The attention paid to the decision of the Crown Prosecution Service not to prosecute undercover police officers focused, rightly, on the invasion of privacy and bodily integrity in their sexual contact with women they spied on.

But in the same statement, the CPS ruled out several other charges.

MISCONDUCT IN PUBLIC OFFICE

In order to prosecute misconduct in public office, the prosecution would have to show that an officer knowingly abused their position in order to bring a sexual relationship about

The police have readily and unequivocally admitted such relationships are abhorrent and an abuse of their position. Speaking for the Association of Chief Police Officers, a body that ran several of the political policing units, Jon Murphy said

It is grossly unprofessional. It is a diversion from what they are there to do. It is morally wrong because people have been put there to do a particular task and people have got trust in them. It is never acceptable under any circumstances … for them to engage in sex with any subject they come into contact with.

In March this year the second Operation Herne internal report into undercover policing declared

there are and never have been any circumstances where it would be appropriate… Such an activity can only be seen as an abject failure of the deployment, a gross abuse of their role and their position as a police officer and an individual and organisational failing

So there we have a police report saying it’s a gross abuse of the officer’s position, but the CPS said there’s insufficient evidence that any officer knowingly abused their position.

Everyone admits the relationships happened and they were a gross abuse. If it is a gross abuse then there is a gross abuser. That must be either the manager who authorised it or the individual undercover officer who did it.

Whichever one it is, former officer Bob Lambert is culpable. He was an undercover officer who had a prolonged relationship including fathering a child with a woman he targeted. After he was promoted to running the squad he mentored Jim Boyling who did the same thing.

If Operation Herne is right and it is both an individual and organisational failing then we should see several officers held responsible for each relationship. Even if they blame the individual officer and claim they disobeyed their guidance, it is negligence on the part of the managers.

But if this came to court, we could expect to see officers from both roles blaming each other. That would be a whole lot of dirty laundry being done in public, and would be likely to point to further abuses. This scandal has already become far too large for establishment comfort. It’s no surprise that the CPS – who helped ensure Mark Kennedy’s evidence was kept from court in the Ratcliffe case, leading to a miscarriage of justice and 20 wrongful convictions – has decided to defy the police’s own admissions of misconduct and keep these officers away from court as well.

BREACH OF THE OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT

The CPS also said that

In order to prosecute a breach of the Official Secrets Act the prosecution would have to prove that the suspect in question disclosed information that would, or would be likely to, damage the work of the security and intelligence services

This is thought to be because officers have named colleagues to civilians. Jim Boyling told the activist he married about several other officers’ identities. This led her to tell Helen Steel that her partner John Barker had in fact been police officer John Dines.

Peter Francis

Additionally, when Mark Kennedy was confronted by activists who had discovered his true identity, he confirmed activist Lynn Watson had actually been a fellow police officer.

Whistleblower officer Peter Francis has been threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. The fact that neither Boyling nor Kennedy are to face charges for naming colleagues to the activists they targeted implies Francis faces something of an empty threat. The CPS appear to have declared it’s open season for him, and for any other officers who want to right some of their wrongs, to step forward and name names.

Despite grave reservations from civil liberties groups and those who have been targeted by Britain’s political secret police, the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill passed its third reading in the House of Commons yesterday and will now go to the Lords.

It will allow police and a range of other state agencies to self-authorise their agents to commit any crime at all.

This is not about foiling deadly terrorist plots, as laws and agencies already exist to do that. Instead, it will give carte blanche to the spycops to abuse citizens campaigning for social change. It specifically includes protecting ‘economic wellbeing’, which would make strikes, boycotts, blockades and pickets legitimate targets for the most serious crimes.

Human Rights Defeated in Parliament

Labour introduced a number of amendments to limit the powers of the Bill, including outlawing the infiltration of trade unions, deceiving people into sexual relationships, and the use of children in spying. All amendments were defeated. Nonetheless, Labour whipped MPs to abstain.

All Plaid Cymru, SDLP and Green MPs voted against it, as did most SNP and Liberal Democrat MPs and one Conservative, Adam Afriyie.

Additionally, a total of 34 Labour MPs defied their leadership to vote against the Bill. Seven of them had to resign positions to do so; shadow schools minister Margaret Greenwood, shadow Treasury minister Dan Carden, and Parliamentary private secretaries Navendu Mishra, Kim Johnson, Mary Foy, Rachel Hopkins, and Sarah Owen.

Many of us have been shocked by the failure of Labour to oppose this attack on democratic freedoms, personal security, and the labour movement in particular.

Labour MPs Spied On

In March 2015, whistleblower spycop Peter Francis revealed that he had personally seen ten Labour MPs spied on during his time at the Special Demonstration Squad in the 1990s.

The targeted MPs were from the full width of Labour’s political spectrum. Several of them made outraged statements to parliament at the time, demanding to see their files.

Here are a few excerpts from that afternoon (with transcripts and closed captions for accessibility).

Peter Hain

Peter Hain was an active anti-racist campaigner in the 1970s and 1980s before he became a Labour MP in 1991. He was a minister for more than a decade following Labour’s 1997 election victory. He is a core participant at the Undercover Policing Inquiry.

In March 2015, he listed his fellow Labour MPs known to not only have been spied on as earlier campaigners, but having it continue while they were MPs who were supposedly protected by the ‘Wilson Doctrine’, a convention that prohibits the security services from targeting parliamentarians.

Peter Hain:

‘Would he pass on to the Home Secretary my request that she ensures that the remit of the public inquiry she’s announced into the operations of the Special Demonstration Squad includes surveillance of MPs publicly named by Peter Francis when he was an undercover officer between 1990 and 2001?

Is she aware – and is he aware – that aside from myself he saw a Special Branch file on my Right Honourable friend the member for Blackburn [Jack Straw] who was actually Home Secretary for four of these years, and files on my Right Honourable friends the members for Camberwell and Peckham [Harriet Harman] and Lewisham Deptford [Joan Ruddock] and my Honourable friends the members for Hackney North and Stoke Newington [Diane Abbott], Islington North [Jeremy Corbyn], and Bolsover [Dennis Skinner], as well as former colleagues Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone and Bernie Grant?

Did this monitoring affect our ability as MPs to speak confidentially with constituents? What, if any, impact did that have on our ability to represent them properly? We know for example that the campaign to get justice for Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager murdered by racists, was infiltrated by the SDS [Special Demonstration Squad], and that the police blocked a proper prosecution.

Did police infiltrators in the Lawrence campaign exploit private information shared by constituents or lawyers with any of us as MPs? Will the Home Office in order the police to disclose all relevant information and to each of the MPs affected our complete individual personal registry files?

It is hardly revelatory that the Special Branch had a file on people like me dating back forty years ago to anti-apartheid or Anti-Nazi League activist days because we were seen through a cold war prism as subversive. Even though we vigorously opposed Stalinism that didn’t stop us being lumped together with Moscow sympathisers. But surely the fact that these files were still active for at least ten years whilst we were MPs raises fundamental questions about parliamentary sovereignty and privilege, principles which are vital to our democracy.

It is one thing to have a police file on an MP suspected of crime, child abuse, or even co-operating with terrorism, but quite another to maintain one deriving from campaigns promoting values of social justice, human rights and equal opportunities which are shared by millions of British people. Surely, Mr Speaker, that means travelling down the road that endangers the liberty of us all.’

Jack Straw

The spycops didn’t just target members of the government who were supposedly their superiors, but they specifically spied on Jack Straw when he was Home Secretary and therefore ultimately in charge of the police.

Straw noted the sinister implication that it may well have been motivated by a desire to prevent police being held to account over the institutional racism that enfeebled their investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

Jack Straw:

‘Does the Minister accept that if these allegations are correct then we have an extraordinary situation where I as Home Secretary – and for three years from ’97 to 2000, was the police authority for the Metropolitan Police – not only knew nothing whatever about what appears to have been going on within the Metropolitan Police but may also have been subject to unlawful surveillance myself as Home Secretary? That ought to be looked at.

But the trigger, what appears to be the trigger, which is much more serious ought to be looked at, which was my decision, taken against a lot of reluctance by the Metropolitan Police, to establish a full judicial inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. And what is completely unacceptable was that it appears that elements of the Metropolitan Police were themselves spying on the bereaved family of Stephen Lawrence.’

Joan Ruddock

Like Peter Hain, Joan Ruddock was spied on earlier campaigning work, in her case the peace movement. She was weeks away from stepping down as an MP and lamented the lack of leverage she had to force answers from the police.

Joan Ruddock:

‘Thank you, Mr Speaker. In 1981 I was elected the chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and two years later an MI5 agent, Cathy Massiter, blew the whistle on the surveillance the phone taps and the collection of Special Branch reports had been undertaken on me. She cited political interference in the service. She said what had happened was illegal and she resigned.

Now, in ’87 I became a member of this House. I took the loyal oath. In 1997 I became a minister. I subsequently signed the Official Secrets Act. How is it that surveillance was carried out on me all of that time? I want to know, and get the Minister to understand, who authorised that surveillance? On what grounds was the surveillance authorised?

And he needs to answer those questions because this is a political issue, it is his responsibility, the Home Office’s and Home Secretary’s responsibility.

Mr Speaker, I am leaving this house. I can do no more than make these points, put in an FoI [Freedom of Information request] to the commissioner, write to the Home Secretary. But frankly, it is something that affects all MPs, and even though I leave he needs to do something and the future government of this House needs to ensure that there is a proper investigation. This should never ever have happened to members of this House.’

David Davis

From the other side of the chamber, Conservative MP David Davis emphasised the fact that spycops is not only a historic scandal, and insisted that the Undercover Policing Inquiry must examine activity right up to the present.

David Davis:

‘Thank you, Mr Speaker. In the last year there have been a number of revelations about the police improperly hacking into journalists’ telephone calls, improperly breaching legal privilege, and using the information they obtained from breaching legal privilege of suspects, and the government has been very coy about responding to my requests about the current state of the Wilson Doctrine.

If these allegations that have come out now are true, it indicates the Wilson Doctrine was broken in spirit if not in the letter.

Can he make sure that the inquiry actually comes right up to date in terms of what it looks into, and that it is drawn broadly enough to ensure that none of these risks exist today?’

Harriet Harman

Two MPs demanded to see the release of their files; Harriet Harman, then-Duputy Leader of the Labour Party, and a relatively unknown but long-serving backbencher by the name of Jeremy Corbyn.

Harman had been an MP for more than thirty years at the time she spoke in 2015. Not for the first time, she defended the right to political dissent without interference from spycops and demanded to see her full file.

Harriet Harman:

‘I’d like to ask the Minister – it’s more important than just feeding in our views to an inquiry, the question is what he decides – and I would like him to assure me that he, the government, will let me see a full copy of my file.

In the 70s and the 1980s when I was at Brent Law Centre and then at Liberty, I was campaigning for the rights of women, for the rights of workers, and the right to demonstrate. None of that was against the law. None of that was undermining our democracy. On the contrary, it was actually essential for our democracy.

The security services do an important job, and the government of course should support them, but if they overstep the mark the government must hold them to account. So can I repeat a request I made to the previous government that was turned down and make it again to this government in the light of these new revelations.

Will he give me an assurance that this government will release to me a full copy of my file?’

Harriet Harman is still an MP. She voted for several of the amendments to the CHIS Bill but, after they failed, she abstained on the final vote.

Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn is the other spied-on Labour MP who is still in the Commons. He defied the leadership to vote against the CHIS Bill last night.

Back in 2015, Corbyn’s outrage at the injustice was palpable as he spoke to the House.

Jeremy Corbyn:

‘Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m pleased that this story has finally come out and as members of parliament we’re in a position to raise questions with the Home Office and demand the truth come out. Unfortunately many, many others unknown to us who were under surveillance do not have that opportunity.

The question is one of accountability of the Metropolitan Police. Who authorised this tapping? Who knew about it? Did the Home Secretary or successive Home Secretaries know about it? If they did, why didn’t they accept the Wilson Doctrine in respect of MPs? Why did they allow this covert operation to go on within the Metropolitan Police?

And I’m very surprised that, in his answer a few moments ago, he said the files might be released to us but they may have to be redacted for security reasons. If I’m under surveillance, or the late Bernie Grant or any of my friends are under surveillance, and whatever meetings we were at they were presumably there, whatever phone calls we made they were presumably recording, I think we have a right to know about that.

We represent constituents. We’re in a position of trust with our constituents. That trust is betrayed by this invasion of our privacy by the Metropolitan Police and I ask the Minister again can we each of us have a full unredacted version of everything that was written about us, every piece of surveillance that was undertaken of us, our families and our friends?’

Still No Answers, What Next?

All their requests to see their files were, like everyone else’s, ignored by the police. Five years later and those MPs, like the rest of us, are still waiting for answers.

The public inquiry into undercover political policing finally starts on 2 November, seven years after it was promised by the Home Secretary. It has granted anonymity to most spycops officers, so even if it does reveal some truth, there is little chance of proper accountability.

A major part of the Inquiry’s remit is to make recommendations for the future. But if the CHIS Bill becomes law, it turns the Inquiry into an academic historic exercise, with the spycops of the future able to commit the most heinous abuses with impunity.

An explosive new report on spycops in Scotland proves the need for a proper inquiry into their activity. The Scottish government is refusing to address the issue, so victims are launching a legal case to force them to act.

Officers from Britain’s political secret police worked all over the UK and beyond. They undermined campaigns, invaded families and violated the fundamental human rights that police are sworn to uphold. Everyone affected deserves answers, but people in Scotland are being shut out.

HALF AN INQUIRY

In March 2014 the Home Secretary announced there would be a full-scale public inquiry into political undercover policing. It came as a shock when, a year later, the Inquiry’s terms of reference said it would be limited to events in England and Wales.

There were voices of outrage. The German government officially asked to be included. Irish parliamentarians challenged ministers to do the same. A judicial review of Northern Ireland’s exclusion is underway, backed by Amnesty International. But nowhere has the objection to exclusion been stronger than in Scotland.

Many of the known spycops were active in Scotland, over a period of decades. Every known active officer was at the 2005 protests against the G8 meeting in Gleneagles.

A number of officers initiated and furthered intimate relationships with women they were spying on whilst in Scotland. Some of them took the women on special trips to Scotland purely to cement and deepen the relationships.

By the Metropolitan Police’s own admission,

‘these relationships were a violation of the women’s human rights, an abuse of police power and caused significant trauma.’

All these visits to Scotland should have been sanctioned by the local police forces. Either Scottish police were complicit, or else they weren’t told, which would be a serious breach of protocol. Either way, it warrants investigation.

The matter has been twice debated in the Scottish Parliament. The Scottish Justice Minister met with victims of spycops in Scotland. The Scottish government, supported by every party in the parliament, made repeated official requests to be included in the public inquiry. The Home Office refused.

POLICE ASKED TO EXONERATE THEMSELVES

The Scottish government’s response to the rebuff was as baffling as it was insulting to victims. They hired HM Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland (HMICS) – a body of career police officers – to conduct a review.

HMICS decided to put the task in the hands of Stephen Whitelock, who had worked in and alongside the posts that deployed undercover officers, including authorising Strathclyde’s deployments of the very Met officers his review examines. It was a corrupt self-investigation. Victims protested to no avail, and so it went ahead without actually speaking to anyone who was subjected to the abuses.

It got worse. When the Strategic Review of Undercover Policing in Scotland was published in February 2018, it went beyond the anticipated whitewash. Much of its content was given over to other kinds of undercover policing, information that was utterly irrelevant to the political infiltrations. It didn’t even mention officers having relationships with women they spied on, let alone what happened and who was responsible.

The Scottish government accepted this vacuous decoy of a review and said there was no need for a further inquiry.

THE TRUTH ABOUT SPYCOPS IN SCOTLAND

Earlier this year, the Scottish Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance published Political Undercover Policing in Scotland: The facts about spycops in Scotland & the questions that remain unanswered [PDF].

Written by academic Dr Eveline Lubbers, it focuses on the two main spycops units, the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU).

There are extensive details on the activity of nine officers in Scotland, their relationships, and the groups they targeted. It also covers Scottish issues affected by political policing (as opposed to officers visiting the country as part of UK or international issues) including anti-nuclear, anti-war, climate and trade union campaigns.

Additionally, the SCOPS report profiles a number of senior Scottish officers seconded to one of the Met’s spycops units. One of them, Phil Gormley, went on to become Chief Constable of Scotland.

Dr Lubbers told Bella Caledonia:

‘Our research found that Scottish officers had crucial leading management roles in both the NPOIU and the overseeing body ACPO TAM, and were as such involved in setting the agenda for the secret undercover units. Our findings confirm that the NPOIU acted on a national level, and that Scotland was within its remit.’

The SCOPS report vaporises any credibility that the HMICS report may have had. SCOPS has delivered a copy of the report to every MSP, including Justice Minister Humza Yousaf. Mr Yousaf has yet to respond.

You can download the report for free, or order a paper copy to be delivered, at the bottome of the SCOPS page.

JUSTICE FOR ALL

The spycops committed crimes, some of them serious. They were agents provocateur, lied in court and set people up for wrongful convictions. They are known to have orchestrated dozens of miscarriages of justice, and the true figure may be in the thousands. They systematically sexually and psychologically abused women they spied on. They stole the identities of dead children from bereaved families.

Every instance of these abuses should be exposed wherever it happened. Every officer should be held accountable. Everyone targeted by these officers and tactics deserves the truth, and the state should give victims all the support and opportunity for redress that they need. They, and the public, must have answers.

‘Andrea‘, who had a long-term relationship with officer Carlo Soracchi, told The Scotsman:

‘As a victim of political policing in Scotland, I seek the truth as to why I was spied upon and why my life and the lives of my family were so cruelly disrupted. I want to know who was responsible for (Soracchi’s) activities in Scotland and which of his handlers secretly travelled with us.’

It cannot be right that people violated by unlawful and unethical political policing in England and Wales have a judge-led inquiry, whilst those in Scotland get nothing at all.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

Tilly Gifford, an activist targeted by political secret police in Scotland, is bringing a legal case to compel the Scottish government into having a credible inquiry into spycops in Scotland.

She has launched a crowdfund appeal for the costs. Please share the link and, if you can afford it, contribute.

Come and support ‘Monica’ in her legal challenge to try to get spycops prosecuted.

In 2013, the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to prosecute undercover police officers who deceived women into relationships.

As we said at the time, other men have been jailed for comparable and lesser sexual deceit, and if the spycops men were not police officers they would already be behind bars for what they’ve done.

Now ‘Monica’, deceived into a relationship by spycop Jim Boyling, is bringing a judicial review of the CPS’ refusal to prosecute.

The case will be heard on 13th and 14th November in the Royal Courts of Justice. There will be a demo at 9.30 on the 13th.

Monica was the first of three women involved in ‘Reclaim the Streets’ with whom Boyling formed long term intimate sexual relationships. Boyling, who claimed to be a van driver and used the cover name Jim Sutton, played a key role in a number of ‘actions’.

Monica’s legal team argues that, contrary to arguments put forward by the CPS, the disgraced former undercover officer should have been prosecuted under the Sexual Offences Act 1956, and been charged with Misconduct in Public Office.

Boyling is now represented as an Interested Party and will be making submissions opposing our case.

The CPS previously decided not to prosecute following a lengthy investigation into Boyling’s conduct arising from a formal complaint made by the third woman ‘Rosa’, whose relationship commenced in 1999.

Monica will also seek to challenge the CPS conclusion that Boyling cannot be prosecuted for misconduct in public office despite the fulsome apology from the police that such relationships were and abuse and would never be authorised and despite the subsequent findings that Boyling dismissed by the police for gross misconduct.

 ‘Monica’ said:

‘I am heartened by our progress with this Judicial Review. I am challenging this decision on behalf of all the women who have been deceived into intimate relationships with undercover officers. Relationships in which we gave the best of ourselves to people whose sole purpose was to deceive.

‘I brought this case because the reasons that the DPP gave for not prosecuting Boyling are symptomatic of the institutional sexism at the heart of our public institutions.  The DPP negated my right to know whom I was actually sharing my life with. It is sickening that they have prioritised Boyling’s ‘right’ to have sex with me and other women in order to maintain his cover, or satisfy his sexual needs.  Further, the possibility that Boyling may have had ‘genuine feelings’ was considered more important than my freedom to choose who I was intimate with.

‘If I had known that Boyling was a serving MPS officer, paid to deceive, control and manipulate the environmental direct action group of which I was part I could never have consented to sexual intimacy with such an individual.

‘I have brought this action, with the support of my legal team, to encourage an honest appraisal of the facts. It is time to make a stand, to say that this behaviour is no longer acceptable.’

Monica’s lawyer Harriet Wistrich of Birnberg Peirce said:

‘The law on deceit around consent in sexual relationships is unclear and inconsistent. On the one hand young women with mental health problems are prosecuted and imprisoned for deceiving as to gender, on the other hand an officer who constructs an entirely false persona and enters into long-term intimate and sexual relationships in order to spy has committed no offence. This will be an important opportunity to clarify the law.’

in November 2015 the Metropolitan Police issued an historic public apology, in which it was acknowledged that relationships between undercover police and their targets were “abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong…a violation of the women’s human rights, an abuse of police power and caused significant trauma.”

The apology stated that these relationships were not authorised, and never would be. The CPS refusal to prosecute clearly flies in the face of this.

This case raises really important points of law in relation to our understanding of what amounts to consent in sexual relationships.  We are pleased that the courts will be looking at this area of law in relation to the acts of undercover officers deliberately deceiving women they are spying on.

The demo will be outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London on Tuesday 13 November, 9.30-10.30am.

Spread the word further with the Facebook event.

The recent hearing of the Undercover Policing Inquiry was a world away from the stereotype of legal proceedings. Whilst other courtrooms seize up with the stale formality and impenetrable legalese, this session was awash with dramatic force that engulfed everyone present. And not in a good way.

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, was sitting in for his second public hearing after taking over from Christopher Pitchford. Concerns victims had about the Inquiry under Mitting’s predecessor have only multiplied as the bias towards police secrecy becomes markedly worse.

NEITHER TRUTH NOR JUSTICE

Mitting said that he would not tolerate the Metropolitan Police’s former tactic of ‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny‘ (NCND) being used to withhold from the public any information about large numbers of officers.

In his first public hearing in November 2017, Mitting unequivocally stated:

‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny has no part at all to play in Special Demonstration Squad deployments’

Yet he has essentially continued the Met’s policy of NCND, rebranding it by saying that revealing any details about a spycop is ‘a potential breach of an officer’s Article 8 rights’, the human right to a private life. This has been the basis of Mitting issuing blanket anonymity to batches of undercover officers in recent months.

Effectively, Mitting is saying the rights of violators are more important than the rights of the violated. Because he regards the officers’ human rights as paramount, the public won’t be told the names of these spycops who invaded citizens’ lives and breached Article 8 rights – as well as Article 3 (freedom from torture), Article 6 (the right to a fair trial), Article 10 (freedom of expression), Article 11 (freedom of assembly and association) and Article 14 (freedom from discrimination).

The overprotection of police privacy is now Mitting’s standard procedure. He looks at what the police officer says, and then at a risk assessment performed by another police officer, then he publishes redacted versions of these statements and issues a ‘minded-to note’ of his intentions.

Dutifully, we then go to hearings where Mitting basically goes along with what the police have recommended. He appears oblivious to the possibility that an officer might want to be anonymous because they have something to hide.

The one exception was the U-turn on Rick Gibson, whose real name is to be released, but only because the Undercover Research Group presented shocking new information about him deceiving women into relationships. Without his erstwhile comrades coming forward with the name the officer had used, the groups he infiltrated and when, this investigation would have been impossible.

NO NAMES = NO EVIDENCE = NO TRUTH

This is the fundamental issue of the Inquiry – we need to know the cover names used by officers in advance, so that those spied upon can give testimony on what the officers did. Without that, the Inquiry is reduced to the police selectively self-reporting.

The hearing earlier this month was concerned with seven officers, all of whom Mitting was intending to grant full anonymity.

Counsel for the victims, Phillippa Kaufmann QC, began bluntly:

KAUFMANN: ‘We are in no better position now than we were before the last hearing. On the contrary, we feel the situation has got worse…

‘these oral hearings, or the invitation of written submissions from us in advance, look increasingly like window dressing and look increasingly pointless in terms of actually having any realistic prospect of having any influence upon your decision-making. That is a matter of great public concern’

RUNNING INTO A BRICK WALL

Two of the officers were known by the code numbers HN23 and HN40. We are offered the bare minimum of information about them, basically just telling us that they existed. Mitting claims publishing their cover names could lead to the real names being discovered which, in turn, could lead to the risk of serious violence against the officers.

HN23 was deployed against one group and reported on other groups in the 1990s. They fear their friends and family will feel betrayed that they kept their spycop past a secret.

HN40 was deployed against two groups in the last decade of the existence of the SDS (ie 1998-2008). They were prosecuted under their false name. Despite this evidence of perjury and perverting the course of justice, the Inquiry seeks to fully protect the officer.

Kaufmann said the refusal to say anything at all amounted to Neither Confirm Nor Deny. Mitting responded:

MITTING: ‘With respect it is not a Neither Confirm Nor Deny approach. It is stronger than that. It is a flat refusal to say anything about the deployment in the open.’

Kaufmann then asked, if we can’t know about the officer can we at least be told why that decision has been taken?

MITTING: ‘I am afraid that HN23 as HN40, they are examples of deployments where you are going to meet a brick wall of silence.’

KAUFMANN: ‘It strikes us as extraordinary that we cannot even be told, for example, was this officer engaged in a deployment in relation to left wing groups or right wing groups. How on earth can the disclosure of that fact alone put that officer at risk?

Mitting was aloof and unrelenting, waiting for her to finish speaking and simply repeating himself.

MITTING: ‘I am afraid you are meeting a brick wall in these two cases and others.’

Maya Sikand, representing whistleblower SDS officer Peter Francis, spoke next about HN23.

SIKAND: ‘We come here, we hope to assist but we are not assisting because you will say, “Well, actually, no, this is a brick wall”. So it does beg the question as to why it is we are invited here’

Sikand then raised the stakes, saying that Peter Francis knows who HN23 is and the groups that were infiltrated.

She said of HN23:

SIKAND: ‘This is an officer who would have valuable evidence to give you about the nature of his deployment and what he was asked to do would be something that he needs to give evidence to you about, because it is likely that there was a level of violence authorised by Special Demonstration Squad managers in his deployments.

‘The difficulty with not disclosing his cover name is that you cannot have his evidence properly tested other than by those with whom he possibly perpetrated that violence or who were witnesses to it, in that group that he infiltrated. So that’s why we say it is of particular importance that you do disclose this cover name.’

Moving on to HN40, Sikand added:

SIKAND: ‘It is Peter Francis’s view that once more this officer would have valuable evidence to give you about the violence that was permitted by Special Demonstration Squad managers to be used by Special Demonstration Squad officers.’

At this point Peter Francis interjected in person.

PROFESSIONAL LIARS

Francis started by reminding Mitting that he and his fellow SDS officers lied professionally, that they had been trained to make whatever they say sound plausible.

Rising to his feet, Francis contrasted the dangers faced by SDS officers with those of former drugs squad officer Neil Woods who was sitting in the public gallery. 

Pointing Woods out to the court, Francis expounded:

FRANCIS: ‘This man here is a former undercover officer himself, Neil Woods, the author of “Good Cop, Bad War“. He personally has led to more imprisonment of individuals totalling approximately 1,000 years for his deployment from 1993 all the way to 2007…

‘That one man has led to more imprisonment than the entire Special Demonstration Squad from 1968 to 2008. He is sitting here in his own name. I am sure he doesn’t mind saying he’s actually brought his wife along today. He walks in society freely and yet there is hundreds upon hundreds of people who would like to pay that man back…

‘I have great, huge, concerns that these professional liars are spinning you, the Inquiry and definitely these poor solicitors they are working with here.’

LAWRENCE SPYMASTER IS PRESUMED FLAWLESS

The court moved on to what Mitting conceded is ‘the problematic case of HN58’.

HN58 was the senior manager at the SDS during a crucial period in the late 1990s. It was five years after Stephen Lawrence was killed, and the Macpherson inquiry was investigating corruption and racism in the Metropolitan Police’s murder investigation. That inquiry was supposed to get to the truth and be the last word on the issue. But unbeknownst to them, the SDS was spying on the Lawrence campaign for justice, effectively trying to undermine the inquiry.

Mitting gave a clear statement in November 2017, saying that he wants this Inquiry to succeed where Macpherson and other previous processes have failed.

Peter Francis, who as an SDS officer was tasked to ‘find dirt’ with which to discredit the Lawrences and their campaign, said it is essential that HN58’s real name is released so his role can be discussed. Francis explained to the court:

FRANCIS: ‘I personally have promised Mr Lawrence, as in Stephen Lawrence’s father… that I would do absolutely everything for him because I and the Special Demonstration Squad let him down in the last Macpherson Inquiry.’

But withholding the real name is not the only issue with HN58. Like most SDS managers, he had previously been an undercover officer. We want the cover names published. With HN58, where there is evidence of wrongdoing as a manager, it suggests possible wrongdoing when he was an officer. His cover name must be published to allow the people he spied upon to come forward with their experiences.

REAL MEN DON’T LIE

But Mitting intends to withhold HN58’s real and cover names for three reasons:

1. ‘There is no known allegation of misconduct against him’.

This is absurd. How can we make any allegations against an officer if we don’t know who they are? Tell us the name and let those they spied on come forward to say if there was misconduct, otherwise Mitting is conducting his own mini-trials based solely on police evidence. Kaufmann bluntly told Mitting, ‘it is not a reason that actually makes any sense’.

2. ‘The nature of his deployment’.
This is impossible to comment on without knowing any details, but it’s clear that officers exaggerate the danger of their deployments.

3. ‘What is known of his personal and family life make it unlikely it would be necessary to investigate possible misconduct even if details of his deployment were made public’.

This is even weirder than point 1, and nobody seemed to understand what Mitting was alluding to. When challenged, he replied ‘I know more about this man than you do’.

Exactly what he meant had to be teased out of him. Eventually he said it.

MITTING: ‘We have had examples of undercover male officers who have gone through more than one long-term permanent relationship, sometimes simultaneously.

‘There are also officers who have reached a ripe old age who are still married to the same woman that they were married to as a very young man. The experience of life tells one that the latter person is less likely to have engaged in extra-marital affairs than the former.’

There were gasps of incredulity around the court. Does Mitting really believe that if a man has stayed married to one woman for a long time he will not have deceived women he spied on into sexual relationships? And that we can be so confident of this that we don’t need to check if it applies in every case?

The idea that men do not hide affairs from their wives, or have arrangements where affairs are tolerated, is utterly bizarre. It is patently untrue, as we already know from other spycops. Several are known to have stayed married to the same person (at least until the truth was exposed by those they spied on), including the infamous Mark Kennedy who had relationships with four women who have now reached legal settlements with the Met.

A man possessed of opinions such as Mitting’s has no place running an Inquiry with sexual abuse of women and institutional sexism at its core.

CRIMES IGNORED

This moment also made clear that Mitting had been using ‘misconduct’ exclusively as a euphemism for ‘deceiving women into sexual relationships’. He had already made the women a special case at the November hearing, saying they deserved full answers, but not mentioning any other groups of victims.

It’s important to remember that sexual abuse was only one element of the spycops’ criminal misconduct. Assault, identity theft, incitement, burglary, perjury and perverting the course of justice were all commonplace. Mark Ellison QC found that not only did spycops lie to courts and spy on lawyer-client meetings, they also withheld evidence that could have exonerated accused people.

Officers have admitted to the Inquiry that they were arrested and prosecuted whilst undercover, yet Mitting has apparently decided this is not misconduct worthy of consideration, let alone telling the victims about.

As Alison, who was deceived into a five year relationship by SDS officer Mark Jenner, wrote in the Guardian last week:

‘Rather than one senior judge, this inquiry requires an independent panel of experts, along the lines of the one that advised Sir William Macpherson in the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, or the Hillsborough Independent Panel.’

WHAT’S THE POINT?

Helen Steel was deceived into a two year relationship by undercover police officer John Dines. He was only exposed through her diligent research.

Having represented herself in the same courts for the McLibel trial, the longest trial in English history, Steel is now representing herself at the Undercover Policing Inquiry, but in effect she spoke for many:

STEEL: ‘Frankly the way that the Inquiry is currently conducting this process gives the core participants absolutely no faith that it is interested in learning the truth because it is basically believing everything the police says and saying, “I don’t need to hear you because you haven’t got anything you can tell us”…

‘it is just a pointless waste of money if we are not being told enough information to effectively participate this Inquiry. It is not going to get to the truth and the whole purpose of this Inquiry is to stop the human rights abuses that were being committed by these units. You can’t do that without our participation and it is a joke that we are being excluded from this process. It is an insulting joke.’

The victims should be heard. They – the people who brought the issue into the light – are the most keen to have the truth publicly established, but they are repeatedly running into Mitting’s brick wall. His excessive faith in police integrity, and refusal to be substantially swayed from that trust, is steering the Inquiry far from its goal.

Last week the Inquiry announced that, despite all that was said at the hearing, it will withhold the real and cover names as intended (with the exception of probably releasing the real name of the now-deceased Rick Gibson). In other words, if an officer is still married to the person they were with at the time of deployment then they are assumed to be blameless and will be protected from scrutiny.

The Inquiry cannot fulfil its purpose like this. Something fundamental must change if there is to be any point in it at all.

Demonstration against Andy Coles, Peterborough Town Hall, 11 October 2017

Former undercover officers from Britain’s political secret police are demanding anonymity from the public inquiry.

They claim having their real names published puts them at risk of harassment and physical harm from those they spied on, and also presents ‘a real risk to employment and reputation’.

Though police give the media details of countless accused but unconvicted citizens every day, they seem to feel officers from these disgraced units are a breed apart who deserve much greater privacy.

The spycops say they fear they may become the target of the kind of harassment experienced by exposed officers Bob Lambert, Andy Coles and Jim Boyling. Except this is not harassment.

Boyling has not been subjected to any organised campaigning. Rather, he complains that on two occasions people he spied on have bumped into him and briefly remonstrated with him, and even he says that isn’t actually intimidation, let alone violence. He suggests that when two cars in his street got damaged it might have been the work of vengeant activists, even though there was nothing to indicate who did it or that it was aimed at him.

ORGANISED CAMPAIGNS

Bob Lambert and Andy Coles have both been the subjects of organised campaigns. The focus has not been them as individuals, but them being in roles which are wholly inappropriate – the list of incidents compiled by the police’s own lawyers plainly shows this.

Meanwhile, Lambert complains that he has been called a rapist. Whether his, and other spycops’, sexual abuse amounts to rape is something that is still untested in law. However, many of the deceived women have made it clear that they did not and could not give informed consent.

Jacqui, who was deceived by Lambert into a two year relationship and having a child, said:

‘I was not consenting to sleeping with Bob Lambert, I didn’t know who Bob Lambert was… it is like being raped by the state. We feel that we were sexually abused because none of us gave consent.’

The rest of the things on Lambert’s list of supposed intimidation he’s suffered all happened to him in his public roles, with the possible exception of two incidents of being ‘confronted by hostile activists while travelling to work’. He says himself that, like Boyling, he has not been subjected to any violence.

It seems both Lambert and Coles failed to tell their employers about their past, implying that they knew the people hiring them would take a dim view of it. In other words, they know the reasonable citizen is likely to see them as abusers. As soon as he was exposed in May this year, Coles resigned as Cambridgeshire’s Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner without any prompting.

This is not about officers being hounded by rabid activists out for revenge, it’s an unwillingness to face the justified shame and scorn they would receive as people who have committed appalling acts.

We don’t see people in other walks of life even attempting this sort of thing. No bank robber has been found guilty and then asked to be kept anonymous as it will upset them if their neighbours find out or it might make future employers think they’re untrustworthy. The spycops aren’t asking for protection from harassment, they are really demanding immunity from accountability.

AFTER THE SPYCOPS

When he was exposed in 2011, Lambert was teaching a new generation of police managers at universities (he resigned in 2015). Coles, who sexually groomed a teenager whilst undercover, is a City Councillor and school governor.

Another one is John Dines, who abused Helen Steel whilst undercover in the 1990s. Because she knows his real name, Steel discovered he is training political undercover police in Australia.

Helen Steel (right) confronts ex-spycop John Dines, March 2016

These men all grossly abused their positions of power to violate the citizens they are supposed to protect and undermine the democracy they are supposed to serve. No other public servant could act so shamefully, so far from the intended purpose of their agency, and expect to be shielded from the discomfort of public opprobrium.

The other exposed officers, despite having perpetrated similar abuses which many would think justifies their being confronted, have been not challenged like this at all – quite the opposite.

The activists who exposed Mark Kennedy went to great lengths to protect the identities of his family (which Kennedy then published when he sold his story to the Mail on Sunday). The group who exposed Carlo Neri withheld his real name to protect his children. They have even withheld the full cover names of officers ‘RC‘, Gary R and Abigail L.

Numerous officers’ current whereabouts are known to activists and researchers. As far as we know, none of them have been threatened with any physical harm and no effort has been made to confront them in their private life. They have only been targeted if they are in roles for which, as one journalist put it, they are ‘uniquely unqualified‘.

If anything, the campaigners have engaged in the lawful democratic processes that the spycops sought to suppress and undermine. The institutions Lambert and Coles are involved in have been leafleted and spoken to, dealing in facts. Since Lambert resigned from his teaching roles he appears to have been left alone. The same is likely to happen to Andy Coles once he bows to the inevitable and relinquishes his remaining positions of civic trust.

THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH

Publishing a spycop’s cover name still leaves the officer hidden, but it lets those who knew them while undercover come forward and tell us what happened. It is the essential prerequisite to getting the truth.

Just having a cover name published does not lead to an officer’s real identity being known. Indeed, that is the whole point of a fake identity. Long-exposed officers such as Rod Richardson and Lynn Watson are still living in anonymity because, unlike the others, they did not give their real names. But when an officer remains unknown to the public, what else is being hidden?

Without the real names, we would never have known that Lambert was using his disgraced past as a platform to pass on his ideas to his successors. We would not know that Andy Coles, who groomed a naive teenager for sex, has positioned himself in inappropriate roles in which he’s endorsing agencies trying to protect older teenagers at risk of sexual exploitation. Who knows how many other ex-spycops are still perpetuating their abuses?

The Catholic church has been condemned for its former practice of dealing with abusive priests by paying off victims and moving the offender to a new parish where the unaware congregation was left vulnerable to further abuse. Withholding spycops’ real names has a similar effect.

Even if we believe exposing them really would put them at risk, it is still not necessarily a reason to grant them anonymity. As Phillippa Kaufmann QC pointed out to the Inquiry last month, the state is used to dealing with such things in witness protection schemes, providing assured security for people at far greater risk – and a lot less guilty – than spycops.

Doreen Lawrence, whose family’s campaign was spied on, said:

‘They were doing the deception. Why should they be allowed to be anonymous while people like me had their faces all over the newspapers ? These people were not innocent. They knew what they were doing.’

Those officers who have done nothing wrong have nothing to fear. Those who have done wrong should be held to account. It cannot begin to happen without the release of the cover names. It cannot properly happen without the release of the real names.

Seven women deceived into long-term intimate relationships by undercover police officers have lodged a complaint with the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

All were targeted by officers from Britain’s political secret police units for relationships that were psychologically and sexually abusive, the most complete invasion of privacy it is possible for the state to enact.

In 2015 the Metropolitan Police apologised to the seven and agreed that the practice

caused significant trauma… it was a gross violation and also accept that it may well have reflected attitudes towards women that should have no part in the culture of the Metropolitan Police… some officers may have preyed on the women’s good nature and had manipulated their emotions to a gratuitous extent

The fact that they were abused in very similar ways by five different officers over a period of 25 years indicates that this was not rogue officers but was a conscious strategy on the part of the spycops units. Despite receiving the Met’s apology in 2015, the women still have not had any real answers or explanation of why they were targeted. 

This has been compounded by the government’s protection of the abusers. They have failed to prosecute or discipline any of the officers concerned or their managers, and refused to amend UK law to unambiguously make such relationships an offence. They have also failed to name other officers from the units who may have also abused women in this way.

The UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women was adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly.  A Committee of 23 independent experts on women’s rights from around the world monitors its implementation. 

In 2004, the UK ratified the Optional Protocol to CEDAW, which allows people who have been subjected to discrimination under the convention and exhausted all domestic remedies to make complaints (since ratification, only three complaints have been made to the CEDAW committee and all have been held to be inadmissible).

Helen Steel, one of the women bringing the case, explained their motivation.

‘Our central aim in bringing this case is to make sure that these abusive relationships are not allowed to happen again. The repeated use of women in this way by undercover policemen is a form of discrimination against women and a barrier to women’s rights to participate in protest activity.’

Another of the women, Lisa, emphasised that the claim is only asking the government to live up to the values it professes to hold.

‘In signing up to this Convention, the UK has committed itself to work to end discrimination against women. If the committee finds against the UK it will be a huge embarrassment and will shine a spotlight on the institutional sexism in the police and the government’s ongoing failure to outlaw these abusive practices.’

The institutional sexism of the Met is apparent in looking at who was targeted; most of the known officers were men, and all of the long-term intimate relationships were male officers abusing female citizens. 

Harriet Wistrich, solicitor for the women, explained:

‘CEDAW has a complaints procedure which is broad in reach, enabling the women to cite gender based violence, gender stereotyping and the impact on reproductive rights, as part of a pattern of institutionalised discrimination by the State in this case.’

The case has been launched to coincide with the 16 days of action called by the United Nations that commenced with International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on 25th November and culminates in Human Rights Day on 10th December. It comes a few days after the Met conceded that the relationships amounted to ‘torture, inhuman or degrading treatment’ of the women concerned.

You can read the details of the women’s complaint and background details in their press release.

Although it may be hard to feel sympathy for the officers of Britain’s political secret police units, there’s no doubt the enacted split in their lives and values caused them severe psychological stress. In a less understanding era, and amidst the inherently macho police culture, such damage was seen as a personal weakness, but since the mid 1990s a few have successfully forced payments out of the Met for PTSD and other harms.

All spycops had to be married. Having a family was thought to give them an anchor in their ‘real’ life – something to come back out for, to prevent them getting lost in their activist social circles or to prohibit temptation to switch sides. Still, the strain on relationships – the secrecy, absence, the warping of personality caused by having two characters inhabiting one mind – has broken one family after another.

Whilst the shocking accounts of activist women abused by spycops have come to light, we are yet to hear from the damaged families also caught up in these stories, though this may change as the forthcoming public inquiry has granted several members of officers’ families ‘core participant’ status.

Beyond their ruined families, after long-term niche activity, spycops aren’t qualified for much else. So what did they do afterwards? Most of the 150 or so spycops are unknown, though the few we have identities of point us to examples of what their lives look like.

Mark Kennedy, 2011

Mark Kennedy’s deployment ended in late 2009 and even before he left the police he had signed a contract to do the same spying under the same false identity this time for a private firm.

He was hired by Global Open, a company set up by another former Special Branch officer, Rod Leeming, who had taken knowledge and contacts from the police’s Animal Rights National Index and was using it to provide spies for institutions targeted by animal liberation campaigners. Kennedy – without fake ID or his team of police handlers, strategists and psychologists – soon came unstuck and was exposed by activists.

Prone to self-aggrandising claims, in February 2013 he told the Home Affairs Select Committee  he worked for the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, adding that he had just taken a security job with a large leisure firm. It’s comforting to imagine this means he is doing nightwatch in a leaky caravan at Center Parcs.

Bob Lambert then and now

Bob Lambert had been undercover in animal rights groups in the 1980s. He set people up for jail, had numerous sexual relationships including fathering a child, and allegedly burned down a department store.

His was ‘hands down regarded as the best tour of duty ever’, leading to promotion as head of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) from 1993-1998, deploying a new generation of officers who took his methods as a template.

It’s not clear what he did from 1999-2001, though it’s notable that this is when the other spycops unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), was established.

In 2002 he set up the Muslim Contact Unit. It’s very odd that the Met’s Special Branch, as intelligence gatherers, would run a community outreach project. It’s even more fishy that they did so using their most effective infiltrators who had no other obvious skillset. Why use spies, unless you’re spying?

Lambert left the police in 2007, collecting an MBE ‘for services to policing’ on his way out. He then gained several academic posts and began writing and speaking on counter-extremism, notably regarding Islam. After his past was revealed by activists in 2011, he swiftly resigned from his planned ten-year project at Exeter University and stopped his public appearances.

He continued to lecture at the University of St Andrews and London Metropolitan University, training a new generation of police managers. Following a series of protests at both institutions, including talks to staff and students, and with the excoriating IPCC report on Lawrence family spying pending, he resigned from both positions in December 2015.

Mike Chitty undercover in the 1980s

Mike Chitty was the first SDS officer tasked with infiltrating the animal rights movement. Rather than inveigling himself into hardcore activism he was ineffectual and only ever managed to be a peripheral member of animal welfare groups. Like many undercover officers, he moved on to police VIP protection work.

Two years later, in 1989, Chitty secretly returned to his old targets. He wasn’t interested in the politics but rekindled friendships and romantic relationships. He would change his clothes, swap cars and become ‘Mike Blake’ again.

After a further two years, his bosses wondered why his claims for travel expenses were so much higher than his colleagues and why he was working in Wiltshire but buying petrol in Surrey. His superiors sent Bob Lambert to investigate.

Lambert spent 18 months feigning friendship and persuading the disgruntled Chitty not to take action against the police or go to the press. In May 1994, Lambert presented his report to his bosses at Special Branch. Suitably impressed, they made him Head of Operations in the SDS by the end of the year.

The following year Chitty finally brought a claim against the Met, but dropped it when he was awarded an ill-health pension. He ended his four-year double life and emigrated to South Africa.

Helen Steel confronts John Dines, 2016

John Dines, who overlapped with Lambert infiltrating London Greenpeace, began a relationship with Helen Steel shortly before McDonald’s served the McLibel writs. They lived together for two years.

Steel tenaciously investigated and exposed Dines in 2013, but this was not the end of it.

She also discovered he is now working at an Australian university, training officers in political secret police work.

Visiting Sydney to confirm it, Steel confronted him personally and ensured he was covered by Australian media and politicians.

Former SDS officer Peter Francis

Peter Francis spied on racial justice campaigns in the 1990s. He became disenchanted with the purpose of the work, and, after his deployment, brought a claim for PTSD. In 2010, months before any spycops had been outed, he did an anonymous interview with The Observer. He used the article to tout for a book deal but no publisher thought the issue would be interesting to readers.

Following Mark Kennedy’s unmasking, Francis – under the pseudonym Pete Black – guardedly gave more information to Guardian journalists Rob Evans and Paul Lewis. The wealth of material formed the core of their definitive book Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police.

In June 2013, Francis finally came out of the shadows and was interviewed for the explosive Dispatches documentary which revealed he had been ordered to discredit Stephen Lawrence’s family.

Unique so far among the spycops, he has subsequently given statements which have been helpful to justice campaigners rather than himself. It’s surprising that he has only been the subject of one smear piece in the Daily Mail, though they may be saving more to discredit his testimony in the pending public inquiry.

Roger Pearce, 2013

Roger Pearce is something of an outlier in terms of our knowledge. Rather than being exposed by those he spied on, we only have a tapestry of his own admissions (so much for the Special Branch’s ‘sacred’ policy of Neither Confirm Nor Deny’).

Pearce was an undercover SDS officer from 1978-1980 and went on to run the unit in the mid 80s, overseeing Lambert and Chitty. He stayed with the Met’s Special Branch and was its head for the final years of his police career, 1999-2003, which were the first four years of the NPOIU. He then took a counter-terrorism post with the Foreign Office before moving on to be European Security Director for GE Capital.

In recent years, he has published two police spy novels, Agent of the State (which, according to his website is being adapted for TV), and The Extremist.

Since the spycops scandal saturated the headlines, he has made a number of media appearances to defend spying on the Lawrence family and stealing dead children’s identities. He has also refused to condemn the use of sexual relationships or the fathering of children.

Jim Boyling whilst undercover in the 1990s

Jim Boyling was the star protégé of his manager, Bob Lambert. Undercover from 1995-2000 – during which time he had two children with Rosa, a women he spied on – he was still a serving police officer when he was exposed in January 2011. His behaviour, though typical of spycops and well known to his superiors, was indisputably serious and he was suspended pending an investigation into his professional conduct. In what is, even by corrupt police cover-up standards, an astonishing feat of procrastination, six years later the investigation is understood to be still in its preliminary stages.

The Crown Prosecution Service looked into whether Boyling and other officers should face criminal charges. They appear to have taken Boyling’s version of events at face value and not bothered  talking to anyone he targeted. In September 2014 they decided not to charge any officers with anything.

More than six years since the scandal broke, no spycops have even faced disciplinary proceedings, let alone criminal prosecution.

Originally published by Real Media, 18 January 2017

The German government have formally asked to be included in the forthcoming Pitchford inquiry into undercover policing. Five officers from Britain’s political secret police units are known to have been in the country.

Special Demonstration Squad whistleblower Peter Francis says he was the first officer to work abroad when he was sent to an anti-racist gathering in Bavaria in 1995. Francis was accompanied by his handler who stayed in a nearby hotel – the infamous former officer turned overseer Bob Lambert. The recently exposed officer known as RC is also reported to have been in Germany around ten years after Francis.

Mark Kennedy was also a frequent visitor to the country, and in 2007 went with fellow officer Marco Jacobs. Kennedy was arrested in 2006 in Berlin for arson after setting fire to a dumpster, and again at an anti-G8 protest in 2007. He gave his false name to authorities which – along with arson, of course – is a crime in Germany.

Like the Scottish government’s similar request, the German demand follows years of sustained effort by parliamentarians from the left-wing and Green parties. Tenacious parliamentarian Andrej Hunko has been working on this since Kennedy was first uncovered, and this week he welcomed his government’s call and spelled out the seriousness and breadth of the issue.

SCOTLAND WAITS AND WAITS

The forthcoming Pitchford inquiry is planning to only examine actions of spycops in England and Wales. As the majority of exposed officers were active in Scotland (and Scottish chief constable Phil Gormley had oversight of both spycops units at the key time) it is patently absurd to exclude Scotland from the inquiry.

Despite their government formally asking to be included last year, and even Tories demanding Theresa May accede, there has been no real response. It has been six months now, yet we have merely been told time and again that “talks are ongoing”.

With the preliminary sessions of the inquiry mostly over, it is starting to look like the Home Office is simply stalling and that the lack of a response will effectively become a refusal once the inquiry begins.

For their part, two representatives of the inquiry fielded questions at the recent conference hosted by the Monitoring Group and Centre for Crime and Justice Studies. They told those attending that it would be nonsense to exclude part of an officer’s story just because it happened abroad, and the inquiry would want the full picture.

Whilst this is some comfort, it is far from good enough. Firstly, the spoken assurance of underlings is very different to the declared decision of the Chair.

More importantly, it avoids many of the real issues. Spying abroad raises questions far beyond the officers’ own stories. Who organised it? Who decided their remit and purpose? How much did the host country know? Who is responsible for crimes committed by officers whilst abroad?

Peter Francis says SDS officers were given

absolutely zero schooling in any law whatsoever. I was never briefed, say for example, if I was in Germany I couldn’t do, this for example, engage in sexual relationships or something else.

NORTHERN IRELAND ALSO IN THE QUEUE

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) says police weren’t even told that spycops were being deployed there. Yet German police confirmed to Andrej Hunko that Mark Kennedy was directed and paid by German police. Which operations were done which way, and why?

That mention of ignorance is the first official comment from police about spycops being in Northern Ireland. SDS officer Mark Jenner was there in August 1995 fighting with nationalists in a violent clash with the loyalist Apprentice Boys of Derry march.

This week PSNI’s Assistant Chief Constable Mark Hamilton told the BBC that nobody in the Northern Ireland police was ever aware the SDS were there, nor of any information being passed to them from the SDS.

With myriad other undercover operations going on in Northern Ireland during the conflict, to have sent Met officers in seems dangerously blase at best. Hamilton said

risk assessments have to be carried out. Anybody who’s deployed here without those assessments would be, in my view, an act of madness.

It seems hard to believe the SDS were so cavalier as to send their officers blundering in like that. Perhaps their contacts in the Northern Irish police aren’t admitting anything. Perhaps the SDS was working with some other arm of the British state. Or maybe this really is another area where the SDS simply didn’t think about the possible impacts on the people it worked among.

All this only refers to the SDS in Northern Ireland. Mark Kennedy, of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, was active in Belfast in 2008. He was there with activist Jason Kirkpatrick who has had confirmation that the Northern Irish government has also asked to be included in the Pitchford inquiry.

ALL IRELAND SPYING

Kennedy was a repeat visitor south of the border as well, notably fighting with police in a Mayday demonstration in 2004. It’s been five years since this was made public knowledge and Michael D Higgins TD – now president of Ireland – demanded an explanation.

SDS officer Jim Boyling was there in the mid 1990s so it’s clear the Republic, like the North, has a long history of being targeted by both of Britain’s main spycops units.

HOW MUCH MORE?

Last year we compiled a list of 17 countries visited by spycops over a period of 25 years. It is barely the beginning. All of these instances come from the fifteen exposed officers from the political secret police units. There are over a hundred more about whom we know nothing.

How much more of this – and what else that we haven’t even imagined – did they do? What campaigns did they infiltrate? Whereabouts were they? What crimes did they commit? Which children are still looking for disappeared fathers under false names?

Their actions – which the Met itself describes as “manipulative, abusive and wrong” – were perpetrated against uncounted numbers of people. The apologies and inquiry apply to actions in England and Wales, but it is no less abhorrent if the victim is abroad and/or foreign.

The German request is a major event. The extensive incursion of spycops into politically sensitive Irish territories surely means there will surely be more demands for inclusion and information coming from there as well. Affected activists have also initiated a legal case in Northern Ireland to force inclusion in the inquiry, a tactic that may well spread to other countries. Yet the disdain with which the Scottish government’s long-standing demand has been treated by the Home Office means the fight is far from over.

The arrogant disregard for the personal integrity and wellbeing of individuals was carried over to the laws and statutes of entire countries. Everyone who has been abused by spycops deserves the full truth, be they a solitary citizen or a sovereign nation.

Andrej Hunko’s letter to Theresa May

German MP Andrej Hunko, who has taken great interest in Mark Kennedy’s deployment in Germany, has written to the Home Secretary, Theresa May, insisting that the forthcoming inquiry into undercover police includes UK officers’ actions abroad.

It comes after May’s announcement last week which, whilst scant on detail, did specify that it will cover “operations conducted by English and Welsh police forces in England and Wales”.

It’s known that officers from the political police units have been going abroad for about twenty years. Conversely, their foreign counterparts work over here.

Thanks to Hunko’s tenacious research, it has been established that Berlin police sent five undercover officers to the anti-G8 protests in Scotland in 2005. It’s not clear how many came from elsewhere in Germany or other countries. These were in addition to the UK officers there, which included Mark Kennedy and Lynn Watson.

A report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) confirmed that Kennedy worked in 14 countries. This isn’t quite the 22 he claims, but whichever is true, it is hugely significant.

Kennedy had sexual relationships whilst undercover in Germany, which is strictly forbidden in that country. Hunko’s letter continues,

German parliamentarian Hans-Christian Stroebele said in the press that Kennedy is known to have played a part in at least three minor crimes in Germany, something that a German undercover agent is not permitted to do.

German MP Ulla Jelpke further proclaimed, ‘the suspicion that Kennedy was acting as an agent provocateur in these crimes still cannot be ruled out’

The extensive information Hunko has prised from the German authorities (32 page PDF) includes the fact that Kennedy was paid by German police whilst working there.

Hunko has previously revealed that

Foreign police officers must obtain authorisation before entering the territory of a sovereign state. They must not commit any criminal offences during their stay. Kennedy, however, sought to impress activists in Berlin by setting fire to a refuse container. Arrested by the police, he even concealed his true identity from the public prosecutor. This is illegal, as the Federal Government has indicated now.

Kennedy was a serving Met officer, hired out to use the identity and methods the Met trained him in. The idea that this bears no relevance to the subject of the inquiry is absurd.

Theresa May’s announcement clearly said

The inquiry’s investigation will include, but not be limited to, the undercover operations of the Special Demonstration Squad and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit

If it is to do that, it must look at how the whole thing worked, it cannot be geographically selective. If this embarrasses the British establishment in the eyes of other countries, so be it. It may uncover more layers to the structure; this, too, is surely one of the points of having the inquiry in the first place.

Andrej Hunko

Hunko’s questions exposed the hitherto unknown European Co-ordination Group on Undercover Activities that organises and focuses undercover work. Established in the 1980s, it is comprised of all EU member states and other countries such as the USA, Israel, South Africa and New Zealand, plus selected private companies. It meets irregularly and says it doesn’t keep minutes. According to the German government, the UK and Germany are the trailblazers in the group.

Far from the undercover scandal being centred on a rogue officer or a rogue unit, the UK’s tactics increasingly appear to be part of a concerted effort in which governments and corporations act together across borders.

It is notable that the aforementioned 2005 G8 summit is beyond the proposed scope of the remit, as it took place in Scotland. Yet Kennedy worked for the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) which a 2003 HMIC report confirmed

performs an intelligence function in relation to politically motivated disorder (not legitimate protests) on behalf of England, Wales and Scotland

If the inquiry excludes Scotland, it excludes part of the NPOIU’s remit.

After his police contract ended, Kennedy stayed in the same community of activists, under the same Met-created identity, using the same methods to spy on them, working for a company set up and run by Rod Leeming, another ex-political police Met officer.

As we’ve previously described, this was not an isolated instance, the entwining of political police and their private counterparts has been going on for decades, and it would be ludicrous to exclude this overlap from the inquiry.

We can presume the German police paid the NPOIU for the use of their officer Mark Kennedy. There can be no claiming that the Met were not responsible, nor that counter-democratic activity and personal abuse by Met officers are somehow insignificant if done elsewhere or with a different institution signing the paycheque.

The dogged persistence of Hunko (assisted by the German government’s more open approach to MPs asking about the subject) means there is a formidable body of evidence about an NPOIU officer’s undercover activity, including the commission of crimes and sexual abuse. This must not be excluded from the inquiry.

Furthermore, if that is what we have about one officer, in one of his 14 countries, what else is there to uncover? For the inquiry to be credible, it must investigate all significant elements of the work of the political policing units.