
acquired information on Friends of the Earth, the Greens, the Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and animal rights charities.
By late 1996, when John Major’s Conservative government was deciding
whether to grant licenses for the Hawk contract, the intelligence reports
on CAAT’s activities started flowing into BAE’s offices at Farnborough,
Hampshire, almost every day.
Calling herself “Source P”, Le Chene initially sent over her briefings on
an encrypted fax to the BAE security offices on the ground floor of
Lancaster House at the airfield.
Later BAE set up software on her office computer so that the company could
access the reports directly from her database, according to a source, who
said the firm paid her £120,000 a year.
Thousands of pages of reports were made by Le Chene to BAE. They poked fun
at the protesters: one had “revolting habits”, another was “seriously into
saving the tortoise”. But they enabled BAE to build a large file of
activists’ names, addresses and telephone numbers as well as always
keeping fully briefed on their meetings, demonstrations and political
contacts.
Le Chene herself boasted a database of 148,000 “known names” of CND,
trades unions, activists and environmentalists which she would sell for
£2.25 each. She offered full biographies including national insurance
numbers and criminal records where possible.
“Putting together profiles is not an overnight job,” she notes in one
report. “It takes time to get to know people, their nick-names, habits
etc.”
Even links with celebrities were passed on. References are made in reports
to the actresses Helen Mirren and Prunella Scales and their opposition to
certain arms companies and the “torture trade”. One agent had obtained a
letter addressed to Anita Roddick, owner of the Body Shop, from the Clean
Investment Campaign, which promoted ethical investments.
The report notes: “This is a very important document. The request is for
the Body Shop to have declarations in their shop windows against the arms
trade. If this is granted by the shops, then the Clean Investment
Campaign’s first success will be notched up.”
Often the reports detailed forthcoming plans for demonstrations by
activists outside BAE’s 60 UK sites. The information was used to ambush
trespassers and then serve injunctions preventing them from returning.
Some of the information was gleaned simply by attending CAAT meetings.
However, one agent downloaded the entire contents of a CAAT headquarters
computer including a membership list, personal folders and details of
private donations. Bank account details were also passed on, according to
a source, and Agent P’s reports to BAE discuss sending computer discs and
tapes obtained from CAAT.
Names and addresses of activists were routinely run through the BAE
computers to check if any were shareholders. The BAE switchboard was
configured to flag up any calls from telephone numbers associated with the
activists.
Desks were rifled, diaries were read and address books photocopied so that
the information could then be transferred to BAE. CAAT members were often
followed.
One such target was Jenneth Parker, described in one report as a
“good-looking” 25-year-old, who was a key activist and networker for CAAT
and student groups.
A tape recording of a phone conversation between Le Chene and a senior
officer in BAE group security reveals that they discussed having Parker
followed. Reports on Parker give details of her addresses, housemates,
hairstyles, the contents of her diary and her alleged habit of smoking
marijuana in the corridor.
During the intense surveillance the pressure groups began to suspect that
they had been infiltrated. One report relays fears amongst CAAT activists
that a meeting would be “full of BAE spies”.
They were not far off the mark. According to a source, Le Chene
infiltrated an agent known as “Brough” into a Humberside offshoot of CAAT
called Hull Against Hawks.
The group was important within CAAT as it is on the doorstep of BAE’s
Brough plant where the Hawk bodies are manufactured.
BAE’s security had a photograph of “Brough” and added to his credibility
within CAAT by ensuring that he was manhandled during protests at BAE’s
annual meeting at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London in 1997.
Le Chene invoiced BAE for the £280 a month rent for Brough’s flat in Hull,
and there is evidence that he was the secretary of the Hull group and used
the name Alan Fossey.
He had become secretary of the Hull group shortly after moving to the
town. He proved very useful, driving his fellow campaigners — a mixture of
students and pacifists — to marches in his van and holding the group’s
meetings in his small flat in a new development by the marina.
His sound counsel was valued by other members of the group. When, at one
meeting, a campaigner had suggested leaping over a fence to “occupy” an
arms fair, Fossey had cut the subject dead by claiming he had heard the
event was being guarded by paratroopers.
Quite how he knew, nobody asked. But then nobody knew the truth about who
really paid the rent on his fully furnished flat, where they met, or who
was really picking up the bill for the phone he used to arrange all the
group’s business.
Le Chene’s agents were instructed to take particular interest in
connections between anti-arms trade pressure groups and the House of
Commons. Meetings and correspondence with MPs of all three parties was
closely monitored and advance warning of any parliamentary events was
always reported.
According to a source, the agents collected a series of letters, many
private, which were sent through to BAE to read. They included
correspondence to or from a number of leading Labour politicians such as
David Clark, then shadow defense secretary, Ann Clywd, the MP, and Jack
Straw, then home secretary.
When CAAT and two other pressure groups hired solicitors Bindman and
Partners to seek a judicial review against the granting of export licences
for arms companies, BAE was alerted to the contents of a letter sent by
the firm to the then trade minister, Ian Lang.
A letter sent to CAAT in October 1996 by Jeremy Hanley, the Foreign Office
minister, discussing British policy on the sale of arms to Indonesia, also
found its way to BAE.
BAE’s security department filtered the information and passed it on to
their in-house government relations teams so that they could be one step
ahead of the campaigners when lobbying in parliament.
Dick Evans, BAE’s then chief executive, would also receive regular verbal
briefings on the contents of Le Chene’s reports from Mike McGinty, an
ex-RAF officer who headed security.
The operation went on for at last four years until the end of the 1990s.
A BAE spokesman said last night: “The company cannot comment on anything
that may relate to the physical security of our plant sites in the UK. The
security of our people and places is paramount.”
Asked about the alleged theft of computer files from CAAT, the spokesman
added: “We would never encourage anyone to do anything illegal.” |