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25 Plays3 years ago
Josh and M discuss the Telegraph's podcast "Bed of Lies."
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Correction on Song Attribution
00:00:00
Speaker
Last week, we attributed the song Creep to the band Creep. This was, of course, a mistake. Creep was, of course, performed by Frank Bennett. We apologise to music fans and stans everywhere. We will not make this mistake again. Oh, sorry. That's the emergency correction hotline. I better get that. Hello? Yes, darling. Of course, darling.
00:00:26
Speaker
No, no, we didn't know that, darling. Yes, I'll give Josh your love, darling. Bye, darling. An important correction? Yes, apparently it's not Bennett, but it's Bennett. Oh, so two Ts rather than one? Yes.
00:00:41
Speaker
Well, that could have been a costly mistake. Frank gets quite litigious. Good thing you got that spotted quickly. Precisely. And once again, the podcast is error free. So let's roll the theme and get cracking with this week's episode.
Introduction and Lockdown Recap
00:01:06
Speaker
Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Dentith. Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison. They are Dr. M. Dentith. We are both in Auckland, but not in the same place. Because we are under lockdown. Level three lockdown. Yes, another one of those.
00:01:33
Speaker
Another one of those pesky lockdowns came in on Sunday morning technically, but I was still out at 10 o'clock on Saturday night picking my boys up from a hastily cancelled scout camp. That was entertaining. But yes, we've had some, I think we mentioned this last, we had a little three-day lockdown, which was over before it began.
00:01:56
Speaker
a Valentine's Day lockdown. And a lot of people like, oh, wonder if we came out of that lockdown too fast and possibly it looks like we did. So it turns out that the cluster we've got is basically related to the Valentine's Day cluster.
00:02:13
Speaker
due to a cluster fudge, due to the contact tracing around that cluster, which appears to have turned into a little bit of a political scandal, with the family saying one thing, the Prime Minister saying another thing, and the communitariat going, well, we don't know what to believe, so we're just going to divide ourselves on partisan lines.
00:02:36
Speaker
Yes, I think this time around there's been it seems like there's a greater sense that somebody wants someone to blame for this one. And there have been stories coming up of people doing things they should not have done, but all going well. I think we're now four days with no more cases found. So the lockdown was due to end this Sunday. So barring anything weird happening over the next day or two, we should be out of it again. But for now, we're socially distant.
00:03:05
Speaker
And this is going to explain some, a little bit of lag in our call tonight, because as we're doing this over Zoom, and there appears to be a little bit of an issue with our connection in there, there's a bit of a lag between my stopping speaking and joshing starting, joshing starting.
Naomi Wolf's Vaccine Conspiracy Theories
00:03:23
Speaker
Oh dear, this is getting very confusing already. I'm gonna blame the lag on that one. But also it's gonna get the full joshing starts of people talking over other people, because there's also a bit of visual lag as well.
00:03:37
Speaker
And presumably cases of one of those is that long pause and then was actually you doing a joke there or literally it's lag. This is going to be great.
00:03:49
Speaker
No, I'm sure that was just lag. Anyway, so we actually, we've got just an ordinary episode this time around. It's not an academic paper. It's not one of us trying to fool the other. It's just plain a thing that involves conspiracies that we want to talk about. But before that, Dr. Dentist, have you been trawling through Naomi Wolf's tweets again? You know what I've said about this. Yes, I have. Well, what have you found this time?
00:04:19
Speaker
Right, so on the 24th or the 25th of March, depending on where in the world you were, Naomi Wolf tweeted the following. Actually, this is one of these things where you can actually flash this up on the video version of the VOD card to put the little screencap of the tweet. Because the tweet goes last.
00:04:38
Speaker
terrifying. Also confirmed slash explains the conversation I overheard in a restaurant in Manhattan two years ago, in which an Apple employee was boasting about attending a top secret demo. They had a new tech to deliver vaccines via nano particles. She didn't actually write particles, she wrote particles that let you travel back in time. Not kidding.
00:05:04
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not sure what's the worst part of that sentence. I think it's the not kidding because up until then you could think viruses delivering nanoparticles that let you travel back in time does sound like the sort of thing you'd see on like an old episode of Brass Eye or something when they're taking the piss out of strange, but apparently, you know, she was not kidding and she was not kidding that she was not kidding.
00:05:28
Speaker
No, now I've been working on a suite of papers about how we conspiracy theorize in the age of the novel coronavirus. And part of that investigation has been looking into how certain people appear to have gone down the rabbit hole, given the beginning and the middle and the not quite end of the COVID-19 pandemic. And Naomi Wolf is a great example of that because she started off back in March or April of last year
00:05:58
Speaker
is simply someone who was concerned that civil liberties were being restricted when it came to our response to the novel coronavirus COVID-19. And now she's in this really weird position where she appears to be talking about time travel nanoparticles delivering vaccines either from the future or in the past. And she's made a variety of pretty weird claims recently.
00:06:27
Speaker
such as, and this is from the 27th or the 28th of February, you know, I read the Madonna website and the sources in my video about how the mRNA is not actually a vaccine, but a software platform. I actually work with developers who create software, so I understand how dangerous it is to have a tick in one's body that can receive uploads.
00:06:52
Speaker
Sounds like she's misunderstanding an analogy as being literally true. I guess you could, if someone wanted to explain how mRNA works, I could imagine them saying, it's a bit like how software works and how you can download updates for your software and mRNA lets you, an mRNA vaccine lets you sort of download an update for your immune system, but it's not actually, it's not actually software and it's not actually downloading an update.
00:07:22
Speaker
And I'm suddenly aware of just how New Zealand-y my accent is when I say actually a lot, but that's beside the point. It's true. It's spelled A-K-S-T-U-L-L-Y. Something like that. And just one more tweet just to round off the way in which Naomi Wolf talks to people online. This is from the 23rd or the 24th of February.
00:07:47
Speaker
How can you describe people as not yet immunised if they don't get the vaccine? They are immunised. They have an immune system. It is very tendacious, inaccurate language. It seems to imply that we're immune to everything all the time. Well, I mean, don't you have an immune system, Josh? Or neither.
00:08:10
Speaker
I do have an immune system, and I am immune to a number of diseases, but not all of them. So when immune comes along, I assume I'm immune to smallpox and polio. Isn't that how it works? Or are we not immune anymore, but we don't have to be? Polio technically is eradicated, so you don't need jab for that.
00:08:34
Speaker
Smallpox still does persist in some communities around the world. But of course, we've actually got readily available treatments and vaccines. So give me give me one more thing you think you're immune to Mr. Science Guy. We get the MMR one, don't we? Measles, mumps and rubella? Or is it just girls who get that one? No, I think I think I think everyone goes through the schedule, although we are of the generation where we probably need booster shots.
00:09:00
Speaker
Yes, I know there was one that, because it can have effects on fetuses, was given to girls, either only girls or girls before it was given to boys, because there was more of a risk there or something.
00:09:16
Speaker
Yeah, I'm pretty sure. I've had my jabs. I've had needles in my arm and not in the fun way. So I assume I must have a bunch of immunities floating around. Do you know which vaccine we should get? Apart from the COVID-19 ones. The shingles vaccine. Yes, probably. We're technically middle aged.
00:09:41
Speaker
And mom has shingles and absolutely hates it. I don't think anyone ever talks about having shingles and having a good time. But if you've had chicken then you can get shingles and shingles will give you permanent nerve damage. So you probably want the shingles vaccine to ensure you don't get shingles shingles. They're bad. This ad paid for by big anti shingle.
00:10:09
Speaker
Anyway, enough disease. Shall we get into the main topic of today's podcast, or do you have anything else to administer before we do
Introduction to 'Bed of Lies' Podcast
00:10:22
Speaker
it? No, that's basically it. I just say get the shingles, that's it. Okay. Right, I will then play that funky chime.
00:10:36
Speaker
They don't come any funkier than that, I have to say. Now, the subject of this week's episode is one that the good Dr. Denteth brought to my attention a few weeks ago. How did you find out about it?
00:10:51
Speaker
So I found out through friend of the show Charlotte Red, that's her Twitter handle, who basically was lamenting the fact that because I'm already meant to be in China by now, she had just listened to the podcast and was really quite annoyed we wouldn't be able to meet up and chat about it.
00:11:08
Speaker
Of course I'm actually still in Auckland, but because of the lockdown, meeting up to talk to people about podcasts isn't really happening at this point in time. So yeah, I found out about Bed of Lies through Charlotte, and I then told you about it.
00:11:24
Speaker
And now we're going to spoil the entire thing to our listeners, so they won't feel the need to go and listen to it, even though they really should. Because there's no way we're going to be able to do the thing justice in our podcast. And believe me, the way the story is told is an absolute masterclass in making you go, what?
00:11:48
Speaker
they did. No, no, that can't be true. What? No, this is it. It can't get any worse. Oh, God, it really does.
00:11:58
Speaker
Yes, so what we're going to talk about today is the Telegraph podcast Bed of Lies by journalist Kara Magoogan, which was released, I think 80 episodes released across November and December of last year. So we're going to spoil the whole thing for you, but yes, I second the idea that you should actually go and listen to it yourself because it does make for good listening.
00:12:25
Speaker
Now, the podcast, when you listen to it, initially sort of sets things up as a bit of a mystery, which then becomes clearer as it goes through. And we might as well follow the same format. So, set us up. What's the hook?
00:12:42
Speaker
So, Bed of Lies consists of a series of weird cases involving a number of left-wing activist women in the UK between at least the 1990s and the early 2010s.
00:12:59
Speaker
And these are all cases of women who entered into relationships with men who turned out to have mysterious pasts. Now each of these men claimed to have some family trauma in their background, which meant they didn't really want to talk about their past, and also explained why they had no contact with their parents and lived far away from their hometowns.
00:13:26
Speaker
Each of these men had a serious mental breakdown about two years into their relationship with these women.
00:13:37
Speaker
Each of them appeared to
Undercover Officers and Activist Groups
00:13:39
Speaker
be handy to have around the house, so they'd be a joiner, a plumber, or a builder. Each of them owned a van, and thus their role in the activist groups that they were involved in was the person who drove people to and from particular events.
00:13:59
Speaker
each disappeared about four years after meeting their partners. And in some of the cases, their partners discovered during their relationships that these mysterious men had passport or credit cards under other names, which are often explained away as being stolen or due to identity theft.
00:14:24
Speaker
So, yes, initially, the similarities are what's strange to begin with. In the podcast, they talked to four women called Rosa, Lisa, Alison and Lindsay, those are all pseudonyms, who didn't know each other to begin with until this story sort of started to come together, left-wing activists, as you say, spread across the 90s, 2000s and into the early 2010s,
00:14:51
Speaker
And all independently struck up relationships with men that all seem to go in the same way. And the similarities are quite striking right down, yes, to the fact that all four of them drove vans, which seems like an inconsequential detail, and yet it was something the same across all of them.
00:15:10
Speaker
It should be said, these relationships were, in many cases, long-term committed relationships. They were sexual relationships, which at least in one case resulted in children. But yeah, there were things which again,
00:15:29
Speaker
If you saw, when you hear it described in one instance it's like okay well that's the thing that happens but then when you hear the same thing in all four instances starts to go weird so yeah the, the, the family trauma was different in most cases I think one guy.
00:15:46
Speaker
at one point talked about how he, you know, had it came from an abusive family and so didn't like to talk to them anymore. Another guy at one point when he was sort of further into the relationship with this woman, sort of took her aside and had a very serious talk with her about where he sort of disclosed that he had been adopted and so had sort of, you know, didn't know much about his family and where he came from, didn't have much contact with his adoptive family and so on.
00:16:14
Speaker
which explained why they didn't like to talk about their families much and apparently lived quite far away from them.
00:16:22
Speaker
And then, yeah, the breakdowns that being seen to at some point have some sort of a panic attack or something like that was something that came across. And these were quite public breakdowns as well. They weren't breakdowns that occurred in a private residence in isolation. Often these breakdowns occurred around their friends and families. They were very, very public. So in one of the cases,
00:16:50
Speaker
The mysterious man celebrates his 40th birthday, they have an absolute raging night and then he doesn't come out of his campervan the next day and they find him in it two days later and he's having anxiety and panic attacks and is questioning exactly what he's meant to be doing.
00:17:10
Speaker
and this is going to be something we'll have to come back to once the reveal occurs because there's something quite interesting about these panic attacks and they say they all happen about two years into the relationship or at least two years after the point where these women meet the man in question.
00:17:31
Speaker
And these are not the same man. The mystery is not going to be one man. It's four separate men, although I believe two of them end up sharing the same name.
00:17:46
Speaker
Yeah, so the interesting, well, another weird thing that happens in at least two of the cases, they have stories where the woman would find strange artefacts, things that didn't make sense. So one woman discovered a credit card, seemingly belonging to her partner,
00:18:07
Speaker
But the name on the credit card was not his name. It had the same first name, but a different surname. Another woman found a passport, which again had a different surname in it. And indeed, that woman, having found that and think that's weird, did a little bit of snooping on the guy's devices, I think, and started to find emails from children who referred to the guy as their father.
00:18:33
Speaker
Now, in these cases, when these things came up, they confronted the men with them and the men had an explanation. Yeah, so for the credit card was theft, he'd basically found a credit card and was using it to buy things online. He was really, really ashamed of what he did. And thus didn't want didn't want her to discuss it with any of their friends with regard to the passport case. Oh, yes. And
00:19:00
Speaker
turns out i do have a passport in a different name but that's because it's the name of a friend who died and their children now look at me as their father and i've never mentioned it in the past because i knew it'd be a complicated thing to bring up but they're not my natural children they simply refer to me as their father because i'm the replacement father figure although it was never quite clear how
00:19:26
Speaker
how the passport actually figured into that story. But the important thing was, he told a story such that she ended up going, okay, that seems reasonable. Yeah.
00:19:39
Speaker
Yeah, I think that guy also basically said I had had sort of a criminal past as well, which obviously, you know, he didn't want to bring up because he's ashamed of the things he did as a younger man. And yes, this friend of his who died, I think that there were a couple of instances where I'd sort of claim to that friends of theirs had been killed and
00:20:00
Speaker
drug deals gone wrong or something like that and I think yeah this was a case where his friend had died and he was like you know look after my kids and his dying breath or something like that and so that was what he did. So there were weird little things popped up but again as we say at this point each of these women had no idea that the other existed and were experiencing similar things.
00:20:23
Speaker
But then, about four years into the relationship, each man would just disappear, would leave one day and then not be gone. When a woman went to their place, all his stuff would be gone. Things would have been gone. Every trace of this person's existence was basically surgically removed from the household they were in.
00:20:51
Speaker
And the things that were left behind were left suspiciously tidy was one thing. But yes, I think one guy claimed that he had to go because obviously this is in England. I'm not sure if we made that clear at the start, but it's for the Telegraph newspaper. So this is in England. And of course, when you live in England, Europe's just a hop skip and a jump away. So these guys would sort of claim to need to go to other countries. I think one guy said he had to go to Turkey.
00:21:16
Speaker
due to his work or something, but then when she lost contact with him and got in touch with his supposed boss, the boss was like, no, I didn't send him to Turkey and things like that. And so obviously this was, you know, it's one thing for a boyfriend to ditch you and to ghost you, but a person who you'd been living with, a person who you were in a long-term relation with,
00:21:40
Speaker
to suddenly just disappear, and especially someone who claimed to have had a criminal past to suddenly disappear, that's enough to make you seriously worried. And so several of these women devoted quite a lot of time and effort to tracking these mystery men down.
00:21:58
Speaker
sometimes that meant accidentally finding them. So at least one case, the woman in question is now working in a bookstore in London. And one day her former partner turns up in the bookstore, and she confronts him and says, Oh, look, I've, I've got to, uh,
00:22:21
Speaker
I can't talk to you right now. Can we talk later? And then they meet after work and he details why he left and why she needs to keep it secret. And then they enter into another long term and what turns out to be quite abusive relationship.
00:22:42
Speaker
And so, I mean, one of the woman gets, I think she freely admits herself, got obsessed with finding this guy who just disappeared from her life after being such an important part of it. She ended up flying all around the world to other countries where he supposedly had been and coming up with nothing. And then one of them went so far as to hire a detective, hire a private eye to try and
00:23:05
Speaker
and hunt these people down. And when they couldn't get any hits on the guys on the name that she knew him as, this was one of the ones who'd found a document under another name and said, okay, well,
00:23:17
Speaker
how about we look for this name, with the same name but a different surname, and based on some of the scant family details that the guy had given, they were able to actually track this person down, find documentation for him, find a marriage certificate for him, which had never been cancelled, and his occupation on the marriage certificate was listed as, M would you please,
00:23:48
Speaker
Police Officer.
00:23:52
Speaker
a police officer. And so this is when the penny drops. These four men who had been in long-term relationships with these women were all undercover police officers who'd been assigned to infiltrate these left-wing activist groups to basically spy on and report on them. And the four years was essentially the end of their, what would you call it? Rotation, the end of their assignment. And that was then basically their tour. Tour, that's the word.
00:24:20
Speaker
And that was it. And so then, then things started to come out. And this, we should say, I mean, this, this, this became public in the UK. So possibly. And there's an ongoing inquiry on the matter happening right now.
00:24:35
Speaker
So if you're listening from the UK, you've possibly heard of this in the news, but it was certainly news to us down here. And so from then on the podcast gets into basically the quite sordid details of how these undercover operations came about. And also why they occurred. So one of the discussions that goes on in the podcast is
00:24:59
Speaker
Why were undercover cops infiltrating left wing groups that did not appear to be involved in criminal behavior? Because it's one thing and say you're on the anti terrorist squad, and you've got the fear of a terrorist event. So you infiltrate a group to find out what they're going to do next to stop them.
00:25:19
Speaker
But notably when it came to these left-wing activist groups, they'd be animal rights groups, environmentalist groups, they actually weren't doing anything illegal per se. So there's a good question, why are you surveilling people who are engaged in perfectly legal behavior? And the story that's told in Bed of Lies is that after the Cold War,
00:25:45
Speaker
there was basically funding for enforcement, and there really wasn't a clear idea of what that funding would go towards, so a new target was looked at, which is left-wing activists, and it seems that the biggest motivation for we need to constrain and know what these people are up to is the defence of capitalism.
00:26:12
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, they looked at, there had been at the time, some big sort of anti-capitalist protests. I mean, but when was the Chogum protests here? Was that late 90 years? I think that was when we recognised it. After we've started uni, so yeah, it must be after I started, so post-96, maybe 97, 98.
00:26:35
Speaker
So there had been sort of big protests of big organisations like APEC, and we had Chogum here. I can't remember what Chogum stands for. And those definitely got rowdy. I mean, you sort of had the hardcore activists up the front who'd be trying to sort of, you know, start some shit with the riot police or break through barriers and make trouble. But I'm not aware of any actual, certainly no,
00:27:03
Speaker
deaths happening there and not much in the way of violence. And indeed, it wasn't just your sort of your hardcore anarchist, anti-capitalist types who are being infiltrated. It was basically any activist organizations on the left. You had them infiltrating environmentalist groups and animal rights activists and things like that. The whole left sort of getting tarred with one brush.
00:27:28
Speaker
Yeah. Um, and at this point, at this point, um, they, they start to bring in a, um, the, the journalist behind this Karama Guggen starts talking with a man who, uh, was a former undercover police officer who hasn't become something of a whistleblower on the way things are done. He w he went undercover in criminal organization. So he wasn't actually one of the people, um, who, who, who did this exact sort of thing. But he was asked to join.
00:27:57
Speaker
He was, yes, no, that's true. And he sort of said, no, that's not what the police is for, essentially. He's like, why would we be doing that? That's not police work. It's not our job to defend capitalism. But they did source what was basically the instruction manual for, so you're an undercover police officer in a left wing organization. And that was quite the eye opener.
00:28:21
Speaker
it was. So first of all, it talks about the idea that technically, officers shouldn't get into long term relationships, because they would be short and disastrous. And they certainly shouldn't get involved in sexual relationships with any of the people. But sometimes things will happen nudge nudge wink wink say no more.
00:28:47
Speaker
Yes, so it's sort of, yeah, that phrase, shortened disastrous, I think was used a couple of times in the sense of if you do get into a relationship with someone, if you're in the situation where someone's keen on you, and it would be a bit weird if you just turned them away completely, and you don't want to blow your cover, then yes, relationships are okay, but you should see to it that they end quickly.
00:29:13
Speaker
and yes again you know if a woman's really into you and wants to have sex with you and maybe you know it might seem weird if you turn her down and well you know you don't want to blow your cover so you might just have to go and have sex with woman yeah we're not saying that you can't have sex on the job we're simply saying that we'll frown upon you having sex on the job wink wink nudge nudge say no more
00:29:42
Speaker
Now, this manual is actually written by one of the men in question. He was the man Andy, who was always referred to as Andy Van, because the most the characteristic about him we've remembered was he was the guy with the van and we'll get into van shortly. And now he's a counsellor in some parts of the UK. So yeah, he's gone into politics. So he has a very senior position.
00:30:07
Speaker
So the manual all the way through refers to the activists that you're targeting as wearies. And at one point she's like, what is this wearies? What does it actually mean? And she asks the police officer, the former undercover police officer that she's been talking to, what's wearies? And he's like, I don't know exactly what it means in this context, but he has referred to, had heard things sort of cases being referred to as wearies, which are just the wearying ones, the ones that were a bit of a chore.
00:30:35
Speaker
And so while he's not 100% certain exactly where they get where he's from and why they're using that term, it's pretty clear that it's not a compliment. And also it's fairly clear, as we find out towards the end of the podcast,
00:30:51
Speaker
that the men in question were not left-wingers. So as soon as they leave the activist circles, they go back to being quite conservative right-wing men. So you can imagine them going, actually, it's quite a worrying job pretending to care about things like animals, the environment, and the welfare of other people. Very worrying.
Infiltration Tactics and Relationship Patterns
00:31:14
Speaker
And so the more they go through this manual, the more the weird things, the weird similarities between all these relationships that they talk about start to make sense. So I mean obviously the whole I have a troubled past and I'm distant from my family is a good way of just maintaining your cover if you don't have to
00:31:35
Speaker
Obviously, you wouldn't want to be introducing people to your actual family members because they probably don't know that you're undercover. As far as they know, you're still a cop. And so you don't want to be in a situation where people would be wanting to meet your family. So you make out as though you're distant to them. You don't really have a relationship with them. They live very far away. And so there's always an excuse for why you don't have to have anything to do with your family.
00:32:05
Speaker
And then it got to the vans. Explain to me vans. Why is it important that they all drove a van? Because Josh, if you're involved in left-wing activism and these wearies, they're going to be very demanding of your time. They're going to want you to do things. Now, if you have a van, you can be the transportation person.
00:32:27
Speaker
which means you can ferry people from events and back from events without actually having to get involved in the event itself. So if it turns out that these wearying left-wing activists are going to do something which is illegal or quasi-illegal, you've got a justification to be sitting in the van
00:32:50
Speaker
doing nothing whatsoever. So it has the handy thing of allowing you to escape any legal consequences of being involved in protest action. It also means you can kind of get involved in the wider community because if you've got a van, these warriors are going to want you to help move house or move furniture around, which means it makes it even easier for you to integrate into the group. So owning a van keeps you out of trouble,
00:33:19
Speaker
and actually helps you infiltrate the group at the same time. Yes, that was one of the things in the manuals where it is quite disparaging of these these wearies who you're going to be infiltrating and one of the things he says is essentially give them an inch and they'll take a mile. If you offer to do any of them a favour, they'll definitely take you up on it and then want to want you to do that for them again from then on afterwards.
00:33:45
Speaker
It also talks about the whole handyman thing saying that's a way you can sort of integrate yourself into the group by making yourself useful as a guy who can rewire this or fix this plumbing or build that or what have you. But of course, it says, you know, make sure you can actually do that because once you get a reputation for being a guy who can build stuff or fix stuff or whatever, all those sponging wearies are going to be wanting you to do it all the time. And so there's one efficient law that can build a kitchen.
00:34:13
Speaker
Yeah, and it took him a year, which indicates that he very much was learning on the job. Now, the breakdowns are interesting. So your first reaction when you heard about the breakdowns was to think that they were a kind of a logical consequence of these men being undercover, wasn't it? Yeah, well, the first time they came out like by this point,
00:34:37
Speaker
Well, I think I think even if you actually just read about the bed of lies podcast, you'd know it was about undercover police officers. I don't think that actually come up with the with the proof positive that these men were police officers, but it was pretty clear reading between the lines. That was what was going on. So when they told these stories about finding these guys having panic attacks and so on, my my my assumption was, oh, OK, that's that's the pressure of the job, right? That's that's them having panic attacks because of having to live this double life 24 hours a day and
00:35:07
Speaker
always being worried about getting caught out, but yet still having to give the goods back to your superiors and so on. I had assumed that these were genuine breakdowns that were happening because of the stresses of the job, but it seems I was being overly generous.
00:35:24
Speaker
No, so in the manual, they talk about you are doing a four year tour. And of course, at the end of your four years, we'll extract you from your service and you'll go back to normal life.
00:35:39
Speaker
Now, of course, you can't just disappear completely. That's going to raise questions. You need to set up your exit plan about halfway through. So fake a breakdown of some description, and then the last year of your tour, start raising questions about whether you feel comfortable with what you're doing, whether you want to do other things with your lives, so that when it,
00:36:09
Speaker
comes the time to be extracted, you've set up the idea that you've had one mental breakdown before, and thus your disappearance can be explained by, oh it must be another mental issue, that's why they've disappeared. So it was an entire and elaborate act.
00:36:29
Speaker
But as we've seen of course they didn't end up deterring these women from wondering what had happened to them and actually going to trace them down. Because these men were having long term sexual relationships, sometimes involving children.
00:36:43
Speaker
sometimes involving children. Yes, that was the nastiest one. That was the one you talked about before, where in several instances, these women were able to get in touch with these guys again and confront them. And I think one of them had what was essentially like an intervention sort of situation, where she got all her friends around her to make sure
00:37:03
Speaker
that she wouldn't sort of buckle and try to take his word for it or think about forgiving him. And I got this guy down there and he sort of started spinning a line about what happened until one of them basically said, yeah, so when did you join the police force? At which point he sort of knew the jig was up. But in this other case, where she met him again in the bookshop, he basically, he just kept on spinning the story. He was like, yes, I am a police officer. I was undercover, but I want to get out, but they won't let me get out. And he ended up,
00:37:32
Speaker
forming this this out-and-out abusive relationship with her where he insisted that this was the guy who fathered children with the woman as well, insisted that her and the kids would have to be locked out staying home all the time because it was too risky for her to go out and so on, and eventually when she realized just what's the severity of the situation she was in,
00:37:54
Speaker
She took the kids and went to a shelter and broke off contact with them completely. But we haven't actually, that's pretty dodgy. I don't think we've got to the dodgiest parts of the official procedure yet. There's the whole identity thing. Oh yeah, actually.
00:38:14
Speaker
It's the manual. So the manual talks about the idea that early on in the program, these officers engaged in identity theft. So they would look for a case of a child who died young, I suppose all children dying, a person who died.
00:38:39
Speaker
who die young. Yes. And then of the same name, so the same first name, because there's this whole thing around the same birth date. Yeah. So to make it easy to not be called out, if you choose a completely different first name, then you might not react when you're called by that name. Or you might react when someone uses your actual first name, you want a birth date, which is very similar, so that you don't have accidents about your
00:39:08
Speaker
birthday, you might be able to get away with fudging the year you were born, but forgetting the day and month is another thing entirely. And so they would steal these identities with the permission of the British state to construct brand new identities.
00:39:24
Speaker
Now it turns out most people actually frown upon identity theft of dead children and occasionally it also comes a cropper when suddenly you might actually bump into a family member or someone decides to look into your past and is able to find a family member who's moved town at which point they might go oh but uh
00:39:50
Speaker
I believe they died at the age of five so eventually they gave up on identity theft and they just decided to do what they should have done the entire time and just invent personalities from whole cloth.
00:40:05
Speaker
Yes, so it was quite elaborate really of exactly what you want to look for in a fake identity. It would be, you know, you want a child about the same age as you, died young, not died at birth, because apparently there would be records of that. Someone who died as a child, not so tragically that it would have made the papers,
00:40:27
Speaker
just someone who, I don't know, I assume that, so not someone who have sort of died in a tragic accident or have you, I guess, just a child who died of a terminal illness or something that might have been... Or died of an infant death syndrome, something of that particular time. Yeah, so tragic, but not so tragic that it would have made the news. And I mean, that's not...
00:40:49
Speaker
That's not in any way particular to this program. That's sort of been a staple, I think, of spycraft for a long time. I know there was a case here in New Zealand some years ago where some Israeli spies had got caught stealing the identity of dead New Zealand children or something for their fake spying identities, and that caused a bit of a diplomatic stink. But even at the time, it was sort of, yeah, this is kind of how we do it sometimes.
00:41:17
Speaker
Don't forget the Act MP who engaged in a bit of child identity theft. That was David Garrett. I don't recall, but yes, I remember that. I forget who it was, but I remember that happening, yeah.
00:41:30
Speaker
Yes, so as you say, it's a thing that was done but it's obviously quite distasteful and when it came out publicly that that happened, that was a good enough reason for them to stop it.
Officers' Personal Lives and Lack of Remorse
00:41:42
Speaker
But I think now we need to come to the dodgiest part of this. Now you recall I said earlier
00:41:48
Speaker
that they found a current marriage certificate for one of these guys and he was indeed married and had been married the entire time with the family who he was you know on those times when he'd sort of you know had to go away for whatever reason that would be him off visiting his actual family. Turns out all the guys were married and it turns out that's not a coincidence. Yes because they were required to be married
00:42:20
Speaker
Yes, so I think there was a bit of a worry that they would go native, that they might, you know, always a danger when you're living amongst these people for so long. What if you became sympathetic to their cause and what if you ended up, you know, deciding to, as that one guy pretended to do, want to pack in your life as a police officer and actually take up with these people who you've been living amongst for years.
00:42:43
Speaker
And so one way to ensure that that wouldn't happen was make sure that they had a life to go back to afterwards. If they had an actual wife and children to go back to, then that would give them an anchor to stop them from getting caught up in their cover. And so, yeah, these people who had been getting into long-term relationships, had been getting into sexual relationships with women, were married with children the entire time.
00:43:09
Speaker
And supposedly the requirements not there anymore? No, but this also explained their work behavior because they would spend the night with their partners and then they would get up early to go to work. And it seems that when they were getting up early to go to work, they were driving home to spend time with their actual wife and children.
00:43:32
Speaker
before then going into the office at the Metropolitan Police Station to work on whatever they were doing at work as police officers and then clocking off in the afternoon or evening to then go and spend time with the
00:43:50
Speaker
woman whose life they'd infiltrated, and crucially, at least in the four cases covered in bed of lies, the actual wives had no idea this was going on.
00:44:05
Speaker
Yes, so indeed, when this came out, I believe divorces resulted once these women found out that while undercover, these guys, exactly what their husbands had been up to. And so, yes, I mean, we've been talking about the guys and what they did. But of course, the effect on the woman involved was devastating. You had these women who sort of basically talked about, you know, I don't have a family, I don't have children.
00:44:30
Speaker
And a large part of that is because I spent a good chunk of my 20s living with this guy who I thought was the one who then disappeared on me and then spent a decent chunk of my 30s trying to catch him down and discovering and processing the fact that my entire life was a lie. And now I can't even contemplate the idea of getting seriously involved with someone again. There was PTSD, there was genuine mental trauma.
00:44:57
Speaker
as a result of finding out that these relationships that you were in were a complete lie. So yes, the public inquiry has taken place. What did the police officers say in response to these charges of you have ruined the lives of many a woman?
00:45:17
Speaker
Well, yes, so there is an inquiry. It's all come out. These people have been interviewed. It's sort of become part of the record. And basically, the guys were just kind of complained about how hard things were for them. Now that this inquiry has come out, how there being
00:45:33
Speaker
raked over the coals and some of them claimed that they're sort of being scapegoated for the fact that their department's procedures were faulty and defective. And basically they didn't really seem to acknowledge the harm that they had done and were mostly just concerned about the fact, oh, my wife left me just because she found out I'd been having sex with other women for years. And lied to her and them about it the entire time. Oh, what was me?
00:46:03
Speaker
didn't seem to be a lot of contrition. So the inquiry, I believe there has been, as a result of the inquiry, there has been an official apology to the woman, but I didn't sound like there's been much more than that.
00:46:19
Speaker
No, now in part, this is because the consequences of the inquiry are still ongoing.
Systemic Issues in Policing and Activism Targeting
00:46:24
Speaker
That's one frustrating part of bed of lies is it just kind of ends. And there's no real feeling resolution. But I think that might be the point.
00:46:34
Speaker
I don't think there either can be actual resolution in a case like this because the damage done is so horrific that apologies or compensation really are never going to pass muster anyway. And that's basically where we end things.
00:46:57
Speaker
again, very much recommend that you go and listen to the podcast yourself, because I mean, it's one thing to hear the two of us just sort of describe it, but the podcast itself consists mostly of interviews with the woman in question, with sort of narration from Karama Guggen, also interviews with the undercover police officer and then yes,
00:47:13
Speaker
At one point, she does talk to one of the officers involved, the notorious Andy Van, who had since gone on to become—to get involved in politics. And she is able to get in touch with him. And he's basically—he's very pleasant and doesn't come across as particularly defensive.
00:47:30
Speaker
essentially the whole thing is just yeah I'm sorry I just can't talk about that because it's all the inquiries underway you know legally I can't I can't give you the answers to your questions I'm sorry and he's very pleasant but he doesn't certainly doesn't appear to express much remorse and and doesn't really give any any substantive answers.
00:47:50
Speaker
No, it sounds as if he had been very well instructed by his solicitor that the answer to every question is an ongoing inquiry, and we will see the results of that in time.
00:48:07
Speaker
And so there you go. I should say as a bit of a coder to this, so Ian sent me the link to this podcast and I sort of listened to it over the course of a week or so. And then afterwards I was at home and said to my wife, I listened to this interesting podcast. It was all about these women in England who were left-wing activists who discovered that these guys they'd been having long-term relationships with were actually undercover cops.
00:48:33
Speaker
And my wife, who's always been a bit of a lefty and sort of knew the activist crowd in her university days, instantly replied, oh yeah, I know someone here who that happened to.
00:48:42
Speaker
So it's certainly not an isolated case, I think. And indeed, those four cases are the case studies. They're the ones where they've actually had the material and the participants were willing to be interviewed at length. I didn't actually get a sense from the podcast exactly how widespread this tactic was, but I'm fairly certain it was more than just these four cases.
00:49:11
Speaker
But actually, there's an interesting part in one of the last three episodes where when it gets revealed that one of the partners is a police officer, he really wants to stress to his partner, oh, no, no, I'm the only one. Because by that point in time, there's a whole bunch of rumors going on that isn't a curiousity every time we hold a protest.
00:49:39
Speaker
there are police officers around it's almost as if there are people informing on our activities with inside information. So it suddenly becomes a conspiracy of I've been outed and I'm trying to control how much this person says what we definitely don't want.
00:49:59
Speaker
is for someone to then go, oh, oh, oh, but there might be more, we need to really stress, there's only one infiltrator, it's me. And also, by the way, you can't talk about it. So there probably were an awful lot of infiltrators, especially given how long the program was going on for, and the four years.
00:50:23
Speaker
Yep, so there we go. Definitely give it a listen if you'd like to learn more about the story. I'd certainly recommend it. But I think that's really all we can say in a single episode of our podcast. Any closing thoughts? Yes, what the police officers did was deplorable.
00:50:44
Speaker
I mean, the thing which makes it, I mean, as a police abolitionist, I'm going to say this anyway, but what makes this particularly deplorable is the fact that they weren't investigating criminal activity.
00:51:00
Speaker
they were simply investigating activism. And of course, as we've seen in the US, particularly around the insurrection of the Capitol back in July, July of this year, they didn't even hit July yet. I mean, this year is turning out to be as long as last year.
00:51:19
Speaker
as we saw in January of this year, it turns out that police forces in the US like the UK and unfortunately like here in Aotearoa New Zealand think of left-wingers as dangerous and right-wingers as their natural allies. So they simply treat the idea that there are people out there who are fighting for a
00:51:42
Speaker
equality, the environment and the rights of animals as being a threat to the natural order. Also, when people turn up with guns in your nation's capital, you end up going, oh, they're not a real threat. I mean, they're right wingers. They're just like us. And that's a problem. That's a massive problem in the West.
00:52:06
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that was the thing. And they talked to the undercover guy who was approached about this. I mean, his attitude, even this guy who was an actual police officer, had the attitude of, why are we doing this? How is this the job of the police? We're not
00:52:24
Speaker
It's not like going undercover in a criminal organization. These, most of the time, apart from maybe a bit of vandalism or something, these people aren't really breaking laws. So yes, it seems like sort of the sort of thing that probably never should have happened and definitely never should have happened the way that had happened.
00:52:42
Speaker
And I think that's all we have for you in this main episode, but we do have a bonus episode and I can tell you one thing for sure, it involves sausage. And not just that, it involves the murder of a sausage king and a sausage king who is a murderer. So if you want to sling us at least a dollar a month,
00:53:11
Speaker
towards getting access to these things. You can find out about not one, but two sausage kings and the murders associated with said sausage kings.
00:53:24
Speaker
So for now we will bid you a sausage free farewell before going on to sausage up for the bonus episode. So for now I think it's simply goodbye for me. And it's sausages from me to you. Sausages.
00:53:45
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr. M.R.X.Dentist. You can contact us at PodcastConspiracyGmail.com and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon. And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.