BRITISH POLICE PETTINESS

Not so petty when you are the target, though



As a chief superintendent in the Metropolitan Police, Ali Dizaei spends much of his time discussing strategies and the finer points of law-and-order policy. Once a fortnight, however, he blocks out a day in his diary for "back-to-the-floor" patrol duties. It's important, he believes, that senior ranks never lose their feel for what it's like out there on the streets.

The day we meet is patrol day, and so it is that at lunchtime we find ourselves standing outside Costa Coffee in Hounslow while he struggles with the zip of the stab vest that is regulation wear for all officers. "I am relatively safe on the streets of Hounslow. But I wear it when I go into Scotland Yard," he says, laughing. The Times photographer and I laugh with him, but there will be those who don't find the joke so funny.

Next week is a big week for Dizaei. He recently went before a promotion board and on Tuesday he learns whether he will become a commander - a rank four steps away from commissioner. Then on March 12 his long-awaited book Not One of Us is published, telling the explosive story of the marathon investigation into him by officers of the Met. Many of the details are astonishing in their pettiness and jaw-dropping in their apparent malevolence.

Iranian-born Dizaei is a high-profile, politically active police officer who was once tipped to be Britain's first black chief constable. By his own admission he can be flash, combative and arrogant. He rubbed people up the wrong way. The result was Operation Helios, a surveillance operation of breathtaking proportions that was mounted against him, ran for more than two years and cost the taxpayer what the Met says was 2.2 million pounds but Dizaei would argue, when all the costs, including that of the trial, are taken into account, was 7 million. It led to Dizaei being suspended and accused publicly of being involved in drugs, using prostitutes, spying and corruption - grave allegations that proved to be wholly and ridiculously unfounded. In 2003 it culminated in bitter farce with Dizaei brought to trial at the Old Bailey on charges relating to matters so mundane that they beggar belief. His acquittal plunged the Met into its worst race relations crisis since the Stephen Lawrence inquiry.

Today Dizaei is borough commander for Hounslow, in West London. In the wake of Helios he was advised that he could have received a payoff of up to œ2 million, but he says that he wanted his job back so he could help to tackle the sort of discrimination that he faced "from the inside".....

Yet he knows that, despite the acquittal and his exoneration in the exhaustive Morris inquiry that followed, there are those who still question him on a personal level. Part of the reason for his book is finally to "put the record straight" and let people know what he is really about. But the timing of publication so close to his promotion interview is, he insists, coincidence: "There are those who probably think that this is stage-managed, but it is not."

Whatever the reality, it has certainly been no secret that he was writing his story. Indeed, it was part of the deal when he returned to work. He agreed to drop both his employment tribunal against the Met and a proposed BBC documentary, "but the book remained on the table". His employers were offered a copy of the manuscript several months ago "but they didn't want to see it. Now there are sensitivities, which surprises me."

Not One of Us is not about the Metropolitan Police Service, he says, but about a handful of officers who he believes set out to destroy his reputation and career: "My accusers would love to hide behind the corporate identity of the Met but I am not going to give them that privilege. Any organisation should be big enough to criticise itself in order to move forward." This is true, but the fact that these individuals - he dubs them "the self-appointed knights of integrity" - were able to operate under the aegis of the Met will not inspire public confidence.

Among the high-ranking officers Dizaei is critical of are his then boss, Superintendent Stephen Otter, now the Deputy Chief Constable of Avon and Somerset, who gave evidence against him at the Old Bailey. But he reserves his most scathing words for Chief Superintendent Barry Norman, who headed the 44-strong CIB3 (Complaints Investigation Branch) team and is now borough commander for Islington.

Helios was a monumental operation that generated 2,288 statements and 1,670 exhibits, but such brain-numbing detail does not prevent Dizaei's narrative from being a gripping read. There are Clouseau-like vignettes but also sinister moments that shudder with all the tension of a John Grisham novel. We learn how his phone was tapped, his e-mail monitored, his bank accounts and those of his brother and father scrutinised. A surveillance team set up residence across the street from his office, a secret camera videoed him outside his home and undercover officers tried to befriend him as part of ham-fisted "integrity tests" that would have been laughable had they not been so serious.

Dizaei is forthright and quick-witted, but reading the book I found that there were several not particularly likeable aspects to him. He can be cocky, dogmatic and volatile. One of the factors that enabled investigators to build a case against him was a break-up with a girlfriend during which he left vile, menacing messages on her voice-mail. In his favour, he relates this episode - and many others - with brutal honesty against himself. Those who know him tell me that he is bold and flamboyant but also bright and charming. Perhaps the quality that comes across most when you meet him, though, is his unerring passion for his job.

Dizaei, now 44, believes that police work was his destiny. In Tehran, where he grew up, his grandfather had been assistant commissioner, his father was head of the traffic police and his uncles were also in the force. By the age of 4 he, too, wanted to be a cop.

He didn't make it as a barrister. A one-year course at the Inns of Court exposed him for the first time to "the Establishment". He found that he didn't have the education or the smoothness to fit in "and being Iranian - a Muslim - wasn't the best start". His father was upset but as far as Dizaei was concerned, it left him free to do what he had always wanted.

Dizaei spent the first 14 years of his police career with the Thames Valley force, where his colour was an issue from the first day. Despite being the only nonwhite in his probationer intake, he was also the only one to be housed on the Whitley estate in Reading, known locally as a British National Party heartland. When he returned home to find "Pakis out of Britain" painted on his front door, he bought himself a dobermann. He was nicknamed Ayatollah, and colleagues joked openly about his "smell". After three weeks of hostility, he says, he nearly quit: "But those early days were reminiscent of my start at boarding school - every time I was pushed I wanted to fight back."

He was tenacious and ambitious, studying for an MA and eventually a PhD in his spare time. Within seven years he was being fast-tracked to the rank of inspector, but he remained unpopular. The assistant chief constable who recommended him for promotion noted that "he should be kinder to people who are less intelligent than him", and that "he has a tendency to alienate himself because of his ability to argue a point". On his day of selection interviews, the group he was with voted him the most likely to be a future chief constable but gave him the least votes as someone with whom they would want to go on holiday.

Dizaei joined the Metropolitan Police as a superintendent in March 1999, having been invited to apply by the commissioner, Sir Paul Condon. It was the year in which the Met was found guilty of institutional racism after the inquiry into police handling of the murder, six years earlier, of Stephen Lawrence, a black A-level student. Dizaei was by then vice-chairman of the National Black Police Officers Association (NBPA). Bringing him on board was a signal that the Met was going to tackle racism head-on.

If you are a black officer who is quoted frequently in the media about racism, says Dizaei, you attract malicious complaints. While he was at Thames Valley an informant had claimed that he was fixing speeding tickets and mixing with a drug dealer. Both allegations were baseless; Sir Paul Condon knew of them and had dismissed them. Within months of Dizaei joining the Met, however, someone else left an anonymous allegation on the Crimestoppers answer machine that he was a burglar. This turned out to be enough for the Met to get a private side intercept - a tap - on his phone line.

Dizaei does not say that this surveillance was racially motivated, but it coincided with rapidly souring relations with fellow officers at Kensington, where he was stationed. They resented the fact that he had been given a car-park space in the yard and that he took time out to attend NBPA meetings. According to Dizaei, his boss, Chief Superintendent Otter, made it clear that he didn't like him drinking tea from an BPA mug or wearing an BPA tiepin.

It is easy to see how Dizaei's trenchant manner may have irritated others, but it is impossible to justify what happened next. The covert investigation into him uncovered no criminal activity but did lead to the discovery that, although he was married, he had girlfriends. Dizaei deals with this by explaining that, eight years into his second marriage, he and his wife Natalie, a nurse, fell out of love and agreed to separate but remain living in the same house for the sake of their three sons.

The way he puts it, both were free to see other partners but they shared an understanding that any boyfriends or girlfriends would not be brought into the home. It sounds a bizarre arrangement. Dizaei points out it was "nobody's business but mine unless it affected my conduct in the job". It didn't affect his behaviour at work but it did lead to a ferocious row outside it - which, in turn, led to Operation Helios.

Mandy Darougeh was an Iranian law student, in her early twenties when Dizaei had a brief relationship with her. When it ended, Mandy went to the house in Henley that Dizaei shared with Natalie and the children and spoke to him from her mobile phone. Both of them were swearing and threatening each other, and after she hung up, Dizaei says, a red mist descended. He called her back three times. When she didn't pick up, he ranted into her voicemail. The quotes, all logged in the investigation against him, made choice reading: "'You want war, bitch, you're going to get war. First I will start with your family and then I come to you and your reputation. I will spread all over London that you are a prostitute."

Of course it wasn't true. It was inexcusable behaviour, he says. "With 20/20 hindsight I should never have spoken the way I did." They made up afterwards. But the apology was not enough. Mandy's mother complained to his bosses and alleged, among other things, that Dizaei was an Iranian spy. To those who had already spent 18 months investigating him and drawn blanks, the accusation was, says Dizaei, "a gift from God". But the spying accusation didn't stand up. The accusation that he had had "inappropriate contact with prostitutes" turned out to be based on a conversation, recorded as part as the surveillance, in which a friend teased him that "the only girlfriends you get are the ones you have to pay for". His suspected drug habit was based on equally fatuous evidence - yes, a nurse friend had supplied him with needles, but they were for his mother, who has to have regular painkilling injections for arthritis and does not have access to good needles in Iran. A charge that he had pocketed cash after booking flights to America through a travel agent he knew was quietly dropped, as were the other serious allegations levelled at him.

The eventual case brought against Dizaei was based on a foolish lie. In September 2000 his car was vandalised outside Kensington police station. Dizaei discovered the damage before he drove off to an afternoon meeting of the NBPA but he didn't report it until he got back three hours later. He didn't want his fellow officers to know that he had been to the meeting - his boss, Chief Superintendent Otter, had already told him that he should spend less time on NBPA work and more time in his operational job: "So, looking for a quiet life, I lied."

This untruth - saying the car had been parked all day - led to him facing trial for perverting the course of justice and misconduct in public office (charges relating to mileage expense claims were later dropped). The trial lasted for five weeks. Prosecuting counsel was Richard Horwell, QC, First Senior Counsel to the Crown; Dizaei hired Michael Mansfield, QC. "If QCs don't defend cases involving scratched cars, it must be the first and will probably be the last time that the First Senior Treasury Counsel has prosecuted one," he writes.

When Dizaei finally returned to work in October 2003, Sir John Stevens, the Commissioner, said that he did so "with his integrity demonstrably intact". Dizaei "accepted words of advice" about the way in which he spoke to his ex-girlfriend Mandy, but all disciplinary charges against him were dropped. He received 60,000 pounds in compensation and was promoted to chief superintendent. He was also given a place on the prestigious Senior Command Course - a course for which he had previously been singled out until Helios blew up in his face....

He and Natalie are now divorced and no longer live together, which means, he hopes, that his children no longer have to see his girlfriend described in the press as a "mistress". His sons are aged 20, 19 and 15 and were badly affected by what happened to him. "The eldest, especially, doesn't trust the police at all. That's a shame," he says.

Dizaei regularly encounters the officers who investigated him. He often finds himself opposite Barry Norman in meetings at Scotland Yard. "I say hello to him, he says hello to me. I'm sure he is not going to send me Christmas cards and I won't be inviting him to my son's wedding. But we are professional. I had to come back with a view that I wouldn't be bitter and twisted, because if I was I wouldn't be able to do my job properly." He believes that what happened to him is less likely to happen to someone else, and that there are now sufficient safeguards in place - "But no, I don't feel safe talking on my mobile phone."

In December the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which is headed by a high court judge, found that the bugging of Dizaei's phone during Operation Helios was unlawful. This is another vindication for him and another blow for the Met.

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