Maybe with my ministry,
I can try and bring down the international arms trade.
It’s on. We can do this.
Last year, the UK sold more than 3.6 billion pounds of weapons
to Saudi Arabia.
BAE Systems denies that its sales of weapons systems to Saudi Arabia
are fueling the conflict in Yemen.
But they are being used in an increasingly controversial war.
BAE Systems are the world’s second largest arms company.
They’re Britain’s biggest arms company.
When Theresa May was making decisions about the arms industry,
her husband’s company is the largest shareholder
in BAE Systems.
Is she going to be thinking about the good of the people in Yemen
or is she going to be thinking about her husband’s company,
who makes a lot of money out of selling weapons to Saudi?
We sold that bomb to Saudi Arabia
in the full knowledge that they were almost certainly going to use it
in the war in Yemen.
In a country stricken by famine,
it destroyed a food store, and people died as a result.
The most of the Royal Saudi Air Force,
it’s all put together, and it’s all flown out
from a base in Lancashire called Warton,
which is where we broke into.
[Investigators]
I’m Sam Walton. I’m a Quaker.
My name’s Reverend Daniel Woodhouse.
I’m a Methodist minister.
I was at work and I was on Twitter.
Someone had posted a picture of a fragment of a bomb.
This bomb had exploded and destroyed a food store in Yemen.
A fragment of the casing
with the serial number of the bomb had survived.
That bomb could then be traced back.
The government knows selling these weapons are wrong,
and they’re determined to do it anyway.
To stop my country’s involvement in these war crimes
was to actually try and do something about these weapons exports.
And that was probably going to land us in jail.
Yeah, it's a point where something more drastic needs to be done
because clearly nothing else is working.
I know nothing has worked over the last decade
that I’ve been involved in.
I was at the wedding of my friends Maya and Andrew,
and I’d seen Woody on a couple of demos before.
I knew his face.
You tend to know everybody’s faces who do activism.
And I kind of went up to him and was like, “Oh, hey, Woody.”
Very quickly got past the small talk and into activism.
And I was like, “I’m thinking of doing some
direct action about the war in Yemen.
Would you be interested?”
And I said, “Yeah.”
And I was like, “It might involve getting arrested.”
I said, “That’s OK.”
I was like, “It probably involves going to jail for a couple of years.”
I said, “That’s fine,” and I think Sam was quite shocked by this.
I spoke to him first, like, less than 30 seconds ago,
and he's already agreed to go to jail with me.
All that stuff was already in my head,
so when Sam said, “Do you want to be involved in this?”
you know, it was easy.
It was like, “Yeah.”
For the next six to nine months, Woody and I would meet up with
a couple of people that were helping us put together the action
and doing bits of research.
We looked at the evidence.
We looked at legal findings.
Eventually we realized that there was
a BAE airbase in Lancashire called Warton.
It’s not an RAF base. It’s not a military base.
It’s a private arms company base,
where 52 percent of the Saudi Air Force
had been assembled and flown out.
Thanks to a plane-spotting website, we could see all the serial numbers
of the planes being made.
There were some Eurofighter Typhoons,
which are the kind of 100 million pound planes,
and we just knew that had to be the most appropriate target.
We had to work out if we could get in, how we could get in.
So we had to go and do a few recces.
We looked at the fences.
Those fences were super beefed up.
There was a moment where we were trying to work out
which hangars contained the planes.
We happened to bump into somebody who was plane spotting.
Who was just like one of these white men
that just wants to tell you everything.
We posed as two people who were interested in the planes,
who were plane spotters.
We were like, “Oh, did you see that plane take off?”
And he was like, “Wow, yeah. It was a da-da-da-da-da.”
And we’re like, “Cool.”
Then we were like, “Do you know where the Saudi planes are?”
And he just, like, talked to us for ten minutes.
And by the end of that, we were like,
“Great! Now we know where the Saudi planes are.”
And so we had all the information we we needed.
Literally, we walked away and we were just out of earshot.
And I turned to Woody,
and we’re like, “It’s on. We can do this.”
About 20 years before,
a group of amazing women had done an action at the same airbase.
It’s a book. It's written as an account,
but it’s also written as a manual for how to do one of these actions.
At the end of it, there’s literally checklists of how to do an action.
And then we went back to London,
and we’re kind of having another meeting,
and we’re talking about when we could do this.
One of the people that had been doing research
pointed out that there was going to be
a delivery of some of these planes imminently.
The last Sunday when we knew they were definitely going to be in the UK
was Sunday the-- I think it it was the 29th of January.
And...
that Sunday is 21 years to the day
after these women broke into the site.
And we were like, “It’s fate. It’s on. We’ve got to do this.”
A little while before the action,
I went to see my parents in Nottingham.
I said, “Basically, I’m going away for a few days,
and I’d really appreciate it if you could come and cat sit.
And it might be that the police might need access to the house
and I wouldn’t want them to break the door down.”
I think Mum’s very happy to know about my activism
after it’s happened.
But before and during, she doesn’t really want to know what I’m up to.
We set about doing some kind of last minute preparations
so we could get all the crowbars and bolt cutters and stuff.
We put them all out on my dining room table,
and we kind of said to my parents,
“It’d be really helpful if you didn’t go into that room.”
We weren’t there to threaten any person.
We didn’t want the security guards who might come across us
to be worried about that we were violent.
And the way of showing this to them and to the courts, actually,
is we drew love hearts on them.
I wrote down some bits of scripture on them.
The more kinds of things that say, “These are not offensive weapons.
We’re using them for a purpose.”
I talked to some of the people in Yemen on Twitter
that I’d been talking to,
and we got some quotes from them.
And we wrote that on a Yemeni flag and brought that.
And we set off at, like, 2:00 in the morning.
And for the first time in a decade or more,
I had a panic attack and felt huge amounts of anxiety.
Yeah, we were really anxious
because this press release was going to go out at 6:30.
And we timed this to when we knew we would have done the action.
The closer we got to the base, the less nervous I got.
I remember driving over the M62.
I remember stopping for a pee in a lay-by really close to the base.
And I remember looking up into the sky
and you can see all the stars.
It was absolutely incredible.
I was like, “You all right, man?” He was like, “Yep...
this is what I’m meant to do.”
I felt completely at peace in that moment.
And we just kind of drove up to the base,
parked where we’d parked our car before.
All darkish colors.
Like, I put duct tape on any reflective bits.
Most of our tools and things would fit into backpacks, which we had on.
The bolt cutters, we couldn’t fit into the backpack,
so we put it in a bin bag so at least you couldn’t see it.
Because if you walk by someone’s house
and they happen to spot you walking towards the base
with huge bolt cutters,
they can probably guess what’s happening.
I just remember the base had these massive floodlights.
And I had to hold my hand up to the lights in the distance
because it was so incredibly bright.
And then we kind of checked that there was no perimeter guards.
And starting to feel the adrenaline kicking in.
Then we kind of walked up to the first fence.
Sam had tiny, little wire cutters.
The wire cutters were going through it really, really quickly.
And just snip, snip, snip,
was through the fence in, like, ten seconds.
And I really wanted to use these bolt cutters.
There was like a... two-meter gap between the main fence.
And we just kind of both shzum-shzum-shzum-shzum,
superefficient,
lift it up so we had a little flap to crawl through.
I don’t remember exactly what was going through my mind,
but I just said to him, “Oh, it looks like a cat flap.”
I threw my bag through, went through. Woody went through next.
And then we were on the base.
And we had our route plotted.
We found out later that the base had a problem with rabbits.
Their security cameras reacted to any movement.
And because of the rabbit problem,
they had to turn off that system because
the cameras were all just turning on at random.
Well, at the end there was a gate. And Woody was like--
“Oh, shall I cut it open with my bolt cutters?”
And I was like, “Dude, we’re not here to trash their gate locks.”
And then we're on the concrete.
Woody was like, “What are we doing?”
And I was like, “We just play it casually.”
So we just walked across this giant, floodlit taxiway.
We’re just two guys walking across.
It must have taken us, like, a minute or two.
And we’re in full view of everything.
And so we saw the doors into the hangar.
We got up to this hangar,
and we’d talked about, “How are we going to get in?”
And there was the double doors,
and I’m thinking, “Goodness this is it.”
So we get to the front corner, and there’s a little door.
Assuming they were going to be locked,
and so we pushed them and they opened.
Like, ****!
I was like, “I can’t believe it.”
We go in, and we’re like, “That’s a stroke of luck!”
We were in, except after them were another set of double doors,
and these were the ones that were locked.
And through the window,
about two meters away from the door,
I can see the nose cone—
a very distinctive nose cone, it’s got two little wings—
of a Eurofighter Typhoon.
We were nearly there.
Obviously, war planes have got a lot of bombs
and a lot of fuel,
and you don’t want to be hammering on those bits.
But there are bits that you can damage.
So, for instance, the tops of the wings are pretty fragile
because they’re carbon fiber.
So, bang, that’s that panel done, got to get a new one.
Nose cone—radar unit.
We started to use a crowbar to prise away the bits of the lock.
And when the rivets come out, it’s like bang, bang, bang!
And the last bit, which was making quite a lot of noise,
clearly attracted security.
And they kind of wander up to us and they look through the door
and they’re like...
If we were inside the hangar
and we were told to stop, we wouldn’t have done.
This is a non-violent action.
We're not here to get in a fight.
We went into downing the tools instead.
And we were like, “Right.”
Like, kind of put our hands up.
And they come through the security door, and they go,
“What are you doing?”
In the end, they were just more confused as to who we were
and what was going on.
I’m like, “We’re here to disarm the Eurofighter Typhoons
because they’re going to be used in war crimes in Yemen.”
And the bloke goes, “What?
You just stay there. I’m going to call this in.”
And we were led back out.
A van pulls up with a bunch of guys in.
They started talking to us.
They’re like, “Did you cut through or did you jump over?”
And Woody just goes--
“I could hardly climb into your van, never mind over a fence.”
And then they take us to the entrance of the base
and there's a couple of police cars there.
And so there was a point where because I was wrapped up warm
in a scarf and all the rest of it,
Sam looked at me and he just did that.
He loosened his scarf and they saw his dog collar
and they were like, “Oh, ****.
What the **** is a priest doing here?”
And then they arrest me.
And then eventually they arrested Woody.
They took us to Blackpool police station.
And then they put [us] in the cells, which were freezing.
They interviewed Woody first
because they wanted to get that reverend out of their jail.
And actually people ask me, “When you broke in,
were you doing it as a Methodist minister?”
And I said, “You know, when I’m asleep, I’m a Methodist minister.
I’m definitely a Methodist minister
when I’m breaking into a BAE Systems base.”
You know, there was a reason why we were doing this.
We'd seen the pictures of the destroyed mosques,
the destroyed hospitals.
We’d read the news of the school bus being blown up, children being...
you know, blown to pieces by British bombs.
You know, if we just took out one jet,
we would down it for weeks or months, and that’d be less bombing campaigns.
And we were almost there.
And that was--
And so I just felt so gutted.
The email had gone out automatically,
and Sam and I didn’t know what else was happening.
But, you know, clearly people were making a fuss of this.
And that was the first moment where I thought,
“Oh, maybe this will have an impact.”
And that was probably the moment where I start to feel
a bit better about it, maybe.
Our action was at least partially successful.
It was useful.
I felt like I had to do this action,
and I didn’t feel I had any other choice.
Yeah, I don’t regret anything I did.
I'd definitely do it again.
[After their arrest in March 2017,]
[Sam and Woody were charged with criminal damage]
[and expected to go to jail for 10 years if found guilty.]
[After a three-day trial in October, the judge found them not guilty,
[deciding they honestly held the belief that]
[the damage was necessary to prevent further crime.]
[BAE spokesperson said:]
[“We provide defense equipment, training and support]
[under government to government agreements]
[between the UK and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.]
[We comply with all relevant export control laws and regulations]
[in the countries in which we operate]
[and our activities are subject to UK government approval and oversight.”]