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506 GCHQ GOES GLOBAL
The -police were so anxious about the safety ot their witnesses
that they were protected in a police station in north London
with three separate air locks. Each witness was guarded by an
armed policeman who had been specially vetted to ensure that
he had no links to south London, where Noye operated. This
caution was justified. Danielle Cable courageously gave evidence
at Noye's trial in 2000, and was later given a new identity. Alan
Decabral, an eye-witness to the murder who also gave evidence,
refused a new identity and was shot dead in his car in Ashford
in Kent on 5 October 2001. 57 To the dismay of GCHQ, its role
in the effort against Noye was being discussed in the newspapers
even before the case came to trial. This triggered a further
operation, this time against journalists and their sources. Codenamed
'Operation Nigeria', it caught journalists from tabloid
newspapers on tape during a surveillance operation that showed
they were procuring intelligence from a private detective agency
which, in turn, obtained its information from corrupt police
officers. Over the summer of 1999 the detective agency in question,
known as Southern Investigations, was secretly bugged by
the Metropolitan Police's anti-corruption squad, CIB3, and one
leading figure was recorded discussing how he had sold a story
to a reporter about GCHQ's role in tracking down Noye. It was
also found that Southern Investigations had an informant in
the Diplomatic Protection Squad at Buckingham Palace. 58
No one could possibly argue that the identification and arrest
of Kenneth Noye was anything other than an immense public
good. Yet, because crime recognises no borders, this sort of work
meant that GCHQ was being inexorably drawn into the controversial
realm of domestic surveillance as well as having to engage
with the contentious politics of internet privacy. During 1996
GCHQ and NSA had joined forces to put forward a solution to
the problem of publicly available encryption, called 'Key Escrow'.
However, this idea had proved unworkable, and in any case the
new Blair government was unsympathetic to it. On 26 May 1999
Stephen Byers, Secretary of State at the Department of nade and
Industry, revealed the latest thinking on 'Encryption and Law