Another Six Spycops Named

Special Demonstration Squad officer Jason Bishop

The Undercover Policing Inquiry has just released six more names of officers from Britain’s political secret police units.

These are the fake names used by officers who took on fake identities and lived for years at a time as one of the activists that they spied upon.

Whilst infiltrating a huge range of campaigns, pressure groups and political parties, many of the spycops acted as agents provocateur, stole the identities of dead children, deceived women into long-term intimate relationships.

The newly confirmed officers are all from the Special Demonstration Squad which, founded in 1968, was the longest running of the two main spycops units.

Covering a period of 38 years, in chronological order of deployment, they are:

Barry Morris
Vietnam Solidarity Campaign
1968

Gary Roberts
International Socialists/ Socialist Workers Party, International Marxist Group
1974 – 1978

Tony Williams
Revolutionary Communist Tendency, Direct Action Movement
1978 – 1982

Malcolm Shearing
Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist/Leninist), Revolutionary Communist Party
1981 – 1985

Dave Evans
Socialist Workers Party, London Animal Action, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty
1998 – 2005

Jason Bishop
Reclaim the Streets, Earth First!, Disarm DSEi.
1998 – 2006

These names come a fortnight after another six officers were named by the Inquiry:

David Robertson
Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, Banner Books
1970 – 1973

Bill Biggs (deceased)
Socialist Workers Party
1977 – 1982

Alan ‘Nick’ Nicholson
British National Party
1990 – 1991

David Hagan
Socialist Workers Party, Class War, Movement Against the Monarchy, Movement for Justice
1996 – 2001

Jaqueline Anderson
Reclaim the Streets, Earth First!, WOMBLES
2000 – 2005

Ross ‘RossCo’ MacInnes
United British Alliance
2007

Not all of this is news. Jason Bishop was exposed in 2013, which had indicated that his flatmate Dave Evans, who travelled with Bishop to the 2005 G8 protests in Scotland, was also an undercover officer. AR Spycatcher, who documents spycops’ infiltration of the animal rights movement, named and profiled Evans in February 2014.

David Hagan is the officer formerly only known by the cipher N81. He is the officer that was described by the 2014 Stephen Lawrence Review as ‘a spy in the Lawrence family camp’. With his insider knowledge of the campaign by Stephen’s loved ones, Hagan was summoned by the Met’s management to brief them at the conclusion of the public inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder in 1998.

WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE US?

We have updated our How Many Spycops Have There Been? page to show the new spycops – we now have the cover names of 45 out of a total of at least 144 undercover officers.

Yesterday the Undercover Research Group published the results of a meticulous sift of the names released so far. They project that, at the current rates, the Inquiry will be granting full anonymity to around 25% of Special Demonstration Squad officers.

The Inquiry’s list of cover names shows the groups they infiltrated. More than fifty are now listed, and all but two are left wing or animal rights. The Inquiry’s gives an average of two groups per officer. Last year they admitted that more than 1,000 groups were spied on, which is at least seven per officer.

More cover names are due to be released, but without a contemporaneous photo or the true list of groups infiltrated, it is very hard to identify many of the people spied upon.

Why aren’t they giving us the real list? Why aren’t the groups being told in their own right? It is another instance of the Inquiry restricting information even as it publishes. It is the secret public inquiry.