UNLESS Neil Basu chooses to write his memoirs, perhaps one day someone else will write a novel based on his career.
After all, Jeffrey Archer’s bestselling new book, Nothing Ven tured, has been inspired by a real life officer from Scotland Yard. At 51, Basu is now in the third tier of command at the Metropolitan Police, having joined the force at 24 after taking a degree in economics from Nottingham University and solving a great many murder cases along the way.
“I am the son of an Indian immigrant,” he told Eastern Eye. “My dad was a doctor born and raised in Calcutta. He went to school there, qualified as a doctor there, came to this country in 1961; married a white woman, my mother, a Welsh woman who is still alive.”
Assistant commissioner Basu is the “National Lead for Counter Terrorism Policing in the UK” and works closely with Sir Andrew Parker, director general of MI5, to keep the nation safe. Basu’s portfolio “also includes responsibility for the investigation of war crime, Official Secrets Act offences and protection of VIPs, royals, embassies, parliament and aviation policing”.
One novel he has read in the past 12 months is Abir Mukherjee’s detective thriller set in Calcutta in 1919, A Rising Man, which introduces an unlikely partnership between Capt Sam Wyndham of the Imperial Police force and his Cambridge-educated assistant, Sgt Surendranath (“Surrender-not”) Banerjee. “I really loved it,” said Basu.
“I don’t get to read for pleasure very often but I really enjoyed it. I was hoping to get the author to sign it for me. I very much want to read his next book.” Basu has got some catching up to do since Mukherjee has already published two other books in the series – A Necessary Evil and Smoke and Ashes – and his fourth, Death in the East, is due out on November 14.
Although Basu’s job is to put terrorists and would be terrorists behind bars – he is not all that keen on the likes of Shamima Begum, the Bangladeshi origin jihadi bride, being let back into Britain – he feels it is much more important to start a national conversation on how to stop young people being groomed online, often by mentors whom they will never actually meet.
What is especially worrying is that “70-80 per cent” of those being drawn into terrorism are home grown Brits. “That is why ‘Prevent’ is so important,” he said, referring to the government’s strategy to stop young people being led astray.
“Terrorism can find you from wherever in the globe simply by inspiring somebody miles away or groups inspiring each other but who will never meet face to face.” The relevant figures are as follows: there are 20,000 people of interest to the police; 3,000 of them are watched; there are 500 police “operations” at any one time; and then it is reckoned there are still some 300 British origin fighters abroad.
“Those are the figures that the previous security minister Ben Wallace has used publicly,” Basu said. “The vast majority of people who are involved in plotting or successfully carry out an attack in this country are either born or raised here (in the UK).” He recalled an observation made a few years ago by the former Prime Minister David Cameron that “we have to stop this becoming a generational problem”.
“The reality is that problem is already with us,” is Basu’s opinion. His annus horribilis, which he would not like to see repeated, was 2017 “with multiple terrorist attacks”. Basu had just taken over as assistant commissioner when two Russians, later named as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, tried to poison ex-Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia at their home in Salisbury on 4 March 2017.
On 22 March 2017, 52-year-old Briton Khalid Masood mounted a terrorist attack in Westminster (five, including a policeman, killed, and 50 injured). On 3 June 2017, three perpetrators, Khuram Shazad Butt, Rachid Redouane and Rachid Redouane, carried out an attack in London Bridge (eight killed and 48 injured).
On 22 May 2017, there was the Manchester Arena suicide bombing by Salman Ramadan Abedi, a 22-year-old local man of Libyan ancestry (23 dead, 139 injured). “2017 had a very profound effect on me,” he said.
“People do ‘wonder why you volunteer to stay in the job’. I do that for one reason only and that is to try and make sure 2017 doesn’t happen again.” He steers journalists away from saying that compared with 2017, the last 12 months have been relatively quiet. “We never use the word ‘quiet’ in law enforcement,” he cut in.
“It always pre-empts a non-quiet period.” The public are blissfully unaware of the outrages that have not taken place – “we have now stopped 19”. The number of live investigations has risen from 500 a few years ago to the current level of 800. “We have disrupted the ones that have been plotted.”
He recalled that 20 years ago when he was training on a senior investigating officers’ course, he would motivate himself by repeating a quote attributed to J Edgar Hoover, the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in America. The latter had allegedly said that “there is no greater privilege than to be asked to investigate the death of another human being”.
Basu has come to think differently: “I work in counter terrorism now and disagree with that statement. I agreed with it when I was an officer investigating homicide but, of course, the greatest privilege is to prevent one.” He reckons “by far the most dangerous terrorist group in the world today remains Daesh (Islamic State) – even though they no longer have a caliphate and don’t control a geographical area.
What they are is an idea. And an idea that has been planted in the heads of a great many people worldwide. And that idea continues to spread by social and mainstream media and the work of independent radicalisers.” Also, when it comes to jihadi terrorism, “Al Qaeda never went away. And Al Qaeda has a reputation of playing a long game. So I would see a resurging Al Qaeda as a growing threat in the future as well.”
Basu is quite frank in arguing that letting back the likes of Shamima Begum into Britain involves taking an unacceptable risk although he also supports the law which states no one should be rendered stateless. In his mind, these are political decisions, “not decisions I get to make. From an operational point of view – rather than deal with an individual case – I will tell you what I think is the best policy for a country.”
He said: “For people who represent a threat to national security – if there is an option for them not to return – that’s the one this country should take. If there’s a capability of prosecuting them and for them to get the sentence they deserve for the crimes they have committed, as a police officer I would always support that.
“The real fact is that once people have travelled abroad and spent any time in a war zone supporting terrorism, they will be extremely dangerous people indeed. If we were to allow a large number of them back into the country that is a very dangerous position for this country to be in.
“They couldn’t be prosecuted because most of these people have been behind the wire in a war zone where we haven’t been able to gather the evidence. But you still have to have the evidence capable of standing up in a British court.
I would have to investigate them while they were here – and they would effectively be on release whilst we were investigating them. Bear in mind there are only so many resources to go round. “If we are talking about people who had forfeited their right in the government’s eyes to be a British citizen because of the way they conducted themselves abroad – that is, supporting or engaging in acts of terrorism – then that (not allowing them to return) is the correct position in my view.”
However, he recognises that suspects cannot simply be stripped of their British nationality. “I am a law enforcement officer so we must always remember the thing we stand for in this country….The rule of law is our most important defence against the rule of anarchy, chaos and terror.” According to Basu, a sinister new and underreported development has been the rise of right wing terrorism.
“It is feeding off the Islamist threat. It suits both ideologies to have a war between them. We managed to get one group (National Action) proscribed but then there are various spin off groups. We had some good successful prosecutions but we are seeing a growth in right wing terrorism and hate crime.
We are seeing a growth in intoler ance which is breeding some of that terrorist capability.” He mentioned the high profile case of a 50-year-old “white supremacist”, Vincent Fuller, who was jailed at Kingston Crown Court for 18 years in September for stabbing Dimitar Mihaylov, a 19-year-old Bulgarian youth. Witnesses heard Fuller screaming abuse during his “rampage”, including one who reported him saying: “All Muslims should die.
White supremacists rule. I’m going to murder a Muslim.” Judge Lodder told Fuller: “This was a terrorist act. I find that it was your purpose to strike fear into the heart of people you described as non-English, in particular Muslim.” Fuller carried out his attack the day after the murder of 51 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand by a white supremacist, who live-treamed most of the shootings online.
A video excerpt of the Christchurch massacre was found on Fuller’s mobile phone. Perhaps it is not doing Basu any favours to tip him as a future commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, but when it comes to tackling terrorism he does see the bigger picture. To be fair, one ought to point out the one controversial decision he made this year. This was to get involved in the uproar that followed the publication of leaked diplomatic cables disdainful of President Donald Trump sent by Sir (now Lord) Kim Darroch, British ambassador in Washington.
“I would advise all owners, editors and publishers of social and mainstream media not to publish leaked government documents that may already be in their possession, or which may be offered to them, and to turn them over to the police or give them back to their rightful owner, Her Majesty’s Government,” warned Basu in a move which received little or no support. Later, Basu insisted the police inquiry to discover the source of the leak had not been dropped and added: “I appreciate 100 per cent the need to have a free press. I absolutely get it.
But it is not the only cornerstone of a liberal democracy – I think one of the other cornerstones is the rule of law …and, of course, the official secrets act. So knowing that somebody was about to for a second time publish something considered a highly classified series of documents – I could not let them go ahead.” That dispute apart, what separates Basu from other senior officers is his ability to see the bigger picture and encourage national debate about the government’s “Prevent” strategy. Fundamental to his philosophy is the belief that stopping people from becoming terrorists is much more important than catching them.
This is what inspires confidence that Basu is meant for higher office. “Even to an old detective like me preventing is much more important than detecting it,” he said. “The terrible outcome of terrorism is the murder of innocent human beings. So preventing those deaths is what motivates me now. “And you stop it by investigating, gathering intelligence and arresting people who are going to do it. (But) if that’s all we ever do we will be in a constant cycle of doing precisely that – and putting more sticking plaster. You know that great old expression that ‘you cannot arrest your way out of a problem’. Well terrorism is no different from any other crime type.
If all we were doing was arresting people we would never stop. “One of the biggest roles that I have got is I get to speak about it because people will tend to listen when the head of counter terrorism says things. My real stock in trade at the moment is we all need to talk about ‘Prevent’. And I don’t mean just me. I am trying to get a debate going. I want other people to talk about how ‘Prevent’ is important and how much better it could be.
