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Crime at London Airport: part three

by Mark Rowe

A Home Office file at the National Archives at Kew in west London; HO 287/1908, sets out how crime was rife at London Airport – the former name for Heathrow – around 1970, as workers on a petty or large scale robbed commercial freight customers and flying passengers alike. As a sign of how the conditions were the same in North America, the Home Office had asked the British Embassy in Washington in October 1971 for reports by the Security Council at JFK Airport in New York. The US was proposing fencing, lighting, and nationwide standards of security for storage for high-value items and regulations for accountability for handling of cargo.

The Daily Mail of April 14, 1971 reported an IATA (International Air Transport Association) meeting. The association’s director of security and fraud prevention, Anthony Stephens, speaking for example about the growth in a ‘black market’ in stolen tickets; and bogus claims for losses, all showing the world’s growth in air travel.

As for Heathrow site security, widely reported in April 1971 was a man who claimed he strolled into a BOAC 747 hangar, wearing a blazer and flannels. That is, given the 13-mile perimeter, someone could jump over the fence. He was an electronics engineer who was attending an exhibition at a nearby hotel, who decided to visit Heathrow and claimed to find himself on the maintenance side.

One of Her Majesty’s inspectors of constabulary, Frank Williamson, in March 1971 reported after talking with Turner. With BOAC for six years, Turner was an ex-colonial policeman. Likewise the new BAA security officer was a 20-years former Met Police detective constable. Neither, Williamson pointed out, was qualified in crime prevention and airlines at the airport operated so differently that the men could not give a picture of crime prevention there. The airport had expanded over 20 years, but crime prevention had not kept pace. Intelligently, Williamson likened Heathrow to ‘a large industrial estate’. Williamson listed shortcomings: lack of information about crime as if affected a company; an apparent lack of interest at senior management level; an understandable incompatibility between commercial practice and tight security to prevent crime; a ‘marked fear’ in the minds of senior management about the attitude of trade unions, if their members were subject to ‘positive measures to prevent and detect crime’’. The probability of detecting theft and handling of stolen goods was ‘far too low …. as well as those who live off crime outside the perimeter’. A crime committee was meeting at Heathrow every six months, which Turner admitted had no value, ‘because it has no standing with the management of the various firms on the airport’.

Meanwhile, insurance underwriters were concerned by so many hijackings and attempted sabotage, that insurance rates were high and that the risks could become uninsurable.

An intriguing letter in the file is dated October 1970 from a colonial police and military veteran, FW Bird, living near Canterbury. He gave his cv; service in Palestine from 1936 to 1946; then in Bahrain, Kenya (against the Mau Mau rebellion), Cyprus (during the Greek nationalist Eoka rebellion in 1956 to 1960), Muscat, Rhodesia, and Aden; and from 1968 to 1970, as adviser to the Ministry of Justice of the Libyan republic. He gave a lecture to the ASIS international security association in London in 1970 on terrorism risks. Bird complained that UK government had been ‘extremely backward’ about terrorist sabotage of airlines, despite warnings over the years that ‘when terrorism had knocked us out of the colonies they would then knock us out both as a political force and as an industrial power even if these attacks had to be carried out in the UK’.

Bird saw a lack of liaison between UK government departments and with industry. In May 1971, Bird had been asked by an (unnamed) government department to look into an airline’s security at Heathrow. Bird was, he said, ‘more than horrified’, because the airline was ‘just sitting back, hoping it [a terrorist attack] will not happen’.

Bird suggested basic security requirements to be enforced ‘by Board of Trade decree’, ‘in the same way as the enforcement of airworthiness certificates are required to control the safety of aircraft and the qualifications of the persons who fly and service them’. Significantly, Bird was arguing for rules-based security rather than particular pieces of physical security or as he put it, basing security ‘on an extra strand of barbed wire and a gate pass’.

In August 1970, an international union of marine insurance cargo loss prevention committee report detailed questionnaire results. For example, firms were experimenting with shrink wrapping of cargo (taken for granted this century) or glueing cartons together on pallets, seeking to make pilfering harder. A plastic film, for instance, was damaged by water, and could be torn when handled. The Swiss were at work on loss prevention because of theft of their watches for export. While theft was common in air freight, security was of low priority, because the air freight margins were so low.

The international report did include Heathrow’s developing of a new ID photo-card with colour on each pass, to show which zones the holder was restricted to – another innovation taken for granted in modern security management.

Turner in a letter of August 1970 to the Home Office admitted ‘we are aware of our shortcomings which exist for a multiplicity of reasons’, including economics. A meeting including Turner and the Home Office in April 1970 noted a large number of people with criminal records were working at London Airport, and likened crime there to London’s docks. For example, registration of labour would be a ‘step in the right direction’. ID cards were not a final answer; as Turner pointed out, what if they were stolen, or forged? And the turnover of cargo drivers (needing ID) was high.

A US Airport Security Council report of April 1971 is in the file, about cargo theft and pilferage at New York’s three airports, described as ‘excessive’. Estimated losses were $10m of goods moved through the city’s airports each year. The report noted an ‘obvious hoodlum influence in airport trucking’, as unionised by the Teamsters. Airline had learned that ‘steadiness’ in the workforce was important in controlling crime; that is, permanent employees rather than casual or day labourers. As the report said, theft of cargo required complicity of watchmen or checkers; and they were stealing too. Housekeeping could remove temptation to steal. New York’s docks and airports, then, were working continuously against crime, but losses were rising; for example due to a harbour strike in New York in 1969, cargo sent instead to airports was piled up in unprotected areas; which invited thefts.

As air travel and freight in general would only keep on increasing, so security people such as Mr Turner would be forever trying to keep up.

Part one: Airport crime prevention ‘hopelessly inadequate’.

Part two: Ted Heath writes from Number 10.

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