2022 February 19 FOIA Centre Mark Watts Dolphin Square BOOK - 3 articles Mark Watts 10p

“Q- Did you put in for more resources help to assist you, who did you send that to?”
“Yes to Commander C1.”
“We thought that a good hit on these people would have been telephone intercepts because we could see they were talking to each
other every two or three days. I put in a request for the intercepts and it goes on a first come first served basis no priorities we
weren’t regarded as a priority so that’s why I went to Surrey and Surrey decided it was a priority.”
“When I tried to get MH off the ground it took a year for the docket to be accepted. I wrote the report and it was about a year later.
“It bounced back and forwards, you can’t put that, [sic] in you can’t put that in it went back and forward. It took nearly a year for
authority just to go and interview. It was so slow.”
“WM-A118 I think was about 8, with him aged 8 through to about 14. He was 13 or 14 when I was interviewing him.”
GB expanded on the “gin palace”, according to the Met’s transcript of its interview with him:
(For those for whom reading about sexual abuse may be a ‘trigger’, you may also want to skip the following section of evidence.)
“Gin Palace is a boat, a certain type of boat, they often used to go off shore people they met on the boat, it was basically an orgy on
the boat, the boat would sail outside of British territorial waters because there were people on there that wouldn’t do it in the UK,
didn’t want to be seen in the UK.”
“Q- Who was taking them there?”
“[The pimp] or any of the 5 main core people. [The pimp] would take them to them and they would take them on, the kids would stop
with him for the weekend and do whatever he told them. That person would take them somewhere else and swopsies [sic] of boys
when they go there basically the way paedophiles were working meet up, meet up in a hotel in a room or something like that each
would bring their own boy, swop boys and be there for the weekend or that night.”
A police doctor examined the boys, says GB. The doctor described WM-A118 as have been abused to the point, says GB in an especially
graphic part of his account (which you may also want to skip if reading about sexual abuse may be a “trigger”), “where he was going to have to
use a tampon just to keep his bum closed.”
Asked how long he was “dealing with MH”, the transcript records GB as saying:
“3 years, all the time not a 100%. It sat in the background. If I got some time I dealt with it.”
Met notes of meetings with GB say:
“GB worked on this operation on his own and was not given the resources to help him. He took Mileshogue with him when he
moved to the Paedophile Unit at NSY [New Scotland Yard] in around 1996.”
“One of the subjects lived within Surrey Constabulary… the operation originally confined to the subject became an enquiry run by
Surrey Constabulary.”
Asked how many people were on Operation Mileshogue, the transcript quotes GB as saying:
“Just one, me. It was difficult to get help, get anything started and in the end Surrey took over the one aspect which related to the
guy who was a former Head Master. They put him under surveillance. They did come into London to have a look at other people’s
habits but it was really just me.”
“Yes it went to Surrey they got what I could never get they got telephone intercept for the main suspects. The core group of 5 would
talk to each other virtually every other day. We put the intercept on and from that day for the two months they were on, I think, the
guy that lived with the man who worked for the Government in Orpington never phoned anyone during that whole period. He didn’t
receive phone calls from anyone during that period.”
He adds that the operation evaporated when he left the paedophile unit in 1999. He says that suspects in Operation Mileshogue cropped up in
a separate investigation into the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE):
“One of my roles at the Yard was Operation HATTON which again was an intelligence led operation into the workings of Paedophile
Information Exchange (P.I.E.), the subjects of Operation Mileshogue had strong links to Hatton but no longer attended the meetings.
I worked on this enquiry until I left the paedophile Unit.”
GB, according to the Met transcript, recalls a troubling episode that raises further questions about how the suspects may have been tipped off
about surveillance of them:
(For those for whom reading about sexual abuse may be a ‘trigger’, you may also want to skip the following section of evidence.)
“Surrey were investigating this one person, it was the Crime Squad that did it.