Barry Strevens is one of those men whose face you have seen, even if you don’t know it.
During his 30-year police career, he was one of the close protection officers either behind Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, or in front of her, making the TV and press make way for the PM. So if Mrs Thatcher was out and about and on the television or in a newspaper photograph, the CP officers would be in the same picture. As Barry Strevens recalls, in those days Mrs, now Lady Thatcher was ‘target number one’. So when business risk, intelligence and investigation consultancy The Inkerman Group appoints Barry Strevens QPM as head of corporate threat (as reported in the November 2006 issue), and he invites you to the Commonwealth Club in Northumberland Avenue, and starts talking about close protection, you go and listen. Towards the end of my hour with him, I ask what you could call the Pygmalion question. Are close protection officers born, or made? Can someone be trained in CP, or is it a skill you either have, or you haven’t? Looking the part – being big, say – helps, but that is no good if the officer hasn’t got brains, Barry Strevens says. “And it is one of the things I always look for; how they [CP officers] react under pressure. You don’t want someone that panics. You have got to be thinking all the time; explore your options; and anything negative, make it a postive; that’s my approach to life.” You can understand that this man, who has had one of the most important CP tasks in history, rates experience. What’s striking, though, is that with experience must come the enthusiasm to keep gathering experience, learning from others. He says: “You learn all the time; I am still learning. I am not boastful enough to say I know it all, I don’t. Anyone who says that, I question.”
Talking of those Mrs Thatcher years, he describes that CP team as the last line of defence. Defending in front of those officers was, you could say, the whole government machine. That said, it is as well to recall that besides the IRA bomb at the Conservative Party conference hotel in Brighton in 1984, US President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, and Swedish prime minister Olof Palme was assassinated in 1986. Barry Strevens does not make this point, though he does say that Lady Thatcher remains under Met Police close protection. He joins the Ashford, Kent-based consultancy from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in London where he was head of security protocol. That involved reviewing the security at many UK embassies and high commissions. The move to Inkerman means Barry Strevens is working again with the consultancy’s chief executive and founder Gerald Moor, who Barry Strevens knew from work in government. In Gerald Moor’s words, Barry Strevens is ‘one of the top close protection and intelligence specialists in the world’. The title, head of corporate threat, means Barry Strevens is in charge of protection teams, research analysts, due diligence, vetting, and tracking technology – countersurveillance ‘sweeps’. Another part of Inkerman Group – the fraud investigation side – is under Nick Howard, the former senior Lincolnshire Police detective, head of specialist risk.
I ask Barry Strevens first about how his public service work compares and contrasts with his work now for private clients – which, in Inkerman’s case, is for embassies, chief executives, and, to recall a ‘spending the budget’ item from the July 2004 issue, the Dalai Lama on a visit to Britain. Then Inkerman worked for The Office of Tibet in London. Briefly, while for government CP work there are set procedures, Barry Strevens says, for Inkerman private clients it is bespoke, discreet. Here the consultancy’s analysts come in – ‘if you are doing it [research] on the hoof, you are in trouble,” he says. Up to date analysis of the country the chief exec is visiting – maybe it’s to a country the corporate has offices in, or a deal to be done? – comes from websites, or Inkerman contacts, on the places the exec is going to, and the likely threats.
“Then we go into the programme of protection. I will have selected a protection team; if it’s a client we haven’t dealt with before, I would tend to go on that particular trip. Because I need to know what that client likes and dislikes.” Next step before departure: sending someone to do the reconnaissance, arranging for instance the transport. And again, before departure the team and principal client will meet, to go through procedures, what is likely to happen: “He knows us and we know him.” In other words, no sub-contracting. Inkerman does not go to the likes of Iraq or Afghanistan, but where it does go – Europe, Americas, south-east Asia, Africa, parts of the Middle East – there are places where criminals may seek to kidnap for extortion, or fanatics may see the client as a target because of the regime the executive (to the fanatic) represents. Behind the CP team, Barry Strevens adds, you have the logistics, whether for transport or communications, Blackberries and the like, and any tracking devices necessary.
I mention the sports security summit featured in the March 2006 issue when speakers discussed protecting Test cricketers. The risky time and place may not be at the place of work, the sports s tadium, but after work, when the sportsmen are … ‘night-clubbing’, Barry Strevens says, finishing my train of thought for me. Not wanting to suggest that Inkerman clients or indeed any chief execs go clubbing, but the point being that humans have minds of their own. “There are places you know not to go to,” Barry Strevens says, and if a client should get into an emergency, there should be a phone number to ring, or a panic button.
I ask about corporate threats overall; he mentions a company’s duty of care to staff, and that you have to balance the risk against the value of the visit. Yes, a client may have its own staff in-country, and security staff, but, he suggests, close protection people can assist. We talk a little history – the Met Police close protection work dates from Victorian days, against Fenians. Churchill’s bodyguard, recently the subject of a TV documentary series, had to contend with Irish and Indian nationalists, and Nazis, who all at various times wanted Churchill dead. How have things changed – or is it a case of nothing new under the sun? While there may be something in the latter – the importance remains of vaarying the client’s time and means of departure and arrival – world disparities in wealth may make a western executive fair game in south-east Asia, Africa or South America in 2006 (or 1906). The difference though is in modern communications available to terrorists. And there’s weaponry available to terrorists, from nuclear down.
Barry Strevens leads on a tour of the Commonwealth Club, a place known to him from his Foreign Office days. After the coffee and the meeting, I sketch out this article over lunch at St Martin’s in the Field crypt – if any reader knows of a more reasonable place to eat and have a pot of tea in London, please say so. I feel that I should have asked Barry Strevens more, for example about his time protecting Mrs Thatcher. Yes, Inkerman are discreet, but I could have asked. I reflected that his point – that it matters how you react under pressure – applies not only to close protection, but to us all.
