The cover-up
I had never, ever, in my life, seen anything like this
The documents detailing the secret lives of undercover officers waging war on serious and organised crime were stored, in the language of Scotland’s elite police agency, off-site.
The phone bills and rent receipts, mailbox numbers and bank documents, passports and credit cards supporting their cover stories were held at a secure location, away from Osprey House, the HQ of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency, once billed as the country’s FBI.
Behind the doors of a nondescript unit on a humdrum industrial estate was the meticulously-maintained paperwork. Well, it should have been meticulously maintained. Instead, it was a shambles. There were bags and boxes of files and unopened mail, some shredded, most not. Beside them lay passports, bank cards, and travel documents in a range of names, some of them linked to undercover operations, many not. There were bank statements, demands from credit agencies, envelopes full of cash. There was an empty bottle of whisky.
It might have been fraud, it might have been the chaos left by an officer in personal and professional meltdown, an officer meant to be painstakingly building the financial infrastructure around Level One undercover operations, including the infiltration of some of Scotland’s most dangerous gangs.
It is unlikely, however, that anyone will ever know exactly what was found in that unit – if there was evidence of possible crimes, if covert operations were possibly compromised, or if undercover officers’ safety had been risked – because a clean-up operation was immediately ordered with officers told to buy a garden incinerator and petrol and burn the lot.
But, after taking the papers to wasteland in an unmarked car, usually used for surveillance, they were challenged by uniformed colleagues before returning to the HQ of Scotland’s premier crimefighting agency and setting the documents alight in a car park. The incident was described by the officer, known as Mrs K, during a revelatory civil action against her former bosses, when she accused them of unfairly forcing her out of the job she loved and putting her under unbearable stress.
She had raised the alarm after taking on a new role and, after visiting the unit, discovering financial documents in names of individuals not linked to any undercover operations.
Her boss Danny Rae, a detective inspector, would describe the scene as a “total disaster” and feared it could risk the safety of undercover officers. When his bosses, Chief Inspector James Reid and Superintendent Ian Thomas visited the out-of-town unit in April 2011, Mrs K said, the place looked as if it had been “completely ransacked.”
She told the Court of Session that after seeing the chaos, Superintendent Thomas said she