At 2pm on 14 December 2002, Helen Steel, a well-known leftwing campaigner, and her parents landed at Auckland airport for a family holiday. They were delayed leaving the airport for an hour, unaware that their arrival had triggered a secret warning on Steel placed by police three weeks earlier, prompting customs to discreetly search her luggage. Surveillance officers employed by New Zealand police tailed them to her sister's home, tracking their movements and taking photographs over the following weeks.
Details of this operation emerged at the spycops public inquiry, which is examining undercover police officers who spied on more than 1,000 political groups between 1968 and at least 2010. Senior Scotland Yard officers arranged for New Zealand police to covertly monitor Steel during two trips to protect the secret that undercover officer John Dines had had a sexual relationship with her for two years without disclosing his identity. When Dines vanished, Steel set about tracking him down.
Costly relocation and surveillance
Senior officers authorised £2.5m of public funds to relocate Dines, including helping him buy a new house, to ensure Steel did not find him. On Friday, Steel told the inquiry the surveillance and use of taxpayers' money was an abuse of state powers to prevent her discovering how a police officer had “deceived and sexually exploited” her. She said she was “really angry” that the Metropolitan police had put her and her family under surveillance, adding the police also wanted to protect an “illegitimate and undemocratic” operation.
On Tuesday, former Met commissioner Paul Condon admitted the inquiry that Scotland Yard had failed to control officers and managers who committed “horrendous abuses”, including monitoring grieving families, stealing the identities of dead children, and lying in court.
The relationship and its aftermath
When Dines started the relationship with Steel in 1990, she believed she had fallen in love with an ideal man in an “idyllic” relationship. He told her he wanted to have six children and spend the rest of his life with her. In 1992, he disappeared after claiming he was having a mental breakdown – a lie to end his deployment. Steel described how Dines subjected her to “sadistic and callous psychological torture over a prolonged period”, giving contradictory signals for six months before finally vanishing.
Steel was devastated and feared her missing partner might be suicidal. She began investigating who he really was, spending nearly two decades fitting together clues and visiting archives to establish he had been an undercover spy. Documents show that while Steel traced Dines, Scotland Yard secretly tracked her progress, logging her visits to his relatives and phone contacts.
Surveillance in New Zealand and relocation costs
In 1995, police recorded that Steel had been in contact with the chambers of Keir Starmer, then a barrister supporting progressive causes, who was giving her legal advice in the McLibel case. The inquiry heard Dines spied on Starmer and accessed confidential details of his legal advice.
In December 2002, Steel flew to New Zealand with her parents for about two months. At Scotland Yard's behest, New Zealand police put them under surveillance. One police report stated measures to “monitor Steel’s movements whilst in New Zealand … Thus far Steel has done little other than local shopping with her sister.” It added “urgent inquiries are in place to fully identify” her sister and family.
Steel said that, although not the primary purpose, she contacted people she believed could be relatives of her former boyfriend. Dines had said he previously lived in New Zealand as part of his fake identity. Unbeknownst to Steel, Dines was nearby – he had moved to New Zealand in 1995 after quitting the Met and worked as a barrister in Auckland. Fearing she would locate him, senior police officers funded moving him and his family to Australia quickly. The £2.5m bill included subsidising a house in Sydney, four times more expensive than his New Zealand home, and compensating him for lost income.
Senior officers justified the expenditure on the grounds that Steel posed a threat to Dines. She rejected this as “malicious lies”, adding the real reason was to protect Dines from bad publicity. The officers claimed they did not know Dines had had a sexual relationship with Steel, a claim dismissed as implausible by campaigners and lawyers at the inquiry, noting that undercover officers routinely formed sexual relationships with women they spied on.
