Posted by he undercover spy who thwarted eco-warriors behind the Newbury Bypass protest of the 1990s has been convicted of trying to have sex with children as young as six.
Special Branch hired a freelance agent to infiltrate a group of activists living in tunnels under the construction site and provide vital intelligence which allowed police to stealthily snatch them from the burrows.
For 30 years his identity has remained a secret.
But the Mail can unmask the spy as Edward Gratwick, who was yesterday convicted of 38 child sex offences.
The 68-year-old was arrested at Stansted Airport on March 7 while attempting to fly to Bucharest to sexually abuse a Romanian schoolgirl after making an arrangement with the child’s mother.
National Crime Agency officers swooped on the airport after receiving intelligence from foreign authorities just a few hours previously. Three children have now been safeguarded, the agency said.
Gratwick had discussed plans to abuse children in the UK and abroad with multiple individuals, some of whom were parents offering their daughters for sex.
He spoke with other paedophiles via encrypted messaging apps, offering to help supply with them children in exchange for money.
In these conversations, he boasted of having sex with a nine-year-old girl in the Dominican Republic.
Gratwick’s passport showed he travelled extensively around the world including to Sierra Leone, the Dominican Republic, Morrocco, around Europe, and the USA.
Investigators said they were investigating whether he had indeed already abused children abroad as he claimed.
Wayne Johns, head of child sexual abuse investigations at the NCA, said Gratwick’s chatlogs were the most depraved that his team of seasoned child abuse detectives had ever witnessed.
‘A dedicated team very experienced in their field had to examine these messages and for them to point out how horrendous they are is testament to the level of offending,’ he added.
When police searched Gratwick’s home in Mitcham, south London, they found 69ml of ‘date rape’ drug GBL, which is a central nervous system depressant, in a drawer of his fridge.
In messages he had discussed drugging children so they would not remember the abuse they suffered.
Detectives also discovered 1,364 indecent images of children on his devices.
Edward Gratwick was today convicted of 38 child sex offences
Gratwick, 68, was hired by Special Branch in 1996 to infiltrate a group of eco-warriors who were living in tunnels under the Newbury Bypass construction site
The Mail today unmasks the spy as a paedophile convicted of trying to have sex with multiple children around the world
n the dead of night, he told his handler that the entrance was being guarded by just one man and a woman, with a third protester asleep in the main entry shaft.
When the male protester left the tunnel to urinate, officers snatched him.
When his girlfriend came out to look for him, she was also detained – and the officers made noises to draw out the third individual.
The tunnel that had taken nine months to build was captured in a few short minutes, and Newbury Bypass was opened in 1998.
Gratwick was paid roughly £1,000 a week for his work, a small fraction of the £8million that had been spent policing the protests up to that point.
Who Watches the Watchers? 