Chris Hobbs
Even allowing for the fact that the security breach, whereby two passengers boarded the flights using stolen passports was probably not a contributory factor to the planes fate, the disaster has drawn attention to a problem that has concerned front line UK Border Force and police officers together with Interpol for many years. This concern was highlighted by the head of Interpol, Richard Nobel, at his press conference today (Monday).
As we will see however, it is still all too easy for individuals holding ‘duff’ passports to board flights not only in Malaysia but also in the UK and indeed hundreds of individuals on stolen or unlawfully obtained passports will be travelling across the world on a daily basis. Some will have obtained these passports purely as means of obtaining residency in a particular country but others holding them will be engaged on far more nefarious activities linked to organised crime and terrorism.
It almost beggars belief that in the UK, most passengers will board a flight without ‘coming under the eyes’ of any UK law enforcement officer. Passengers will of course, feel as if they have been dragged through a hedge backwards by the time they have actually set foot on their plane. Queues at check in, followed by the removal of shoes, x-rays of hand baggage (and shoes) verbal interrogations and possible body searches will be followed by a further passport examination at the aircraft gate.
But think about it. When, as a passenger, have you actually encountered any law enforcement officer as you leave the UK? A handful of ‘target’ flights might come under the scrutiny of hard pressed counter terrorist or UK Border Force customs officers in less than ideal conditions at the aircraft’s gate, but the odds of winning a national lottery prize are probably greater than encountering a UK law enforcement officer as you leave the country. .
It is now far too easy for ‘duffers’ as these individuals are collectively known, to leave and, as we will see, even to re-enter the UK.
The rot started in 1998, when ‘my name is’ Jack Straw, as Home Secretary, decided to save the princely sum of £3,000,000 by abolishing departure (embarkation) controls at airports amidst a welter of meaningless spin and the fury of professionals in various fields from family court judges (abducted children) to women’s groups (forced marriages).
The statement issued was a typical example of the spin that was to set the tone for the years ahead.
‘We have decided to replace the residual embarkation controls with an intelligence led and target-led operation involving a partnership between enforcement agencies, carriers and port authorities.’
This grossly misleading, meaningless statement provoked ridicule at the time amongst immigration and police officers working at the borders who knew that it was arrant nonsense. At a stroke Jack Straw removed any chance of those leaving the country on illegal documents being detected. Only highly trained officers will be able spot stolen passports (which will normally contain substituted photographs) while the detection of fraudulently obtained genuine passports (FOG’s) presents an even greater challenge.
FOG passports have been obtained by persons stealing, buying or otherwise obtaining another person’s identification details. There are 9,000 known UK FOG passport holders but many more thousands are undetected. Although the vast majority of ‘FOG’ holders are foreign nationals, one British gangster possessed not only his own UK passport but another in a completely different identity. If he wanted to travel undetected or even escape justice, he would simply just use his ‘FOG.’ It is believed that he is one of many and at present their detection is extremely unlikely.
Most taxpayers would expect their government to make strenuous efforts to detect imposters travelling on stolen or FOG passports yet one of the most effective methods, embarkation controls, lies moribund. There are UKBA experts in this field working in countries where stolen and fraudulent passports are a particular problem but these officers strongly believe that their effectiveness is weakened thanks to the missing pieces of the puzzle that are those embarkation controls.
The Home Office will point out that passengers travelling with stolen passports, who feature on the Interpol Index that is now the subject of much discussion, will also be on the Home Office Warning Index, known not very affectionately as HOWI. Thus when the passenger checks in at a UK airport, his details will pass electronically from the airline to the National Border Targeting Centre via the Borders System Programme which has replaced the problematic and expensive e-Borders systems. The whole question of the e-Borders disaster is worthy of examination in its own right.
If the passenger is believed to be in possession of a stolen passport, this will trigger an alert to the staff at the NBTC who should take action and ensure the passenger is hauled off the plane. Alas only 65% of flights are on the system and the HOWI database itself is overloaded with poor and hopelessly out of date intelligence.
This means that NBTC staff have to sort the wheat from the huge quantity of chaff, thus in the interval between when our imposter checks in and the plane taking off, those hard pressed NBTC staff may not have got around to seeing, researching and sending the alert.
Even where the alert is passed to the border force staff at the airport, supervisors, themselves under pressure, may conclude that they don’t have enough staff to deal and of course the passenger is travelling in the right direction; out of the UK.
Doubtless Theresa May’s advisors will point out that an imposter or indeed any passenger would still have to get any device or weapon through airport security. That is true but of course the bad guys (or girls) only have to be successful once and we know for a fact that hundreds, indeed probably thousands of UK residents have trained or fought abroad with terrorist groups; the ease of their travels of course has been made a walk in the park thanks to the absence of any meaningful scrutiny as they depart.
One major problem faced by UKBF customs officers as flights arrive in the UK is what is known as ‘rip on rip off’ tactics emanating from abroad. In countries notorious for the illegal exportation of controlled drugs, illicit packages are taken airside by corrupt airport staff usually concealed in a vehicle. That package is then placed on a flight either as baggage or handed to a passenger who has cleared security and is airside.
After the plane arrives in the UK, the package is collected by a corrupt airport worker and taken out via a staff exit or in a vehicle. Thoroughly checking all vehicles entering and leaving airports would of course be impractical in that it would bring the airport to a halt. There is however a strong case for specialised search teams to be created who would then be able to conduct thorough random searches of vehicle both entering and leaving major UK airports.
Rip on rip off smuggling is very much confined to high risk ‘drug countries’ located in the Caribbean, South America and Africa. Yet the principle of by passing security checks and placing illicit items on a flight could be applied at any airport including those in the UK; however where the item is an explosive device there would be no collection at the arrival airport as there would be no arrival.
A handover or collection at any UK airport involving a corrupt staff member, once the passenger had cleared security and is airside, would be a relatively simple matter. Surely therefore it would be desirable for the imposter or even the genuine passport holder who has evil intentions to have to pass through an embarkation control staffed by trained UKBF officers backed up by counter terrorist and now National Crime Agency police officers.
The panacea of an electronic, remote e-Borders/Border type System of course won’t bring individuals to notice who are not shown on any warning index. That needs old fashioned experience, nouse and detective work which in turn means officers on controls scrutinising departing passengers and passports.
UK FOG passport holders have a major advantage when travelling in that, on arrival in the UK, passing through passport control means that they are unlikely to be challenged or even spoken to by a UKBF officer due the fact that their passports were genuinely issued therefore no alert would show after that passport is ‘swiped.’ Indeed those UKBF officers are discouraged from holding up any passengers arriving with a British or European passport unless they have specific intelligence or an obvious forgery. Queues remain a priority.
Detection of FOG holders is often a matter of luck yet back in 2010, a successful Metropolitan Police operation in partnership with border force officers at Gatwick, Heathrow and in Jamaica had seen a rich harvest of arrested FOG passport holders both in the UK and Jamaica. The successful detection technique, perfected by a Metropolitan Police Detective Constable, caused concern in that Jamaica is not a country where fraud is endemic.
A meeting in January 2010 involving senior police and UK Border Agency officers together with those from the ‘front line’ raised concerns that problems with Jamaican nationals illegally in possession of UK passports meant, in turn, that the sheer volume of imposters in respect of all other nationalities was likely to be off the scale and hugely resource intensive.
Officers in UKBA were later to tell me that the prospect of opening a can of worms in respect of UK FOG passport holders meant that no further meetings on the subject were held either within UKBA or involving both police and UKBA. It was and is a classic case of the Home Office holding their hands over their ears whilst saying ‘we don’t want to hear this.’
Several months later the Met Police expert was instructed to stop his work on FOG’s despite the fact that there had been no handover to UKBA officers and indeed the technique required simultaneous access to a number of databases including those of police not normally available to those outside the police service.
The detective constable ignored the instruction on the grounds that no arrangements had been made by his senior managers to have his work continued and weeks later he was then threatened with disciplinary action.
Thus if you are a UK FOG passport holder, unless this article makes a real difference, you will continue to have a relatively easy run through what for you are virtually non-existent border controls.
On the other hand if you are a terrorist or potential terrorist reading this, take care, as it just might be that the Malaysian tragedy, the comments by Richard Noble and this article, could encourage Theresa May and her staff to reintroduce more efficient controls, stop reducing the effective numbers of counter terrorist officers at airports and introduce an effective system of random searching in respect of vehicles entering and leaving the airside sections of major UK airports.
One fact that can be counted on is that any stiffening of border controls will be greeted with horror by the airport authorities. Passengers delayed, even briefly, means less money spent in airside retail outlets. They should note however that when embarkation controls were in operation they were leisurely affairs with none of the queuing problems endured by arriving passengers.
The costs of implementing measures to strengthen border controls and indeed airport security would cost just a few million pounds per annum; a pin prick compared to the cash thrown at e-Borders. It is to be hoped that Theresa may will read this and conclude that it would now be political suicide not to do so after all ‘they’ only need to be lucky once !!!
ABOUT CHRIS HOBBS, FORMER METROPOLITAN POLICE OFFICER
Mr Hobbs is a former Metropolitan Police Officer who retired from the force just days before the 2011 riots after 32 years service. About one third of that service was spent in UK and Jamaican airports working as a Special Branch Officer and for Operation Trident.
As a keen football spectator in his youth, he made a study of football hooliganism and as a young Sergeant he submitted a paper to Met Police Senior Officers which contained suggestions in relation to policing what had become a national problem. He was awarded £5,000 for that original initiative. From the force suggestion scheme for that report and the changes made are still in place today. Hobbs also contributed to a training programme for Met Officers in relation to ground safety in the aftermath of the Bradford fire and Heysel.
Between 2000 and 2010, he worked for Operation Trident and headed up a small airport unit. Hobbs spent a total of 18 months during this period undertaking a series of deployments to Jamaica. Shortly after his retirement he was presented with a ceremonial sword and Saropa by the UK’s largest Sikh temple for work done within the Asian community during periods of tension in the 1990’s.
Since leaving the Met, Hobbs’ views aired on Sky and BBC London during the riots seemed have no doubt heralded a number of TV appearances on Sky, BBC London, BBC News 24, Al Jazeera, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio 5, LBC, and Radio 4. The most recent was on BBC’s The One Show. The subjects included, border controls, the Olympics, street gangs, Jamaica, David Miranda, Mark Duggan, football related violence and dubious police crime figures.
A recent article by him on police whistleblowing which received much favourable comments can be viewed at: http://www.guerillapolicy.org/policing/2014/03/02/silence-is-golden-why-officers-will-refrain-from-speaking-out
Hobbs is a trustee of a small charity which he co-founded alongside some of his colleagues whilst serving in Jamaica which has enabled some of the poorest Jamaican children remain in education. He is just about completing a book on his times in Jamaica which although generally light-hearted contains several chapters which are a damning indictment of border controls.
Vigilance learnt there is already a publisher’s interest and further interest from two national newspapers in the finished article.
Mr Hobbs is also an ageing DJ which is purely a hobby.
Hobbs who usually does not charge his clients says: “There is no charge for friends or charity events and any fees go towards our own charity as above. I am in constant touch with former colleagues in both airport counter terrorist (formerly Special Branch) units and UK Border Force Officers and I know the views expressed in the piece are identical with those hard pressed front line Officers.”
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