12
Once Kemp had completed his marathon production run in his basement lab in the manor house, he and Bott swiftly concealed the evidence. Under the floor tiles in their kitchen, about a foot down, they hid a plastic box containing 1.3 kilos of LSD crystals, the equivalent of thirteen million microdots. In the garden, they buried two brown bottles beneath the compost heap by their potato crop; inside them was another 120 grams of crystal, roughly 1.2 million microdots. To finish the job, they smashed up their lab equipment and assorted hardware, and dumped the remains down a disused well.
Also concealed in the cottage were the various component parts of a crude tableting machine. However, Kemp and Bott were in no rush to convert their LSD. That could wait. More pressing was their deteriorating relationship with Solomon, who had agreed to put their product on the international market. To do this, Solomon had secured the services of Isaac Sheni, an Amsterdam-based Israeli in his early 30s who also maintained an address in north London. At some point, he is alleged to have bought the Microdot Gang’s acid for sale on the continent, which may be why Solomon knew him. They could have run into each other socially in London. But exactly how they got together is anyone’s guess. Sheni was a mysterious character. Known to law-enforcement agencies on both sides of the Atlantic as a major dealer in LSD, hashish and heroin, Sheni always managed to stay out of their reach. There were persistent rumours that he actually worked for Mossad – the infamous Israeli secret service – either moving drugs on their behalf or reporting on his business associates. During this period, one of Mossad’s strategies for undermining its enemies was to encourage their military personnel to take drugs. Operation Blade, which began in 1968 and ran for ten years, involved Mossad agents buying hashish in Lebanon and then employing dealers near Egyptian army bases to sell it to the soldiers inside them.
With Sheni on board, Kemp and Solomon agreed on a price: Solomon would pay Kemp $500 per thousand microdots. Unfortunately, they agreed on little else. The lingering animosity over the Gerald Thomas affair – Kemp blamed Solomon for bringing him into the gang, an accusation Solomon thought was grossly unfair – bubbled to the surface and their new partnership was in danger of collapsing before it had even begun. Luckily, there was an old mutual friend who was prepared to act as bridge between them and be their acid middle-man.
Dr Mark Campbell Tcharney had met Solomon and Kemp in Cambridge in 1969 when he arrived there to study medicine. The son of a diplomat, he attended grammar school before going up to university. After graduating in 1972, he moved to the capital, lived in squats and communes and completed his medical training at the East London Hospital. In 1974, he bought an isolated farmhouse for £25,000 that was about half an hour away from Kemp and Bott’s cottage. The property had four acres of land and was perched on an exposed hilltop, screened by trees, with just a narrow lane leading up to it. Tcharney moved in with his partner Dr Hilary Rees and operated out of Shrewsbury Hospital as a part-time locum. Naturally, Bott and the two of them had a lot in common, especially once Bott began working as a doctor in the Accident and Emergency Department, Bronglais Hospital, Aberystwyth; she could swap stories with them at the end of a long shift.
Other than seeing Tcharney and his partner, which they did frequently, Kemp and Bott’s social contacts were limited to their nearest neighbour, a couple with a young daughter: according to her, they were ‘very friendly with Kemp and Bott, especially with Christine’ and she recalled that, though Kemp was ‘a little more reserved’ and ‘tended to stay in the background’, Bott ‘would often be walking past on her way to the mountain, sometimes walking her goats, and would always stop to chat to us’.
As a result of Kemp and Bott’s low-key lifestyle, the team of Lee’s officers watching them had little to report to their boss. Lee had set up surveillance on the cottage while Kemp was still commuting back and forth to his manor house lab. Keen to get eyeballs on them as quickly as possible, Lee took on a cold damp cottage with no sanitation, water or heating that was available as a summer rental, 200 yards from Kemp and Bott. Four officers, posing as fishermen on holiday, moved in for a two-week stay. As an observation post it left a lot to be desired. There were no windows facing Kemp and Bott’s place. To overcome this handicap, they drilled a small hole through the slate roof and poked a telescope out of it, which allowed an officer – who was perched on the top rung of a ladder positioned by the loft entrance – to peer through the other end. At night, they were restricted to taking note of any vehicles entering or leaving the property, a thankless and pointless task. When the fishermen’s time was up, two sets of ‘married couples’ took up residence and continued the watching brief. Frustrated by the limited views on offer, Lee opted to try and get a microphone near to Kemp and Bott’s cottage. Lacking the necessary gear, Lee got permission from the Home Office to visit a secret research centre and walked out with £6,000 worth of state-of-the-art surveillance kit: motorised cameras, lenses, telescopes, miniaturised microphones, transmitters and receivers.
Lee was hoping to take advantage of the fact that most evenings Kemp and Bott sat out on their makeshift porch and talked for hours. Wearing soft-soled shoes and black clothes, Lee and another officer crept onto Kemp and Bott’s land at 3 a.m. one night with the aim of planting a bug by a dry stonewall about 10ft away from where they sat and chatted, but as Lee stealthily paced out the distance he noticed the bedroom window was wide open: the slightest noise might wake the sleeping couple. Lee retreated carefully to the wall where his colleague was waiting with the listening device. After a few moments’ cautious digging and scraping the rocky earth to make a hole with their trowels, the fear of being overheard became too much to bear and they retreated. Undeterred, Lee decided to try again the next day. The best moment to strike would be while Bott was delivering Kemp to his basement lab, giving them roughly an hour and a half before she returned. An observer posted on a nearby hill watched for Bott’s Renault, while a female officer sat in a car ready to block her arrival if needed. As it was, Lee and his team-mate got in and out with plenty of time to spare, leaving the bug where they’d intended to the night before. That evening, as Kemp and Bott settled on their porch, Lee and his colleagues huddled round their receiver waiting to hear voices but all they picked up was bird song. By mistake, they’d hidden a microphone that lacked the range they needed to pick up anything useful.
Meanwhile, a few miles away at Llanddewi Brefi, two of Lee’s undercover hippies were trying to form a relationship with Smiles. For accommodation, Lee furnished them with a used transit van, which they decorated with appropriately psychedelic colours, images and slogans. Inside, they made do with a couple of old mattresses, some blankets and a primus stove. They had fake driving licences and criminal records for drug offences registered at Bristol Crown Court. Getting a fix on Smiles was not a problem. Something of a local celebrity, he was loved for his flamboyance and care-free attitude to money, lighting cigarettes with £5 notes, dishing out whiskey to pensioners, giving random gifts – like the watch off his own wrist – and stuffing charity boxes with cash. The undercover officers hung out in Smiles’ favourite haunts – his local, the New Inn; the Railway and the Red Lion in Tregaron; and the Black Lion in Lampeter, where he bought champagne by the bucket-load – but struggled to get close to him. Smiles was wary of fresh faces and kept well clear of them. Realising it was going to take time to land him, the hippy cops began to make themselves known on the local scene, hoping that word of their authenticity would get back to Smiles. On 21 June 1976, Midsummer’s Eve, they attended a 10 p.m. screening of the cult movie Performance (1970) at the village hall in Pontrhydfendigaid which, according to one of them, was ‘like a scene out of Woodstock’. Around 100–150 hippies showed up for the film. The room was thick with hashish smoke. Joints were in constant circulation and a young woman with flowers in her hair offered them some magic mushrooms.
Earlier that month, Lee had shifted his surveillance of Kemp and Bott’s cottage to a new site. Aside from the inconvenience of the vacation rental, the fortnightly turn-around of pairs of couples had hit the buffers: there were no more female officers available. Lee chose Bronwydd, a 400-year-old stone-built farmhouse half way up a mountain with two bedrooms, which was available to rent for £10 per week. It was 2 miles from Kemp and Bott, and had outbuildings where the team could conceal multiple vehicles. The interior, however, was even less welcoming than the previous location. When it rained, the kitchen flooded. The only fireplace had a chimney breast made of woven willow brands that produced so much smoke and soot that the front door had to be kept open when it was lit.
In order for his officers to stay there for the long haul, Lee invented a cover story and gave himself the lead role. He was a Mr Calvert, the owner of an import–export business and keen ornithologist who was hoping to recover from a traumatic divorce in peaceful and tranquil surroundings. Though primarily there for relaxation, Mr Calvert intended to continue running his firm and would be receiving visits from colleagues as well as having his male assistant staying with him at the farmhouse. They moved in at the end of June and immediately set about spreading word of their arrival, putting down roots in the bar of the Talbot Hotel in Tregaron, where they spent every lunchtime and evening, and built a rapport with the landlord and his wife. Though none of the other regular punters questioned their identities, a few found them almost too convincing; two single men shacked up like that could mean only one thing – they were homosexual. Knowing that such an assumption might damage their prospects of being accepted by the community, Lee replaced his assistant with a female officer who acted as his secretary. She proved popular with the locals at the Talbot and it wasn’t long before she and Lee were taking part in raucous after-hours drinking sessions.
As they bedded in, Lee pondered another attempt at putting a microphone close to Kemp and Bott’s porch. The main obstacle was the formidable mountain that separated their cottage from his base at Bronwydd farmhouse and blocked any signals from travelling directly between them. To overcome this problem, Lee and his team would have to plant a receiver on top of the mountain, which could pick up Kemp and Bott’s conversations and relay them back to Bronwydd, which was 600 yards away from the peak. Working from the top down, they successfully buried the cable, but woke the next day to find 100 yards of it had been uprooted and destroyed by hungry sheep. When the same thing happened again, they laid the cable above ground by lacing it through wire fencing. This painstaking task was performed in scorching heat and took six days of sweat and toil; by the end, they were wearing nothing but swimming costumes, layers of mosquito repellent, and gauntlets and wellington boots to guard against the adders that nestled in the thick fern that covered the lower levels of the mountain.
Compared to that, hiding the bug close to Kemp and Bott’s cottage was child’s play. With everything ready, Lee and his exhausted colleagues sat round their receiver, switched it on and were struck by the stirring sounds of a Welsh male voice choir. Switching it on and off again made no difference. All they heard were the choir’s harmonious voices. As before, sheep were the culprits. They’d chewed through the cable’s insulation and turned the mountain-top transmitter into a giant aerial that was faithfully broadcasting Radio Wales.
From the beginning of Operation Julie, Lee was convinced that Kemp was in charge of producing the LSD for a network that had a central hub in London, where the as-yet-unidentified ‘Henry’ had overall control of supply and distribution. Supporting his theory was material given to him by the CDIU. In April 1974, a young Englishman was arrested on arrival in Australia with 1,500 microdots. In exchange for a lighter sentence, he told his captors that he’d got the acid from the Last Resort restaurant in Fulham, though it had originally come from Wales. In response, the CDIU tapped the premises’ phone and raided it, but found nothing.
To help follow these leads, Lee would have normally turned to the Metropolitan Police and its drug squad. However, Lee had kept them away from Operation Julie for a reason; they were riddled with corruption and malpractice. Standard procedure involved finding a dealer, protecting their supply in return for a slice of their profits and information about their rivals, who would then get busted, giving officers the chance to sell on some of the drugs seized. Higher up the food chain, the dynamic former head of the drug squad and several of his key personnel had been hauled through the courts for overzealous and criminal behaviour. One of the CDIU officers who’d gone to Canada to speak with Gerald Thomas was later convicted of accepting bribes from pornographers while working for the Obscene Publications Squad. As far as the Microdot Gang were concerned, Lee had word from a trusted informant that they had friends inside Scotland Yard.
However, he had another option: HM Customs & Excise, the organisation that policed the country’s borders and was on the frontline of the war on drugs. To tackle the smuggling of contraband into Britain, HM Customs & Excise had established the Investigations Branch in 1946. By the time Lee got in touch, it had been renamed the Investigations Division and had a dedicated drugs taskforce with six separate teams comprising sixty men and two women. The first thing it did was confirm Lee’s doubts about the Metropolitan Police’s reliability, telling him that ‘substantial corrupt payments had been made to London police officers for protection by the LSD distributors’. Next, the Investigations Division gave him a file they’d compiled on Russell Stephen Spenceley, based on a report they’d been given by a recently retired Thames Valley Drug Squad detective. In it, Spenceley was named as one of the key players in an LSD ring operating between London and Reading circa 1971–72.
Intrigued, Lee invited the former Thames Valley cop in for a chat. Apart from what Lee had already gathered from his report, the source said that a man named ‘Henry’ was manufacturing the acid that Spenceley was selling. The son of a farmer, Spenceley had dropped out of Chelsea College of Science and Technology in 1969 and immersed himself in London’s drug scene, where he met and befriended Smiles. Todd recruited Spenceley as a dealer when he was in the process of moving the yellow capsules full of Solomon’s share of Kemp’s Paris acid. In 1972, Spenceley moved to Reading and on 14 March was convicted at Sandwich Magistrates’ Court for cannabis possession and fined £20. The following year he relocated to Woodstock in Oxfordshire and then, in 1974, to Glynrichet Fach, a small hill farm about 8 miles from Smiles in Llanddewi Brefi. While he ran a small car-delivery service, his wife worked as a nurse at a local care home. Once Todd got the Hampton Wick lab up and running, Spenceley was ready to take on his former role. He enjoyed the money the LSD business made him, travelled extensively – Europe, Scandinavia, Africa, America – and shared Todd’s love of high-class dining; Spenceley’s favourite restaurant was La Sorbonne in Oxford. Run by a French chef, La Sorbonne regularly made the Michelin Guide and was popular with local celebrities.
During the course of Lee’s conversation with the retired Thames Valley officer, he mentioned that a certain Andy Munro was linked to the all-important ‘Henry’. Lee recognised the name from the lists found on Gerald Thomas. He had his officers drop in on Munro’s Clapham flat, only to find his brother and girlfriend and no sign of the chemist. Clearly, all roads led to ‘Henry’ and Lee made it his priority to track him down. Several of Thomas’ anecdotal remarks to his CDIU interrogators hinted that the connection between ‘Henry’ and Solomon and Kemp was Cambridge. Two of Lee’s detectives combed through the court records for the city and the whole county going back ten years but came up with nothing. They talked to members of the Cambridge Drug Squad, who had only vague memories of Solomon and a bloke called ‘Henry’ – though one did recall the arrest in Cheltenham of eight people from Cambridge for possession of cannabis. Lee’s officers went straight to Cheltenham, rifled through the records, and found what they were looking for. In July 1970, Henry Barclay Todd was part of the group that was caught and then acquitted. Not quite daring to believe that this was their man, they asked round the station for any further details and were rewarded with the revelation that Todd was accompanied by a young American woman – Solomon’s daughter.
Included in the local county court records of the case was a postal address for Todd in the East End of London. After sitting on it for a week and talking to the other residents in the building, it was obvious that Todd had not lived there for years. A thorough trawl through the relevant public records revealed that Todd always used that address on official documents, with one exception. On an application to have his young daughter added to his passport – dated 20 March 1975 – Todd had supplied a contact number that did not match the East End address. It was the phone number of his flat at 29 Fitzgeorge Avenue in Earl’s Court. Within a few hours, a surveillance van was parked outside. That evening, they watched as Todd drove up, got out of his car and entered the building.
By the spring of 1975, Ronald Stark was adjusting to life at Don Bosco prison in Pisa. Deploying his near-perfect Italian, Stark got a job with the prison barber – which put him in a position to hear all the latest gossip – and used his language skills to help other inmates with their legal documents. Having found his feet, Stark proceeded to forge an alliance with high-ranking members of the Red Brigades, a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group that was engaged in a bitter struggle with the Italian state and had gone from humble beginnings to achieve national and international notoriety. The Red Brigades were formed in the autumn of 1970 by three sociology students who had experienced the pitched battles between radicals, striking workers and the police that had erupted across Italy in the late 1960s. The Red Brigades’ founders felt that the traditional parties of the Left were too wedded to the system to contemplate revolution. It was down to them to defend the proletariat, while hitting the capitalists where it hurt.
At first, the Red Brigades focused on sowing discord at the various Fiat car plants, factories and subsidiaries in Turin that together accounted for half the city’s workforce. Industrial relations were fraught and Fiat hired known fascists to try and control their employees. The Red Brigades organised rallies, handed out leaflets, set fire to some cars belonging to much hated managers and planted firebombs under Pirelli trucks. These early actions were followed by their first exercise in kidnapping. On 3 March 1972, they seized their target – an executive at the Italian subsidiary of Siemens – and released him twenty minutes later. Between February and December 1973, they carried out three more kidnappings: a manager at Alfa Romeo; someone from Fiat’s personnel department; and the provincial secretary of a fascist trade union. Having gagged him, shaved his head and removed his trousers, they tied him to a pole next to the gates of the Fiat factory and left him to rot.
Up to this point, none of their captives were held for more than eight hours and none of them were particularly newsworthy individuals. This changed when the Red Brigades grabbed Genoa’s right-wing attorney general on 18 April 1974 and kept him for thirty-five days. They interrogated him, put him in front of a revolutionary tribunal and demanded the release of eight of their comrades. The whole incident was extensively covered by the press and prompted a massive crackdown. Though most of the Red Brigades were already underground after a series of raids and arrests the previous year, many of them were flushed out of hiding and joined the growing number of them languishing behind bars.
Stark went about winning the confidence of the Red Brigades prisoners by talking up his connections to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). This line of approach was guaranteed to impress the Red Brigades as they regarded the PFLP as both an inspiration and brothers-in-arms. The PFLP had emerged in the wake of the Six Day War, June 1967, a stunning victory for the Israeli army over the combined forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. This had caused thousands of Palestinians to join the exodus that had begun during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, when around three-quarters of a million were driven from their homes and into exile. While most went to Jordan, around 100,000 entered Lebanon.
The PFLP was a largely independent group within the PLO – which had been founded three years earlier – and combined Marxist-Leninism with Arab nationalism. In their opening statement, the PFLP declared that they were at ‘the beginning of a new stage of revolutionary work in which the masses would assume responsibility for leading the fight against imperialism and Zionism through revolutionary violence’.
To carry out actions on an international stage, the PFLP created a Foreign Operations cadre with bases in Jordan – where members of West Germany’s Red Army Faction and the Roaming Hashish Rebels went to train. Aside from hit-and-run attacks on targets within Israel, the Foreign Operations unit specialised in hijacking passenger planes. Their campaign began in Rome on 23 July 1968 when they boarded El Al flight 426, diverted it to Algiers and kept it there for thirty-nine days. The next two attacks were at Athens and Zurich airports, where planes were assaulted on the runway, causing two deaths. On 29 August 1969, they took control of TWA flight 840 at Los Angeles International airport and held it hostage for forty-four days. Six months later, they opened fire on a passenger bus at Munich airport, killing one and wounding eleven. Then, on 6 September 1970, they pulled off their most audacious heist yet, the simultaneous seizure of three flights to New York. A Pan Am jet from Brussels airport was diverted to Cairo; in Frankfurt, a TWA plane was seized and rerouted to Jordan; and a Swiss Air flight from Zurich suffered the same fate. All three were blown up a few days later. Not content with this haul, the PFLP attempted to hijack a British Airways plane at Heathrow on 9 September, but never got off the ground.
On 17 September, the King of Jordan ordered his troops to uproot and expel the Palestinian guerrilla forces in his country, which by now amounted to thousands of fighters, mostly congregated in refugee camps. The activities of the Palestinian resistance had provoked Israel to repeatedly invade the monarch’s territory, and its calls for proletarian revolution threatened to undermine his hold on power, while the recent hijacking extravaganza only added to the pressure on him to act, as did the fact that the PFLP had already tried to kill him twice. Over the course of an eleven-day battle – that became known as Black September – Jordanian soldiers killed anywhere between 2,000 and 20,000 Palestinians. Many more fled into Lebanon, swelling their numbers there to about 400,000, roughly one-sixth of the population. The surviving guerrillas went with them. The PFLP established its HQ in Beirut and located its military bases and ammunition dumps in the Bekaa Valley, home of the Lebanese hashish trade and close to the cannabis fields owned by Al-Masri, Stark’s former business partner.
Because of his frequent trips to see Al-Masri, Stark would have learnt about the PFLP’s presence in the area. There is also the possibility that Stark got to know them because groups like the PFLP regarded drug smuggling as a useful source of income. In the spring of 1971, eight men from Lebanon – who claimed to be working for the PLO – were arrested at Heathrow airport with eight suitcases containing 145 kilos of hash. Some years later, a US Senate Committee report stated that ‘the PLO has been involved in worldwide drug trafficking’ selling its merchandise in ‘Britain, Sweden, West Germany, Canada and the United States’.
There was also a considerable overlap between drug running and gun running. The same suppliers often made use of the same routes and personnel, and the two commodities were interchangeable; drugs were exchanged for weapons and vice versa. As the Red Brigades were increasingly in need of guns, Stark’s offer to connect them to the PFLP would have been extremely enticing, and there is evidence that Stark was not simply telling them what they wanted to hear. During 1970, while Stark was spending chunks of time in the UK, Special Branch – who were responsible for countering domestic terrorism and political subversion – ran a check on him. It concluded that he was buying and selling guns for the PLO, a subject that Stark had raised with Steve Abrams, his host at Hilton Hall. Abrams remembered a ‘conversation’ between them about the ‘PLO and arms deals’ that seemed to him to be more than just idle banter.
Overall, Stark gave the Red Brigades inmates enough reasons to invite him into their inner circle. The importance of this union for Stark’s future increased when his new friends were joined by Renato Curcio, their leader and founder member. Curcio was initially taken prisoner in the autumn of 1974, but on 18 February 1975 he was busted out of jail by his wife and comrade, Mara Cagol. After two of her team, dressed in workmen’s overalls, cut the prison phone-lines, they broke in brandishing machine-guns and liberated Curcio. Having freed her husband, Cagol was trapped by police in a remote farmhouse on 5 June, wounded and executed on the spot. Curcio, meanwhile, evaded the authorities until 18 January 1976. Holed up in a flat in Milan, he fought a twenty-two-minute gun battle before surrendering.
Stark was introduced to Curcio and soon won him round by showing him a secure cryptographic system for encoding radio messages. In return, Curcio told him about a plan to assassinate Judge Francesco Coco, who was due to preside over the trial of the Red Brigades prisoners. Stark spied an opportunity. He was scheduled to go to court himself in July and information like this might work in his favour. Through a prison guard Stark arranged a meeting with officers from the Interior Ministry’s anti-terrorism squad, who passed what Stark told them to Pisa’s state prosecutor. However, Stark’s powers of persuasion were not enough to convince the prosecutor; he mistrusted Stark’s motives, questioned his credibility and disregarded his warnings. But on 8 June 1976, Judge Coco met his end. Returning home from work, he entered the side-street that led to his front door with his bodyguard beside him. As they walked along, three men armed with automatic weapons appeared from beneath some arches ahead of them, walked on a few paces, turned and discharged their magazines, instantly killing the judge and his guard. Though Stark had been proved right – and the authorities were sufficiently worried about his safety to transfer him to Bologna jail – it made no difference when he stood trial a few weeks later. Realising his gambit had failed, Stark declared that he was a political prisoner and refused to recognise the court’s right to try him. Stark was sentenced to fourteen years in jail and fined $60,000.
Over a year had passed since Stark’s arrest, yet at no point had the US government expressed any interest in extraditing him. Aside from the indictments for conspiracy to produce and distribute LSD that concerned Stark’s Belgian lab and his collaboration with Billy Hitchcock, Nick Sands and the Brotherhood, the Feds were keen to question him about his part in the hashish oil trade. On 6 August 1975, the DEA in Los Angeles issued a warrant against him for organising an amphetamine ring. Five weeks later a New York City court found him guilty of making false statements on a passport application. Despite all these outstanding charges, nobody was in any hurry to make Stark pay for his crimes. Apparently, the US authorities were quite content to leave Stark exactly where he was.