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An insight into the character, personality and passion of the leading figures in the Investigation and Intelligence industry who have shaped the way we gather, analyse and utilise information and intelligence.
There was one night when we crept out and there was a bar in town
that we were banned from going to, and we went there and it got
firebombed. Oh, my God. What are the
real skill sets you need to learn as close? Protection,
situational awareness, and that soft diplomacy. The
whole ethos is you're not there to get into a fight. You are there to
extract your principal. You see the trouble early and you get them out of the
way. And the diplomacy, it's being able to get your point
across, not be walked over, but at the same time, not upset anyone.
Hello and welcome to the Intelligence Advantage podcast, where we talk
to the movers and shapers in the investigation and intelligence
space. My name is Gary Miller. I've been an investigative
lawyer for nearly half a century, and I'm also the chairman of the
IfG, a network of international investigative and
asset recovery lawyers. Today is
a very special day because I am joined by Hayley Elvins,
who, as you will get to hear, has an amazing.
Had. Had and is having an amazing career at the moment.
She operates under the name of the Sloane Risk Group.
So I'm delighted that you have been able to find time
this morning. Hayley, welcome. Thank you very much for having me.
My pleasure. Now, thank you. You have sent me
some very useful information about your
career and some of the things you did. And of course, what
jumps out at me is the
starting point in everybody's career and in particular
yours, I think. I read that you
joined the Royal Military Police at the age of 21.
Yes. So I want to know what it is
not what most young ladies at that age decide to do. So
what was it that took you in that direction? I
have always had a real sense of adventure. You know, I was always sort of
reading the adventure books as a child. I was very
fortunate in that my school, it was a state school, but it had a
combined cadet force, the CCF head, and actually
precluding that, do you remember? I think it was something
like the Krypton Factor. There was this assault called. There was this, like, 80s program
where people would go on and some sort of, I don't know, like a
Saturday night and Same thing. And there was this military assault course which the
contestants had to do. And I was obsessed with this. And it was my dream
to do this military assault course. And then my. My
school had this. This cadet force which I joined,
and I did my Duke of Edinburgh's award. I learned to sail. We did all
the military camps, and I adored it, and that was
it. That was it. I was going to join the army. So no family
background? Your dad wasn't in the army? Your brother, your sister, your mum,
it was just something you picked up from school? No, my dad's a
chef. My parents have always worked in catering.
So what they have installed in me is a tremendous sense of
hard work because I grew up in a restaurant, they had
their own restaurant and then I helped them from an early
age. So, yeah, hard work came into the agenda quite early.
So would you be an apprentice sous chef as well at
the same time as being a member of the Royal Military
Police? Is that what part of your job was? My kicking
skills are not as good as my parents. Excellent. So
you're not short of a few amazing dishes when your
family gets together, Hayley. So
the decision that you made was a natural one from what
I'm hearing. And what did your parents think? Did they have ideas
that you should actually go in to the family business or
were they absolutely delighted that you had your own direction?
No, they loved it, really. There was this moment just before I
joined and I had a one to one chat with my dad and he did
say to me, are you sure you don't want to be an air hostess or
something? But they have always been
so proud, they really have. So.
So tell me a bit about the, the
application process. What do you. Do you just. In those days, I don't know
whether you probably did have email. Do you just put in an application or do
you front up to the local recruitment office? No, this was in the days when
you walked in and knocked on the door and had to put your big girl
pants on. And my careers office was in Brighton
and yeah, I just, you know, and they had all the posters in the window
of the sailing and the snowboarding, the things that most people never really get
to do in the army. And somehow I ended up doing all of them. I
think I was the person that always put my hand up and said yes, but
yeah, I walked in, knocked on the door, had to do some
tests and they said, you scored highly. We
recommend you go into the Intelligence Corps as an officer.
And at the time I was. Hold on a minute. I mean, that's amazing, isn't
it? I mean, you were. You come out of. No. Is
it school or uni? I had done college, so my parents
had said to me, at least do college before you join. I was never going
to university. I just, you know, I was. I can study very well.
I just, you know, at that point in my life, being in a Room with
four walls just was not for me. I get it. I just
wasn't interested. So you'd been to college. What did you do at college?
If I can be. So, no, I was rather let down at college so I
signed up for Computer Aided Design. IT
and I think it was geography. When I turned up on day
one, they said, ah, the Computer Aided Design course isn't running. You can
choose product design, art or photography. I later then
studied photography but at the time it was pinhole cameras and things that I had
no interest in. Yeah, and I did product design and it was, I hated
it. It was nothing that I am good at. And I
spent most of college in the pub, if I'm completely honest. A
fine place to spend college. You probably learn more about life
there, Hayley, than you would had you stayed at college.
So yeah, I got a job doing door work and one of the
doormen was ex Royal Military Police. And he said to me,
oh no, you want to go RMP or have a great life? You can specialize
in close protection. So. Oh wow. So you,
you, you were doing some part time work which kind of gave you
an insight into the rmp, is that it? Exactly that.
And I thought, oh wow, that is what I want to do. And amazing.
So what do you think it was? Or maybe they told you when you done
filled in the application form, answered the questions that they suddenly
say you would be perfectly suited to
intelligence. Is it what I call my wife?
And every, almost every woman I know
is curious and much more curious than mankind.
We kind of just drift through life just as long as you feed us and
give us a beer occasionally. But is it natural
curiosity that kind of gave them
that impression? Or was there something else you answered when you said, no, I want
to get involved in intelligence. I don't know. I think I'm always
quite happy to see outside the box and I will
always sort of look for my own reasoning and not feel
embarrassed about not going, you know, with the grain. But I think actually
profile probably came into it. You know, I think I probably had a good profile
where they could sort of put me in a lot of different places and I
don't look like an army or an intelligence person. But at
the time, unfortunately they, they didn't give enough information on what
intelligence actually was. And the way the course was sold to
me is you do lots of stuff on the computer and you learn a language.
And I thought, well, I'm terrible with languages. Oh, I see. Okay,
me off. Which was a shame. But in a Roundabout
way. I then ended up working intelligence later on anyway. Fair
enough. So you answer your questions and
was there a, like a percentage fail and pass
rate in those days or did you have a lot of competition
to get this particular position post? So we went on a.
I think it was a two day selection. Fitness has always been good.
So I passed that with no problems. I think I was a tiny bit
short. I think at the time they had a height limit. And I remember like
standing on my tiptoes because I'm pretty sure I had a couple of centimeters to
make up. I see. So that
certainly didn't seem to work against you, that's for sure.
And so when you've got through that selection and of
course you are told
a bunch of stuff about what's in store for you, what did you.
Before you actually learned that, what did you think the training would be? And
did it turn out to be anything like you expected? I
think it was everything I expected. Wow. And whilst
now I like working for myself, I like being independent, I like
being my own boss. At the time, I was able to play the
game and do as I was told. And it's funny that some people couldn't. I
mean, we all joined, so we. We all got the train and we were picked
up at Winchester for our basic training. And I remember this
one girl, and it was. It was as the Reading Festival was ending, so there
was all these kids with backpacks and there was this one girl who
joined and everything was just untidy. She. She
couldn't fold, she couldn't organize. And in hindsight, she. She
probably had adhd, but no one knew what that was. Right. Okay.
Couldn't make a bed. She just could not get anything right.
And, you know, and the rest of us just didn't understand it because we were
just playing the game and we'd be there in the morning trying to help and
make a bed and get things tidy. And all the instructors
kept saying, I think we picked up the wrong kid. You were at the
Fretting Festival. Why did you get. How did she get through the
admission process? Hayley? No. I don't know.
Wow. Anyway, so she. It wasn't exactly
adding any brownie points to your little group. So how many
women were in that intake? Quite a few, actually.
There were. So I guess There were 30 of us
in our training squad and I would say at least
10 of us were girls at the time. That's impressive. I mean,
going back to that day, I would expect you to have said two or three.
So do you think those percentages have changed much nowadays? Is it something
that young women feel and want to get involved in?
Honesty, I don't know. And I've been having a few conversations recently
about the amount of women who are not putting their hands up
to go into specialist departments and close protection and things. And it
almost sounds like there's a real lack of confidence out there. So when it comes
to debatering, I honestly don't know. Okay, that's fair enough.
But when you, when you're doing your training, you
mentioned that they said, we think you'll be great with intelligence. Were you given
a selection of here's five things you could major in, as it were,
or they just assessed you and said you look like an
intelligence dude. Yeah, they assess you, they look at your score, they
said, go and do this. And a lot of it might come down to the
quotas they're trying to fit at the time. I don't know
my case and I went off and joined the rnp. How long is
the training and what was the toughest part of it for you? So you do
your basic training, which in hindsight must be a few
months, and then you go and you have a couple of weeks holiday and then
you go into a phase two training and the military police one. They're
all different depending on what you specialize in. And the military police one was at
Chittisto at the time and again, it must have been
quite a few months. And it was the, you know, it was the physical
fitness, it was, it was the police work, it was sort of, you know, learning
all the legalities, sort of learning how to do an investigation, how
to run an interview. Okay, Right down to learning to drive with
a trailer, you know, all the different things that you needed for your
particular job. But the, I
guess the, the scope of the activities
by definition is that you are policing
people in the army. I guess. So it's not your Joe
Blow walking along the street. Of course, the
soldiers have been known to attend pubs, coming out and dealing with them.
But it's a much more kind of pressure
cooker environment, isn't it, when you're actually policing people in the army?
Or is it no different from what you learned was
policing on the beat or whatever? I mean, I can't really compare it because
I've never been a regular. There is quite a
strong us and them divide. You know, when it comes down to
people in the army, you know, they have to keep us a bit separate. You
know, you have your own mess, you can't really build those friendships with
people you might then have to go and arrest the week out. You're like the
internal affairs part of the FBI or whatever, aren't you? You know, you're
keeping an eye on them. Yeah. We weren't necessarily liked all that much.
I see. Did that ever spill over into an incident or not? Did you ever
find yourself in a difficult situation? I
can't say it really did. And in honesty, I didn't spend that much time
doing police work. I see. Okay. I got sent straight
to Northern Ireland and I initially got sent down to South El Mar
and was working in an intelligence cell that was closed
down. I got moved to do courts and witness protection, which sort
of meant meeting anyone who was flying into Northern Ireland,
sort of current soldiers or existing military personnel who had to
go to court for various reasons. Well, that sounds pretty scary
because Northern Ireland, for whatever the period
of the Troubles, was a really dangerous environment.
So when you say an intelligent cell, was it the stuff that you read
or see on the TV you were actually involved in trying to
penetrate or find out who was running what
kind of illegal activities in South Omar or whatever?
What was your. Without obviously getting you. Getting you banned
for life and prosecuted, what was the kind of thing
you were doing? It was all about processing intelligence
sightings between certain groups of known people
and passing. Noticing patterns and
passing certain information on to people who would then look at it in more detail.
I see, so you were like first line observation.
Were you sitting in a. In a car, sitting with a telescope in a room?
What kind of. There were some times where it was operational and you needed to
go in the ground. But typically this was remote and this was bringing
sort of looking at different types of intelligence coming in from
different angles. Sources. Okay. And
you found that stimulating and interesting or you were quickly
moved out of that to something else. I was glad when I moved because it
was typically 12 hour shifts. It In a, you know, cabin
sort of thing. Yeah, it wasn't the best job. Then I moved to the
courts and witness protection and we would. We sort of give armed
protection. We'd meet people off planes at the airport. We'd take them to wherever they
needed to stay. We'd take them to the courthouse. And would.
These would be IRA informers, I guess. Would it.
Or even not ira, but people that had witnessed an
IRA or an illegal activity? Or was this
more to do with illegal activity by the
members of the rnp? No, typically.
I mean, one case that springs to mind was some soldiers that were involved in
an Incident with some IRA members and
they were accused of assaulting them and this was quite historic. I think this was
10 years later. I see. Okay. Had to take them down to
literally sit in this private room with these two IRA guys. Right.
Whilst yeah, the whole case was. Was looked at basically.
But typically it was usually things like people had come back for
to give evidence or you know it was, it wasn't always
on that scale. Right. And of course
there's always got to be a question regarding danger and
excitement. What was the most dangerous thing you did while
you were in Northern Ireland? Well,
that you're allowed to talk about. I'll talk about
a non work one. When I was in Porter down it was quite a
small environment and we sort of, we did really have some good relationships with
sort of senior officers and some of their wives and there was quite
a social group and there was one night when we crept
out and there was a bar in town that we were banned from going to
and we went there and it got firebombed. Oh
my God. And you know we realised
pretty quickly and we left through the back exit which the fire door
led into this, this corridor which then didn't go anywhere and we ended up
having to go back out the front past this roof that was on fire and
car that was on fire and then one of the officers wives snuck
us back into camp in our boot. So this is
what you might call a rather unusual girls night out. Right.
And was this a pub that happened to be known for being
frequented by army wives or
females from the army or something like that or not? Oh, I think
it was more likely one that was likely to be targeted by the
ira. Yeah but I mean because of that.
Because I think. No, I don't think it wasn't really
for military. I think it was more the owners that being targeted. I see. Oh
I see. So somebody that wasn't necessarily a sympathizer.
And so you were doing that and was the
court protection, witness protection. Was that
when the light bulb came on and you thought oh I quite like this or
what happened? Yeah, I was already trying to get into close
protection but basically that's not something you can do straight away. You
really should be serving at the time it was about six years
before you will get loaded onto that course and even then it's not many people,
not many people get onto it let alone pass it. So the, you know
and I was sort of doing a lot of phys at the time to get
myself fit enough to pass it. So I sort of expressed an interest
and kind of got laughed at because I'd only been serving a couple of years.
So is it regarded as kind of a peachy, peachy
opportunity? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It
was sort of a great, great way to start really, because it gave you that
situational awareness. Yeah. And you know, we were carrying pistols
and you've heard all the stories of how many times women in particular have taken
their pistol off, put it on the toilet cistern, trousers to clatter
to the floor and then walked out and left it there. So it gave you
that real awareness of how careful you have to be when you are moving
around. So you were clearly trained in firearms and
that was part of the close protection training, correct? Yeah. So
later on when I went, I was already trained in firearms to be,
be in the army non stop, let alone Northern Ireland. And then we did much
more extensive firearms training as part of the coach protection course.
Okay. And is there a particular. You know, again,
most people see
glimpses of what you did and what you are doing
on tv, but what are the real skill sets you need to learn
as close protection? Is it as.
No, you tell me rather than me trying to answer it. What are the real
skill sets involved? I think the biggest ones are actually
they're not what you would imagine. They are situational
awareness and that soft diplomacy. I mean the whole
ethos is you're not there to get into a fight, you are there to extract
your principal. You see the trouble early and you get them out of the way.
And the diplomacy, it's, you know, mostly we were sort of
dealing the RMP certainly at the time. The people that we'd be protecting,
they might be politicians, they might be ambassadors, they
might be higher ranking military officers. So there are people that sort
of outrank you in life in a lot of ways. And you are the one
who tells them, no, you can't do that because it's too dangerous. And you have
to sort of word that in a way of oh, have you thought about this?
So it's being able to get your point across, not be
walked over, but at the same time not upset anyone. Right,
yeah. So there's an art of diplomacy, as you say, involved in
that. And, and you mentioned Northern Ireland
and close protection there. How long were you in Northern Ireland
and where did you go to next? So I double
toured in Northern Ireland. I moved into courts
of witness. I was a little timer at Lisbon in the police unit
there. And then I basically put my hand up to
do some boxing training. Never boxed before. I'd done a little bit of Krav
maga but not to a particularly high level. Right. I love
it. I can just see you there, you know, like with, with all of
the Israeli specialists. I can see you taking them down one
by one. That's fantastic. So I signed
up this boxing training which was like a unit regimental boxing thing, and
they trained us and there were only two girls, myself and another lady who was
a pti. And when it came down to it, there was all this
training and then there was gonna be a proper match which was hosted at quarter
down. And we couldn't have a proper fight because
our weight was too different and we were the last two women, all the others
are dropped out. So a lot of this proper fight and we had
to do an exhibition round because I think she was very tall.
So she had to lose weight, I had to put on weight.
And to be fair, we didn't do very well. You know, we hadn't trained
enough to be competing or exhibiting at that level whatsoever. But
we gave it our all and the kiss was fantastic. So
off the back of that, the close protection unit
space came up and it went to one of the guys in my platoon
and I love him, he was in love with this girl
at the time. I don't know if they stayed together or not, but he literally
turned his face down because he was in this relationship.
And was that love within the ranks or was it
love outside the ranks? I think she was serving as well, from memory.
I see. Okay. And I've always been quite
necky. That was the expression used to describe me.
And I walked straight up to my sergeant major's office, I knocked
on the door and I said, sir, there's a space on the
cloac protection course on Monday, so and so doesn't want to do it. Can I
have his face? And he was brilliant as sergeant Major and I see
him now and again and I always buy him a point. And he literally picked
up the phone, phoned on the Moore and he said, I'm sending Corporal Dansey
down to you on Monday for the closed protection space.
And the, his reasoning was that I didn't have to do the beat up training
because I was fit enough from doing the boxing.
So yeah, I, I, I cut a corner. Well, it's, it's,
you know, taking the initiative, I think is what it's called.
You wanted that post and you went for it, which is amazing.
So you then go, where, where, where do you start off your close
protection proper training proper. You just
sent down to A site in Hampshire and it's, I think
it's still exactly the same. They put you in houses. So I think there were
probably 30 of us to start with on the course and they put you in
houses, like six of each per house. And
I was the only woman on the course and this was a, I think it's
a 12 week course. Right. And it,
they put me in the house with the three foreign students
amongst others. And two of the guys were from Egypt.
Oh, so this is interesting. So obviously they're training
people for other military, police or close protection
in other countries. Are they? It doesn't happen all the time. I think we had
one from, oh, I can't remember where he was from.
One was from Australia, two are from Egypt and one was from, from somewhere else.
But basically they put me in these, these two poor Egyptian
guys and I had, you know, I'd never really come across Muslim
people before. It wasn't. Something must have freaked them out.
You must have freaked them out more than them, you. I mean it
took me ages to rest because we had these stupid teeny weeny running shorts and
then we just sit there in our lounge area having a chat and I've got
these stupid shorts on and I just couldn't understand why this guy wouldn't look
at me. I'm like, why won't he look at me when I'm talking to him?
And he didn't know what to do. I don't think he'd ever seen so much
special. Oh wow. God. Talk about cultural differences. Right,
well that shows you the army or the RMP certainly didn't
have much nous when it comes to
cultural differences, but there you go. And they were trying to push us
all out of our comfort zone to see how we dealt with, I guess. So
I guess if you can't cope with that then you're not going to be any
good coping with a diplomat or something. Okay, so then
you're in this house and what do you do? You get up in the morning
and each one of you plays the diplomat and the rest of
them play the close protection. How does it work? No, it's very
intense. So you spend the first couple of weeks
doing, you have dashing lessons and you go out inside and do practicals. So
it's everything from how to walk with a principal, how to
sort of change formation, it's anti ambush drills. So
it's driving vehicles, you do a lot of skid pan training and you've got
two cars, you've got your bodyguard car and your backup car, and they'll be like,
right, they'll throw something in front of you, say, right, this car's disabled and you
have to get people out, get in car, and then you're being shot at
at the same time. Firearms was obviously a massive one.
There was sort of pistol training. Training,
you know, training where you throw everything together and you sort of have
to deploy the right weapons at the right times, reacting to the right
threats. And tell me this, like, you see, with
the President's close protection, are you supposed to throw yourself in the
way of a bullet if your diplomat is exposed? You
are, yeah. And absolutely every single one of us on that
course would have done that. Wow. Yeah.
Yeah. So just kind of zooming into that particular
experience. What was the most
immediate danger you put yourself in for a.
For somebody who you were protecting? Again, it
comes down to that situational awareness. I've had a few times when I
have told people, we are leaving, we are getting in the car and we're going.
I went to Bosnia as my first tour and I looked
after Paddy Ashdown. Yes, I saw that. I've met Paddy. So I'm going to ask
you a couple of questions about that. Yeah. And, yeah, we had an incident
where he was on a road trip somewhere and someone did come up to him
and sort of started to, you know, to sort of try and start an
argument with him, and we extracted him really quickly. And I think I might have
pulled my baton, but certainly not my pistol, you know, and it's all about knowing
that and understanding the threat and reacting appropriately to what is
happening at the time. So it's not as if you were in one of those
situations where someone was running at somebody with a knife and you had
to disarm them or something like that. You were fortunate that you never
were never put in that situation, certainly not there. And
it's about planning. You know, it's about. We would do our reconnaissance, we would learn
where he was going. We know our roots in, our roots out. It
was extremely well organized.
Okay, so you're now in Bosnia. Was
that the first overseas posting other than Northern Ireland for
you? Yes. Okay, so this is,
if I'm not mistaken, this is after the. The war
had finished, is that right? Or was things. Were things still, you know,
going off big time? No, this is after. There was
still, you know, there was quite a heavy threat against him at one point that
we had to react to. Right. Because why?
Because he was in charge of the negotiations or
something. He was put in, you
know, to monitor the entire government and the
structure and how things were developing, really. And that
he basically dismissed. I think it was
about 100 people in one go. And it ranged from people very
high up in politics right down to police
officers. And as a result of that, we had. So his job
was to kind of assess who was still going to be
part or who could be part of whatever governmental system was
going to be in place. Yes. Very interesting.
So you were there for how long? Hayley Mine's tour.
So we had an eight person team. Again, I was the only woman.
How does that play out? I mean, you don't seem to be someone short of
confidence, but does it feel weird to be surrounded by. I
mean, were there women serving in the
army separately as well, or were you
the only woman in the village, as they say? No. Everywhere else I'd been,
especially in the rmp, there were a lot of women. And we never had
that us and them mentality between us because there were already.
There were always so many women in training. We just all got in and mucked
on together and we were all young. It just wasn't a thing.
And then, yeah, when I went on tour again, I'd always
trained with men and it didn't feel odd to be the only
woman. No. Okay. And did you feel that
there was something to do with intuition, instinct,
that you and or women may have had an advantage
over your male counterparts, or
does it come down to real individual instincts? I wouldn't
say that it's intuition. I would say that it's diversity of thought. I think women
will think about things differently and possibly things
differently. That makes sense. And so
you do your tour, which is a
normal period, a six month period for a tour. Yeah. And then
what do you do next? So then for some reason I was
sent back to Northern Ireland, although I'd kind of done my time there. I see.
And I was put back into courts and witness protection, which. Which I really
enjoyed. Yeah. But at that time,
sort of Iraq had now started. There were all these
Green Zone jobs paying a lot of money. There was a lot of
sort of change in the coast protection area. This is when SIA
licensing was literally just being implemented.
And I, you know, the grass was greener, basically. I didn't
want. It rains a lot in Northern Ireland. I just didn't want to do
another two years in the rain.
And I signed up. Well, that's a first. It wasn't the bombs, it wasn't a
terror, it was the rain. And for a girl,
for a young lady, Coming from England where we're not short of rain,
it must have been bad, Hayley. No,
it was, yeah. No, and to be honest, it can get quite depressing. It's just.
Yeah. Constant miserable weather. Yeah. So I then signed off
at that point, which was, I think you have to do. You can sign off
at your four year point and by the time you've served your notice, it's closer
to five years. So then I left and I,
I mean, I can say this because I've unfortunately been outed by some rather
poor journalism, but I applied to join MI5.
Okay. And I wasn't, I wasn't
overly set on it. It was, you know, you go to the sort of the
leaving careers office and there's different jobs you apply for and
I didn't really know what I wanted to do, but, you know, I
had the close protection. I was probably going down that angle and, and I applied
for a role in an operational role and
I just kept on sort of every. There's a lot of stages to the
recruitment process and every time one of them came up, I could do it or
could go to it. And I wasn't hung up on it. Well, I had been
offered a job in Iraq in the Green Zone. Okay. And it
was literally driving people around within that area.
And my parents have never asked anything of me ever.
And my dad at time said, please don't take it. Oh, so you got through
whatever the recruitment requirements were, you were
ready to be appointed and operational.
This wasn't framer 5, this was completely separate. Oh, I see, yeah, yeah. This
was a civilian job, so he'd asked me not to take it. So
basically my friend took it and I ended up working for Saudi Princess.
So I then traveled the world for the best part of a year doing.
Yeah. And I was what, early 20s and it was five star first
class, you know, living in Soho. How do you, how do you get into that
business, Hayley? I mean, was it just putting your name around,
telling people, I'm now no longer in. Yeah,
it was hard at the time because this is the really sort of early days
of the Internet and email and it's not like now we didn't have
LinkedIn, we didn't really know how to build a network. So I was, and I
was printing my CVs on paper and just sending them off. So I
worked for a London based company who then gave
me the job looking after this. I see, so you applied to the
corporates that were, whoever that we know, the.
I don't know Control, risk. The Krolls, the. Yeah, all of those, all
of those saying this is my particular specialty and
because I know from dealing with them now for many
moons is, you know, close protection in particular
is not something that the run of the mill corporate
intelligence organizations run by definition, it's
very, very intense. And it's not something that can
be productized in a way that for example, fraud
investigations could be. So I get it. There are certain
groups that you go to. Every single one of the investigation
agencies would go to a similar group of
subcontractors. If I use that word. Yeah, yeah, exactly that.
And you know, and it's a good network and at the time, you know, well,
they, they always will have. The R and P have an excellent reputation
in that field of, you know, our training course is, is the best there is
out there. So jobs aren't, aren't hard once you've got that
qualification. Yeah. And at the time, yeah, as I say, SAA
licensing wasn't around. So when that came in, there was suddenly an
influx of a lot of people who'd done door work suddenly upgrading to a close
protection license. And, and it changed the market in a big way.
So you now, you did need. And you now need a license to
be a close protection officer. Do you or close protection. Yes.
Work in this country. Is it the same, do you know, in other places? Or
you wouldn't know what the international.
And so you would be appointed
to these rather sometimes exotic
individuals. And what was the most challenging
part about some of. Or the most challenging,
obviously without naming names, person that
you had to protect in the private sector.
I have been so lucky with my clients. Right.
I've been so lucky. I, I really have just had the best
experiences. So the princess that I looked
after, you know, it was all, it was sort of Paris Fashion Week and then
New York Tennis Open and all these amazing bars and clubs and things
which at the time in my early 20s was brilliant. And, and
with her, the main thing I had to be aware was making sure she looked
the right way when she crossed the road because she was just moving around the
world all the time. She tipped me. So that was the thing that I had
to be really on top of. And then when I
later, when I went back to close protection, a jaunt with,
with a very famous pop star and that involved sort of a tour
of South America. Again, you know, it was just
an amazing experience. And is it just you or do they hire
someone like that would hire a few people for close protection or what?
It depends like, so with Princess, there were two of us and we worked a
day off each. So that's what's known as an individual bodyguard
role. And then other jobs, there'll be a whole team. You'll have a driver, you'll
have a backup car, you'll have advanced party. So it
depends, it depends on the threat level, the person where they are they
need. Interesting. So, Princess pop
star, what other category of
high profile people were you lucky enough to be
able to engage with and to work for?
Probably the most rewarding thing I've done, and this is
in the early days when I'd actually then later set up my own company. I
had a phone call from someone I know who, who's ex Special
Forces. He runs a terrific company specializing
in real, like adventure travel and getting people to real places
that you can't just go on easy, get a lot of film work.
And he said to me, oh, I really need a female cp.
I've got a situation where we need to extract some children
who basically they were kidnapped by their father from Trinidad and
Tobago. Wow. He took them to join
isis, took them to Syria, as you do.
Their poor mum had no idea where they were. They'd just gone. She didn't
know. It gives me shivers now. They were 4 and 7 years old at
the time and in short, they thought
he had then been killed, but he hadn't.
He got himself a new wife who had her
own children. They were in Rakow. I think
she was escaping at some point, put these poor boys on
this truck and some, whoever the people were moving them
out, wherever they, you know, out this war zone.
She, they made her kick them out because basically they were two black
boys. And I don't know if it was because they were black and they didn't
like them or if it was because they looked different and they would draw attention
to everyone else. Oh, I see. Regardless, these two kids got
dumped on the side of the road. You know, I think they had a pretty
terrible experience. They then ended up in a refugee camp,
I imagine very traumatized, didn't know who they were or any, you know, where they
were. By chance, this, a journalist was
out there and I think he was doing a podcast and he saw these
two boys and he thought, you know, they, they don't look
like they belong here. You know, doing some digging. And again, by
amazing chance, his sister lives in Trinidad and
she traced the mother. So a lot of work was done by the human
rights charity Reprieve. And the head of the
charity, Clive Stafford Smith, engaged His friend
Roger Walters of Pink Floyd, to basically take his private
jet with some bodyguards into Herbal
to basically bring back these. These two boys. Unbelievable.
So it was the most amazing thing. So I got this call saying, oh, you
know, I'm looking for women to go to Syria. And I was like, heck, I'll
do that one myself. Unbelievable. So what
did your role involve, going on that jet to pick up the boys or
what? We went to Erbil and because of his insurance,
he wasn't allowed to cross into Syria. So we were in
Erbal. We sort of had to go in, sort of meet some government ministers and
sort of do a little smoothing, and then we were allowed to sort of
cross the river, crossing into Syria. Right.
It was an amazingly orchestrated plan. You know, it was done
with sort of Special Forces excellence. It was.
Everything was accounted for, all the contingencies.
And at the last minute, the day before, they said, oh, you're not going to
the refugee camp to pick them up. You're now going to this town. Like two
hours inside Syria. So that wasn't part of our
agenda at all. So. And we weren't armed for any of this because, you
know, if we had got stopped, it probably would have got us into more trouble.
Yeah. So we basically went to this ministerial
building and the idea was that it would be very covert. We'd
get these kids and we'd go. But someone had tipped off,
you know, wanted a bit of press and had tipped off all these journalists.
And we turned up and there were probably about 30, 40 journalists, photographers
there. Oh, wow. This was in the refugee camp, was it? Or something
now? In this government type building. So they had been
extracted from the camp and identified as being the
kids of this lady, I guess. Yeah. So by then,
this had been officially arranged at this point. I see. Okay. And
luckily, I'd spoken to the mum the night, because the mum was with us when
I was there for the mum and the boys. And there was another male cpo,
a special forces guy. So it was just the two of us,
two journalists and the human rights charity and the
mum. So we three journalists, actually. So
I spoke to her the night before, and there were these two amazing women who
were doing a podcast on the whole thing.
Reese Sherlock and Lama Amin. And they'd done a lot of work
previously. They'd been on a rooftop in Raca at the height of the
war and they'd lived up there for weeks. Wow. So did they
specialize in helping refugees or helping
collateral damage from the war or what? They were just
literally reporting on everything going on.
So they were now doing a podcast on. On this
particular trip. Yeah. And we had a bit of Girls night before. So it was
Ruth, myself and the mum, Felicia.
And I'd said to her, I said, look what happens tomorrow.
Because she hadn't seen her children. This is four years later, you know, she. We'd
been out to buy warm clothes for them and she was having to judge how
big they'd be because she didn't know, you know, there wasn't
conference calls at the time. She hadn't spoken to them
properly. And I said to her, what do we do if they want
you to hand over the boys to you in public in front of
anyone? Because I could as a mum, you know, I had two small children. I
could only imagine how hard that would be. And she said to me, I
don't want to do in front of cameras. It's got to be private. And I
was so glad we had that conversation. We got there the next day
and we were mobbed, kind of walking in, I see.
And they shuffled us into this big room where they'd set up all these
cameras and sort of. I guess it was. The minister was going
to get all the attention for handing her the choice. I see. So that whoever
was in control in Syria at that stage wanted the kudos of being the
rescuer, is that it? It was along those lines, yeah.
And I mean, you know, this is. This is where,
luckily I'm not the shrinking wallflower and I will upset people if I have to.
I just said to her, no, get up. Because they positioned her at the absolute
far side of the room. I said, no, we're not doing this. Come with me.
And I sort of bundled her out the door and I pushed her into the
first door I could find, which was a small. Right.
And it was just pure, pure chance that boys were in there.
So the boys were in there with someone from, I guess, the refugee camp. So
she had that privacy. And then. And literally
all these people mopped out behind me. And I literally
stood with my back to the door, gave it my war face, and very,
very loudly told everyone they were not going in and she was going to see
her children on their own. And the guy that I was working with did the
best thing he could possibly do, which was to get out the way, and he
left it to me. He was there. I could see him. I knew he had
my back, but he knew you had it. But I had it. And they weren't
going to push a woman out the way. No. Interesting.
Yeah. So it was true how less is more in that
situation. Yeah, yeah. Wow. Must have been an
incredibly emotional moment for them and for you. I mean,
how do you cope with it? Do you. Are you just standing, holding back the
tears at that moment? You don't feel
emotion. You feel you've got to be tough, you've got to.
And there's a front, you know, it's an act, but you've got to give it.
And yeah, I was thinking I might have to really defend myself.
They do try and push me out of the way, which luckily they didn't. And
you know, people getting quite cross because they wanted this exclusive. They've been promised this
scoop, obviously. Yeah. And then, you know, then the
diplomacy took over and we agreed that they would then do an interview
afterwards, which they did, and then we obviously extracted out, but by that
point it was going live on tv. So we're thinking, right, we need to get
back over this border now because we've got a two hour drive. And they now
know that there's this little convoy. So you had to get back into Iraq, is
that it? Or Iraq, which wasn't necessarily the safest place in
the world. We did get detained by the Iraqi police.
We knew, you know, that we were pre warned. Right.
I mean, we spent what felt like hours in the police station. But
no, they were great. They basically wanted to talk to the boys to
get as much information from them as they could, but they just, they
were, you know, they were quite traumatized. I
was about to say. I mean, you mentioned that there was a. The
press wanted to speak to the mother and the kids. I mean,
what are the. Did you have any idea or is it now
that it's many years since of what they actually went through?
Were they. I don't know what, what happened to them over that four
years. They were living in a toilet block on the floor
at one point. And from what I understand of it, there was no
duty of care to the children. They're just chucked in this camp and
they were looked after by. I don't know if she's
German, she was a white convert who has
now been charged with terrorism, I believe. And
she looked after them, from what I understand. She. She took care of them for
granted. Wow. What. Whatever happened to the father who took them?
Well, the mother was told initially that he'd been killed
in a bomb. It later transpired he wasn't. He was,
he was alive and I think he'd been arrested. I see, yeah.
And is there a happily ever after? Story is the mum and the
kids grown up and now leading a relatively healthy, happy
life. Yeah. They went back to Trinidad, and we did stay in touch for quite
a long time. She had her hands full with them because, you know,
I just remember one of the boys saying to her, because the dress that they
wear, she covers her head. But they were very bright colors.
Yeah. And I remember one of the boys saying, that's haram. You know, you should
be wearing black. You should cover your face. And that's the indoctrination that
they had, you know, So I think she probably had her work cut out with
them. Um, but she. She was a very strong woman, so I. I imagine she
did a good job. That sounds incredibly challenging.
So difficult to find. Another example is there that
comes close to doing something like that. Was it kind of mundane after
that, Hayley, or Not really. I think that's certainly the
most interesting and the most rewarding job that
I've done. I mean, I've never really done celebrity work because, you
know, I think people want me. They want discreet protection. You know, it's politicians and
princesses. It's not rock stars. I did do
the South America tour, which, again, I did, because I'd
never been to South America and I hadn't done that work. And it was
a whole range of concerts, and it was just. I was going to
learn from it. It was, you know, a new experience. Yeah. Okay.
So that was terrific. But now I sort of. So I'm. I'm now
running a company, so I haven't been on the ground myself in. In
a few years, as every now and again, a particularly
interesting job might come up that I might think, oh, maybe I'll go out for
that one, but I kind of need to be here. All right, so
take me through, just in a condensed fashion,
the transition from working for a lot of these other
companies and going out on these jobs. And you've been in
business now how long?
So what was it you decided that I could do this as well as
anyone else, and you wanted to, or you wanted to set up something with
your own hallmark on it? In complete honesty, I was talked into
it. My husband had sepsis. I. Oh, my
God. Done a whole separate career, which you
probably haven't time got into, which is good, because there's not much I can say
anyway. I have a feeling it might be to do with public service as
well. So I left there, and I was actually going to set up a
solar panel company with my husband, who's an electrical engineer, and
we had two small children. By then he got sepsis and nearly died
and was extremely sick in hospital. Oh, my God. And
I basically had to get the money rolling in, so I started
freelancing. I was doing sort of mixture of close protection
work and surveillance work. Okay. And I sat in the car
with a great guy, I know his ex, customs next
size. And he basically talked me into it. And he's someone who will talk
to you until you do what he says. And I think he had me for
eight hours nonstop. And he, like, why are you working for other people?
You need to be doing this for yourself. And I literally went home and
formed company. And where was the, was the name
an easy choice for you? You just looked around the corner and said, oh, yeah,
that Sloan is a good name. The time I was working for a
family very close to Sloane Square
and I was spending a lot of time in that area and I sort of
sat there in the car one day thinking, right, this is a good name. But
I, I didn't have any money to sell the company. You know, I had, I
had, you know, I was just, you know, living on what I earned. So I,
I very, very slowly crossed over from sort of
freelancing, slowly building up my own clients
and a lot of white labeling for much larger companies. Okay. Yeah. Which is
typical. Sort of in the security world, people will say they do all these
things and when it comes down to it, they will subcontract a lot of them.
Absolutely, absolutely. And that's right, you know, you can't be a
master of everything, so you bring in professionals to deal with certain things.
So a lot of that early work was around surveillance, hostile surveillance,
counter surveillance, close protection, and physical penetration
testing. So tell me a bit about the surveillance work that you did.
I mean, you'd obviously, you mentioned this right at the beginning. You'd obviously been trained
in some kind of surveillance in order to do close protection. Right?
Yeah. So I've had a lot of operational experience, shall we say?
So a lot of the work that I do now is for corporate clients and
it's sort of strategic security programs and it might be
educating them on supply chain risk conversion,
security risk management, and creating
specialist projects. So we will put together close protection teams,
hostile surveillance detection teams, penetration testing teams,
inside a risk management. But a lot of that early work,
it was that real sort of on the ground operational stuff
and surveillance at the time, I
don't do, I don't do as much now. These days I will do hostile surveillance
awareness more than anything. So this would be for.
I mean, it sounds as if it's kind of, you know,
espionage kind of arena. Is that what it's like, the
corporate espionage? It might be, you know, working for people who
have, might be looking into forward investigations. It might be
that they're doing due diligence. They think they've got an insider problem.
It's always legitimate. You know, it's, it's. What we do has always got to be
necessary and proportionate to the clients. My
clients are typically corporate. I don't get involved in sort of
the matrimonial type things because inevitably it gets
quite dirty and messy. Yeah. And
it's just not worth it. But you know, there's been a lot
around that, that angle and the,
the insider risk.
I mean, I've always been fascinated by counter
surveillance because you are
looking at it from a defensive perspective. And
the biggest risk or one of the biggest risks, I don't know enough to talk
intelligently about it must be an insider who is
disaffected or has been blackmailed or
whatever. Is there a similar situation that you've come across
where you've, you've had to unearth or you've been retained
to find the mole, as it were? Yeah, there's been quite a
few. My. One of the first jobs that we got involved
in it was for a luxury goods company and they had an insider
problem. And without going into too much details,
the insiders were creating an
operation where they were going to steal a lot of goods from this
company and we needed to basically find evidence of that.
So we needed to think about the least intrusive way to do
that, which we did with technical devices, audio devices. In the
end we found what we needed basically. So
that was more of a technical operation. We have been involved in some
sort of fraud type investigations where we've had to follow
people that have been accused of market manipulation.
And again, it's just being very careful to make sure that, that
we tick the legal boxes and it is proportionate and
we're handling data properly. Yeah, no, I get that,
I get that. And so if you had a magic
wand, what would be the ideal kind of
cases that you would love to be handling from now on in? In other words,
if you could cookie cutter this kind of case where there's a
challenge to do this, this. That's really what gets you up in the morning.
I think what I enjoy the most is a lot of my clients are corporate
and a lot of the private clients sort of want the close protection and things.
My sort of sweet spot is in the middle. So it's the
executives and what they need and that crossover between the business risk and
personal risk. Okay, so a lot of it is education and it's
really teaching people how to, how to manage their
digital footprint, you know, how to avoid routine, how to,
how to not have their guests and their staff on the wi
fi that, that they use for work. Is it a lot of common
sense stuff you're talking about or a bit more than that?
It is for me because I've been brought up with it for a lot of
people, not especially sort of the next gen where, where everything is
put on TikTok. So for me there's two angles, but the first is the personal
security and it is protecting that group of people,
I guess the families, really everything from the digital
to vetting their staff to, you know, I see.
Making sure that the, that the people that are in their own
homes are trustworthy and stuff like that. Yeah, exactly.
And the second, what I enjoy most for the corporate clients is the
physical penetration testing programs. So give us an
example of what that looks like on the ground. So basically that
is breaking into places to test their security. So there's a bit more to
it. So it might start at looking at their doing
OSYNC research to sort of see what they're putting online that gives away their
security or lack of it, or what their staff are doing and
saying it will involve reconnaissance, sort of looking at the
vulnerabilities in their building, their perimeter, their process.
Could it involve getting to know somebody, them and trying to
see how malleable they are? Stuff like that? Yeah,
sometimes, you know, we sort of sent people into work functions and things just to
sort of see what people talk about if they've left their ID card lying around.
And then basically we'll come up with a plan to
test what we think are the vulnerable points of the building. And it might
be driving in, it might be tailgating in, it might be
talking our way in. And this might sort of coincide
with, with perhaps digital attack
and sort of working out how we can get through their help desk and
things. And then we'll sort of see how far we can move
laterally through a building. You know, we've had times where we got to
executive, you know, CEOs desks and so
what's the biggest kind of gotcha, you know, when you've been employed to do
something and you came back to the client and said, you're not going to believe
this. We got into. We found your diary for
19, you know, for 2,000, what's the biggest kind of
find in penetrating testing?
We've had a lot of files on individuals that have been named and they've
sort of been celebrities. We found their information. There's been.
I can't go into too much detail. There's places we've got into that we really
shouldn't have got into. One of them was we did a test on a
police station, which is probably one of my more favorite jobs.
But I think the overall sort of takeaway is that what we then
produce is valuable. It sort of really shows people, you know, there's
a lacking up process here. We need to tighten up here. We're investing,
you know, we've invested all this money in cctv, but what we really need to
do is make sure it's being monitored, you know, in real time.
We've gone past the witching hour because it's just been so much fun.
So what kind of message would you leave
for anyone that is thinking about
whether they need close protection? Counter surveillance
is the message that guys, girls, you are so
much more vulnerable than you think you are. What's the message that you think
in this day and age with social media and stuff that you want to leave
as your parting swan song? I think it's all
about assessing the risk. I think it's about training people to understand their
risk and making sure that, that they are getting what they actually
need. So it's, have the conversations, you know,
speak to someone who will really get to the crux of that and won't just
sell you a service for the sake of it. So it's, it's really getting to
the bottom of it and making sure you're getting a really genuine and
honest service that suits you and your lifestyle and enables your
lifestyle. You know, security shouldn't block what people do, you
know, it should allow it in a safe way. And
from an observation, listening to you, you
would certainly, you are the poster person for
saying to women generally, don't be put off. This
is close protection surveillance. Male, female.
It's a great place to be. Yeah, I
absolutely adore my job. You know, I love working.
I got some great clients with some great problems, you
know, some great projects that we solve and there's so
much out there. It is a very diverse industry. There
really is something to fit everyone. Great.
Well, that was a really. I can't
believe how the time has flown. So fascinating.
Tons more to unfold, I'm sure, but
we're going to call it quits. There Hayley, it's lovely to
sit and chat with you, and I can't wait to
meet you in person for a cup of coffee and find out what
hubby did or does. And
I'm sure that would be equally interesting. So thank you so much
for joining me. I hope it wasn't anywhere near as
scary as you thought it might be. No, it's been very enjoyable.
Thank you for having me. Thank you for listening and if you
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