45 years ago this month, Searchlight broke one of the most important stories it has ever investigated – British nazis were planning to bomb the Notting Hill Carnival but were thwarted by Searchlight’s mole, Ray Hill. I was there. This is the inside story.
When Ray Hill, Searchlight’s most famous ‘mole’ in the British far right, boarded the Paris metro on the evening of 20 April 1981, he believed he was on his way to a routine birthday celebration for Adolf Hitler.
He’d been invited over to France “to meet some of the comrades” by a French fascist called Alex Oumow when they had met at the Brighton home of the notorious Hancock family, lifelong fascists who ran a printing operation which produced publications for the extreme right across the board.
The Hancocks were at the very heart of the British far-right scene.
Veritable arsenal
The previous night in Paris Ray had stayed at the flat of a French-Vietnamese fascist called Yann Tran Long, whose apartment turned out to be a veritable arsenal of guns and ammunition.
The next morning, Ray couldn’t get out quickly enough. A Hitler birthday party, to which Oumow was now taking him, would be just so much light relief.
Oumow led him to a nondescript backstreet restaurant with a large private dining room curtained off at the rear.
Behind the curtain, already the worse for wear, were about 40 Nazis, members of the Faisceaux Nationalistes Europeans (FNE), all in uniform, noisily celebrating the fuhrer’s birthday.
Ray’s standing on the British far right at the time was considerable so he was led straight to the top table and placed next to an older Nazi with a finger missing.
After some introductory chat about the state of the British far right, this gentleman got to the point.
The Brits’ turn
The comrades in Italy, France and Germany had begun to fight back, with the bombings at Bologna, in Paris and at the Munich Oktoberfest. Now it was the turn of the Brits to do something meaningful.
What, asked Ray, did he have in mind?
“You must bomb Brixton!” barked his companion, and around the table there were cheers of approval. The French, he said, could provide anything that was needed: explosives, detonators and timing devices. Were the British up to it?
Ray was shaken but said he would take the idea back to England.
Of course, he had no intention of doing so, but Oumow had other ideas. Whilst in England, he had made contact with Tony Malski, a deranged member at that time of the neo-nazi British Movement. Oumow had been impressed.
Ray was to contact Malski and tell him to get in touch about the bomb plan.
“You must bomb Brixton!” barked his companion, and around the table there were cheers of approval. The French, he said, could provide anything that was needed: explosives, detonators and timing devices. Were the British up to it?
Ray could hardly ignore the instruction, but he tried to minimise the chance of contact actually being made by just casually dropping it into his next conversation with Malski:
“Oh, by the way, Alex wants you to get in touch sometime.”
It didn’t work. Shortly afterwards, Malski phoned Ray. He’d been in touch with Alex. He was excited.
And the target had changed:
“We’re going to do Notting Hill. We’ve already got the geli, all we need now are the detonators. We’ll give them a fucking Carnival to remember.”
Open fire
They met a few days later. By now, according to Malski, the plan had developed. They were also going to put two gunmen on the roofs of buildings overlooking the carnival.
After the explosion, they would open fire hoping that black people would think the police were firing on them and react violently.
“We’ll turn the n*****s on the cops!” Malski exclaimed.
He explained that he was going to Paris to pick up the detonators, travelling on the weekend ferry. It had all been arranged with Alex.
Security Service
Things were now getting serious.
I was with Gerry Gable, Searchlight’s founder and publisher, in the Searchlight office in London when Ray called to provide us with Malski’s precise travel arrangements.
Gerry looked at me. “We’ve got to get this to the security service” he said. “Do you know anyone there?”
I did not.
“Nor do I”, said Gerry.
With no connection of our own to the security service, we decided to approach a television journalist we had worked with before, who we knew had highly placed contacts in Customs & Excise, one of whom was their liaison with MI5.
We called him, and he made a call.
Call from “the Home Office”
Shortly afterwards, we received a phone call from a chap “in the Home office”.
He understood we had something for them. We did – a memo we were in the process of writing. He thanked us. Someone would call to collect it shortly.
A couple of hours later, a bearded gentleman in a Barbour jacket turned up at the office and took delivery of the briefing note we had prepared.
And that, we thought, would be that.
‘They were also going to put two gunmen on the roofs of buildings overlooking the carnival. After the explosion, they would open fire, hoping that black people would think the police were firing on them and react violently’
Hopefully, they would arrest Malski in the process of bringing back the detonators from France, where we presumed he was to collect them from Yann Tran Long. And we hoped, with luck, Malski would put it down to a random search.
But it wasn’t to happen.
The weekend came and went. And then, on the Tuesday. Malski was again on the phone to Ray. “I’m back”.
Carnival race war
Ray was flabbergasted. “Successful trip?” he asked. It was, said Malski, without elaborating. We had to conclude that he had returned with the detonators.
There was now only one option left: to blow the whole story, even with the attendant risk that Ray’s cover might be blown as well. That risk now had to be taken.
We contacted the Daily Mirror and they splashed the story on the front page: “Carnival Race War Plot”.
The Shadow Home Secretary, Roy Hattersley, weighed in, demanding police action.
Malski was furious but wouldn’t discuss the Paris trip with Ray on the phone.
It was a nervous few days, particularly for Ray and his wife. But when Malski phoned the following week, it quickly became clear that he was not blaming Ray for the leak.
Providentially, he had completely forgotten that he had shared his travel plans with Ray who, as a result, was completely above suspicion.
South coast leak
Malski had concluded that as Yann lived in France and the leak had been to British Special Branch, the leak must have originated in the Brighton circle around the Hancocks and Alex Ormouw.
“It’s definitely someone on the south coast” he concluded.
“Definitely…” agreed Ray.
However, Malski now wanted to “fix Searchlight”.
He told Ray he was starting legal proceedings against the Daily Mirror, Searchlight and anyone else who had named him in connection with the plot.
We waited for the writ. Sadly, it never arrived.
Press complaint
What did arrive was a complaint to the Press Council. Malski was claiming that Searchlight had been inaccurate and unfair in portraying him as a nazi psychopath.
The Press Council was a largely toothless body, but we did not want an adverse finding which Malski could parade around as vindication.
We could not put Ray forward as a witness, and although we had plenty of third-party evidence of Malski’s fanaticism, we needed something more.
So, posing as the UK correspondent of ‘Soldier of Fortune’, the US-based mercenary magazine, I phoned Malski and told him I had been advised that he was the man to speak to about paramilitary activity in Britain.
Gabbled freely
Malski needed little encouragement. For almost an hour, he gabbled on freely about far-right paramilitary networks, claiming: “I am speaking for a paramilitary organisation.”
He described groups made up largely of ex-servicemen, trained in explosives and organised in cells.
He spoke of automatic weapons, high explosives and plans to intervene during future riots.
“The battle’s with the n*****s,” he said. “We don’t want to end up having a shoot-out with the police.”
Vindicated
We submitted a full transcript to the Press Council.
The following July it completely vindicated our coverage, concluding that the deception had been justified in the public interest.
It described the taped conversation as “a horrifying one” and said it was compatible with the picture of Malski that had emerged from our reporting.
But even now, Malski remained undeterred.
Only weeks after the Press Council verdict, Ray received another call from him. Yann Tran Long was in London and wanted to meet.
They arranged to meet at the Kings Cross Wimpy Bar. Opposite the café was a raised platform above the station entrance, screened by a four-foot wall – an ideal vantage point for a photographer.
‘I couldn’t miss’
Mike Cohen, an old 62 Group hand and Searchlight’s veteran photographer, took up position there.
He had no idea Ray was working for us. I simply gave him a photograph and told him to look for a young Asian man meeting him outside the café.
I met up with Mike a couple of days later to collect the pictures.
“I don’t know who your man is,” he said, “but you can thank him from me.
“When he saw his chum coming up the road, he signalled it by throwing his arms in the air and welcoming him like a long-lost brother. I couldn’t miss.”
Tran Long was staying in a west London bedsit and was travelling around the UK making contact with its hardest-line Nazis.
Special Branch visit
He told Ray he had brought detonators into Britain and that Special Branch had visited him and searched his room but failed to find them – despite the fact they were simply under the bed in a shoebox.
Once again he offered guns and ammunition. Ray seized the opportunity, pulled out his address book and asked for a price list. Tran Long obliged, writing in his own hand: detonators £10 each; guns £400; sub-machine guns £400, with various prices for ammunition.
Tran Long told Ray he had already visited certain nazi contacts, including Ian Souter Clarence in Dorset and the Hancocks in Brighton, and suggested his offers of weapons had attracted interest elsewhere.
Before Ray had a chance to meet up with Malski in person to hear what had happened on his cross-channel trip, the two had a falling out.
Malski wanted Ray to assume the leadership of Malski’s new madcap party, the National Socialist Action Party, and took umbrage when Ray declined. It was a while before they were talking again.
Eventually, though, with a little help from Searchlight, the Paris-based end of the plot was shut down by the French police.
Secret camera
In 1982, filming for The Other Face of Terror, Ray again visited the Clichy flat of Yann Tran Long. This time he was secretly recording his visit and captured the sound of them producing weapons – including automatic weapons – from a cupboard and showing them off to him.
And it was only now, during this filming, that we finally learned what had happened on Malski’s trip to France for those detonators the year before.
Ray arranged to meet Malski in a west London pub. Ray’s briefcase was wired for sound, and a French television camera operator with a concealed camera was positioned across the other side of the bar.
Gerry and I played pool nearby, just in case anything went wrong.
Warned off
Ray eventually got the conversation round to the Paris trip, and Malski offered an account of what had happened which took us completely by surprise.
He had, it seemed, been stopped not on his way back, but on the way out.
And far from being arrested, or even questioned, he had been warned off.
He told Ray:
“They said, ‘We know where you’re going. We know you’re going to pick up some things in Paris. We were tipped off to look for a bloke with your description, your name’.
“He said, ‘We’ve been tipped off you’re going to pick up some gear.’
“He said, ‘Don’t bring it back in’.
“Now, the only three that knew I was going over there to see him was Alex Ormouw… only him, Yann and me… And Alex was the one who introduced me to Yann in the first place”.
So, Searchlight’s intervention had stopped the bombing, though not in the way we had intended.
Malski did not bring back the detonators because he was warned not to, after we had passed our information to “the Home Office”.
You can hear that part of the conversation here:
Before the film was transmitted, we passed details of what we had discovered during the Paris filming trip to our contacts in the French police trade unions, and French police raided Tran Long’s flat in Clichy, arresting arrested everyone there, including a Spanish fascist, Juan Lorenzo Martinez, who was wanted for two murders.
The terror cell which had plotted to bomb the Notting Hill Carnival had at last been dismantled.
You can watch The Other Face of Terror, which tells the whole story, here:
andy bell 
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