A life in close protection
Jacquie Davis has been protecting royalty, billionaires and politicians for 30 years. She tells Ben Machell how not to get killed
I am at the Soho Hotel in central London. This is not, in itself, unusual. Whenever a celebrity wants to give an interview, often as not they want to do it here. Which means that several times a year I’ll be hurried up to some anonymous suite, often past hopeful fans and lingering paparazzi, in order to be shut away with a famous person. They could be an actor, pop singer, comedian, whatever. The point is they are always stars. People with careers that have made them recognisable.
Jacquie Davis is the total opposite. Her career depends on being anonymous. Lives have depended on it. “I have to blend in,” she says. “I have to be a grey person.” Davis is a close-protection officer, which is security industry-speak for bodyguard. She is the most experienced woman in her field for the simple reason that she was the first. Thirty years ago, she left a job with the Metropolitan Police to hire herself out to anyone who wanted help to avoid being killed, kidnapped or extorted. Today, aged 60, she’s still going. “Really, I’m the granny now of female close protection,” she says at one point, laughing to herself.
That makes her sound a bit cuddly. Only, she absolutely isn’t. There was, for example, a period when she was “chased around the world for two years by Russian agents trying to kill the person I was protecting”. Or the months she spent training with former members of the SAS: “Abseiling out of helicopters, escape and evasion, survival courses, all kinds of things.” Then there was the time she posed as a beggar in Baghdad in order to run surveillance on a compound where some American oil executives had been taken prisoner by Saddam Hussein’s sadistic son Uday. “They had accused him of cheating at cards,” she says. “Which was a stupid thing to do.”
Davis is tall and straight-backed, with high cheekbones and auburn hair cut with a practical fringe. She is the operations director of a private security company called Optimal Risk Management and lives alone in Hertfordshire with her 15-yearold cat, Delta (named after the US Delta Force). She talks in the same direct manner as soldiers and police officers, and shares a similar appetite for sarcasm and black humour. “I’m not very emotional,” she says. “I’ve got better as the years have gone on. But it’s a lifestyle rather than a job. It comes before everything.”
Her clients include “multibillionaires, businesspeople or foreign royal families”, but she typically avoids celebrities, who often seem to want security teams simply as a way of drawing attention to themselves. “I turned down Madonna years ago. She wanted to go running around Hyde Park every morning surrounded by bodyguards. Well, no thanks. I don’t want to be part of some PR thing.”
She once provided security for Benazir Bhutto when the latter was Pakistan’s prime minister. She was, Davis says, “an obstinate cow” who only really had herself to blame for later getting assassinated. “What did she do? She stuck her head out of the sunroof. Her two bodyguards lived. She died,” she shrugs. Davis, I should add, still seems to hold a grudge against Bhutto, whom she blames for almost getting her killed during a hostage rescue mission. Which she’ll get into later.
For now, there are two more things to know about Davis. The first is that there is a Netflix film, Close, based loosely on her experiences. It stars Noomi Rapace as a chain-smoking female bodyguard protecting a wealthy mining heiress. And the second is that in her 30 years of protecting people, she has never lost a client. “Nobody dies on my watch,” she says.
As a girl, Davis had always wanted to join the police. By the late 1970s she had married and was with the Met. “I was doing uniform stuff, crimesquad stuff, dealing with prostitutes,” she says. She enjoyed it, only there wasn’t a huge amount of variation. Plus, at the time, it was “very poorly paid”. So, despite the fact it was technically illegal, many of her male colleagues would moonlight as private security guards.
By the early 1980s, there were growing numbers of “Middle Eastern families starting to come over and invest in London”, which presented a unique opportunity: rich Arab men wanted protection for themselves, but also for their wives and daughters. And cultural mores dictated that female family members could not be left alone with a burly off-duty male police officer. Or any man. “So the guys said they needed a female. And I thought, I quite fancy that.” So she left the police and became the first female on what is known as the Circuit: the world of professional private security. The male bodyguards would, to begin with, assume that because she was a woman, she would be able to help look after the kids of the families they had been hired to protect. “I had to tell the guys, there are nannies here to look after the children. That’s not my job. My job is to stay with the principal, who is usually a princess or a queen.”
“Benazir Bhutto was an obstinate cow. What did she do? She stuck her head out of the sunroof. Her two bodyguards lived. She died”
Recently divorced and with no children of her own, Davis began to specialise in undercover surveillance work, as well as close-protection jobs. It didn’t take long, however, before the job’s all-consuming nature began to tell. “My mum died when I’d spent 18 months undercover,” she explains. “If you’d asked me what my real name was, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. When I got the phone call, I was surrounded by the people I had infiltrated, and they didn’t even know I had a mother, so I had to tell them that my sister had had an accident. I left on Saturday, and was back undercover on Monday.”
So she took a break from surveillance work, met her second husband and, just as significantly, was introduced to David Stirling, the founder of the SAS. By this time, he was running a private security company, KAS, employing many former special forces troops – “All the guys from the Iranian embassy siege went to work for him” – and he wanted to take her on. “I had the surveillance skills,” she says. “You have to remember, the guys from the SAS hadn’t worked with women. And as much as they taught me, I taught them.”
In 1990, just prior to the Gulf War, she and a team of operatives travelled to Baghdad to find and rescue those American oilmen being held captive by Uday Hussein. “Once we had located the compound, the easiest thing for me to do was put on a burqa and beg on the street,” she says. “Full burqa, brown contact lenses and a sign in Arabic saying I was deaf-mute, so I didn’t have to talk to anyone.” She was there for weeks watching the compound, seeing what time people came and went. “All I’m doing is watching the guards going in and out. At 11pm, the prostitutes would go in with bottles of scotch. And I’m feeding all this information back.” Obviously, it was dangerous work – and really, well, unpleasant. “For the first couple of days, you’re being kicked by the other beggars because they don’t know you.” Sometimes, guards from the compound would saunter over and throw rocks or “buckets of piss” at her. Eventually, she explains, her team paid a prostitute to take in a bottle laced with sleeping tablets, “so the guards would be dopey”. Then they went in, grabbed the oilmen, and made a break for the Kuwaiti border. “War broke out that same day.”
She’s done “several” jobs in Pakistan. One involved locating and rescuing a 23-year-old British woman. “She had met and married a guy at university who’d said, come back to Pakistan and meet my family for six weeks. Six months later, her mother hadn’t heard from her.” It was a similar set-up to the Baghdad job, with Davis, in burqa or shalwar kameez, running surveillance on the building where the woman was held, before driving through the front gate and snatching her back. “She’d been beaten, raped and starved,” Davis explains flatly. The plan had been to drive to India, but she says they “got compromised” and found themselves pursued by a Pakistani army unit “who, fortunately, were not very good shots”.
She believes it was Bhutto who “dobbed her in” to the army. Just before the rescue, Davis had bumped into Bhutto at an Islamabad hotel. A few years previously, when Davis had been assigned to Bhutto as a bodyguard, she had attempted to petition the politician on behalf of a number of British women whose children had been taken to Pakistan by their fathers and not allowed to return. Bhutto refused. And when she saw Davis a few years later, back in Pakistan, her suspicions were aroused. “She’d obviously guessed why I was there” and “put two and two together”.
Anyway, says Davis, she’s dead now, not least because she wouldn’t listen to her bodyguards. That can be a common problem among powerful people. Davis believes that the advice of Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed’s security team was often ignored or countermanded with, ultimately, tragic consequences. “The ego of, ‘I’m rich and powerful; I know more than you.’ But then I have some clients who really get it,” she says, citing J.K. Rowling, with whom she worked for a number of years. “I say to them, ‘You’re employing me because you’ve got a problem. This is what I would like to happen.’”
There are, she explains, more and more female bodyguards, but they remain a minority. Of the 14,000 people with close-protection licences in the UK, fewer than 1,000 are women. But there are, says Davis, reasons why clients want a female bodyguard. For one thing, they offer more discretion than hulking minders. She once took Geri Halliwell to task for walking round with four massive blokes. “She wasn’t doing herself any favours.” Men, she says, like female bodyguards because they’re discreet. They could be an assistant, a mistress, anybody. Whereas if you’re a woman, a female bodyguard can stay with you at all times in a way male bodyguards can’t. “The assassin could be in the toilet,” she says.
And if this talk of assassins in toilets strikes you as too much, Davis doesn’t blame you. Because unless you’ve spent years immersed in a world of industrial espionage and secretive billionaires, how would you know? “If the public knew what went on, they’d be terrified,” she says. Plus you only need to read the news to see that certain states have no qualms about ordering killings abroad. The job that involved running with a young client from Russian agents was, she says, a case in point. “We moved countries, literally going around the world. We were two steps ahead of them for two years.” The pursuit ended, she says, because, “I think they paid Putin back the money they owed”.
It was also stressful for Davis, who had to spend every day keeping her client alive. Her job really takes precedence. Just as she was undercover when her mother died, she was on a job in Pakistan when her second husband died after a sudden heart attack. “You’re never where you need to be when something happens,” she says, with a hint of exasperation. For a long time she considered it taboo even to feel, let alone express emotion while on a job. One of the things she tried to explain to Rapace during the production of Close was that, when everything’s kicking off, you look as if you’re holding things together. It’s only afterwards that you can allow yourself to fall to pieces.
Close security is, she says, a tight world. You don’t really make new friends or relationships. “We tend to socialise together.” At 60, she no longer has to go into the field if she doesn’t want to. “I can get teams to do it. But I still like being out there.” She’d like more women to follow in her footsteps, and hopes the film will encourage others to join the profession. “We still have such a shortage of females in our industry,” she says before getting up to go. “So I’m hoping women will see it and think, ‘You know what? I might want to do that.’”
A longer version of this article appeared in The Times. © The Times/news Licensing. Close is showing now on Netflix.
“I turned down Madonna years ago. She wanted to go running around Hyde Park surrounded by bodyguards. Well, no thanks”