Bodyguard (22 page)

Maidstone to Margate was forty-three miles. It was time to go and pick up Štefan the Translator. The undercover cop was driving. In the car, he got chatting, asking me about the Štefans, finding his role for the evening. In reality, the less he knew the better because, as the money man, then he would know less than nothing.

We were due to meet Štefan at 17.00 – at the side of a road. Bang on time, he was there just before the junction in the most unglamorous of RVs.

I wound down the window and showed him my money man. ‘We’re happy to do business,’ I announced. There was twenty grand in the boot – with trackers on the case to follow the trail. ‘Are the girls coming?’ I said to Štefan the Translator.

All he was interested in was his money. I had also concocted some bullshit that I would keep him on as an interpreter. I loved doing that – promising people an afterlife once they had led other souls into hell. I got off on their big eyes dreaming of riches – you can’t underestimate the motivation in seeing their faces when it all went tits up. Selling other humans for cash was
disgusting
– I couldn’t wait to nail them. The extent of their crime was doubled in my eyes by their disappointment when their greed failed to come good.

We pulled in at the services between junctions seven and eight on the M20. Paul needed a piss. We were also way too early. When we headed back to the car, Štefan the Translator was not his bubbly self. My sixth sense kicked in. I told him that if he did well for me tonight then we could see what happened but he was suspiciously quiet. My guard was on.

Then his phone rang. He answered in Slovak and hung up.

‘Everything all right?’ Paul asked. ‘Everything OK for tonight?’

‘Yeah, yeah, everything still good,’ he replied.

Paul and Dom tried to inject a bit of life into him. ‘Who was that?’ Paul asked.

‘It was Štefan.’ He had told him who was with us. ‘Paul, Dom, the Boss and the money man.’

On those words, I lost my confidence. I had been 100 per cent certain. Štefan, asking who was there, made me nervous. In his eyes, who was this money man? There was nothing I could do. I had to pursue this, we were too far in, but something wasn’t right.

We knew Bar 26 on a Monday would be quiet. All we could do was agree a cut-off time if it wasn’t going down. Crucially,
circumstance
had played into my hands – my fictional houses were ready.
The Slovaks were aware that day was coming – I had always said first week in January. Both parties knew we were in the end zone. We were all set up to go.

When we arrived in Margate, we pulled up two cars down from the unmarked police car. That was a tactical park. The money stayed in the boot – the supposedly romantic couple keeping watch would always have their eyes on the rear of the car, leaving the cash there for Dom and the UC to go and get it on my word. That’s when they would storm the joint.

Bar 26 on the promenade couldn’t have been more depressing on a dark, cold Monday in January on the British coastline – it didn’t get much worse than Margate in the winter. The bar was deserted, Margate a ghost town. Inside, there was a solitary barmaid and a couple of people drinking. The football was on the big screen but it couldn’t have been deader.

Paul and Dom took Štefan to the bar; the UC sussed out the toilets and the exit at the back. I waited by the wall. I don’t know if the bar was better for us for being quiet or if it had been rammed. There was something eerie about it, but equally it was perfect if you wanted to go unnoticed. There was nothing to do while we waited, so I did what any bloke would do in this situation – chatted up the barmaid. She was a bored blonde student type who didn’t really care for customers – she wanted an easy life painting her nails. I bored her senseless, telling her I was a builder on a job. She must have been wondering what the hell we were doing in there – to me that meant we were playing the game perfectly. Štefan never came to the bar to hear any of this.

By 19.45, the other couple had left and I was getting increasingly edgy – they were close to an hour late. ‘What’s happening, Štefan?’ I asked him.

‘They’re coming, they’re coming,’ he replied.

‘We need to know. I’m not hanging around here. I’m here to do business.’ I was spitting inside.

Štefan said he would call. I made sure Paul went out with him to watch his body language.

‘They’re definitely coming; they’re just running a bit late,’ Štefan told Paul. ‘He’s just doing a bit of business.’

I looked at the UC. We were both thinking the same. Events were following a familiar pattern. Half eight became nine and Štefan was starting to get agitated. We were probing him every five minutes.

‘He told me, they are definitely coming,’ Štefan insisted.

I’d had enough. ‘Phone him now. I’m not wasting any more fucking time here. You’ve got me down here to do business. This isn’t how I do business.’ I read him the riot act.

He looked like he knew the game was up – all along he had been sent to front this no-show, and now he was running the risk of ending up dead in the back of my car. At least he would finally get to see the money. Štefan did make that call. The line was dead. Straight to voicemail. I was furious.

With Paul outside having a fag with him, I told the UC it was off. He had been on enough of these jobs to know when you had been stood up.

‘I’m not a hundred per cent sure why, and there’s no point arguing about it now, but shall we abort?’ That was me being diplomatic. What I meant to say was that if the money man hadn’t been introduced, we might have had them. We decided to give it a little longer. I ordered Štefan to keep trying. At 21.45, I told him it was his last try.

‘You are dialling the right number, aren’t you?’ I glared at him. No answer. ‘I ain’t fucking doing business any more.’ Then I got up to leave. ‘Where are you going, mate?’ I asked Štefan, as he went to follow me. ‘You ain’t fucking coming with me – you haven’t delivered.’

I left Štefan there, and never saw him again. It was dead.

We debriefed back at the retail park, handing back the money. Kent Constabulary stood down their strike teams and we said goodbye to the undercover cop before chatting it through for an hour.

‘I think we’ve been spooked,’ I told Annie. How come it was all hunky dory then nothing? I’d heard Štefan say on the phone ‘the money man is with us’ and that was key. Štefan had clearly felt
something
wasn’t right and must have relayed that back. God knows what became of the girls, if indeed they were ready to go. For me, Kent Constabulary had ballsed it up. We had no choice realistically other than to get into bed with them. Doing so cost us.

A couple of weeks later, the DS and his team came to see us at Television Centre. We handed over copies of everything we had – they too had begun spending big cash on this and knew we were on to something. We agreed that if they got lucky, we would be back in to film the sting. We handed it over to them on a plate. They didn’t seem overly interested – or perhaps they weren’t showing their hand. That call never came, even though by December Kent Constabulary had jailed two other individuals for human trafficking offences. Two years later, even bigger sentences were handed out to gang leaders running the sex trade out of the Czech Republic into the Channel ports. They were convicted, having been caught arranging sham marriages in Dublin. Ireland was always the key, it seemed – and we hadn’t even gone out there, despite all the clues. Among all this, in November 2008 Britain’s largest unit investigating human trafficking was shut because of cutbacks.

Paul did make one more call to Štefan the Translator and laid down the law – I was furious with him and he had blown any
opportunity
of big bucks in the future. He had stayed the night at a cousin’s in Margate; Štefan the Boss was no longer returning his calls and he didn’t know what had happened that night. Or so he said.

T
he BBC had been banned from Zimbabwe since 2001; it seemed the obvious place to go next. John Simpson wanted to be broadcasting live from Harare on the day of the 2008 elections. This was the perfect pick-me-up after the botched job in Kent and a knock back from the BBC. I’d planned a fantastic exposé in Amritsar, and was all set to pose as an agent for a top sportsman who wanted his own clothing range. I would get in undercover with my fake website and bent business card and expose the sham coming out of these sweat shops. I couldn’t believe News had turned me down.

By mid 2008, this was becoming the way. It was harder and harder to justify funds. More and more paperwork would bury me at my desk. This particular foot soldier was useless if he wasn’t allowed in the field. So, when I got called to a planning meeting on 11 June, somewhat disillusioned, this was just what I needed.

Our only real presence out in Zimbabwe was a reporter called Ian Pannell, based in Cairo, who’d done some undercover work there. Ian would slip in from time to time and vaguely sign off on his reports without being location-specific. The Zimbabwean
government
had spent a lot of money buying top notch gear from China
– they had some of the finest jamming equipment going. That was what we were up against.

Intelligence told us that security was at its tightest. Border
crossings
were heavily patrolled – getting into Harare and Bulawayo, in particular, was a real nightmare. They were ramping up surveillance in rural areas, too. We knew that it would be slow, hard work, just to nail a couple of quality pieces. Robert Mugabe’s boys, Zanu-PF, were in complete control. We had also been told to watch out for another group – The War Veterans. They were setting up roadblocks and checkpoints with Mugabe’s Central Intelligence network. One hundred per cent vehicle checks and body searches were now the norm. Inside the country, we had two BBC guys, but Firle Davies and Brian Hungwe were probably under observation. We didn’t tell either of them that we would be bringing John in – the less they knew the better, even if they did work for us. If Simpson got caught, it would be a massive propaganda story for Mugabe. There might also be repercussions for Brian and Firle.

John was too big a name for him to get a real beating but we knew that Mugabe would parade him, portraying him as a spy. All of us would be thrown into prison in Harare and the British Counsel there would have to pick up the pieces. That would also have been a massive story for John. Me, personally, I would have seen it as a failure of my professional ability. This time I didn’t want to get arrested and thrown into one of the most notorious, filthiest prisons in the world. Riddled with AIDS as they were, bending over in the shower was not an option.

Nor did I want London bogging me down in debriefs and paperwork – every op had a knock-on effect for the next one, and it always meant more questions and answers and less time on the road chasing the story and building up my air miles! My biggest concern was that once we were there, there was no way John wouldn’t want to go live in Harare. When we worked together, he would always listen to me but he expected me to have a plan B. We were obviously in the business of putting pictures and people on the box at a moment’s notice. I knew
we would have to have that conversation, and I knew too there was no point arguing with him. If we were there, he would expect it. To this day, I have never stopped John going on the telly.

Craig Oliver at the Ten told me it was in my hands. If I felt we could get away with it, then so be it. The BBC buck was being passed. Everybody knew John would want to broadcast but nobody really wanted to commit to it. Only after the event with the power of hindsight would they all pile in, sifting through the wreckage of any international incident. Somebody would pick up the broadcast – he would get monitored on BBC World and the next thing we would be on the run, always changing our addresses and moving around. John wouldn’t tolerate packaging stuff up and sending it back, only to wait a week before it aired.

On 18 June, I landed in Johannesburg. Ian Pannell had discreetly stored a transmitter, laptop, camera, cables, external hard drives and some radio gear at a safe house in a secure compound in Borrowdale, in the suburbs of Harare. Our cover story to get in was that we were a British company called Sport and Leisure Tours, looking for lodges and safari game parks for sports fans to retreat to in between matches. The Lions were due to tour in 2009 – I would show them Africa as they recovered from getting walloped on the pitch. I knew my rugby and cricket. It was perfect, my favourite cover story to date.

As soon as we arrived in Joburg, I met with Dirk, an advisor from LGI Security who had been a policeman in Bulawayo. Dirk had helped Ian, and was going to be our security man for this trip. We had to find the quickest way in overland. There was no point flying directly there – John wouldn’t get through the airport. Our plan was to hide him in the back of the 4x4s with a big hat on. He was just an old man travelling with us – there was no point in dressing it up; we just had to conceal him.

Before we left, I set up a number in London and recorded an answer phone message on a faceless untraceable number inside Television Centre to say we were currently out in the field and would
return your call soon. If anyone in Central Intelligence went so far as to check out the number’s authenticity, then frankly, we were already past the point of being in the shit. I also put a load of images onto my camera to show the work I had been doing was genuine and well underway. I loved it. I loved it. I loved it.

Secretly, I half hoped there would be a genuine enquiry or two when I got back! If we ran into grief at a checkpoint and got questioned, I felt that the potential of them getting too interested in our story was small. We also had two Zimbabweans and South Africans driving a Zimbabwean registered vehicle. We couldn’t do any more if we were going under the radar. When we made it to Harare, John would stay put in the safe house. We would shoot the rallies and election posters under the guide of our South African cameraman, Nigel. John was not to go out. That, at least, was the plan. First we had to get there.

Dirk flew straight into Harare – being a local, this wouldn’t attract any attention. Waiting with me was TT, also from Dirk’s company, and Steve Fielder, a tobacco farmer whose land had been taken off him. Nigel and I flew up to Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. John and my old mate Oggy from Friendly Fire were due in the next day. On arrival, John couldn’t have been clearer. We had about ten days on this job. The elections were coming. Don’t even ask John about going live in Harare, I was saying to myself. It was definitely going to happen.

From Lusaka to the border at the Kariba Dam, we knew it was three hours max. We had to put our foot down, of course – we were being met on the other side. Standing on the basin of the Zambesi River, this was one of the largest dams in the world, approximately 130 metres high and 580 metres long. It took twenty years to build, took the lives of eighty-six men, and cost nearly $500,000,000 – in lay terms, about half of Simpo’s wage. It was massive.

By comparison, the border post was nothing more than a glorified shed. That’s why we chose to cross here. Our information told us that
it was still barely computerised, and, at six or seven hours to Harare from the other side, easily the quickest way in. John, Nigel and I went first; Oggy and the rest of the gang followed. Our vehicles suited our story. The traffic was pretty busy – quite a few people were coming back and forth across the border. Getting out of Zambia wasn’t a problem. It was never going to be. It was on the Zimbabwe side where the fun and games would start.

‘Have you got any money on you?’ TT said. We were back in the land of cash payments. TT went over to butter up Customs, laughing and joking with them. It was that kind of place – sleepy border mentality of the staff, busy border crossing. Result: nothing happens very quickly.

Then I spotted it. I glanced at TT, thinking, ‘Fuck – they are not on the point of joining the twenty-first century are they?’ There was a computer on the end of the desk. Admittedly, it did look like one of the early Amstrads but maybe they had got their shit together after all. Tediously, they were still writing the names of everyone passing in a big book. I was waiting for the Amstrad to whirr into action.

This was the moment of truth. I handed the passports to the
immigration
officer. One by one he wrote down every fucking middle name you didn’t know you had. Then he opened up John’s. He was travelling on his Irish passport. It was more discreet. We were all in the game of multiple passports, and plenty of visa stamps or journalist
accreditation
was always a bit of a giveaway. Paddy Simpson was less visible.

It was one of those moments where you daren’t speak but also feel the need to fill the air with waffle so as to not show your nerves. Seconds turn in to moments. We’ve all been there.

‘Simpson …’ he began to recite out loud what he was writing.

This was it. The whole world knew John Simpson. It was just a question of whether Immigration were paying attention or not.

‘S-I-M-P-S-O-N,’ he spelt out. Then his mobile rang. The timing couldn’t have been better. ‘I gotta take this call,’ he apologised.

The chief got up and began shouting into the phone. Now, that was more like it. The officer who lifted the barrier up and down at the crossing took over. I couldn’t believe our luck. Lifting John’s passport open, he didn’t have a clue.

‘Blah blah Simpson,’ he wrote, misreading John’s middle name for his Christian name. I was trying not to laugh.

TT and I looked at each other. He gave me that look that I had seen so many times before, so I slipped the guard five US dollars. In a magic handshake, the money was gone. We were now in Zimbabwe.

Outside, the two 4x4s were waiting for us. We also had a forward vehicle to sniff out the roadblocks and any trouble ahead. Our plan was to stop overnight at a lodge: I didn’t think it was the right thing to do to drive into Harare for the first time late at night.

We stopped for lunch about half an hour beyond the border. That’s where John started buzzing. ‘Look Craig,’ he began, ‘what do you think the chances are of getting to Harare tonight? I’d like to get in today. That would give us three days or so to gather stuff before the election.’

I knew this was coming. ‘I don’t know, John. I’ll talk to the guys.’ Obviously I couldn’t really make that decision alone. TT, Steve and Dirk would know much better. The problem was the daylight. These places can be very different when the light goes.

‘Isn’t John tired?’ they asked, knowing he had only just flown in from London that morning.

I told them that when John sniffs a story, we had to go. He wanted to push on. But we would have to go now. There was no time to waste. We were up and out five minutes later, abandoning lunch which had just been served.

We changed who would sit where. Steve drove the front
vehicle
– the local should lead. Behind were Dirk and Nigel shooting general shots in the countryside. The rest took up the rear. We all had comms between the vehicles. If there looked like being
trouble
ahead, Steve would radio back and we would take an alternative route. That could only mean one thing – through the bush. John
was tired but he was also in the zone, sitting there quietly in the back scribbling furiously into his notebooks. I had seen this in him many times – a lovely gentleman turning into a furious hack when he got an instinct.

Steve spotted the first roadblock an hour down the road. ‘I’ve told them what you’re doing … pretty relaxed … they probably won’t even stop you.’

TT told me to get John down, hide all evidence of journalism, and make him to pretend to sleep. I had my five dollars just in case. I was expecting this to be the first of seven checkpoints. We slowed down. One cursory look into the car, and we were through. Happy days. I could tick that off. One down, six to go.

I didn’t want to get too complacent but if all the checkpoints were like that in the rural areas, then we were laughing. The next couple followed just the same patterns. They looked like lazy officers who couldn’t be bothered and weren’t really paying much attention, if any. Was it really this easy? Why hadn’t we tried this before? I put it to TT that if it was like this all the way, it was going to be a doddle. Would it be like this in Harare? Probably not. The War Veterans in the capital were actively looking for white journalists – they were pretty rattled at the moment. With the elections coming, there couldn’t be a more tense time to arrive. This made my mind up.

‘We need to think about an evacuation plan,’ I said. My thinking was that if we had an injury or had to flee under the radar, I knew that most of the farms had airstrips. What would be the chances of getting hold of a small light aircraft and one of the farmers flying in from Bulawayo, heading south and taking us into South African airspace? TT and Dirk, being both ex-military and police, had
serious
contacts at the border. They didn’t see this as a problem. Craig Summers was impressed with both of them. If the shit hit the fan, I knew I could rely on them.

On the horizon, the lights of Harare came into view. I knew now we would make it before night fell. That was no longer a concern.
I was just wary that the checkpoints into Harare would be a different kettle of fish.

‘They’re stopping everyone,’ Steve radioed back. ‘There’s no way round.’ And there were still three checkpoints after that. ‘Play the game,’ he advised. ‘And see what happens.’

Steve cleared the greeting party. Once through, he pulled over up ahead out of sight to spell it out to us. ‘They’re looking for food. They aren’t interested in anything else. Sort out some Pringles or
something
and you’ll be fine. That’s all it will be.’