At 2pm on 14 December 2002, Helen Steel, a well-known leftwing campaigner, and her parents landed at Auckland airport for a family holiday. It had been a tiring journey, so they were irritated when they were delayed leaving the airport for an hour.<\/p>\n
What they did not know until recently is the reason for that delay. Their arrival had triggered a secret warning on Steel that had been put in place by police three weeks earlier. It prompted customs to carry out a discreet search of her luggage.<\/p>\n
Steel\u2019s sister collected the family and drove them to her home 90 minutes away. Again, none of them knew surveillance officers employed by New Zealand police were tailing them.<\/p>\n
Nor did they know that over the next few weeks, police officers tracked their movements and took photographs of them. One picture was of them leaving her sister\u2019s home.<\/p>\n
Details of this extraordinary operation came in yet another damning disclosure to the spycops public inquiry, which is examining the conduct of undercover police officers who spied on more than 1,000 political groups between 1968 and at least 2010<\/a>.<\/p>\n The inquiry has heard in recent weeks how senior Scotland Yard officers arranged for the police force of a country 11,000 miles away to covertly monitor Steel on two of her trips there as part of a calculated plan to protect a secret.<\/p>\n They feared that Steel was about to expose one of their undercover officers. The spy, John Dines, had had a sexual relationship with Steel for two years without disclosing his real identity to her. When he mysteriously vanished from her life, she set about tracking him down.<\/p>\n John Dines seen operating undercover at a Greenpeace stall in the 1990s at an anti-McDonald\u2019s event. Photograph: Spycops inquiry<\/p>\n As well as the surveillance, the senior officers authorised the expenditure of \u00a32.5m of public funds to relocate Dines to ensure that Steel did not find him. This included helping him buy a new house.<\/p>\n On Friday, Steel, giving evidence to the inquiry, said the surveillance and use of taxpayers\u2019 money was an abuse of state powers to prevent her discovering how a police officer had \u201cdeceived and sexually exploited\u201d her.<\/p>\n She was \u201creally angry\u201d that the Metropolitan police<\/a> had put her and her family under surveillance, adding the police also wanted to protect an \u201cillegitimate and undemocratic\u201d operation, in which undercover officers such as Dines spied on tens of thousands of political campaigners across four decades.<\/p>\n On Tuesday, Paul Condon, the former Met commissioner, admitted at the inquiry that Scotland Yard had failed to control the officers<\/a> and their managers who committed \u201chorrendous abuses\u201d.<\/p>\n These included monitoring grieving families such as the parents of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence<\/a>, who were campaigning about police wrongdoing, stealing the identities of dead children<\/a>, and lying in court<\/a>.<\/p>\n When Dines started the relationship with Steel in 1990, she believed she had fallen in love with an ideal man in what felt like an \u201cidyllic\u201d relationship. He told her he wanted to have six children and spend the rest of his life with her.<\/p>\n But in 1992, he disappeared from her life after claiming that he was having a mental breakdown. It was a lie to enable him to end his deployment.<\/p>\n Steel has described how Dines had subjected her to a \u201csadistic and callous psychological torture over a prolonged period\u201d. For six months, he had given her contradictory signals \u2013 repeatedly going missing, claiming that he could not handle their relationship and life, before returning and proclaiming his love for her.<\/p>\n After he finally disappeared, Steel was devastated and also fearful that her missing partner might have been suicidal. She started to investigate who he really was as \u201cnone of it made any sense\u201d.<\/p>\n It took Steel nearly two decades to establish, by fitting together disparate clues and visiting many archives, that he had been an undercover spy.<\/p>\n Documents before the inquiry now show that, while Steel was trying to trace Dines, Scotland Yard was secretly tracking her progress, logging, for example, how she had visited people who turned out to his relatives and who she was phoning.<\/p>\n At one point, in 1995, police recorded that \u201can examination of telephone calls from Steel\u2019s home also shows her to have been in contact\u201d with the chambers of Keir Starmer, then a barrister supporting progressive causes.<\/p>\n He was giving her legal advice as she had become a defendant in the celebrated McLibel case. In the longest trial in English history<\/a>, she and another campaigner were sued by the fast food chain, McDonald\u2019s, in a David and Goliath battle.<\/p>\n The inquiry has previously heard how Dines spied on Starmer<\/a> and accessed the confidential details of his legal advice. In December 2002, Steel flew to New Zealand with her parents to visit her sister and friends for about two months.<\/p>\n Dave Morris and Helen Steel outside the high court in London at an appeal hearing in the McLibel case, which became the longest trial in English history. Photograph: PA Images\/Alamy<\/p>\n At the behest of Scotland Yard, New Zealand police put them under surveillance and reported back. One police report set out the measures that would be put in place to \u201cmonitor Steel\u2019s movements whilst in New Zealand \u2026 Thus far Steel has done little other than local shopping with her sister.\u201d It added \u201curgent inquiries are in place to fully identify\u201d her sister and family.<\/p>\n Steel said that, although it was not the primary purpose of her visit, she also contacted people she believed could have been relatives of her former boyfriend to see if they would tell her where he now was.<\/p>\n As part of his fake identity while he worked undercover, Dines had said he had previously lived in New Zealand for part of his life.<\/p>\n What Steel did not know at the time was that Dines was nearby \u2013 he had moved to New Zealand in 1995 after quitting the Metropolitan police and was working as a barrister in Auckland.<\/p>\n Fearing that she would locate Dines, the senior police officers agreed to fund the costs of moving him and his family to Australia quickly.<\/p>\n The \u00a32.5m bill included the cost of subsidising the purchase of a house in Sydney, which was four times more expensive than his New Zealand home, and compensating him for his lost income as a barrister.<\/p>\n The senior officers justified the expenditure on the grounds that Steel posed a threat to Dines. She rejected this claim as \u201cmalicious lies\u201d, adding that the real reason was to protect Dines from bad publicity.<\/p>\n The officers claim they did not know that Dines had had a sexual relationship with Steel, and did not question why she was so intent on finding him. It is a claim that has been dismissed as implausible by campaigners and lawyers at the inquiry, who point out that the undercover officers routinely formed sexual relationships with women they were spying on.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At 2pm on 14 December 2002, Helen Steel, a well-known leftwing campaigner, and her parents landed at Auckland…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":544308,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,43,139,69],"class_list":["post-544307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544307\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/544308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}