The New Spymasters (18 page)

I was leaked the document:

CONFIDENTIAL

FM FCO TO IMMEDIATE BERLIN

TELNO 156 OF 311619Z JULY 01

AND TO IMMEDIATE FRANKFURT, ATHENS

INFO IMMEDIATE CUSTOMS AND EXCISE, ACTOR, WHIRL

INFO ROUTINE HOME OFFICE, NICOSIA, NCIS

YOUR TELNO 334

SUBJECT: ANTONIADES

Summary

Agree suggested lobbying action in your telno 334. Customs and Excise ready to fly in to support. Main line of argument – need to protect informants.

Detail

We agree that the Consul-General should meet the State Secretary to press the case for Mr Antoniades' release immediately.

The telegram – sent at the behest of customs – told diplomats in Germany to make the case that:

A public trial in Greece would reveal Mr Antoniades' long career as an informant for Customs and Excise (1987 to date) and put his life at risk from criminal elements … Most importantly, Mr Antoniades continues to be a vital informant. His continued extradition would prevent one current anti-drugs operation from proceeding. [ … ] Were Mr Antoniades sent to Greece to face trial, it would make recruitment of informants very difficult, and ultimately harm our collective efforts to stem the drugs trade.

The telegram mentioned a document prepared by Savery, Antoniades's old handler, about his ‘earlier career', but said this should be kept in reserve. If necessary the document could be handed over, with a warning ‘that a public trial might reveal this historical background thereby opening the possibility of an attempt on his life. So we would prefer to keep the Savery document in reserve.'

The message was signed in capitals – like all Foreign Office telegrams – with the Foreign Secretary's last name: ‘STRAW'.

It was followed by a statement to the court from Nick Baker that testified that Antoniades, particularly between 1989 and 1992, had given ‘extremely valuable intelligence in relation to heroin trafficking and was responsible for a number of high value seizures including the biggest ever seizure at the time'. That was a reference to a tip from Antoniades that led to the 1991 arrest of a Thai intelligence officer at Heathrow with forty-nine kilos of heroin.
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When he heard of the lobbying to free Antoniades, Collins was livid. ‘I got information that senior customs officers were travelling to Germany to secure his release,' he said. ‘I was shocked. I could not believe it. He was one of the top ten drug dealers in the UK … He had been on the periphery of lots of murders.' A meeting was called with customs at which, Collins recalled, the police were told that Antoniades ‘had been the best informant customs ever had and what he had given the UK far exceeded the damage he had done'. Collins thought this was ‘absolute rubbish'.

In Germany, the pressure worked and the court released Antoniades. But the intervention seemed premature. Under British rules, if informants wanted to avoid prosecution they needed strict approval in advance for committing a crime that was necessary to maintain their cover. Without such approval they had no protection from either prosecution or trial, and rightly so. They had no general licence to commit crime. If an informant was arrested and charged with breaking the law, unless their actions had been approved already, the informant's help to the authorities could only be taken as mitigation after his conviction: a judge could then secretly use this background as grounds for a more lenient sentence.
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In the US, the FBI used a similar but more transparent system that gave informants a basis for committing minor crimes with approval from the Department of Justice. But the key point in both countries was that the crimes had already been approved. To run spies is to enter a grey zone, particularly when dealing with the criminal world. Compromises have to be made and interests weighed up. But a decision to sanction one crime to prevent another should not be made by the officers or even the agency that handles a particular agent; such waivers should be requested by a senior elected official or politician and signed off by someone independent, ideally a judge, who should also first make sure that he has all the evidence, approaching other agencies as necessary to ascertain how clean the agent really is.

*   *   *

By the early 2000s, Her Majesty's Customs – a British national institution established in 1203 by King John and pre-dating Parliament – was in turmoil. It had always had its oddities. At the old headquarters on the Thames, the investigative branch, which was known for its camaraderie and high jinks, was housed in a big hall known as the Long Room. According to several former officers, bottles of whisky were sometimes stashed in the drawers and they occasionally used to play a game called the ‘Long Room steeple chase' which involved highly trained officers leaping from desk to desk without touching the floor.

However, the real issue was not oddities or jollities, but how customs handled its informers in the underworld. In particular, a series of convictions for smuggling and duty evasion were overturned because customs or its lawyers had concealed the fact that some of their star witnesses in court were also secretly employed as agents. There had also been a series of more straightforward blunders in agent handling. For years, customs had allowed some shipments of drugs to be brought from Pakistan into Britain by informers. These were so-called ‘controlled deliveries', used to catch buyers in the act of handing over cash for the drugs. But in one disastrous case the drugs vanished on to the streets, making customs a supplier of heroin to criminals.

It was not that customs had a particular problem but rather that there was a sort of perfect storm brewing: just as intelligence activities were coming in for much higher scrutiny by the courts and the public, there was this push to deploy more covert agents in the risky criminal world. As part of their efforts to establish a new role after the Cold War, intelligence agencies had put themselves into the public domain. But, in both Europe and the US, this openness also triggered an unprecedented scrutiny of intelligence activities. The more experimental business of placing spies inside organized crime could not always bear such scrutiny. The final indignity for British customs was a corruption inquiry, ironically named Operation Virtue, launched by Thames Valley Police, one strand of which involved Antoniades and the men who handled his case.

By the early 2000s, Antoniades's value as an informant had diminished. The London crime scene had come to suspect who Antoniades was working for: when drug dealers were arrested, their defence lawyers demanded to know from prosecutors if he was involved in the case. Even if they were caught red-handed with drugs, they would claim that Antoniades had put them up to things.

In July 2002 there was a more serious incident. Chris Yakovidis, a businessman who had been arrested over an alleged £1.4 million VAT fraud, swore in a statement that he had paid a fee of over £250,000 to Antoniades to get himself cleared of the charges. He said Antoniades had promised to get it done using his contacts in customs. When the charges were not dropped, he decided to finger Antoniades.

The police suspected more than just fraud by Antoniades; they were concerned about serious corruption within customs. That summer Operation Virtue officers swooped in dawn raids, arresting both Nick Baker and Lionel Savery, Antoniades's long-term handlers. Baker, who had risen to become chief of customs' covert operations, was suspended from duty for several months, though he was later cleared of all suspicions, as were Savery and other customs officers. Antoniades, however, had been out of the country at the time and a police warrant was issued for his arrest. Until it was dropped, he declared he had no intention of returning.

Though the customs officers were cleared, their institution was dying. The main investigative branch of customs was wound up and folded into a new outfit, the Serious and Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), in which former or detached intelligence officers were placed in many leading roles. It was thought, perhaps, that those who had been supposedly trained in handling agents could do a better job of spying on criminals than police or customs had managed so far.

Baker, who retired soon after, had obviously been harmed by the police investigation, yet he remained sanguine. ‘In this business, we level hard accusations against people. You have to expect people to throw accusations back, however baseless they may be,' he said.

Through it all, he remained loyal to his agent, Antoniades. I asked him if customs had really been so sure that Antoniades was not gaming the system and working both as a criminal and an informer. He replied that all kinds of checks were in place to stop that.

‘We did use him to provide information, to identify targets,' Baker said, but after getting information on a drug dealer, for example, many other methods were used to double-check the tip. Other sources said extensive use was made of phone taps. Customs had more ‘lines', as phone intercepts were called, than any other agency. Baker insisted that nothing they received from Antoniades was relied upon without verification; it was merely raw material that was checked and rechecked. As far as he was concerned, Antoniades had performed a vital service for British customs, achieving more than almost any other agent of theirs.

As for Antoniades, he always denied the accusations made by police that he remained criminally active. But, he revealed, he did play the system. He said that customs at first distrusted him and followed his every move, deploying people to track him and bugging his calls. ‘Do you think they left me alone?' Later, though, things changed. ‘In the end, they trust me fully. They let me do what I want.'

He had a network of people who supplied him with information (his ‘sub-sources' in intelligence speak). He said that customs knew he ‘made people believe' that if they gave him information he would not only pay them but, if they asked for help, he would give it. He tipped off some drug couriers to avoid arrest. Conversely, he said that he also issued threats, telling dealers, ‘I know what you do. Give me some information or you are going to see problems.'

Over the years, he admitted that three people who had worked for him were killed by other criminals: ‘Not because they were informants but because they were stupid.' His reputation also kept many of his other informers alive: ‘They mentioned my name and said if you bother me I am going to call my friend Keravnos. When they mention my name people shut up, you understand?'

So, I asked, was he running a form of protection?

‘Listen, my friend,' he said, ‘people know me. They know I've been shot ten times and been in prison three times and still I'm here. They know this man is something.'

*   *   *

On Friday 11 February 2011 I got an email out of the blue. I was sitting in a hotel in Afghanistan. It was from Antoniades's stepson, Fahim.

Dear Stephen

A few years back you wrote about my father, Andreas Antoniades. He is now 80 and ready to talk about his past activities. If you are interested please get in touch.

Many thanks, Fahim Antoniades

The message referred to an article I had written on Antoniades for the
Sunday Times.
Over lunch at a Mayfair restaurant, Fahim and his mother, Hafiza, Antoniades's wife, filled me in on their story. They revealed that Antoniades was in Tunisia, where he had gone to try to establish another casino. He could not return to London because there was still an arrest warrant from Thames Valley Police, from the team that had been investigating allegations of corruption at customs. Could I fly out and see him?

When I got to Tunisia, where the dictator, President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, had just been toppled, it was clear that Antoniades was trapped. So many things seemed to be closing in on him. He was angry that after all these years he had no money and no pension. He couldn't come to Britain and no one in Britain would try to cut a deal with the police to negotiate his return. It all made him furious.

I began to research Antoniades's history as an informer, going back to his time with EOKA. In Cyprus, I met some of his old comrades – both those who despised him as a traitor and those who defended him. I also discovered the fate of Hollowday, who, contrary to what Antoniades had thought all those years, had not died in the attack, but instead had been crippled by a bullet that pierced his spinal cord. He spent the rest of his days in a wheelchair, returning home to Lincolnshire and then dying in Portugal in 1967.
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His wife, who died a few years later, left behind a beautiful account of their life among the pine and almond trees of Cyprus, which the couple's daughter-in-law kindly shared with me. I never met Lionel Savery. I left a couple of messages on his answer machine but then I heard, in April 2012, that he had died. A tribute in the
Daily Telegraph
testified to his ‘dangerous life as an intelligence officer in Malaya and Cyprus'. After leaving the military, he had become a ‘labour relations adviser' in the magazine industry. That sounded rather like the cover story of a spy to me. His wife, Marisa, also had connections to British intelligence, according to friends.

From Antoniades there were yet more tales of adventure. After his release in Germany, he started another secret venture: this time for the CIA. Hafiza was an Afghan and after the fall of the Taliban, using her contacts, he went into business helping the CIA to buy back weapons from the former anti-Soviet mujahideen warlords they had once supplied. The operation went well until, while he was away in Dubai, his British security guard, an ex-soldier, shot dead two Afghans in an unexplained struggle at a hotel. It was the end of another scheme – and a blow to Hafiza's hopes of returning to live in her country.

I had often wondered how much to believe Antoniades, even though I came to like him a great deal. I could verify his work as an informer: I had seen the documents and spoken to his handlers. But should I believe his protestations, despite what policemen such as Collins said, that he did not continue, on the side, to be a major criminal? As a writer, I always wanted to reach a conclusion, to come to some certainty about where the truth lay. But with him, just when I thought I had got the story straight, a little detail changed and somehow that provoked new doubts. But, from another angle, his ability to keep you guessing also indicated why he was so good, why he was such a survivor. When I asked him once what it took to be an informer, he suggested that the trick was fooling people. ‘You have to be smart,' he said. An informer stayed alive only by using his wits to maintain an act. ‘Because I have been an informant for twenty years and everybody thinks I was a drug dealer. Even now the police think I played a double game.' He had survived so long as an informer by deceiving people; he had the ability to talk his way out of any situation. But knowing he had the skill to betray others so well always left me with the nagging worry that I was being cheated too.