Jewish security team helped catch nail bomb killer
CST gained key intelligence from an informant that led to arrest of neo-Nazi
A JEWISH security group gathered the key undercover intelligence that led to the arrest of the 1999 nail bomber who killed three people in attacks on minorities in London.
Dave Rich from the Community Security Trust (CST) was the ‘handler’ for an agent codenamed ‘Arthur’ who had infiltrated the capital’s extreme far-right scene at the time.
Between 1996 and 2004, Arthur passed Mr Rich a stream of intelligence on the BNP and militant group Combat 18, in order to help protect the Jewish community from attack.
In the wake of the nail bomb atrocities in Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho in 1999 — which killed three, including a pregnant woman, and injured 140 people — the Evening Standard printed a CCTV image of a suspect.
Arthur saw the picture and recognised him as David Copeland, now 45, a member of the far-right underground. He alerted Mr Rich, who passed the information to the police, leading to Mr Copeland’s arrest.
In 2000, the killer, who had been targeting London’s black, Bengali and gay communities, was convicted of murder and given six life sentences.
“If someone is going through minority communities to attack, at some point, Jews are going to be on that list,” Mr Rich told the JC. “That was our fear at the time.”
The revelation is alluded to in the new book Codename Arthur by Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate, as well as the new Netflix documentary Nailbomber: Manhunt.
Arthur, who had a family history of fighting fascism, had been working as a volunteer undercover informant for two years, passing information to the Searchlight antifascist magazine, before he agreed to work with the CST in 1996.
Over the next eight years, Mr Rich
built up a relationship with the whistleblower that turned into a friendship.
They would meet in hotels and communicate on the phone or via a pager.
“Sometimes he’d be going out with the BNP three or four times a week, leafleting, or party meetings, or sometimes just for a drink,” Mr Rich said.
“For a long time, this was [Arthur’s] life. He really gave up a lot just to plunge himself into this. He was absolutely in the midst of the London far right, for all that time. I would meet him frequently, or if it was something more urgent, we would speak on the phone”.
The Metropolitan Police was running its own informants. But, Mr Rich said, the Jewish community has a proud history of defending itself. “There is institutional knowledge in the Jewish community of defence work stretching back to the 1940s,” he said.
“It has become very professional and is not done in amateurish way. All of our operational decisions were taken to minimise risk to Arthur.”
IT WAS one of the Community Security Trust’s most secret operations ever.
Under our 1994 joint project to expose some of London’s worst farright extremists, an anti-fascist informant — codenamed Arthur — infiltrated the British National Party (BNP) and spent the next decade distributing leaflets and attending hundreds of meetings, birthday parties for fascists, BNP weekend festivals and Blood & Honour concerts full of neo-Nazi skinheads.
Arthur reported all of it to us and the anti-fascist Searchlight magazine — which was also involved in the operation — as part of our effort to combat the extreme-right’s violence, bigotry and hatred.
This is an area of CST’s work that we rarely, if ever, discuss publicly, but it is an essential part of our efforts to protect the Jewish community.
Fifteen years after the operation ended, Nick Lowles of anti-racism group Hope Not Hate has told the story of the operation — and CST’s involvement — in a book called Codename Arthur.
It describes how during that time, I would regularly meet Arthur in various hotel bars around central London and scribble frantically while he told me about what he had been up to.
We would discuss upcoming activities and plan his operations. His information and insights were invaluable and allowed us to build a detailed, three-dimensional picture of the BNP’s activities in London.
We knew all the organisers and main activists and we were inside their supposedly secret meetings. But more than that, Arthur helped us to get under the skin of the far-right and really understand the culture of this violent, racist, misogynistic world at its grassroots.
Arthur’s most important achievement came in 1999, when a series of nail bombs in London killed three people, injured 140 and struck fear and devastation into London’s minority communities. The perpetrator, David Copeland, was identified from CCTV images in the Evening Standard by a work colleague and also by Arthur, who, of course, uniquely knew all about Copeland’s far-right activities.
We at the CST passed Copeland’s name and background straight to the police, while our security guards patrolled Jewish neighbourhoods in case of a further bomb attack. Now Arthur’s role is rightly recognised in a new Netflix documentary called Nailbomber: Manhunt.
Antisemitism was central to this farright world. Arthur obtained the first copies we had seen of Nick Griffin’s antisemitic booklet Who Are the Mindbenders?, which claimed a Jewish conspiracy was controlling the British media (Griffin became BNP leader two years later). He was present when the BNP hosted European antisemites such as the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson and German neo-Nazi leader Günter Deckert, and joined BNP members supporting disgraced Holocaust denier David Irving when he unsuccessfully sued historian Deborah Lipstadt.
The viciousness of the anti-Jewish hate that permeated the world Arthur moved in was chilling to hear, as was the casual violence that so many of his fascist associates would boast and laugh about.
This all took place in a pre-digital age, but CST’s work identifying potential terrorists who may harm our community has adapted to the challenges and opportunities of the online world.
Last year, CST researchers identified 20 such people who we reported to counter-terrorist police, some of whom are now in prison.
We didn’t shout about any of these at the time, because that is not CST’s way of doing things: as the Jewish community organisation that works closest with police to keep our community safe, we often need to be discreet about how we go about things. But it may be reassuring to know that this work goes on behind the scenes, day in, day out, as it has done for years.
Approximately half of the potential terrorists we reported to police last year were, like Copeland, far-right extremists, while the rest followed a violent jihadist ideology. As we know from bitter experience, antisemitism comes from all directions and it doesn’t only threaten Jews. Some of the potential terrorists who we report to police appear more likely to attack other targets, but terrorism endangers all of us, whatever our background, and protecting the Jewish community helps to build a stronger society for everyone.
Arthur is one of the unsung heroes who has made a major contribution to this effort, and he deserves our thanks.
Dr Dave Rich is Director of Policy at the Community Security Trust. ‘Codename Arthur: The true story of the antifascist spy who identified the London nailbomber’, by Nick Lowles, is published by Partisan Books
We heard his associates boast and laugh about casual violence’