The story of Patricia Cahill and Karyn Smith is, in one sense, simply a story about injustice, in which two daft teenagers are robbed of their youth in a foreign jail, one for being reckless, the other for nothing – merely for being there. But beyond that, it is a story of intrigue and secret manoeuvure, in which almost every party behaves with breath-taking selfishness and in which the simple truth of the injustice is lost in a blizzard of lies.
Take, for example, the behaviour of Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise Service. Just as long as the conversation is deniable and their names are not used as sources, senior Customs officials have been happy to discuss the case with all sorts of people. On these terms, they say two things. First, both girls are certainly guilty of trying to smuggle 26 kilos of heroin out of Thailand. Second, both girls have a history of drug dealing at home in the West Midlands.
These confidences have had a powerful effect. Several journalists who have been following rumours of injustice, have been deflected. Thai diplomats in London who have been battered by criticism, have been encouraged to hold the line. British officials who have been caught between their desire for friendship with Thailand and their embarrassment over the case, have been allowed to stay on the fence. The trouble is that these Customs officials are lying.
The most that can be said of the guilt of the two girls is that Patricia Cahill admits that she knew she was going to have to “bring back a little something” when her boyfriend paid for her holiday in Thailand, but she insists she thought it was precious stones, not drugs. But the precise nature of her guilt was thrown away in a bizarre display of intellectual juggling by the Thai courts.
Patricia was 17 when she was arrested at Bangkok Airport in July 1990 and so she was tried as a juvenile, behind closed doors. This was to her advantage, since a juvenile can normally be jailed for no more than seven years for drug smuggling in Thailand. But the Thai authorities – apparently seeking international approval for their tough stand – then proceeded to ignore her age and sentenced her as an adult, to 18 years and nine months. The unfairness was aggravated by the fact that the boyfriend who persuaded her to be his courier has never even been questioned and is still cruising around Birmingham with his portable phone and his flash white suit.
The injustice suffered by Karyn Smith is even clearer. Patricia never told her what she was doing and the airport police who interrogated her concluded that she was innocent. Yet, she was charged so that members of the Drugs Squad could claim a reward (and an inflated one at that, since someone appears to have added some 20 kilos to the 5.8 kilos that were hidden in shampoo bottles in the girls’ cases). She wanted to plead Not Guilty. Yet she was persuaded that this would earn her a death sentence and so she pleaded “guilty but ignorant”.
At her trial, the sole issue was whether or not she knew that there was heroin hidden in her case. She was bound to go to prison, because Thai law makes it an absolute offence to possess heroin, but if she could prove her ignorance, she could escape with a light sentence. In the event, the prosecution did not even try to pretend that she knew. They had no evidence: no confession, no hint from Patricia that Karyn knew what she was up to, no finger-prints on the heroin bags, no witness who saw her handling drugs or heard her buying them, no cell-mate who said she had confessed, nothing. Yet, perversely, Judge Nori Chantorn ruled that she did know she was carrying heroin. Then he sentenced her to 25 years.
The Customs officials who have been so busily damning the two girls admit that they had no knowledge of them before they left for Thailand and yet they want to claim that everyone knew that they had a track-record of dope-dealing. In my own private conversation, I was assured by my anonymous Customs source that: “They were young and foolish and they were in it for the money. In their home town, they were quite notorious for their activities – for pushing little things. No-one has very much doubt about their social standing.” But how did he know this? “The police up there,” he said.
But the police up in the West Midlands say this is nonsense. Before their arrest in Bangkok in July 1990, they had never come across either girl as a drug-dealer, nor even as a drug-user. Their names had never come to the attention of drugs intelligence collators at all. And, unlike Customs, West Midlands Police are not talking off-the-record. They even supplied a signed certificate of good character for both girls which was presented at their trials in Thailand last year.
But why should Customs lie like this? The answer goes back to July 1990, when Patricia’s wealthy boyfriend, who had invited the two girls for a free holiday, arranged for tickets to be bought in their name for a round trip which took in Amsterdam, Thailand and Gambia. As soon as the airline saw the itinerary, it smelled drugs and contacted Customs who simply relayed the names of the girls to Bangkok and left it to the Thai authorities to deal with them.
When the Thai authorities proceeded to make a mess of it, Customs had a problem. They took the decision back in July 1990 to hand over the fate of two teenaged British citizens to the Thai drug authorities. But if the British Customs admit that the two girls have been given rough justice, they will have to admit too that they were reckless with their intelligence and, by doing that, they will sour relations with the Thai authorities whom they have spent years cultivating as allies in their international war against drugs. So, regardless of the evidence, they lie.
But they are not alone. The Foreign Office – which matches Customs in its desire to avoid friction with the Thais – has been equally misleading. Last October, the European Parliament voted to support Karyn Smith, and the Guardian published a long story exposing the Foreign Office’s inaction and its furtive attempts to silence the campaign on her behalf.
In Bangkok, one British Embassy official replied to the mounting pressure by seeking out a former News of the World reporter who now lives there and feeding him a story to the effect that the Foreign Office was refusing to support Karyn Smith because evidence of her innocence was a fairy tale. But the plan back-fired. When the reporter managed to plant his highly-coloured story in the Observer, the Foreign Office in London was so acutely embarrassed that it was finally forced publicly to declare its support for her. The Ambassador carpetted a number of his officials, all of whom denied knowing anything about the story, and the Observer received a scorching writ for libel. The Evening Standard then lumbered into the same trap, defending the Thais and claiming – on the strength of some anonymous source – that both girls came from “rackety backgrounds”. The Standard received its own writ.
But despite its new supportive posture, the Foreign Office continues to play a double game. It has circulated a letter to MPs and others who have complained, in which it dismisses the idea that Karyn Smith’s trial was unfair on the basis that “her Thai defence lawyer did not take that view”. In support of this claim, they cite the fact that her lawyer did not appeal. Yet the Foreign Office knows that the lawyer withdrew an appeal, not because the trial was fair, but because Karyn believed her best hope of freedom was a Royal pardon and she could not apply for that while she was appealing. In December, the Foreign Office finally decided to check the truth of its position by asking for the first time for a transcript of the trial.
But the strangest games have been played by the Thais. For months they persuaded Karyn’s London lawyer, Stephen Jakobi, to avoid publicity by promising him that Karyn was about to be pardoned. When he finally broke lose and went to the press, they denied that a pardon had ever been promised. But the same official who told Jakobi to expect a pardon also gave the same story to reporters, including me. The Embassy now says that the official does not remember saying this, that if she did she was only repeating the opinions of friends and, anyway, she has now gone back to Thailand. Yet, an even more senior Thai official has since repeated the same empty promise.
It is now clear, however, that the series of messages which Stephen Jakobi sent to the Thais was deliberately lost in a bureaucratic jungle. His first request for a pardon was faxed to the Thai Embassy in December 1990. The Embassy now says that a fax is unacceptable, that they simply put it in a drawer and did not bother to contact Jakobi to advise him of this. Jakobi then wrote a series of letters to the office of the Thai Prime Minister in Bangkok. The Thai Embassy now says that all these letters were simply relayed back to them in London, where they were put in a drawer. They did not bother to tell Jakobi that it was unacceptable to write directly to the Prime Minister. “He is a lawyer. He should know our procedures. If he misunderstood, that is his fault.” The Foreign Office, which knew exactly what Jakobi was doing, also failed to advise him that he was following the wrong procedure. So Karyn Smith lost nearly a year of her life before the Foreign Office finally spoke up.
The most curious game played by the Thais involves someone who does not exist. One Guardian reader who knows the Thai authorities went to the Embassy to discuss the case and was shown a letter, which purported to come from a friend of the two girls. It was very damaging. (Note to subs: the errors of grammar and spelling are in the original letter)
“I knew Patricia Cahill when I lived in Solihull Birmingham. For eighteen months before she visited your country she was selling drugs in clubs in Birmingham along with her friend. Because in this country they are so soft with drug sellers they hardly ever get caught so make a lot of money Patricia and her friend wanted my sister and myself to go to her dealer who is an Irishman and a West Indian dealer as four people could carry more heroin. Patricia and her friend are very evil they used to go shoplifting, stealing clothes and their parents must have known where they got all their goods.
“I once met the parents of both and I know they were greedy for money and didn’t care were the money came from. Maybe you can contact the Thai government and Police letting them know what an evil couple of girls they are and should be jailed for life as they have committed too many crimes and have not ever been caught. These girls must never be freed as they most likely have killed innocent people.”
The letter is phoney. Its author gives an address in Manchester which does not exist and a name which does not show up in the phone book or the electoral register. Apart from the allegations of crime, the background information is wrong: the two girls could not have been selling drugs for 18 months in Birmingham, because they met only three months before the trip to Thailand; the letter-writer could not have “once met the parents of both”, because the parents did not meet each other until after the girls were arrested. Among friends and associates of the two girls in Birmingham to whom I have spoken, there is not one who will even hint that either girl was ever involved in selling any drug, a significant omission since some of the friends have fallen out and are keen to snipe at each other.
Yet the Thai Embassy has not only used this letter to worry the Guardian reader who visited them, but also passed it on to Bangkok. There, in breach of any accepted judicial practice and without any sign of the procedural obsessions which surround the Thai pardon procedure, the letter was submitted to the court in Patricia Cahill’s trial and read by the judge who sentenced her to an adult term in prison.
The most intriguing question is who wrote the letter. There are a few clues. It does contain a few scraps of accuracy: Patricia’s boyfriend, who set up the trip to Thailand, is not Irish but he is white and he does have a black friend who works with him; Patricia Cahill had been charged with a shoplifting offence in Birmingham. It also contains errors and awkward phrases which suggest it might have been produced by a foreigner. This may all combine to suggest a foreign author with a personal, if malicious, interest in the case. But the clues are not conclusive and, like so much in this story, the truth is obscured by lies.
