UCPI Daily Report, 2 Nov 2020

Tranche 1, Phase 1, Day 1

2 November 2020

Evidence from:

David Barr QC, Counsel to the Inquiry

The opening day of the Undercover Policing Inquiry was wholly taken up with David Barr QC, Counsel to the Inquiry, spelling out what the Inquiry is, and explaining the foundation and early years of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) undercover political policing unit.

There were some surprises – many new targeted groups were named and several officers’ photos were published. Whilst these are welcomed, leaving it so late it means the people in those groups, or who would recognise the officers, are only just getting a chance to learn they were spied on. As a method of disclosure, it seems designed to exclude affected people from being able to contribute to the Inquiry.

WHAT THE UCPI IS ABOUT & HOW IT WILL WORK

Barr made it clear that while there was a significant focus on left-wing groups, the SDS’s remit went beyond them very early on in its history, encompassing those opposing race and gender discrimination, campaigns for disarmament, and justice campaigns such as the family of Stephen Lawrence. Spycops, Barr confirmed, had been involved in the blacklisting of politically active workers.

Barr said ‘several’ had deceived women into long-term relationships (it’s more than 30, David). Spycops stole the identities of dead children.

Spycops stand accused of being agents provocateur, including Bob Lambert, accused of firebombing a Debenham’s store in 1987 while undercover. (The Metropolitan Police’s investigation into this, begun in April 2016, four years after the allegation was made, has still not concluded!)

The Inquiry, he assured us, will make facts public wherever possible, drawing on historic documents as well as testimony made directly to the Inquiry.

He then ran through a chronology of the scandal: basically one myopic whitewash report after another, interspersed with increasingly outrageous revelations from activists and journalists until the public inquiry was called. Unfortunately, there was a lack of recognition from him of the activists, notably the women deceived into relationships, who did most of the major work exposing the officers. Without them, none of this would be happening.

Barr ran through the Inquiry’s terms of reference, as laid out when it was commissioned in 2015. One of the limitations mentioned is this is an Inquiry into the actions of police officers in England and Wales, even though the spycops are known to have travelled to around 20 other countries, undermining campaigns and violating human rights.

The immunity of witnesses was mentioned – no document produced at the Inquiry will be used against people in future criminal proceedings (unless it’s about giving false evidence to the Inquiry itself), though documents produced by others for the Inquiry aren’t covered by this.

The Inquiry has told 19 families that their dead children’s identities were stolen by spycops. Additionally, one family whose living child’s identity was stolen has been informed.

THE NEW SCHEDULE

When Sir John Mitting took over as Chair in 2017, he cited his predecessor’s desire to discover the truth – that’s not necessarily the same as revealing the truth to the public though.

The Inquiry is divided into Modules, subdivided into Tranches and Phases, which you can see explained in our UCPI FAQ. Sir John Mitting will preside alone over the evidence, then a panel will be appointed by the Home Secretary for the final module that will look at making recommendations for the future (which the CHIS Bill seemingly makes irrelevant).

Although originally scheduled to report in 2018, the Inquiry is now looking like it’ll finish in about 2026. The pandemic is slowing the delayed process even further, as they say that classified documents can’t be worked on at home.

There was dismay at the new protracted timetable for the Inquiry. Tranche 1 Phase 2 (SDS 1973-82) is now expected to be in March or April 2021. They expect the Tranche 2 (SDS 1983-92) hearings will happen in the first half of 2022, Tranche 3 (SDS 1993-2007) in the first half of 2023. As for Tranches 4 (NPOIU), 5 and 6, who knows?

THE FIRST EVIDENCE HEARINGS

The first evidence hearings (Phase 1 of Tranche 1) will start next week. They will cover the formation of the Special Demonstration Squad in 1968, in response to protests against the war in Vietnam, and why it continued beyond that.

There is no evidence in any documents that the earliest SDS officers (1968-72) had sexual relationships with women, nor that it was standard to steal dead children’s identities. However, these things do emerge in Phase 2 (1973-82), the hearings due to take place in early 2021.

Witness statements have been taken from 18 SDS officers for Phase 1 (1968-72), eight of whom will give evidence. For the targeted people, Tariq Ali from the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign will give evidence, and Dr Norman Temple from Irish National Liberation Solidarity Front will have his statement read for him.

The Inquiry will examine documents including Home Office Circular 97/1969, which specifically said spies must never incite crime, and if there’s ever a possibility of misleading a court the spy must be withdrawn (which is cited in our post about spycops and miscarriages of justice).

In covering who was responsible in the early period, Barr listed Home Secretaries and Metropolitan Police Commissioners. It’s worth noting that the huge delays in starting the Inquiry mean that three Met Commissioners (collectively in charge 1977-1993) and two Home Secretaries have died since the Inquiry was announced.

STOPPING THE ‘STOP THE WAR’: HOW THE SDS BEGAN

A March 1968 demonstration in London against the Vietnam War ended with windows being broken at the American embassy. Eager to avoid a repeat at the October 1968 demo, police came up with the idea of deep-cover intelligence officers, and the Special Demonstration Squad was born.

The Inquiry was then shown a contemporary ITV report of the March protest, featuring lots of pushing at police lines and officers kicking people on the ground, two officers carried away on stretchers, several fireworks and some incidental damage to shrubbery. It was overdubbed with continual crowd noise that doesn’t change when the scene cuts, and a voice-over about the wild violence of protesters in “a riot such has Britain has never before witnessed”.

Internal police reports allege foreign demonstrators were catalysts and agitators, though Barr said that Tariq Ali from the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign contests the accuracy and validity of this focus.

Chief Inspector Conrad Dixon of Special Branch resolved to prevent a repeat. Dixon’s report of April 1968 said no intelligence had shown anyone planning violence at the demo, and yet it happened. Implied in this is a common police belief that things have a rigid command structure similar to their own, and if that can’t be seen it must be because it’s being well hidden.

The Inquiry went through a number of contemporaneous documents. They showed a few that said Special Branch had gone to a degree of effort to find out the scale and nature of the March 1968 demo. One Special Branch document describes Special Branch attending a Vietnam Solidarity Campaign meeting but being recognised and asked to leave. Another attempted to attend a private meeting was aborted due to cops not knowing anyone and dressing like cops. Special Branch clearly felt a problem in not being able to get into meetings of anti-Vietnam War activists.

There’s very little contemporaneous documentation of the formation of the Special Demonstration Squad, but it appears to have been founded on 30 or 31 July 1968. Early SDS documents stated its intention as being solely to gather intelligence ahead of the 27 October 1968 Vietnam demo, using publications, informants, technical devices, and undercover police officers.

It rapidly moved from this multi-method narrow-remit approach to the very opposite – just using deep-cover police for a wide, ill-defined range of ‘subversives’.

As the anti-Vietnam War movement factionalised, the SDS infiltrated the various groups. Officers ‘Don de Freitas’ and ‘Margaret White’ posed as a couple to infiltrate a group. One black power leaflet they came across led to prosecution and imprisonment of its distributor, and the officer gave evidence in her real identity.

The spycops had been deployed into a variety of groups, even taking active roles in the organising.

THE OCTOBER 1968 DEMONSTRATION

By the time the October 1968 Vietnam demo came round, Chief Inspector Dixon saw all the factions and anticipated less trouble than had been seen in March. He was correct, but David Barr said that’s not the point. The Inquiry must ask was this necessary? Was it proportionate? Could intelligence have been gained without the use of spycops?

On 29 October 1968, the US ambassador congratulated Special Branch for a less volatile demo than in March. One has to wonder if there would have been such a strong reaction to March demo if it had been at a target that didn’t embarrass the UK in front of the USA.

We were then shown another contemporaneous news report. As with the earlier one, there’s a striking difference between the pictures and the commentary – the ‘Maoists’ / ‘anarchists’ (the words are used interchangably) are violent for linking arms and walking into police, police ‘keep their cool’ throwing punches and kicking.

Again, Barr recounted the police’s narrative seemingly from a position of accepting it as fact, describing how they regarded the comparatively peaceful nature of the Oct 1968 Vietnam demo as a big success for the policing tactics.

It’s unclear if the Inquiry is taking all this at face value. The October 1968 demo was always intended by the organisers to be more peaceful, and the International Marxist Group stopped a large attempted breakaway to the US embassy.

Certainly, it was used as the pretext for making the SDS a permanent arrangement with a much wider scope. Barr talked about the dual role of SDS, covering demonstrations/public order and subversion, but pretty much every organisation seeking any social change could be seen to fit into either category (or both).

The conflation of the former with the latter gave an excuse for state surveillance of almost all protest groups. Within a fortnight of the October demo, spycops boss Chief Inspector Dixon had proposed long term infiltration of the relevant organisations. Funding was requested from the Home Office. Home Office wasn’t overly keen on permanence but paid up anyway.

DEEPER POCKETS, WIDER NET

The documents make clear that the Home Office reticence wasn’t due to any ethical principles. Rather, Home Secretary Reginald Maudling was very afraid of personal impact of exposure.

The fact that the government was terrified of spycops being public knowledge indicates a belief that the public would be outraged, as indeed they were once the truth came out in 2010. They always knew it was profoundly unethical, that it was abuse of citizens and unwarranted curtailing of political dissent.

Funding was granted for the calendar year in 1970 and 1971, but in 1972 it moved to the financial year, indicating that the old temporary spying on Vietnam War protesters had become permanent and broader. A vague mention of spycops in the press yielded no serious opposition from public or civil liberties groups, leading to increased confidence in making the unit permanent, continuing and expanding their roles.

The SDS was directly funded by the Home Office until the late 1980s, which would have been discussed and presumably they wanted to know what they were getting for their money, yet somehow there are no documents of any kind about the SDS in any of the Home Office archives.

Early 1970s documents show the unit’s stated aims being forecasting the scale and mood of demonstrations, identifying organisers, and ‘gathering information for long-term intelligence purposes’ with people profiled ‘within weeks’ of first expressing interest in ‘extremist ideas’.

WHO WAS TARGETED

David Barr then read out lists of groups targeted according to the SDS’ first few annual reports. Some we knew from the Undercover Research Group/ Guardian list, but almost 50 were new.

Certainly, the breadth of interest was extraordinary. It included groups from Hackney United Tenants Ad-Hoc Committee to Croydon Libertarians, Justice for Rhodesia to the Independent Labour Party. The Undercover Research Group posted the full list.

The reports lamented the ‘obvious problem’ of finding it hard to infiltrate black power movements. “Coloured and foreign organisations, because of their exclusivity, continue to be resistant to penetration”.

The SDS said that the Communist Party and extreme right wing groups weren’t covered by its remit, but was up for doing it if they were told to. This is essentially asking for sanction for mission creep.

Big Flame were among the groups described as “penetrated to a lesser degree”, but this somewhat arbitrary distinction doesn’t mean the involvement is minor. They were targeted by Richard Clark, aka ‘Rick Gibson’, but the group became suspicious of him and discovered that he was using the stolen identity of a dead child. They confronted him and he left. The story was unpublished at the time

Clark deceived at least four women he spied on into relationships. One of them, Mary, gave a powerful statement to the Inquiry in 2018:

“I came from South Africa, thinking I had escaped that kind of interference by the state in the life of its citizens. To find that the police and the state in the UK operate in a similar fashion is very disturbing”.

Chief Inspector Dixon laid down some rules. He wanted recruitment by personal approach, and daily supervision of officers, with a maximum of 12 months (the average ended up being 4-5 years). He was firm that officers should not get actively involved in groups, drafting leaflets, etc. This, as has already been mentioned, wasn’t adhered to even then, and it went right out of the window shortly after.

None of the officers the Inquiry has spoken to recalls formal training. There is little evidence of specific guidance on criminal activity, sexual relationships, breaching legal privilege. Unsurprisingly, most say they didn’t commit any offence when undercover.

The Inquiry then published photos of various officers, all seemingly taken at the same event (one has to suspect the 1968 SDS Christmas party). Most of the officers whose faces are shown were backroom staff, rather than actual undercover officers. The Undercover Research Group posted all the pictures of the 1968 spycops.

EXAMPLE DOCUMENTS

The Inquiry concluded the day by showing a range of documents to illustrate key themes.

A report on large public meeting of Vietnam Solidarity Campaign from 1968:

Routine form for early SDS work reporting on events. It lists all the officers present at the meeting (which included Dixon, the head of the SDS, and Saunders, second in command), all of whom were able to vote at the meeting. The document is noted as having been copied to MI5. It’s a clear illustration of spycops having influence on the organisations they spied on, and that this was known at the very highest levels.

A report from officer ‘John Clinton‘ on the April 1972 International Socialists conference:

Almost 400 people attended, and the report is lengthy. This was followed by another from same officer, on the results of International Socialists national committee election, noting specific person’s politics. These two were the basis for the next document, a cover note saying managers were very pleased about the reports on International Socialists, that it proves the value of the SDS, and reports have been copied to MI5. This is proof that such reporting wasn’t a rogue officer but within the remit of the SDS.

A 1969 report from officer ‘Bill Lewis‘ on the International Marxist Group’s summer camp in Scotland, attended by 42 people. This shows spycops acting across borders and jurisdictions very early on, and makes a mockery of the Home Office limiting the Inquiry to England and Wales.

A 1971 report by ‘David Robertson‘, reporting on a Maoist couple, including personal details about financial affairs, home life and child. This kind of intrusive, unpolitical detail was commonplace in such reports.

A 1968 document from ‘Don de Frietas‘ and ‘Margaret White‘, officers who pretended to be a couple to infiltrate the Havering branch of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. The report covers a meeting in a pub with details of all nine attendants.

A 1971 report from ‘John Clinton’ on a member of the International Socialists, who wants to get fellow members to work within a trade union. This was followed by another Clinton one from 1973 reporting on membership changes in International Socialists, noting their locality and trade union. These illustrate the attention to trade unions even in the early days of the SDS.

A 1973 report of officer HN338, noting names of three people who’ve asked for information on the International Marxist Group. This shows that one didn’t have to be an activist or even a member of a target group in order to have a spycops file.

A 1971 report also from HN338 on a Black Defence Committee talk entitled ‘Rhodesia and the racist problem in Britain’. Opposing those things was a threat to the political establishment.

A 1971 report by ‘David Robertson’ on Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) meeting addressed by a delegation that had visited China, but includes details of industrial action and remarks about the ethnicity of certain attendees.

A 1971 ‘Robertson’ report, submitting a Women’s Liberation Front leaflet that advocated an end to exploitation and repression of all kinds, equal pay without regard to gender, access to contraception and abortion. The report has been stamped as copied to MI5.

A 1971 report from officer HN338 reporting on a meeting of editorial groups of an activist publication called Indo-China, showing active involvement in steering groups. Numerous spycops wrote articles whilst undercover, encouraging the political activity they were ostensibly there to undermine.

A 1973 report from officer HN338, reporting on meeting about police oppression by International Marxist Group, Socialist Labour League and International Socialists. Example of police regarding well-earned threats to their reputation as seriously as any other threat.

Finally for the example documents, a report from 1974 by ‘John Clinton’ reporting on a Socialist Worker rally for the Shrewsbury 24 and their families. This clearly shows spycops working to defending the reputation of the police against those who’d expose miscarriages of justice.

All documents mentioned have been uploaded to the Inquiry Archive for 2 November 2020.

 

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COPS will be live-tweeting all the Inquiry hearings, and producing daily reports like this one for the blog. They will be indexed on our UCPI Public Inquiry page.

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