A former Royal marine who posed as a migrant to travel across the English Channel on a small boat, said his undercover operation exposed the weakness of the UK’s borders.
Experienced soldier Lee West, who toured both Afghanistan and Iraq, entered France’s Calais migrant jungle in 2019 where he came face-to-face with people smugglers, before risking his life in a dinghy to find out just how easy it is to illegally enter Britain.
Speaking to BTL’s Lee Hall, Mr. West described how he and a friend decided to take on the personal mission after watching countless news reports on huge numbers of illegal immigrants making the perilous journey.
After travelling to France and entering its Calais jungle of migrant camps, they posed as French Foreign Legion deserters desperately looking to escape the country.
There they came face-to-face with not only hundreds of immigrants from across the world, but also the money-hungry people-smugglers controlling the illegal networks.
“It was very unnerving,” the former soldier told BTL. “The realisation hit us that we'd put ourselves in this isolated, volatile, notorious camp, which we didn’t really know anything about, apart from what we see on the media.
“During the evenings in the camp, the mood in would change significantly.
“A lot of people may look at it and think, well, this is a camp united in their goals and a big community or helping each other. And it’s not the reality.
Volatile
Mr. West described how they observed violence within the French camps mixed with alcohol and drug abuse.“And as I know, after 17 years in the Marines, when you put a lot of young men—which they predominantly were—in a place together, they’re bored, because there’s nothing else to do, apart from sit around the campfire, drinking, and the politics come into it, different backgrounds, different cultures, different countries.
“And they’re all competing as well, because as much as you may think they’re all united, they want to get across the border first.
“So there is competition as well and a lot of people look at it from the outside, and don’t see the inner workings of it. We did get to see it.”
The soldier described how he’d only observed “one or two” women in the camps, excluding aid workers.
The pair spent most nights sleeping alongside a group of Syrians who he said, in his eyes, were not refugees.
“Anybody who is a refugee, who’s fleeing from war, persecution, deserves to be helped,” he told BTL.
“And that goes without saying. But the moment you are provided with that help, and then decide, okay, well, I want to move on to somewhere different, for whatever reasons.
“You give up that status of being a refugee because then you’ve been given the safe haven, you’ve been given that opportunity to, to be safe.
“And you’ve decided for your own personal reasons that you want to move somewhere else, which is fair enough […] but they had been provided that safe haven so at that point that they let go of that (refugee) status, they then become economic migrants in my eyes.”
Choppy Waters
Mr. West said he wanted to make the mission—recorded for the pair’s “Trampface” Youtube channel—as authentic as possible.Apart from basic preparation, he would undertake the journey as close to how any migrant would do so.
It also meant using none of his military survival skills.
After choosing an isolated coastal spot to launch the dinghy, they set off in the early hours to begin crossing one of the world’s busiest shipping channels.
“I’m not ashamed to say that I was bricking it, we hit the surf and it was throwing us around in the pitch black,” he said. “Of course, we had all the trepidation of what lay ahead of us and already we were being thrown around in a washing machine.”
After pushing through the choppy waters, they made it out onto the Channel without detection from the French authorities.
It was there that the enormity of their mission hit home.
Mr. West said: “We had our mobile phones waterproofed inside our pockets, whether they would get signal in the middle of the channel, we didn’t know.
“We had nobody shadowing us and it just hit me then that if something goes wrong, that could be the engine, that could be a puncture or it could be a boat hitting us, getting lost, running out of fuel—nobody is going to be coming for you.”
Four-and-a-half hours later, they reached the English shoreline, a beach in Kent not far from Folkstone harbour. Although no authorities were on site, locals who spotted the men pull their dinghy onto the beach contacted police.
“A couple of local bobbies turned up, and questioned us, which, initially, we were taking it quite lightly because we haven’t actually done anything illegal.
“We had passports on us, and we are British citizens just out on the Channel for a day on the boat. Technically, we should have checked in with the harbour, so yeah, we had broken a rule, but we weren’t doing anything illegal.”
However, when Border Force and the National Crime Agency turned up to question the men, they found themselves facing accusations they were human traffickers.
Weak Border
Mr. West told BTL: “What we didn’t know at the point of arrest until we got back to the station where the custody sergeant had to justify why they were holding us was, ten minutes before we landed, two actual boats had turned up about a couple 100 metres down the coast from our position.“We found out that their drivers were ex-military. So of course, when they were questioning us, what do you do for a living in Mr West? Well, I’m in a Royal Marine.
“My friend’s a former royal engineer, two and two together, they must be in cahoots with these other books who have turned up of actual migrants.”
The pair were arrested on suspicion of human trafficking and held for over 14 hours.
“I think they were embarrassed as well, because we had pulled their pants down,” said the former soldier.
“We’d breach their defences, got across with very little behind us and exposed them over how easy it was.”
Despite the seriousness of the situation, Mr. West said there were some comical moments.
‘It was quite a funny moment where the Border Force, an old sea dog, turned up.
“And he sort of looked at us and he looked pointed at the deflated dinghy on the floor and said, let me get this right, you’ve just come from Northern France on that.
“And we were like, yeah, and he was like, it’s 4-7 sea state out there. He said, Not even my cutter boats are going out. That’s why you’ve got across and beat us because it’s too rough for our own boats to go out.”
Stowaway
The pair were also questioned about an unlikely stowaway found on their dinghy.“Anyone of a certain age will remember the sitcom “Only Fools and Horses”,” Mr. West said.
“There’s a famous episode where they inadvertently come back from France with a stowaway in the van, Gary, as he’s called.
“Our friend, when he'd come over to meet us about a blow-up doll and dressed him up and stuck Gary’s face to it.
“So of course, when we’re getting questioned by these very serious operatives from the NCA, we were just laughing at this with the fact that we had that brought a stowaway across. And by the end of the interviews, they were actually referring to […] him as if he was an actual human being.”
Mr. West, who released his book “Never Above, Never Below—An Adventurous Pursuit of War, Escape and Darkness” earlier this year, said the experience influenced his views on immigration.
He said: In respect to my belief that refugees should be given help no matter where their from, where they are, if we can, we should help them.
“But the moment they become economic migrants, then no, my opinion isn’t that they should be allowed to come across in boats just because they believe they want to go to a different country.
“And we got to see from from experiences in the camp and coming across.”
