3. The Mole

[MUSIC PLAYING] BBC Sounds, Music Radio Podcasts. [GUNSHOTS] Carnot, mid Wales. It's the dead of night and four men in balaclavas have just smashed down a door to the basement of the mansion house, Plastlasin. This just happens to be the same mansion that contains the secret lab run by our psychedelic chemist, Richard Kemp. The masked men stumble around in the gloom. This place has been churning out a large chunk of the world's LSD supply, raking in huge amounts of money. But all the burglars seem interested in is a dead mole. This is "Acid Dream," the story of an attempt to start a revolution of the mind from a Welsh farmhouse. 1976, a small green renal pulls up outside the mansion house at Carnot. Out of it climb two figures. It's Richard Kemp and Christine Bott. After the crash that killed the vicar's wife and her unborn child, both Richard and Christine are having a crisis of conscience about their activities. They've dismantled and cleaned up all traces of the lab. But still, Christine is feeling deeply worried. A few weeks earlier, while at the police station, following the crash-- Through the open door of another room, I could hear voices. Suddenly, a word jumped into focus. Surely that was Carnot. And again, Anna Baldi. A policeman came out of the room and, on seeing me, closed the door behind him. Richard dismissed Christine's concerns. But still, they decided to halt operations for a while. Now, outside the mansion house, down the long drive, way past the stumps of the long dead oak trees, a telephoto lens pokes out the rear window of a caravan, parked in a lay-by. Behind the lens is a police officer called Stephen Bentley, for now. Later, he'll be called something else, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Right now, he's Stephen Bentley. And he's just spotted his two targets. My reaction, really, was one of subdued excitement. I say subdued because I couldn't go leaping about in the caravan. That would have drawn attention to myself and ourselves. How did Stephen end up in this caravan? To understand that, we need to go back in time three years to 1973, in Canada. We're a drug smuggler named Jerry Thomas, gave Detective Inspector Dick Lee of Thames Valley Police the names of the leaders of the micro-dot gang. Dick Lee wrote down four names-- David Solomon, Henry Todd, Paul Anna Baldi, and Richard Kemp. Lee had the names, but he couldn't trace any of them, until Richard's tragic crash. After the crash, Dick Lee had the location of the micro-dot gang's genius chemist. He had a case. The Home Office, the Chief Officers Association, and Chief Constables across the UK allowed Lee to form the first ever nationwide combined drug squad to bust the micro-dot gang. They had to give this epic police operation a name, a name that would underline the scale of its ambition and the weight of what was at stake. So they called it Julie, after one of the female officers on the case. Dick Lee had suspected something was going down in Wales for a while. Before Christine and Richard had arrived at Carnot, Lee's focus was on another character who was similarly attracted by the Cambrian Mountains. The man, the myth, the legend smiles. We did drink a lot. We'd get home from the pub and drop 5, 10, 15, whatever, and pass out. And then about an hour or two later, you wake up, fully tripping. Absolutely gone. So then we go for a big walk through the night. Named after the megawatt smile, permanently plastered across his face, smiles saw himself as a latter-day tombstone catty, exploring the boundaries of time and space with a little chemical assistance. Just wanted to see how far it would go, how far, what's beyond the veil, how to get there. Through his career, smiles has been responsible for dealing LSD to millions of people. And he's consumed nearly as much LSD himself, famous for megadosing. Smiles knows more about the inner workings of the mind than most. It's like entering a multidimensional world, really. Everything becomes hyperreal. You can watch the fly beating its wings as it goes past the strobes. You see all the colours. You see them all just tumbling like rainbows almost. In 1972, Smiles moved his wife and step-daughter to rural Wales. He wanted somewhere cheap to live and somewhere away from the keen eyes of the law. And Wales seemed to fit the bill. In a quirk of fate, he bought a house in Llandewi Brevi, just a few miles from where Richard and Christine would settle. So by 1975, with Richard, Christine, Smiles, and his supplier Russ Spensley and Mysocrigie, all living within a 20-mile radius, rural mid-Wales was the epicentre of the global LSD trade. But the funny thing is, because of the cell structure of the micro-dot gang, none of them knew the others existed. They didn't even meet until... But we'll come to that. It's April 1976, and Lee selects 28 drug squad officers from 10 police forces and sets of base in Devise's Wiltshire for the launch of Operation Julie. In May, officers were sent to mid-Wales to spy on Richard and Christine, officers including Stephen Bentley. We just got on with our job, you know, clicking the camera lens and taking notes and recording his movements. You know, and that applied to the other people that we saw there too, such as Paul Arnaboldy, the American, and Christine Bott, whenever she turned up in the small window that she drove. From watching the mansion at Cardinal for weeks, the police were convinced that production run had recently taken place. But they couldn't be sure. So, Dick Lee basically ordered the surveillance team to break in and have a look. Overnight, four officers had to learn how to become criminals because they needed to make it look like a burglary. So they did what any highly trained, sophisticated crime-fighting unit would do. They went to Woolworths. Here, they bought Balaclava's marigolds, torches, hammers, drills, screwdrivers, and a small bag of pick and mix. They waited until it was dark, because that's what criminals do. They got into their Balaclava's and washing up gloves, and... They broke into the lab. They searched the whole place, took samples of paint, surfaces, but there was nothing. And then... That was the occasion when Diarisse found a dead mole in the drainage leading to outside, and that mole was eventually tested at the Forensic Science Laboratory at Aldermaston and discovered to have died from an overdose of LSD. Richard and Christine had thought of everything, except the chance a mole could climb into their drainage system and be spiked to death. This mole would lead indirectly to the biggest drug bust the world has ever seen. And for Stephen Bentley, this is where his life changes forever. This is the moment he's asked to become a mole. I mean an undercover carp, not a rodent. You know what I mean? A few weeks later, Stevens, in a Ford Transit van with his friend Eric, heading down the M4 towards Wales. Only he's not Stephen Bentley anymore. He's now going by the name Stephen Jackson. It was the 3rd of June, 1976. Glorious Hot Summer's Day, which most days were in that hot summer of 1976. And I was excited, but I was also a little bit concerned, a bit worried about what lay ahead. It was fear of the unknown. As they drove, Stephen and Eric rehearsed their cover story. The back story was that we were in Wales looking for Eric's brother. So the story went, Eric's brother had been arrested on a minor drugs charge and had skipped out. So we believed to be living in that area, possibly, you know, in a commune with the TPP people or whatever. In the mid-70s, there was no training for officers going undercover. They just made it up as they went along. Basically, just create another identity and get on with it. So Stephen and Eric spent the last few weeks doing their best to become hippies. They've left their hair and beard grow, and the police have provided them with a transit ban. Eric's wife had the bright idea to paint a large flower on the back. But could two 1970s coppers really blend in with the counterculture? With a fake identity and money in his pocket, Stephen felt a sense of freedom he'd never felt before. A freedom that would become addictive. He knew nothing about honesty, apart from all the horror stories that were perpetuated in the media of that particular time. They stopped to pick up a hippie hitchhiker. And the two men decided to try their story out on him. It seems to work, they passed the first test. Stephen Jackson is a credible character. This is good for Stephen Jackson. Dangerous for Stephen Bentley. Stephen had spent the last few months watching Richard and Christine, but operational focus now switched to the supply chain. And it wasn't long before Stephen and Eric met their man. 3rd of June, 1976. Stephen and Eric walk into the new inn in Llandewi Brevi. It's quiet. There's nobody serving. Two men sit at the bar. They're backs to our undercover coppers. One of the men turns and fixes them both with a megawatt smile. It can only be one person. The man, the myth, the legend smiles. Buss and I were in the new inn, as was quite often the case. Eric and I walked into the new inn in Llandewi Brevi, and there was this guy sitting on a stool with his back to us, with another guy also with his back to us as we walked in. And they slowly turned around and nodded, said hello. The guy with the teeth and the big smile and the black hair, long black hair, that was Smiles. They introduced himself as Smiles. And he introduced his pal as Buzz, and they were the two guys. And we got chatting to them and told them the story about Eric's brother. And this is where accounts of what happened next differ. Yeah, I know he has a different version. For Stephen, everything was going to plan. The clothes, the backstory, the van, and now they'd found their target. They were nailing this undercover like. Here's Smiles' account of that meeting. These two came in and, you know, I'd been dealing drugs for long enough to have that sixth sense, to know, you know, when somebody's playing for the other side. And I said, yes, was it? Two halves, is it? Officers really are on duty, aren't they? Smiles reckons he had their number from the minute he saw them. What a utter load of Tosh. Stephen Bentley remembers things slightly differently. That was actually quite exhilarated. Maybe all things are possible at the same time in this mind-bending story. What we do know is that Stephen and Smiles spent the next eight months hanging out, getting drunk, taking drugs and becoming friends. While Smiles openly smoked hash in front of Stephen and Eric, he kept his LSD business under wraps. Was this because he knew they were police? Or because he was a professional drug dealer who knew to keep his main source of income hidden? All we do know is that every week, Stephen was calling a police colleague in Devises and reporting back everything he discovered about Smiles in what was known as the Llandewi Brevi log. But the longer Stephen and Eric spent in the world of Smiles, the more they had to play the part. The drinking was fine for two police officers in the '70s, but Smiles would often take the officers back to his home and pass out joints. Was this hospitality, or was it a test? On one particular occasion, when I tripped, we were smoking cannabis in a pipe, in a bomb. No doubt there are certain people who say, "Well, you can't trip smoking cannabis. "Well, I've got news for you. You definitely can." You know, THC is the active ingredients, and it is an allusogenic. And anyway, yeah, I smoked out of this pipe, ended up in the toilet in Smiles, Eric was feeling sick and was tripping, you know. After I'd been sick, this huge dragon's head or something came out of the bulb and was rearing up at me. And as the weeks and months rolled by, something started happening to Stephen and Eric. Their minds were being opened, whether they liked it or not. So it's the summer of 1976, a heatwave that feels like it could last forever. The sun is shining over the green slopes of the mountains above Llandewi Brevi. And beside the deep river that makes its way down the mountainside stands Stephen Bentley. But he's not Stephen Bentley anymore. As he stands over the water, he strips his clothes, feels the soft breeze on his skin and dives into the water. Every day he spends in this place, he becomes more and more Stephen Jackson, the hippy second-hand car dealer, living out of a van. Eric and Stephen started every day of that endless summer in this way, skinny dipping in the river, making themselves breakfast on a camping stove before heading down the village to drink all day when the pub's opened. This was their job, with no bosses, no wives, no children, regular money and perfect weather. Stephen and Eric adapted to their new routine with admirable dedication. Every few weeks, they'd return home to their wives and girlfriends. Eric seemed to manage the transition fine, but Stephen increasingly found himself longing for his other life. His life in the mountains, in the streams, in the pubs, in Smiles' company. And he couldn't help but think that he and Smiles were becoming friends. I really liked him, immensely liked him, and felt quite close to him in a lot of ways. I didn't think he was that dissimilar from myself. He had a similar kind of sense of humour, a similar laid-back attitude to life in general. So, it gradually morphed into, he's the target, into, you know, I actually really liked the guy. It's dark in the village of Thandewibrevy. The pubs have long since shut, and the night sky is a blanket of starlight against which lie the shadows of the mountains. Inside Smiles' little cottage, he's leading a meditation session with a small group of friends. Stephen Jackson sits cross-legged on the rug and takes a long rank on the joint that's being passed from smiling face to smiling face. He joins the slow, gentle, Buddhist chant that ripples across the room. Slowly, imperceptibly, the other members of the group drift off until there is just two of them in the room, Stephen and Smiles. Two friends, one moment in space and time. Stephen opens his eyes and there's his friend, vulnerable, trusting, honest. I really had this urge to tell him who we really were and warn him because I didn't want to see him locked up and go to prison for many years. Smiles stops chanting and opens his eyes. The megawatt smile returns. In this quiet intimacy, Stephen opens his mouth to speak. This is "Acid Dream Dream". "Acid Dream" was written by Tim Price and narrated by Risa Fance. Christine was Hannah Murray and the contributors were Olson Hughes and Stephen Bentley. Original music was by Griff Reese and sound design by Peregrine Andrews. The researcher was Hailey Mills and the production coordinator was Caroline Barlow. The producer was James Robinson and it was a BBC Studios production.