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Countering Extremism with Guy Mathias - Part 1

• Philip Grindell MSc CSyP

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"Countering Extremism with Guy Mathias" – The Defuse Podcast 

This two-part podcast features an in-depth conversation between Philip Grindell and Guy Mathias, a renowned security expert with extensive experience countering extremism, particularly in the pharmaceutical and research sectors.

Episode Summary

In this fascinating discussion, Guy Mathias shares insights from his distinguished career addressing extremist threats, particularly from animal rights groups in the UK during the 1980s through the 2000s. The conversation explores the evolution of extremist tactics, sophisticated intelligence gathering methods, and how organizations can prepare for and counter modern extremist threats.

Guy discusses how extremist groups evolved from direct action like arson attacks to more sophisticated operations involving infiltration, data mining, and targeted pressure campaigns. He emphasizes the importance of preparedness, risk assessment, and understanding both direct threats and supply chain vulnerabilities.

Key Topics Discussed:

  • Guy's background and entry into security without traditional military/police experience
  • The evolution of animal rights extremism in the UK, particularly the SHAC (Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty) campaign
  • Sophisticated tactics used by extremist groups including: 
    • Direct action (arson, liberation of animals)
    • Infiltration and insider threats
    • Intelligence gathering and targeting
    • Supply chain disruption
  • How extremist tactics have transferred to other causes and evolved with technology
  • The importance of preparedness and risk assessment
  • Challenges of screening and vetting employees
  • Protecting organizational leadership
  • Current and future extremism trends

Notable Quotes:

"The tactics were a local level. They were at a national level. They became an international level tactic." - Guy Mathias

"I would certainly argue that there is a requirement for those of us working in the sector be that security risk or resilience, to be prepared. What does preparedness look like?" - Guy Mathias

Practical Advice for Organizations:

  • Develop and maintain a dynamic risk register that is regularly reviewed
  • Understand your organization's supply chain vulnerabilities
  • Implement thorough pre-employment screening
  • Consider ongoing screening for high-risk positions
  • Educate leadership about potential threats
  • Conduct vulnerability assessments for executives
  • Prepare resilience plans for disruptions

The podcast provides valuable historical context and practical security insights for organizations facing potential extremist threats in today's complex environment.

Guy Mathias - https://www.linkedin.com/in/guy-mathias-19555673/

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Diffuse podcast with host Philip Grindel, CEO and founder of Diffuse, a global threat and intelligence consultancy that blends psychology and intelligence to mitigate threats and risks to prominent people and brands.

Speaker 2:

So welcome back to the Diffuse podcast. My guest today is someone I genuinely consider to be a friend and a mentor and I think those terms are often used quite liberally. But I met Guy when I first I think probably just after I left the police actually and started on my journey and I'm going to give him a proper introduction because he deserves it. But he's the closest thing I would think in the security industry in the UK and he's going to hate this phrase but to being an influencer. And I don't mean one of these people on Instagram who's flogging makeup, I mean somebody who has genuinely been there, seen it, done it over decades and seen all the kind of new best ideas come and go. But what we're going to talk about is such a serious subject. So let me introduce Guy and then I'm going to introduce the subject, and I think this is going to be a two-part podcast, which I think is going to be really interesting. So our guest is Guy Mathias. So Guy is a renowned I use that term in its proper sense security expert and, in fact, the recipient Huntingdon Life Sciences serving as a corporate security advisor to GSK, where he audited global facilities and authored Extremism Past, present and Future. He has served as the chair of numerous prestigious organisations, including the UK Pharmaceutical Industry Security Forum, the Food and Drink Security Association and the Security Commonwealth. Guy has built vital relationships across industrial, academic, police and government sectors. He is a fellow of the Security Institute, where he served on the Validation Board Chair sorry, as the Validation Board Chair and Strategy Director he now contributes to the Security Industry Authority Strategic Forum on Public Protection Initiatives and was recently appointed to the Risk and Security Management Forum Council in 2024. So with all those things going on, we're very lucky to have him, because I know how busy he is.

Speaker 2:

Now. I saw an article a couple of weeks ago in the paper which sparked my attention, which was in the Times paper in the UK and the headline was the sabotage squad attacking UK military supplies again and again. So this subject we're going to talk about is something that's quite close to my heart, because during my policing career and actually, interestingly, at the very beginning of my military career I on occasion was posted to various environments where there were serious threats to military and other locations. And we often look at what's going on now and people talk about the animal rights movement. But I don't think it depends how old you are, whether you really understand the level of threat that the animal rights movement posed back in the 80s and maybe 90s even, and they were, in my view, terrorists.

Speaker 2:

Nowadays we see lots of single action protest groups, whether it's environmental, whether it's palestinian, whether it's whatever it is, and and it's important to to make the reference that 90 of those people are protesting against something that they're very passionate about. They're doing it because they believe in what they're doing, and they do it peacefully, and they don't pose any genuine physical harm. They're not seeking to pose any genuine physical harm. But within those groups there are individuals, who some might call them professional activists, who do pose genuine threats, both to organisations, to their finances, to their reputations and actually personal physical threats to individuals.

Speaker 2:

And that's where Guy comes in, because Guy's worked in that space back in the day when it was at its worst and for those of you who don't remember and Guy will talk about it they were planting car bombs under executives' cars. They were acting like terrorist cells, and so you couldn't play at being in charge of security in those days. That was the real deal, and so Guy was there and survived it all, metaphorically speaking and mentally speaking as well and has gone on to contribute to the UK security industry as, in my view, a voice of reason and sense across various forums, as I mentioned. So that's enough about me and about me talking. It's about Guy. So, guy, welcome and thank you for doing this. I know we've talked about it for a long time. I can't believe we haven't had you on before, actually bearing on our relationship.

Speaker 3:

But welcome, and I'm really looking forward to talking about this because I think it's such a relevant subject right now philip, um, a privilege, yeah, overdue, um remiss of me, uh, to not get to this quicker and uh, thank you incredibly for the reforce and kind words and let's hope I can in some small measure match up to those throughout the podcast as well. And I might just say I think in a wonderfully eloquent way you've summarized probably what was involved in my career pathway but also some of the challenges I face. So, yes, hopefully we can elucidate and cover off some of those points within the podcast that may give your listeners an opportunity to understand and perhaps prepare for what is a issue that is certainly not going to go away and I think is going to be there for probably time and memorial.

Speaker 2:

I think you're right and I think over the years, with the emergence of the internet and social media and all those sort of things, they've become possibly even more difficult to to tackle. Um, but let's talk about history. Then let's go back to the beginning. How did so? You're I? One of the things I I most like about you is you're not from the kind of traditional or what people think might be traditional security backgrounds in terms of military and policing and everything else. But how did you get into the security world?

Speaker 3:

Great question. Yeah, and I think to a degree still an unusual element of sorts these days, but particularly in those days as well. Yeah, I was planning to go through my career status to have gone into the military or law enforcement and, sadly, a medical condition that wasn't a big issue for me but obviously became a big issue for my career precluded that opportunity and about 25 career choices later at a relatively young age. Some may have said, was there a uniform fetish involved? But it was just around not being able to get into the military or law enforcement. I had siblings who were senior police officers in law enforcement so I obviously felt I was nailed on to become a super cop. We'll never know, will we? But in essence, yeah, I had to recalibrate, and recalibrate fairly quickly because there were the concepts of bills to be paid and also understanding where I might go. So I was very, very fortunate in meeting someone who was pretty far reaching at the time, who had worked in the military, who had started to deal with the challenges around what was then very much animal rights extremism, and I was again incredibly fortunate, as I've been throughout my career, of accident rather than design. This particular person took a punt on bringing me in Initially as a manager analyst and my knowledge as a manager analyst was significantly zero at that stage of what I was seeking to understand. And, by the way, I had no intention of staying within the world of security, risk and resilience because at some stage I was still going to get back into another shot at law enforcement before I was eventually disabused of that. So I went into it.

Speaker 3:

You pointed out rightly this was back in the late 80s. There was a significant physical intervention threat problem with what was then the Animal Liberation Front Strange Beast, strange acronym the acronyms ALF would have fitted very much the time of PIRA and the IRA and the UDF. So there was an association in more ways than one. From that I then moved into this strange arena and thought, first and foremost, this is a strange beast to deal with. And my first exposure would have been looking after a facility in the UK which was essentially attacked by the Animal Liberation Front and they caused at that stage and this is in the 80s a hundred thousand pounds worth of damage and fire related damage and, it would be possibly fair to say, terrorized the security team who were there to protect the establishment. So pretty much an own goal.

Speaker 3:

Where I got very, very lucky was that, prior to this occasion happening, I was also an exponent of technology and said that we would put in some very, very early cameras that were probably the size of a small car at that stage. We put those in Long story short for the podcast and people listening to this. In Long story short for the podcast and people listening to this, it secured the convictions of a character who, for the podcast, will remain nameless, but a leading figure in the animal liberation front and a couple of his cohorts, and they picked up a fairly significant jail terror from that. What did it mean for me? Well, after the events, the damage had still been done, but we'd recorded the evidence, were too able to secure the conviction, but it then made an early impression in terms of what I was doing.

Speaker 3:

From that I was able to secure a position that said okay, maybe we'll invest in you in terms of developing an analytical capability and an intelligence capability. That sounds terribly impressive. I said to you that I was doing my best impression of David Jason's brother in A Touch of Frost with a card index. I know, philip, you've been around long enough, but not as long as I have, but you'll certainly remember card indexes.

Speaker 3:

So the card index was born for me and that was a series of intelligence compilation, open source initially but also as I then inadvertently stayed within this career path increasingly a concept of connectivity and sharing information through what was then the life sciences industry. But eventually that became a much wider picture across industry sectors throughout the UK and indeed globally. So that's kind of where I sort of set up my stall at that particular time. It was evident at the time that law enforcement were also tentatively looking at an intelligence group at Old Scotland Yard to determine, particularly looking again at the animal rights picture. But also at that stage corporate had nothing in play. So I wish I could say I had the foresight to be the leader in terms of bringing that to fruition.

Speaker 2:

But actually it was OK. Maybe this is something that I can develop and also look to utilize from my perspective as well. So we're talking late 80s, incidentally, card indexes. I loved those card index systems. I found it so easy to walk into the intelligence units where I was, pick out a card and very quickly get a an understanding of the individual and their, their kind of career through crime or whatever. So, yeah, I know that technology is a great thing, but I thoroughly enjoyed a good card system. Um, so when we, when you looked back at those times then, were you know what were the tactics, what were they, what were they, what were they trying to achieve and how were they trying to achieve it?

Speaker 3:

I mean tactics. Certainly in the late 80s it was very direct action. So so it was literally arson attacks. It was the concept of liberating, so liberating whichever particular species or animals that they felt they were able to get at, and there was no real great rhyme or reason. It would be anything that they could secure and release, that they could secure and release and perhaps a reference point, there would be the ecological damage. That was attritional at the time.

Speaker 3:

Some of us may remember mink. Mink were released in great numbers, certainly in East Anglia, and wreaked havoc upon many species within that particular area. So this whole concept of you know, rightly you, you know I have no support at all for fur trade. I'm quite happy to go out there and say sorry, I just don't get that, don't see that, couldn't see any meaningful aspect to what was being done, but this concept of then releasing a vicious predator into the world and the chaos that that caused. So it was direct action, it was significant, it was beginnings perhaps of personal attacks as well, albeit not quite so wide-ranging. And I think you made a good point which I forgot to pick up when we started this, philip, in your kind introduction to me. This is all pretty much pre-internet, pre-mobile phone. It's old school, you know ways of communication, you know you're still sort of terrestrial televisions, you've not got much in the way of satellite communications or whatever. So it was pretty primitive and I think probably the ability to get profile aspirations was very difficult to achieve at that time. So it was very localized, very much on the campaign. We're talking obviously in the late 80s and I would argue, probably somewhere around 97, would be again for me a seminal change in protest, certainly in the field of animal rights, but also single issue activism and extremism. And that was really compounded with the introduction of what was Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty. Now, very, very simple four words, four descriptions.

Speaker 3:

Shack, as it became well known and some of your listeners may well remember Shack, and some people can certainly Google Shack and watch their laptop blow up with the sheer reference material that's available to it as well, up with the sheer reference material that's available to it as well. But Shack was formed in sort of well incipient 1997, but in reality came to public attention in 1999. And again, the character who formed Shack was someone that I had dealt with back in the 80s and other colleagues in the industry had dealt with in terms of mass trespass and in terms of early criminality. And it was quite interesting that this particular character, who was single-minded, single-focused, pugnacious, decided that he could take maybe some of that emerging technology that I've referenced in terms of early internet, early communications and put in play a group to carry forward and prosecute animal rights in the UK. I think that was a significant game changer in extremism and protest in the UK initially, certainly into Europe and globally as well.

Speaker 3:

And I know the aspiration for the podcast is perhaps we look at this in two parts, but certainly in those first early days this was still primitive, still very much in the early days, but what it did do was bring in new tactics and those tactics had been researched evidently, and there was already early linkage from that time into probably anti arms probably would be the classic piece. So I would see some synergies already in 99-2000 in the concept of what was being done in terms of the anti arms trade piece, what was being done in animal rights as well. And I think those tactics were both designed to cause the issues around reputational damage to organisations and corporates in life sciences, but also those first real moves into sustained, consistent attacks on people, and when I say attacks on people and again you mentioned the car bombs in the intro this was reputational damage, this was significant intimidation and I would, as you would expect me, to share your definition. I think this was terrorism, certainly my definition of terrorism, whilst at the same time I think UK government decided it would be called extremism, partly as a differentiator, partly at this stage, of course, it's still very much pre the terrorism picture that I know you personally were heavily involved in combating. So there's still a space there and I think it was coincidental at the time that the Czech campaign, certainly in other campaigns that were being held in the UK, were in a fairly big and wide expansive space for extremism, and again, the Brits can only call it domestic extremism, which makes it feel slightly warm, fuzzy and reasonable, and very much wasn't reasonable.

Speaker 3:

So, tactics wise, yeah, a whole raft of stuff that came in and that was designed to target the locations of places within life sciences that were considered to be areas where you could have consistent 24-7 protest. You could bring together consistently maybe 15, 16 times a year, certainly on most UK bank holidays a significant protest number of people drawn in from all over the UK and indeed on in terms of Europe. You could pay people to attend and protest to remunerate them for giving up their time. So, even if the idealistic aspect of commitment to something like animal rights was a bit wavy, you could. You could reward people by getting them to go there and where you could, you could reward people by getting them to go there. And where else could you go? At that particular time?

Speaker 3:

For quite a long period of time and we're talking here really 1999, probably through to around 2010, 2010, before the sort of significant jail times which we can come on and cover later but you had a 10-year window here whereby people essentially were able to go around the UK certainly protest, to intimidate, to be abusive, to get away with arguably law-breaking activity, and at the time there was no joined-up thinking. There was no joined-up thinking in the judiciary. So the justice system, cpa, were not geared to deal with this. Individual police forces, of which we still have and had then the 43 county forces, were not equipped to deal with this. So there was no learning, there was no reservoir or repository of information that had been put together. So all of these tactics which were researched and I think it's also worth pointing out that the homework that was being done, the research that was being done, was a key factor prior to launching Shack, and that carried on and continued, and certainly that will be one of the things when we talk about how you try to seek to combat some of these issues is preparedness, but also getting ready for dealing with what people have managed to ascertain around your organization.

Speaker 3:

So, tactically, it was at a local level. Tactically, it was taking on locations, researching where domestic residences were, establishing information from people through connectivity. Friends reunited the white word. Where is that now? Yeah, the pre, the pre, the predicate, precursors of LinkedIn, the precursors of Facebook, you know, is Philip Grindel, a member of Bognor Regis tennis club. Does that link him to working for a pharmaceutical? Well, it could do, because he may be using that very early email address naively to be his membership piece and then building that information and then building those links into other people and all of the things that I. I know you personally and your previous life where you would have mitigated that ability for people to do data mining.

Speaker 3:

This is a very, very early form of data mining, a very primitive one, but the one that was effective and those tactics went through.

Speaker 3:

So it was an opportunity to determine, as transgressors, what people who were protesting and were extremists could do in terms of law. What could they do that pushed the boundaries of the law without breaking the law? Could they therefore also successfully ensure that they had legal advice for a uniformed officer or a security officer to challenge this person who was taking photos, challenge this person who was banging on a car, and that's at best. Or challenge someone who was standing outside for hours with quite heavy noise bases and the sheer sort of terror tactics that were being used as well and I coined a phrase. I don't think I ever copyrighted it, which was a shame, but it was transferable terror tactics and I think those again were an early forerunner of where people could use them in other forms of protest as well. So the tactics were a local level, they were a national level, they became an international level tactic and it would be telephone blockades, it would be facts. Do we remember faxes, fax blockades?

Speaker 3:

much explain what faxes yeah, it's, it's all of this early stuff that was used and you know we can also look at um.

Speaker 3:

You know the, the aspect of yeah, the primary target was always the, the facility and all the people, but actually those follow-on targets became so much more and we can talk again about the supply chain piece and logistics as well.

Speaker 3:

So, apologies, philip, it's a sort of long-winded introduction into those tactics at the time, but but certainly, you know, quite refined and defined and I think certainly Schack's leadership had already thought this through and, we are aware, had spoken to other people in Europe and therefore had taken lessons from protest in Europe and the States about, probably, the funding model, because, again, protest cost money, despite the ideological aspects and the belief in whatever people are protesting against.

Speaker 3:

There's a requirement, if this is effective, if it is sustained, that you've got to be putting people out there continuously to stand on a premise 24, 7, whether that's one person, 20 people, 50 people. You've got to have the ways and means of being able to get, logistically, people in minibuses and coaches to demonstrations. You've got to ensure people maintain the pressure, which therefore comes back to the commercial aspect of actually paying people to maintain the pressure. So this piece was very much an evidence, as I say really from the word go from 1999 through to 2010. So it's, I kind of say, in the work I did, around past, present and future extremism. As with everything, it's a snapshot in time, but it's a decent decade-long snapshot in time and certainly sort of before the advent of the 2007 bombings and the modern picture of terrorism coming into play.

Speaker 2:

So I think people often underestimate and I think you've articulated this underestimate the sophistication of some of these groups and some of the individuals involved in these groups. Did you experience insider threats?

Speaker 3:

Yes, Absolutely yeah, and sophistication is a great sort of segue into achieved. But I think I'd gone as far as I could in terms of a logical progression around prosecution of crimes which were quite significant. It was sophisticated and that certainly developed and you're right to pick that up. And I think, pertaining to insider threat, yeah, a huge issue was the continued exposure of infiltration and it was something that certainly at the time was a sort of subject matter expertise that I developed. Why? Because I had to, because not only was I dealing with my day job in terms of the many infiltrations that we would have had and I thought I had developed quite robust sorry, that's I, not we we had developed considerably robust methods of pre-employment screening. I think we'd also again going back to the joys of the card index. We developed into technology with an IT-based system that was, I felt at the time, second to none in terms of how that was utilised, both for intelligence gathering, intelligence analysis and interpretation and pre-employment screening, to the point that it was used quite considerably and extensively in the UK. But the sophistication piece was there, you know, if you look at some of the classics and it's something I haven't done for a long time, but I used to talk quite often and present at conferences on insider threat. But when I look back at some of those old, rather substantial PowerPoints that I put together, the case studies were quite phenomenal because this was an investment again. So again you know, themes are returning.

Speaker 3:

There was money, there was a considerable financial investment in taking somebody like a another and giving them a cover background and putting them in essentially almost as a sleeper, without taking us into the worlds of espionage. But they were. They were put in as a sleeper. They would sit for two, four, six months in whatever position they had within an organization and it may not necessarily have been the obvious one where they would have been dealing immediately with, let's say, animals. They wouldn't necessarily have been the obvious one where they would have been dealing immediately with, let's say, animals. They wouldn't necessarily have been an animal lab technician. They could have been put into domestic services or engineering or finance. And then there's that transfer through. So if you look at the case histories of people, these are people who are living in a provincial town or city and paying out for rent and paying their bills whilst they're waiting to secure employment and then subsequently augmenting their employment with the ability to be funded.

Speaker 3:

Then you've got sophistication in terms of listening devices, which are initially again we've talked about this tremendous leap forward at the time in technology but the ability to have button devices that were both audio and visual recording, the ability to transmit that information and to take that data. So the insider threat became very much an insider reality and there's a whole raft of well-documented insider threat infiltrations that go through. Now I will freely and I used to say this continuously so we didn't stop everybody who tried to come in. We would try and mitigate and reduce, mitigate and reduce and my view, certainly within the old friends of mine who are in the ethical and moral stance about what was happening in the life sciences industry, would say actually in some respects it shouldn't matter if philly philip comes into a facility with a shoulder mounted camera and films everything, because we should be sufficiently robust and ethical that there's nothing to film. That's wrong and that therefore almost implies that we're hiding stuff if we try. But it was the obvious elements again about the piece around people. People were being exposed. So that aspect as to sophistication was there very much.

Speaker 3:

On the insider threat, I think it still continues and again recently, because obviously I'm still involved in this area. It's still there. It's still there significantly. It's still there within the whole range and gamma of single issue extremism and activism that we're seeing. So there are people who have secured employment in the defence sector, there are people who have gained employment in the oil and gas exploration centre, and even renewables. But there are also, then, the ability to subvert, and we've talked about infiltrations, but the other opportunity again with the funding stream is to subvert people. We've talked about infiltrations, but the other opportunity again with the funding stream is to subvert people who are already employed. Now you're not necessarily perhaps trying to get to their ideological belief of what they're doing, but you're certainly trying to persuade them to sell whatever secrets are perceived to be there and that must be and I'm conscious time-wise for this particular first session, but I think it kind of segues onto the issue that we see.

Speaker 2:

You know, we saw this week at Heathrow, didn't we? Where one simple thing shut down the entire airport, which you know, we can all have a debate about that. But if you're then putting insider people into these organisations in the current time where cyber is a major threat and actually they are, um, you know, opening an email they shouldn't open but doing it on purpose, for malicious reasons, to bring down the, the, the network, etc. You know, again, it moves away from the sort of traditional guards and gates type security in terms of preventing these, these adversaries, coming into our space and opens up a whole new challenge around insider threat, cyber. You know all those sorts of things, you know, maybe we'll talk about this in the next, in the next podcast, but it, it, you know, I think it's, I think we we often dismiss and we've talked about this what we call eco-warriors or whatever the single-issue people are. But I think the message from what I've taken from this first session is that they are sophisticated, they're determined, they're well-funded, they are professional and they pose a genuine challenge. Security challenge as much as anything else and mindful that they've been going, some of these people, for 40 years.

Speaker 2:

And I think I know that when I was working in the policing and we were dealing with some of the stuff in the Heathrow Airport, I remember one term which I found fascinating, when some of the proper protest groups there said they were facing lengthy sentences in prison and they used the term about they were prepared to martyr themselves for the cause. Prepare to martyr themselves for the cause. So if you have that scenario where people are prepared to go to prison for long sentences and they're going to be funded and they're going to work, you know it must be so challenging to stop those individuals doing what they are determined to do. So the last question I think on this, on this particular section, and is how did all that have an impact on the security professionals? You know it's it's it's it's all right talking about intimidating staff and what have you, but what about the actual security professionals that were were the guards and gates, and were they getting intimidated? Were they being targeted? How did that, that constant threat, impact them?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, wonderful question again. Yeah, very, very relevant. I think again I sort of share in that sort of 10-year period of time, I think, going into, certainly, that arena and taking on a team that was contracted so it was contracted guarded services at the time. That was contracted so it was contracting guarded services at the time. And, interestingly, um and again, to protect the, the innocent on the podcast and avoid any litigation, the company involved at the time, um, initially sort of stood up quite well, uh, and I think, secured a couple of prestigious awards for the services they were providing. But then, very quickly, I think, when the ante was picked up and in terms of localized pressure, in terms of demonstrations, sadly, in my opinion, folded pretty quickly. This, I think, sometimes exemplifies the benefits of pre-planning and resilience planning. So I had a plan, luckily in the back of the pocket, which was enacted over a three-day weekend, which brought those teams nationally and there was a significant number of people in-house. That worked quite well. But then, of course, the targeting of those individuals yes to your question continued. I think what continues, even when I look back from a historical perspective, is those people continued in the face of significant adversity parameters that go with long hours, long periods of time, standing to all elements of the weather and to deal with fairly sustained pressure, bore it with remarkable stoicism and humor. But proof of the pudding was that at the same time, we were in environments where other people at that stage could go and take.

Speaker 3:

What I did think we were doing with our in-house team was that we were affording them really good levels of training and accreditation to professionalise them further from where they were. I think the motivation and incentive piece was there, not necessarily in terms of fiscal reward, but I think in terms of saying we will have your banks, we will look after you, we will ensure that, if you have to go to court and give evidence, that we train you and prepare you and make you fit for purpose in terms of giving that. But they stuck at it and, despite blandishments of going to other, more lucrative roles within things like government, immigration centers and conscious that that's still topical now as it would have been back then, over that particular 1999 to 2012 period, to 2012 period, essentially, we had very little turnover other than by demographic or other than by, occasionally, health and when I say health I think health in the sense of being affected by natural health. The stresses and strains were phenomenal and I can pay no better credit to the teams that I had the privilege of leading at the time, and I would add those I was fortunate because we ensured that we also had a strong management presence in the UK. So I was very conscious that, disproportionately, we invested heavily but had to.

Speaker 3:

It would possibly be the argument in terms of people and that facility as well, but there was tremendous stress. So, yes, they were targeted, they were physically attacked, they were physically abused and mentally abused at the time and we had to work very hard. I think there's almost an element and I know you will know this from your service levels with military and law enforcement gallows humour. I'm not sure if it's gallows humour or gallows endeavour, but it's certainly an ability to stick at it. And, as I say, I remember seeing in. We were talking around the year 2000,. I can remember at the time of the Millennium Bug and then sort of sitting in there and waiting for something to happen and then subsequently I think we had something like 1800 demonstrators outside the facility in Huntingdon and going into that at sort of two o'clock in the morning thinking wow, this is a long period of time to have to deal with this. I was doing that leading, trying to show some degree of leadership from the front. These people were doing this every day, seven days a week, 24-7.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, guy. We're coming to the end of this particular first podcast, but but I I want to encourage people to um subscribe to this podcast, because the next section of this podcast, part two, is going to be talking about okay, so what's happening now and how do we learn from the past to try and counter the threats that are active? So, before we conclude, remember, subscribe to this podcast. Leave a review if you can. That's always welcome. We also have a weekly newsletter that goes out every Monday, which you can subscribe via our website, diffusedglobalcom.

Speaker 2:

But for now, guy, thank you so much for this. Really, I think it's such an interesting insight into the past and to remind people that, however sophisticated things are now, they were sophisticated previously and we had less sophisticated methods to counter them, and so sometimes that meant we had to be a bit more creative and a bit more using our initiative. But I think anyone who remembers those days, or perhaps people who don't, will be fascinated by what we've talked about today, and I look forward to part two. So for now, guy, thank you very much. Thanks, philip.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening to the Diffuse podcast with host Philip Rendell, CEO and founder of Diffuse. Please rate, review and subscribe on your favorite podcasting platforms.

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Philip Grindell MSc CSyP

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