Tranche 2, Phase 2, Day 2

15 October 2024

This summary covers the second day of ‘Tranche 2 Phase 2’, the new round hearings of the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI), examining the animal rights-focused activities of the Metropolitan Police’s secret political unit, the Special Demonstration Squad, from 1983-92.

The UCPI is an independent, judge-led inquiry into undercover policing in England and Wales. Its main focus is the activity of two units who deployed long-term undercover officers into a variety of political groups; the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS, 1968-2008) and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU, 1999-2011). Spycops from these units lived as activists for years at a time, spying on more than 1,000 groups.

Opening statements: Day 2

James Wood KC (Albert Beale; Gabrielle Bosley; Jane Hickman; Claire Hildreth; Hilary Moore; Rebecca Johnson; Robin Lane; Dave Morris: Geoff Shepherd; Paul Gravett; Helen Steel; Martyn Lowe)
Rajiv Menon KC (Friends of Freedom Press)
Dave Morris (McLibel Support Campaign)
Peter Weatherby KC (Hunt Saboteurs Association)
Sam Jacobs (Sharon Grant OBE; Stafford Scott)
Owen Greenhall (Joan Ruddock; Diane Abbott)
Fiona Murphy KC (The Category F Core Participants and TBS)
Kirsten Heaven (Non-Police Non-State Core Participants’ Co-ordinating Group)

1) James Wood KC

James Wood KC opens today’s hearing. He is speaking on behalf of 12 individuals represented by Hodge Jones and Allen:

• Albert Beale
• Gabrielle Bosley
• Jane Hickman
• Claire Hildreth
• Hilary Moore
• Rebecca Johnson
• Robin Lane
• Dave Morris
• Geoff Sheppard
• Paul Gravett
• Helen Steel
• Martyn Lowe

Their written Opening Statement goes into much more detail than his abbreviated oral submissions.

Wood began with some strong words about the officers of the Special Demonstration Squad, stating that they had:

‘committed some of the most serious abuses of state power against activists in modern times. They displayed, we say, a complete contempt for the basic rights and dignity of those they spied upon’.

Introductions

Wood went on to introduce those he represents, all of whom had been targeted for their involvement in a wide range of groups, including London Greenpeace, the women’s peace movement, the Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign and various animal rights groups.

He noted that their political views, and the tactics they chose to use, varied, but made the point that none of them encouraged or promoted any form of direct action that would cause harm to anyone.

He took some time to explain that London Greenpeace was a small, autonomous, group, established in 1971 and completely independent from the much larger Greenpeace organisation that now exists. He provided pen portraits of those who were active in the group in the 1980s and explained a little about their background and interests.

Both Albert Beale and Martyn Lowe could be described as ‘pacifists’ and had long been involved in anti-nuclear, peace campaigning and projects. Albert is due to give evidence on 11 November and Martyn is scheduled to appear on 4 November.

Dave Morris spoke later that morning, about the McLibel case in which he and Helen Steel were involved. Morris was also part of the Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign, set up in the aftermath of the anti-Poll Tax demonstration that took place in central London in March 1990. He will be providing more evidence on 5 November.

Like Morris, Steel was also involved in a wide range of environmental and social justice groups over the years. She was also one of the women targeted and deceived into a long-term sexual relationship by one of the spycops, and so is part of the ‘Category H’ group. Helen will give evidence on 27 November.

Gabrielle Bosley got involved with London Greenpeace in the mid 1980s. She will give evidence on 7 November.

Paul Gravett became active at the same time. He was particularly interested in animal rights, and Wood went on to give an overview of the main groups that Gravett was involved in. These included Islington Animal Rights, London Boots Action Group (LBAG), and London Animal Action (LAA).

These groups were heavily infiltrated, both by a string of undercover police officers and by corporate spies (sent by the fur trade and vivisection industry). This Inquiry should examine how much information was being shared by the Special Demonstratoin Squad (SDS) with such players. Paul is due to give evidence on 13 November and 14 November.

Claire Hildreth was also passionate about animals, and involved in both LBAG and LAA. Hildreth formed a very close friendship with one of the spycops, HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’. She will appear on 11 December.

Wood turned next to a discussion of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a name used by people who took direct action to end animal suffering. He highlighted that one of the ALF’s principles was:

‘Reverence for Life: In all actions we take the utmost care that no harm should come to either human or animal life.’

The Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group (ALF-SG) had a press officer and an office, that produced publications. It did not take part in direct action.

Robin Lane served as press officer, and spokesperson for the group, between 1986-88. He has a long history of involvement in campaigning against animal abuse, and will give more evidence on 12 November.

Wood also mentioned Greenham Common women’s peace camp very briefly, as it has largely been covered by the evidence given by Jane Hickman, Hilary Moore and Rebecca Johnson during the Inquiry’s ‘Tranche 1 Phase 1’ hearings earlier this year (which examined spycops 1983-1992 who targeted groups not involved in animal rights).

Wood simply noted that there was no real justification for this SDS targeting; it was done on the ‘apparent whim’ of Margaret Thatcher.

Unsafe convictions

Geoff Sheppard was convicted of two serious offences, and the safety of both convictions is cast in doubt by the conduct of two different undercovers. Geoff will give evidence on 14 November and 15 November.

In July 1987, times incendiary devices were planted at several Debenham’s stores, set to go off overnight when the buildings were locked and empty, with the intention of them triggering the store’s sprinkler systems and thereby causing huge economic damage to the furs that Debenhams controversially still sold at the time. HN10 Bob Lambert ‘Bob Robinson’ was closely involved in initiating, planning and carrying out this action.

Sheppard went to prison for his part in the Debenham’s action. By the time he was released, Lambert had been made an SDS manager. However he had trained up a protégé, HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’, who encouraged Sheppard to return to activism and facilitated this by providing transport.

Sheppard’s second conviction, in 1995, was for a firearms offence. Rayner was lauded for providing the intelligence that led to this, but kept quiet about the role he had played in inciting Sheppard.

Had the SDS now decided that securing criminal convictions should be one of their roles? Wood contends that the SDS was ‘completely unsuited’ for this, given that they would always prioritise maintaining their cover over the criminal justice system. The involvement of the spycops was never disclosed to the courts and none of the usual safeguards were in place to ensure fair trials.

Legal privilege

In another issue which has come up in other Opening Statements, Wood explored the SDS’s ‘disdain’ for the criminal justice process, and lack of respect for the principles underpinning fair trial processes. SDS reports are full of details about what should have been considered ‘legally privileged material’.

Bob Lambert frequently visited Sheppard while he was in prison on remand. His reports contain information about the two co-defendants, the meetings they had with their lawyers, legal strategies and interpersonal conflicts.

Officer HN109 has told the Inquiry that he did not have a clear understanding of the concept of ‘legal privilege’ and so did not provide any guidance about to the undercovers he managed. It appears that none of the unit’s managers did, and such information was routinely recorded and retained.

Lambert’s lies

Wood then returned to the Debenham’s story, going into more detail about Bob Lambert’s involvement. Lambert organised the first planning meeting, and argued that all Debenham’s stores, even those that didn’t sell fur, were legitimate targets.

He chose the Harrow branch as his target, and told the others that he had successfully planted a device there. £340,000 of damage was caused as a result. Overall, this anti-fur campaign is estimated to have cost Debenham’s around £4m. They stopped selling fur as a result.

Lambert continues to deny that he was directly involved in this action. Wood highlighted some of the discrepancies around this. Most shockingly, we heard for the first time today that CCTV footage from Harrow had been handed over to the (anti-terrorist) police who first attended the scene. It was then snatched by Special Branch officers, and has never been seen since.

From examining Lambert’s reports, it is clear that he was privy to far more information about these improvised incendiaries than he should have been, and that he curated the content of reports in a way that seems designed to mislead, and hide the extent of his direct involvement.

He claimed that these reports had been ‘sanitised’ by his managers but the relevant managers all deny doing so. The Inquiry has not been able to find all the reports that are believed to have been produced around this time.

However, there are SDS reports, identifying another person, ‘MSW’, as a ‘quartermaster’ for the Debenham’s campaign. ‘MSW’ was politically active between 1979-84, but says he had no knowledge of this serious crime, and did not even know the two men who were convicted or ‘Bob Robinson’ (Lambert) himself.

Lambert also made false, unfounded, allegations about Helen Steel being involved, which she denies. It seems that there may be a pattern of Lambert fabricating such stories to cover up his own deeds, and perhaps to advance his career.

Another witness, Chris Baillie, has come forward and told the Inquiry that Lambert had set him up to be arrested for criminal damage done by a third person to a butcher’s window. He will appear as a witness on 6 November.

It is clear that some people were suspicious about exactly what Lambert was up to, However, according to one of his managers, HN109:

‘the value in his intelligence potentially blinded more senior officers to how it was being obtained.’

Other SDS officers, like HN11 Mike Chitty ‘Mike Blake’, are known to have made similar comments.

Having later become an SDS manager himself, was Lambert able to destroy records relating to his own deployment and misconduct? Did he also ensure documents relating to Geoff Sheppard’s relationship with ‘Rayner’ were destroyed?

Interestingly, Lambert also told some activists that he carried out a similar, incendiary, action in Selfridge’s in August 1988.

The Inquiry will undoubtedly have lots of questions for Lambert when he finally appears between 2-5 December. It is estimated that his evidence will require four full days, longer than anyone else in this set of hearings.

Responding to the State

Wood made some comments about the Opening Statements we heard yesterday, in particular the one delivered by Peter Skelton on behalf of the Metropolitan Police.

Some of the mistakes made by the SDS are repeated, for example a failure to distinguish between various animal rights groups and those involved in them – labelling them all as ‘militant’ – along with attempts to exaggerate the impact of animal rights campaigners on those they protested.

Pickets outside shops, offices and homes may have been annoying or unwelcome, but at the time they were entirely lawful, and represented only a minor inconvenience, not a public order problem, and were hardly ‘terrifying’ in the way the police would have us all believe.

Even Bob Lambert is known to have written:

‘By late 1984, however the public order threat posed by various animal rights groups had all but disappeared.’

He notes that the only clients of his who were convicted of criminal offences had been encouraged and supported to take those actions by undercover officers.

It is clear that the SDS had a motive for portraying animal rights activists as ‘extremists’: this boosted their reputation and annual applications for increased funding. The Met continue to make these allegations because they seek to justify the highly intrusive infiltration of these groups.

What was the point?

These deployments were entirely speculative, and, Wood says, ‘entirely without justification’.

Despite spending years in the field, SDS officers didn’t always produce much useful intelligence in their reports, from the ‘cosy world of middle-class animal right campaigning’. Their deployments were not reviewed regularly.

Out of control

There was a lack of supervision or managerial control. Undercovers were given the freedom to operate as they wished, resulting in impropriety. Some (for example, HN2 Andy Coles ‘Any Davey’) took up positions of responsibility in the groups they targeted; others (like Bob Lambert) are known to have used their dominant personalities to influence the direction and activities of their target groups.

Most of the undercovers were older than those they spied on (having followed the advice they were given to ‘knock a few years off’ their real ages), and as a result younger activists often looked up to these men, and sought their advice about personal issues. There is evidence of them abusing their power, manipulating and ‘grooming’ people.

We heard that Claire Hildreth had confided in HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ about her experiences with ‘creepy’ HN2 Andy Coles ‘Andy Davey’. He did not report Coles’s predatory behaviour to managers at the time.

This feeling of freedom undoubtedly extended to inciting and committing other serious crimes. The spycops believed they could act with impunity, and that their superiors would always have their backs.

Relationship with the Security Service (MI5)

According to Wood:

‘the evidence shows the Security Service and the SDS working alongside each other in close liason at all times’

The written Statement provides a great deal more detail about this. We know there were weekly meetings between the two. There was ‘intense political interest and influence’ in the units’ targets, including the groups listed above.

Re-traumatising the victims of these violations

The final issue raised by Wood was about the ‘procedural difficulties’ faced by Helen Steel. He explained that she had been finally been given disclosure, but this meant she had been supplied with ‘many thousands of pages of material’ and asked to respond under extreme time pressure.

This material relates to the abuse she suffered, and includes many untrue and unproven allegations made about her by those abusers. Reading this has been extremely distressing and re-traumatising for her, but the Inquiry is not taking a ‘trauma-informed’ approach, and appears not to understand the significant and cumulative effect on Helen.

Her privacy has already been grossly violated by these officers, and now she (like other Non State Core Participants) is being expected to apply for privacy redactions within a very tight and inflexible time-frame.

He reminded the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, that the primary focus of this Inquiry should be to examine police misconduct, rather than unproven allegations made by former officers about their victims. The effectiveness of this Inquiry could well be impacted, by the inability of Helen and others to participate fully and effectively and provide crucial evidence.

A reminder

Wood drew Mitting’s attention to a European Court of Human Rights judgment, ironically from Helen’s own landmark case, Steel and Morris v United Kingdom.

This ruled that:

‘even small and informal campaign groups, such as London Greenpeace must be able to carry on their activities effectively and that there exists a strong public interest in enabling such groups and individuals outside the mainstream to contribute to the public debate by disseminating information and ideas’

He was sure that if the European Court had been aware of the state-sponsored intrusion of London Greenpeace at the time of this case, their words would have been ‘more forceful’. Democratic principles, such as freedom of speech and freedom of expression, do not seem to be recognised by the Met.

He went on to say that the SDS ‘represented the worst in our society’, the police were ‘incapable of properly balancing…civil and democratic rights’ and the unit should not have existed.

Mitting’s response

Having heard all of this, Mitting asked Wood to communicate to Helen that he acknowledges ‘her detailed and informative statement’, saying her evidence ‘is of the greatest assistance to me’.

He went on to add that he is ‘encouraged to hear’ that she will provide oral evidence during these hearings, but wants her to send in the documents she refers to it her witness statement, especially the photos, as soon as possible (before she gives evidence on 27 November).

2) Rajiv Menon KC

Menon spoke again on Tuesday, this time on behalf of the Friends of Freedom Press (FFP).

They provided an Opening Statement and other evidence in the Inquiry’s Tranche 2 Phase 1 hearings earlier this year (Steve Sorba from FFP provided a witness statement and gave oral evidence in Week 2), about the SDS’s spying on the anarchist movement.

In particular HN85 Roger Pearce ‘Roger Thorley’ infiltrated the Freedom collective between 1979 and 1984 and later became a commander of Special Branch.

Today’s additional written Opening Statement addresses the evidence of SDS managers and other recently disclosed material.

Menon began by reiterating core participants’ profound concern that the Inquiry will be holding hearings in closed session, and that evidence will remain hidden from public scrutiny, perhaps forever, to protect the privacy of the officers and their families and the interests of the British state.

He then went on to consider the evidence of SDS managers, which raises important questions about SDS practices, where officers were allowed to cross what should have been operational red lines. Managers turned a blind eye, or sanctioned unconscionable behaviour, pointing out that the position of the Met becomes more and more untenable with every Tranche of Inquiry hearings:

‘the SDS did not serve any proper policing purpose’.

Historical overview

Menon noted that the decade under investigation in this tranche, from 1983 to 1992, is critical. The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 saw a shift in the political direction of the country. The post-war consensus between organised labour and capital was abandoned, leading to a showdown with the trade unions.

The period was marked by struggles against racism and fascism, and the titanic struggle between the miners and the government. The gloves came off, and the police played a key role as enforcers of government will, known as ‘Maggie Thatcher’s Boot Boys’.

The SDS was an elite squad within Special Branch and they knew their officers would be protected at all costs. That meant attitudes changed.

During the 1980s we see reporting shift from a more old-fashioned objective style, to one that was exaggerated and inaccurate, intrusive, pejorative and laced with scurrilous fantasy. Officers and managers shared jokes inside the intelligence community echo chamber, at the expense of those on whom they spied.

Under the shadowy direction of MI5 the SDS created a culture whereby the supposed public order policing purpose was secondary to the real purpose of the SDS as a secret political police force.

Entitlement and arrests

Menon then examined evidence about the pay and overtime SDS officers felt they were entitled to.

‘SDS officers were overpaid and overvalued. SDS managers colluded in allowing their undercover officers too much independence, Roger Pearce’s mantra was: always defer to the officer in the field. This degree of autonomy spiralled out of control in the 1980s…

‘These undercover officers were likely to have been the highest paid officers in the Met, at least for their rank…

‘undercover officers could claim [overtime] for all their time in the pub or even in bed with an activist, supposedly gathering vital intelligence to protect the state, “Fucking for Queen and country” as Roger Pearce so crudely put it in his first novel.’

Menon also notes that during the Tranche 2 period now being examined (1983-1992), more SDS officers were arrested and ended up in court in their cover names. Although often for relatively minor offences, this was inevitably a stepping stone to more serious criminal involvement by SDS officers, as well as spying on defence lawyers.

It was also in direct contravention of Home Office instructions which unequivocally forbid any use of informants that may result in misleading a court.

None of the SDS managers appeared to regard the reporting on a legal advice as a problem.

Fantasy reporting

He then considered the problems inherent in MI5 using SDS undercover officers as human intelligence sources, often producing ‘fantasy reports for MI5’.

Menon notes evidence that senior managers felt that:

‘being a fantasist was a good trait for a undercover officer.’

‘Productive’ officers like Roger Pearce understood the game. Pearce would sex up his reports with lurid detail that played to the taste of his managers. His reporting style became the new SDS template for the 1980s.

HN115 Detective Chief Inspector Tony Wait says that MI5 received copies of virtually everything that SDS produced. They were ultimately serving the same political masters: a Conservative government, determined to crush the so-called enemy within.

The evidence of HN109 and HN11 Mike Chitty paints a further, worrying picture. HN10 Bob Lambert, HN5 John Dines ‘John Barker’, HN8 (names restricted) and another unnamed undercover officer formed a ‘cabal’ within SDS. Lambert was the leader, and Menon notes,

‘There is reference in Eric Docker’s witness statement to the detective superintendent of C Squad, Dave Short, saying of Lambert: “The man’s out of control, you’ve lost him.”’

But was Lambert a rogue officer or was he playing a managed role, a participating agent provocateur? Lambert’s protégé, Dines, expressed the opinion that ‘rules are made to be broken’.

Lambert and Dines were regarded as the elite within a squad, that operated in a culture of impunity.

An inevitable problem

As an anarchist organisation that dates back to the 1880s, Freedom has a long historical memory. They say this is exactly where such state-sponsored spying always ends up, as agent provocateur activity which gets out of control or is carefully orchestrated with appropriate plausible deniability from the people in charge.

And so we come to ‘Operation Sparkler’, the prosecution of two Animal Liberation Front activists after improvised incendiary devices were placed in three Debenham’s stores, where Lambert is suspected of placing the third.

The investigation was taken over by SO12, Special Branch, away from SO13, the anti-terrorist squad. This appears abnormal as SO13 made the arrests. Was Special Branch trying to ensure that certain lines of enquiry were not pursued?

HN39 Eric Docker was promoted to detective chief inspector of SDS in October 1987, the month after the arrests. It was he who wrote up the commendation report for Bob Lambert.

Then, towards the end of the 1980s, things changed again. The Security Service Act was passed and the Service, also known as MI5, came slightly out of the shadows, as its activity was put on a statutory footing for the first time.

Margaret Thatcher was ousted, following the hugely successful anti-Poll Tax campaign in 1990, and MI5 had to do a full re-think. By 1992, there had been a change of focus and approach to ‘domestic extremism’.

This is addressed in the corporate witness statement of ‘Witness Y’. MI5 told Special Branch that they no longer needed all the ‘product’ that the SDS supplied.

This was the exact moment when there should have been a re-think, but instead of disbanding SDS, the Metropolitan Police Service and Special Branch doubled down, expanding their domestic surveillance operations, as we will see in Tranches 3 and 4 looking at later spycops’ activity, when the very officers who were the most responsible for the worst excesses of the SDS – Lambert, Dines and Coles – became the unit’s managers.

Menon ended his statement with the advice that the Inquiry needs to ask some searching questions, especially of those managers who were meant to be supervising the Lambert-Dines cabal:

‘Whether SDS activity was simply immoral or also criminal remains to be fully explored. On behalf of Freedom we suggest that there is now more than sufficient evidence from witnesses and documents for you, sir, to conclude that it was both.’

3) Dave Morris

Next we heard from Dave Morris, the only Core Participant to make oral submissions (as he is appearing as a ‘litigant in person’), on behalf of the McLibel Support campaign.

The McLibel case ended up becoming the longest trial in English legal history. There were just two defendants, Dave Morris and Helen Steel.

Morris explained that Steel had been unable to contribute as much as she might have liked towards the accompanying written Opening Statement, due to the Inquiry’s delays in making disclosure to her and the unreasonable length of time allowed for her to go through this evidence. She has only managed to write a partial personal witness statement, but aims to produce another before giving oral evidence on 27 November.

It made a refreshing change to hear directly from one of the people who had been targeted by the spycops. Morris will give further oral evidence on 5 November.

Introducing the McLibel case

Dave explained some of the background to this infamous legal case. As life-long community activists, he and Steel were both involved in fighting for a better future, they were both involved in London Greenpeace, and along with other campaigners, distributed copies of a leaflet entitled ‘What’s wrong with McDonald’s?’

When the McDonald’s corporation threatened legal action, Steel and Morris refused to back down, and found themselves defending a libel case against a well-resourced, powerful multinational. They had to represent themselves, as legal aid was not available for such cases.

They relied on the help of volunteers to assist them, and received ‘pro bono’ advice from a young barrister named Keir Starmer for around ten years.

As a result of publicity around this ‘David and Goliath’ case, the leaflets which McDonald’s had set out to suppress were widely distributed for many years, all over the world.

We now know that the SDS not only infiltrated the campaign, they also collaborated secretly with McDonald’s before and during the case, something Morris condemned as ‘a serious miscarriage of justice’.

We also now know that one of the undercovers, HN5 John Dines ‘John Barker’ engineered a long-term relationship with Steel – they even lived together – and this had been described the day before by the Inquiry’s own Counsel, David Barr KC, as Dines’s

‘cold, calculating emotional and sexual exploitation’

Infiltration

In the 1980s, London Greenpeace was a small group, campaigning about issues that were of widespread public concern, like the treatment of animals and workers and the environment. The trust and privacy of those involved was abused by the infiltration of SDS spies.

HN10 Bob Lambert ‘Bob Robinson’ became a prominent and influential activist in what he described himself as ‘a peaceful campaigning group’. During his time undercover, he deceived four women into sexual relationships and fathered a child with one of them.

In 1986, he helped to create and distribute the original 6 page fact-sheet which asked ‘What’s wrong with McDonald’s?’ and provided the reader with a list of answers (everything from nutrition and diet, environmental damage, unethical advertising, worker exploitation, factory farming, global poverty…).

Morris brandished a copy on screen, and explained this was the leaflet that prompted McDonald’s to threaten libel action. A shorter version was produced and given out during the McLibel trial, with at least 3 million copies being printed and distributed in the UK.

When HN5 John Dines ‘John Barker’ joined the group, he also helped to produce and distribute these leaflets, organise events and protests, and become the group’s treasurer.

It wasn’t just these two SDS officers who infiltrated London Greenpeace; there were also at least six ‘inquiry agents’, corporate spies sent by McDonald’s to gather information between 1989-91.

McDonald’s hired former police officers for this operation, and one of them had a fraudulent sexual relationship with a member of the group, which lasted for around six months.

As a result of the intelligence gathered by the SDS and these inquiry agents, McDonald’s served libel writs on five named individuals in September 1990.

Three of the group felt they had no option but to pull out of what promised to be an expensive, unfair fight, leaving Morris and Steel to stand up to McDonald’s in court.

The case – including a full appeal – ran until 2005.

The pair went on to win a case against the British Government in the European Court of Human Rights, and were formally represented there by Keir Starmer there (as they received legal aid for this). That court ruled that the state had violated their right to a fair hearing and freedom of expression, but had no idea about the extent of the intrusion they had suffered.

Breaching legal privilege and spying on Starmer

Dines reported that the leaflet ‘is causing much concern within the corporation’, shortly before the McLibel writs were served. According to him:

‘Arrangements are in hand to monitor events arising from these legal proceedings’.

He went on to report on confidential discussions between the recipients of those writs and their lawyers.

In a later report he boasts:

‘It is accurate to say that I was “by the side” of Helen Steel and Dave Morris in 1991 and relaying the legal advice back to my bosses in the SDS’.

He used to collect Steel after she had attended legal strategy meetings with Starmer.

Secret unlawful collaboration between McDonald’s and the Met

It is clear that information flowed in both directions, between McDonald’s and the SDS.

McDonald’s recruited Sid Nicholson in 1983 as Head of Security. In his prior 31 year police career, he had worked in apartheid South Africa before coming to London and rising to the rank of Chief Superintendent in the Met, covering the Brixton area.

He was responsible for McDonald’s security and ran their spying operations. He brought in other former police officers, such as Terry Carroll (also from Brixton), who was hired as a Security Manager, and admitted in 2013:

‘I was aware that Sid would liaise with Special Branch officers about the protestors’.

He also recalled Sid telling him that there was a ‘Special Branch bloke’ inside London Greenpeace.

In 1990, he had sent Nicholson a memo, promising:

‘I will get onto Special Branch to get an assessment’.

Nicholson testified during McLibel that his security team were ‘all ex-police’, and it’s clear that this strategy meant they were all able to get hold of information from mates who were still on the force. One of the McDonald’s spies held two long meetings with a Special Branch officer in June 1990 to share private information.

Morris noted in passing that Bob Lambert had worked on Special Branch’s C Squad, with special responsibility for the Brixton area, while Nicholson was still in post.

A police ‘file note’ from 2002 (disclosed recently by the Inquiry) reveals that although HN5 John Dines ‘John Barker’ was heavily involved in the anti-McDonald’s campaign in 1990, the SDS had made sure that his name

‘was deliberately omitted from the McDonald’s libel writ list’

Morris describes this as ‘blatant manipulation of the legal process’, and calls on the Inquiry to investigate the roles played by undercovers in this web of secret collaboration and subterfuge.

The search for the truth

Dines began cynically faking a mental breakdown in 1991, and finally disappeared from Steel’s life the following year, telling her that he was going abroad. As a result, she suffered heartache and worry, and spent many years trying to find him.

By 1995, Lambert had been promoted to SDS manager, and was worried about the possibility of either Dines or the Commissioner being sub-poenaed to give evidence at the McLibel trial, if Steel were ever to discover the truth about her ex-partner.

By 1998 Steel and Morris knew only that Special Branch had provided their private details to McDonald’s, and successfully sued the police over this. In 2000, the Met offered to make a pay-out of £10,000, plus costs, rather than go through ‘a difficult and lengthy trial’.

Morris says now:

‘Had the true picture been known we may well have not settled the claim.’

The judgments of the High Court and the Court of Appeal found that much of what had been printed in the leaflet was true, and that McDonald’s had breached both employment and animal welfare legislation. However they were never prosecuted. Why not?

Consequences of the case

London Greenpeace never fully recovered after the McLibel case, and its activities gradually fizzled out.

Although the ‘McLibel Two’ won on some points, they also lost on some. As a result, Steel and Morris had damages of £60,000 awarded against them, which they refused to pay. Morris says the case:

‘certainly had real consequences. Not only Helen and myself, but also Keir had to put in years of unpaid and intense work to help defend the action’.

For Steel, the stress of fighting the case was magnified by the trauma of Dines’s fake breakdown, her concern and her efforts to trace him. She then had to deal with the additional trauma of gradually uncovering the shocking truth about his identity.

Morris says this case is another example of the police:

‘showing their utter disregard for the integrity of legal proceedings’.

4) Peter Weatherby KC

Peter Weatherby KC appeared on behalf of the Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA).

Before talking about the activities of the HSA, Weatherby made clear:

‘there was no legitimate justification whatsoever for undercover policing targeting it as an organisation or its supporters or its activities or their families or their homes or their private and sexual lives…

‘undercover policing interfered with a fundamental constitutional and convention rights of Hunt Saboteurs Association supporters relating to freedoms to organise, assemble and act as well as their personal rights as autonomous individuals.’

He outlined various transgressions of undercovers, quoting SDS officer HN2 Andy Coles ‘Andy Davey’:

‘Misleading a court is something done by criminals and government ministers alike – we shouldn’t be squeamish about the ends justifying the means in our own case.’

This casual approach to misleading criminal courts is an affront to the rule of law. Managers knew and consented, and:

‘if ever this Inquiry needed evidence that the SDS was allowed to operate beyond any normal lawful limits, this is it… [SDS] was a political policing unit to which normal lawful limits were simply not recognised or applied.’

The HSA was formed and still exists to prevent the killing of animals in blood sports. Its core activities were and are to take non-violent direct action to prevent such cruelty and to lobby government to enact laws to criminalise and stop activities such as fox-hunting and hare-coursing. Some supporters report illegal hunting to police and provide evidence for prosecutions, there’s nothing inherently unlawful about those core activities.

Opinion polls show the majority of the public is against blood sports and has been throughout at the whole history of the Hunt Saboteurs Association. The Hunting Act passed in 2004, cementing the HSA’s position on the right side of history.

It is a national association with democratic structures, which takes part in national lobbying. Activities against hunts are invariably through local groups.

The HSA has always believed in non-violence. This is a moral and a practical choice. Confrontation or violence are a distraction. To make a hunt ineffective, saboteurs lay false scents, blow hunting horns to draw hounds away, and make noise to cause wild animals to seek safety.

Weatherby notes:

‘Pursuing wild animals with dogs may well not have been unlawful during the period under consideration and neither was disrupting that cruel pursuit in the ways described.’

Conversely, hunt supporters often sought to deter and intimidate saboteurs through organised violence perpetrated by hired thugs. Hunt saboteurs have been killed and sustained serious injuries requiring hospital treatment. This is an important point which Weatherby addressed at some length and in more detail in his written statement.

Violence directed at hunt saboteurs was so severe that the HSA collated these experiences and submitted a written report entitled ‘Public order, private armies: Security guards of British hunts’ to the Home Affairs Select Committee investigating the use of private security firms. There was little subtlety in the campaigns by hunt supporters against hunt saboteurs and the threats were in plain sight.

Undercover officers witnessed the violent attacks on hunt sabs and on occasion reported on where the real threat lay. Managers refer in contemporaneous documentation to the risk of officers being injured by hunt supporters.

HN2 Andy Coles ‘Andy Davey’ stated:

‘I feared serious assault from terriermen or being shot at by irate farmers more than anything else during my tour.’

In 1992 the British Field Sports Society (BFSS) ran a campaign to encourage hunts to use so-called stewards to deter saboteurs.

In the words of BFSS spokesperson, Nick Herbert:

‘we’re going to start hunting the saboteurs.’

This left little to the imagination.

Herbert went on to become an MP and was policing minister between 2010 and 2012. In that role, he defended undercover officers having sex with women they spied on.

He is now Lord Herbert and chair of the College of Policing, responsible for the authorised professional practice for undercover officers.

In this context, Weatherby examined whether the HSA were a public order threat. An SDS report from 1989 summed it up:

‘From a public order point of view the threat of violence these days comes more from supporters of the hunt rather than from the 20 to 30 saboteurs.’

Why then were the HSA made a target? The answer is politicised bias. Put simply, ‘Those associated with hunting had greater access to the corridors of power than those who opposed hunting.’

Weatherby referred to obvious and key areas of questions the HSA urge the Inquiry to focus on.

Justification

Any such deployments should be subject to precise justification based on a rigorous process, based on evidence properly recorded and regularly reviewed and supervised at a high level.

None of this appears to have occurred. There was no tenable justification for the deployments against the HSA.

Weatherby cited the 1995/1996 SDS annual report:

‘The emphasis that penetration of hunt sabotage groups is a means to an end rather than an end in itself in terms of SDS operations remains valid.’

Thus, from the SDS’s own mouthpiece, it seems their justification for infiltrating the HSA was a speculative attempt to identify people who might be involved in other acts. Could this means to an end infiltration ever be justifiable in principle? The HSA firmly refute that idea.

Proportionality

What proportionality exercises were conducted? Were legitimate aims identified at all? Is there evidence of any significant useful intelligence obtained at the time?

Weatherby notes that even if what he calls the ‘Animal Liberation Front excuse’ were accepted, most so-called ALF activity involved low-level criminal damage caused when rescuing animals or damage perhaps to butchers’ shops.

Instructions and training

What were the instructions to undercover officers? What was their training? What were their limitations, not only generally but on those target activities?

Weatherby pointed to undercover officers taking part in, encouraging or organising serious criminal activities; he notes that a number of the women personally violated in deceitful relationships were hunt saboteurs, and adds:

‘you’ll hear from witnesses who were befriended by undercover officers, they not only went to festivals and abroad with them, but they welcomed them into their own homes and families and introduced them to friends unaware of their true identities.’

Finally, he notes that police bias against hunt sabs often led to unlawful arrests. Many such detentions did not result in charges and not infrequently hunt saboteurs took successful civil claims.

Officers like Lambert, Dines and Coles were also arrested, which raises a number of uncomfortable issues. Did these officers infringe legal privilege? Were these arrests used as a means of enhancing the standing of undercover officers in their deployments? Did undercover officers mislead criminal courts?

‘The Inquiry must not only establish the facts concerning these violations of fundamental rights and affronts to the administration of justice, it must also establish accountability and bring to an end such unacceptable practices.’

5) Sam Jacobs

Sam Jacobs appeared next, on behalf of Sharon Grant OBE (in relation to Bernie Grant) and Stafford Scott (Broadwater Farm Defence Committee)

There is an accompanying written Statement.

Jacobs made a brief oral statement, and referred the Inquiry to wider points made in the opening statement of the co-operating group of non-state non-police core participants, about shocking SDS mismanagement, culture and lack of accountability.

He notes that documents disclosed in this Tranche have important implications for all of his clients, including those whose evidence will be heard in Tranche 3 who, because of restriction orders have not yet had sight of the material.

Targeting

How groups or individuals were selected for targeting by the SDS remains opaque. Managers’ statements shed little light.

Only HN115 offers a detailed account of targets identified by the SDS, following consultation with the Security Service and senior managers from other squads.

Jacobs urges the Inquiry to consider:

‘the interests and concerns of the Metropolitan Police which will have informed the apparently amorphous targeting strategy.’

Like Scobie on Monday, Jacobs gives the example of a Special Branch report from January 1983, ‘Political extremism and a campaign for accountability within the Metropolitan Police’, which makes it plain the police viewed any attempt to bring accountability as subversive in itself.

The subversive aims of the Greater London Council included ensuring the police complaints procedure worked effectively. The report describes attempts to develop monitoring groups as ‘grandiose’, and ‘sinister’ and sought to discredit democratically elected officials as having extremist connections.

Jacobs concludes@

‘It is clear that the very notion of police accountability was viewed as problematic by Special Branch…

‘reporting on these groups and the various justice campaigns in the Tranche 2 period [1983-1992] and beyond was a deliberate objective.’

Sharon Grant OBE

Managers’ witness evidence about reporting on elected officials is inconsistent and has served only to muddy the waters and to raise further concerns.

The 1 June 1988 briefing paper produced for the Security Service’s Management Board on counter subversion refers to F Branch monitoring of various mainstream political groups, including the Labour Party.

This casts doubt on managers’ claims that there should be no active reporting on MPs or that reporting on members of Parliament by the SDS and Special Branch was either discouraged or was simply incidental.

Reports on Bernie Grant and other MPs were frequently supplied to the Security Service. Special Branch had a direct interest in the activities of elected politicians and they did report on their activities.

The 1983 report on police accountability references dozens of elected officials, including Bernie Grant, with (inaccurate) details of their purported political beliefs and allegiances.

The interest of the Metropolitan Police and the SDS appeared to be at its highest when Bernie Grant was critical of policing methods or of the police. The Met is most concerned with its own reputation and using Special Branch reporting to defend itself from criticism.

Sharon Grant has long-held concerns that the Met was the source of unfavourable media stories about her husband and the evidence disclosed to date heightens those concerns.

Stafford Scott

Managers’ evidence has exacerbated Scott’s concerns about why he and the Broadwater Farm Defence Committee were reported on by undercover officers. The Metropolitan Police made it clear that they regarded any campaigns for police accountability and justice to be subversive by their very nature, and Scott was involved in precisely this area of work in his community.

Managers’ statements insist that reporting on such groups was a by-product of reporting on the other political groups, and so was justified in the interests of public order.

However, not one single report on Stafford Scott or of the activities of Broadwater Farm Defence Committee that raises any legitimate concerns about public order, or evidences manipulation of the group by political activists.

Managers approved and submitted reports by undercover officers, yet did not confront or address the racism that was so clearly prevalent. Two of the reports describe speakers at public meetings as ‘negroes’.

HN78 Trevor Morris ‘Anthony “Bobby” Lewis’ is referred to as ‘a coloured potential recruit’.

It is clear that he was regarded as a useful asset, who would be able to obtain access that might not be available to other undercover officers.

HN59 states that managers would edit reports, sometimes removing words or phrases. HN109 states that he had an editorial role over the reports, removing irrelevant or judgmental comments. Yet explicitly racist language was not edited.

Undercovers’ and managers’ constant refrain is that the language used in reports was reflective of its time and should not be judged by today’s standards:

‘yet this is language that is more in tune with the segregated American deep south than London in the 1980s.’

The language and attitude expressed in the reports, which went unchallenged by managers, shows that minorities were regarded as a threat by the Metropolitan Police whenever they sought to organise around issues of justice and accountability.

The opening statement of the Met Commissioner to Tranche 2 Phase 1 described reporting on social justice campaigns, family campaigns and community organisations as ‘indefensible’, resulting from:

‘a critical failure on the part of its managers’.

Scott asks the Chair to be aware that these attitudes and behaviours do not operate in a vacuum, and the critical failures of the SDS managers were also critical failures on the part of the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office, and not just the individuals giving evidence to this Inquiry.

6) Owen Greenhall

Owen Greenhall appeared on behalf of Diane Abbott OBE and Dame Joan Ruddock, who have supplied a written Opening Statement.

Diane Abbott has been a leading anti-racism campaigner for decades. In 1987 she became the first black woman to be an MP, representing Hackney North and Stoke Newington. Re-elected in 2024, she is now the longest-standing continuously serving female MP, the ‘Mother of the House’.

The Right Honourable Dame Joan Ruddock PC is an anti-apartheid campaigner and former chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). She was MP for Deptford from 1987 to 2015 and held several ministerial positions, including Minister for Women, Minister for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and Minister for Energy and Climate Change.

Greenhall explained that both Abbott and Ruddock were subject to SDS reporting and they share a number of concerns (expressed in their opening to Tranche 2 Phase 1 earlier this year and expanded here)
(i) The targeting of MPs and the adequacy of disclosure.
(ii) Concerns over racial discrimination in the activities of the SDS.
(iii) Concerns over the use of information gathered by the SDS.
(iv) Procedural issues related to the Inquiry.

The targeting of MPs

Reporting on MPs was a central concern in the creation of this Inquiry, and was debated in Parliament in March 2015.

The response from the Minister for Policing Criminal Justice and Victims, Mike Penning, was that he would:

‘do everything I can to make sure that the documents are released… We have to find out exactly what went on.’

Spying on MPs raises serious concerns over the erosion of the Wilson doctrine against police surveillance of Members of Parliament, inappropriate collection of personal information and interference with the democratic process. Greenhall pointed out:

‘It’s notable that only Labour MPs appear to have been targeted.’

Former undercover officer Peter Francis has revealed that Special Branch files on MPs were typically ‘very extensive’ and often contained personal and private information.

HN78 Trevor Morris ‘Anthony “Bobby” Lewis’ was asked whether he ever saw a file on an elected politician. He replied:

‘I was going to say hundreds. Many, many, many… they are all marked ‘Secret’… probably top secret.’

Trevor Morris published a book ‘Black Ops: The Incredible True Story of a British secret agent’ using the pseudonym Carlton King.

Greenhall quoted from that book:

‘It is the job of the Security Service to vet and assess senior politicians; the Branch assisted with this duty where and when required. When the Branch came across intelligence relating to politicians (through its agents, desk officers or SDS operatives et cetera)… it would pass this intelligence to the Security Service.’

Yet very little of this reporting has actually been disclosed by the Inquiry to date (when questioning Morris they didn’t menton his book and later absurdly said MI5 had forced them not to admit he was in fact Carlton King).

Core participants ask that these discrepancies are investigated to ensure that the Inquiry uncovers the full truth of what took place.

Racial discrimination in the activities of the SDS

Greenhall quoted Home Office guidelines produced right at the start of this Tranche, in 1984:

‘Special Branch investigations into subversive activities in particularly sensitive fields, for example in educational establishments, in trade unions, in industry and among racial minorities, must be conducted with particular care so as to avoid any suggestion that Special Branches are investigating matters involving the legitimate expression of views…

‘It is not the function of the force Special Branch to investigate individuals and groups merely because their policies are unpalatable, or because they are highly critical of the police, or because they want to transform the present system of police accountability.’

Yet there was extensive reporting on racial justice campaigns and police accountability issues.

Indeed, Managers appear to have been unaware of the guidelines. Annual reports for the SDS indicate that campaigns on racial issues were a key aspect of targeting, the Anti-Nazi League, a variety of local anti-racist and anti-fascist groups and predominantly black family justice campaigns regularly feature.

The purported justification – concern that these groups might be taken over by other organisations – is racist, assuming black-led organisations could not preserve their own independence.

The use of information gathered by the SDS

Throughout the Tranche 2 period (1983-1992), the SDS worked hand in glove with the Security Service. One primary purpose of the Security Service was vetting. The SDS played a crucial part in this.

‘Witness Y’ accepts:

‘it is in my view highly likely that some (possibly most) of the information sought from SDS officers was sought in order to be used for vetting purposes’

Security Service influence on targeting is confirmed by SDS managers. HN115 Tony Wait states:

‘The Security Service influenced our targeting decisions quite a lot. Most of our deployments were in agreement with them. We would always seek their views before deciding on new targets.’

Security Service requests were often coupled to political and diplomatic concerns at the time (see our report on the Opening Statement on behalf of CND).

As Carlton King, aka HN78 Trevor Morris, writes:

‘the Branch was only one cog in the British state’s domestic national security apparatus, the Security Service (MI5) was an even more central component, as was the Home Office, the judiciary, the press and of course the politicians, in particular cabinet-level government ministers who sat at the centre of this machine and could therefore tweak it to their advantage.’

That past involvement coming in one of the largest anti-nuclear movements could inhibit the future career of those concerned is reminiscent of the authoritarian regimes which the SDS and Security Services claimed to be fighting against.

Greenhall therefore asked the Inquiry to:

‘fully explore the use that was made of SDS reports for vetting purposes, particularly in relation to politicians and civil servants.’

Procedural issues

Greenhall echoed the concerns raised by many other core participants.

‘The disclosure and Rule 9 process for Tranche 2 has been heavily delayed for the non-state core participants and that has had the effect of marginalising their impact and in many respects excluding them from effective participation.

‘The impact of these delays has almost exclusively been to the detriment of non-state core participants… limitations on attendance at hearings has hindered the engagement of the core participants in the Inquiry…

‘The Inquiry is asked to ensure that procedural issues do not reduce the accountability of those responsible for the SDS… [and] to take steps to minimise the prejudice to non-state core participants affected by the delays.’

7) Fiona Murphy KC

After lunch, we heard from Fiona Murphy KC, representing ‘TBS’ and ‘Category F’ Core Participants (people deceived into relationships by undercover officers)

‘TBS’

Murphy spoke first on behalf of TBS, whose mother ‘Jacqui’ had a long-term sexual relationship with HN10 Bob Lambert.

TBS was born in 1985 and his father, posing as a committed animal rights activist using the name ‘Bob Robinson’ (an identity Lambert stole from a dead child), was involved in his life until 1988. Then he disappeared, abandoning TBS, who did not learn of the true identity of his father for a further 24 years. He has provided a written statement to the Inquiry.

TBS has given powerful testimony, setting out the difficult process of reconciling himself to his biological father’s absence, his tragic attempts to learn more about the fiction that was ‘Bob Robinson’, to identify with that fiction, and how TBS has struggled to come to terms with the reality that his understanding of his parentage was based on a lie.

TBS complains that the treatment of him by the Inquiry has not been fair, has not been consistent, has not been predictable and has not facilitated him in being heard in relation to decisions that affect him.

He aligns with the remarks of other core participants about issues arising from delay and disclosure. The unorthodox approach to the marshalling of evidence taken by this public inquiry runs the significant risk of the truth being obscured.

The Inquiry also chose to limit TBS’s legal funding, locking his lawyers out from considering the evidence of civilian witnesses, including the evidence of his own mother.

‘These experiences have undermined TBS’s confidence in your Inquiry, sir, and he endorses the analysis of the non-state non-police core participants opening statement that this is an Inquiry in crisis.’

The Commissioner’s responsibility

TBS has outlined in his witness statement:

‘The Metropolitan Police Service do not seem as an organisation to accept that … they had responsibility to try to minimise the impact, to hold their hands up, to accept that they had allowed a toxic culture to develop which led to these issues. To acknowledge the wrongs done and to provide resources to help the victims, such as me, to access specialist psychiatric and psychological help.

‘It feels scary that as an organisation the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] were happy for me to go through my whole life without knowing the true identity of my biological father. And if it were not for the work of activists and journalists I would probably never have known the truth or had the chance to meet my biological father.

The Metropolitan Police Service simply left me alone to deal with all of this, both before and after I learned of Bob Lambert’s true identity.’

The Commissioner of the Met apologised to TBS in his opening statement for the distress he has suffered growing up not knowing his true parentage, for the fact that the Metropolitan Police should not have allowed Bob Lambert to behave in the way that he did, and committing to ensure that TBS receives answers to his questions during this Inquiry.

The apology addresses Bob Lambert’s conduct, it does not address the organisational responsibility of those who knew of TBS’s existence in the years and decades following his birth. It does not address the Commissioner’s own failings in relation to TBS in the period leading to and following Bob Lambert’s exposure.

TBS invites the Metropolitan Police to provide a corporate evidential witness statement deposed in full compliance with the Commissioner’s duty of candour, addressing the chronology of the organisation’s awareness of the developing public interest in the SDS in general and Bob Lambert in particular.

When did the Met became aware that there was a significant likelihood that Bob Lambert’s true identity would be disclosed publicly? When was it obvious that Bob Lambert’s identity would become known to TBS? What decisions were taken regarding the need to notify Bob Lambert’s identity to TBS before his mother pieced the evidence together from press reports?

Lambert was exposed on 15 October 2011. He made apologies on 23 October to London Greenpeace and to Belinda Harvey, who he had deceived into a relationship. He made no mention of Jacqui or TBS. He made no effort to contact them.

Eight months later, by chance, Jacqui stumbled on the truth when she saw an article in the Daily Mail on 12 June 2012.

‘It was unconscionable for the Metropolitan Police Service to leave TBS and his mother to find out the truth in the manner in which they did.’

Murphy set out the legal framework on the Rights of the Child, citing pronouncements at the highest judicial level that the best interests of children are not served by the concealment of truth. On the contrary, it causes mental and psychological suffering which does not diminish with age.

Knowledge of one’s true identity positively contributes to personal development, to one’s sense of self and there are also of course important practical consequences, including in relation to knowledge of potential hereditary medical conditions.

Had the Metropolitan Police sought advice at the time of TBS’s birth or at any stage subsequently, they would have been advised that notifying TBS of his true parentage was in his best interests.

TBS will learn facts about his childhood and early development during this Inquiry. The decision to restrict his legal funding is therefore particularly cruel. TBS has had to suppress his identification with the non-existent ‘Bob Robinson’ and to come to terms with the true identity of Bob Lambert.

In his own words:

‘The father that disappeared was a fabrication, and I’ve had to grapple with deconstructing that myth that my life was built around.’

The impact upon TBS of this deception has been profound and it endures to this day.

Murphy highlighted some details from the evidence, such as the decision to obscure Bob Lambert’s identity and whereabouts at the time when ‘Jacqui’ was seeking to have TBS adopted by her new husband, misleading social services and the family courts. The name of the individual who did this has been restricted by the Inquiry, preventing publication.

She also notes:

‘Bob Lambert’s deployment as “Bob Robinson” continued for a further three years after TBS’s birth, but that he was permitted to return in a managerial role. Despite his having demonstrated in these starkest terms that his professionalism and propriety could not be relied upon and that he posed a significant risk of ongoing harm to those among whom he was deployed.’

Murphy then made a chilling appeal to the Inquiry:

‘There is evidence, sir, that we ask you to consider with care that there were other children born of these abusive relationships.

‘At a bare minimum, sir, it is the Commissioner’s responsibility to assure you that no other human being is living a life with the truth obscured from him or her as it was from TBS for more than two decades.’

Families whose loved ones’ identites were stolen

‘Category F’ are the families whose loved ones’ identities were stolen by the Special Demonstration Squad and its officers. They have also provided a written Statement.

The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police publicly apologised to the families on Monday, adding that misconduct by officers while using the dead children’s identities was disrespectful to their memories, and the Commissioner has apologised to all the families for this and for the Metropolitan Police’s failure to stop that misconduct from occurring.

Murphy noted that the apology was welcome, but detailed the inadequacies of the Met’s response:

‘What is apparent is that the risk to families from such events was never considered, although it ought to have been. This is but one example of the SDS’s deplorable myopia.’

Senior officers within the Metropolitan Police were fully aware of the practice but did not take any steps to stop it for two decades, nor to close the SDS.

Few officers turned their minds to the inevitable impact on the families or the devastation that this practice has wrought on their families, already made vulnerable by the premature loss of a child or a young adult, and how the memories they all cherish have been tainted and tarnished by it.

The families participating in this tranche covering the period between 1983 and 1992 are:

• Frank Bennett and Honor Robson in relation to the theft and abuse of their brother Michael Hartley’s identity.
• Faith Mason, in relation to her son Neil Martin.
• Marva and Judy Lewis in relation to their brother Anthony Lewis.
• Kaden Blake, in relation to her brother Matthew Rayner.

They represent only a small proportion of the victims of identity theft by the Metropolitan Police in this period.

The families want to understand the extent of the intrusion into their own lives and how the identities were used.

They are concerned that in taking a child’s identity the officers went on to research and use details from the families’ private and family lives, so as to test their identity choice and to build their ‘legends’.

Meanwhile, no care was given to the risks to which the families were thereby themselves exposed.

Officers went far beyond acceptable conduct, seducing women, inveigling themselves into the lives of others, attending parties and weddings and even celebrating the birthdays of dead children as if they were their own. They committed criminal offences and appeared in court as witnesses or defendants in the names of dead children’s names.

They undermined lawful and legitimate protest movements. For the Marva Lewis and her family it was especially bitter to learn that HN78 Trevor Morris ‘Anthony “Bobby” Lews’ sought to undermine campaigns for racial justice while:

‘pretending to be my brother… he had stolen the identity of a deceased young black boy and his work undercover contributed to undermining the investigation into the racist murder of another black boy, Stephen Lawrence.’

‘The restricted family’

The families registered their regret and disappointment with the Inquiry. They are concerned that onerous restriction orders over historical practices are impeding the Inquiry’s investigations.

Many officers continue to enjoy anonymity, to the dismay of the families. This means it is the dead child’s identity with which their misconduct will be forever associated, and not the identity of the officer who was responsible.

The Chair has said that any attempt to challenge the restrictions, which were applied without reference to the families, is ‘discouraged’ and:

‘would almost certainly result in the existing restrictions being upheld… [and it’s] very unlikely that the Inquiry would extend funding for the purposes of any such scrutiny’.

The families have not been placed on an equal footing to the police core participants, and the Inquiry is failing to comply with the principle of open justice.

These problems are at their most acute in relation to ‘the restricted family’, a family who have been forced to participate in this Inquiry anonymously by reason of a restriction order covering their own name, to protect the identity of the officer who stole it.

They have been silenced and disempowered, denied the opportunity to speak openly about the trauma they have suffered, and their hopes that this Inquiry might expose the truth and achieve a measure of accountability have rapidly faded.

8) Kirsten Heaven

Our last speaker of the day, Kirsten Heaven appeared on behalf of ‘the co-operating group of NPSCPs’ – this means all the Non-Police Non-State Core Participants in this Inquiry, whose lawyers try to work together to represent everyone’s shared interests.

They produced a lengthy written Opening Statement for Tranche 2 Phase 2, in addition to the individual and group statements many of these people have made.

Initial observations

She pointed out that at the same time as making various apologies for the actions of undercover officers and ‘systemic management failings’ in yesterday’s Opening Statement, the Met also sought to persuade Mitting that the Inquiry should really now focus its attention on what they call the ‘primary question’: whether or not the spycops deployments were justified, rather than exploring the way these undercovers behaved.

She said:

‘Put simply, abhorrent behaviour and systemic managerial failure are matters that clearly go to the heart of the question of justification’

The Met are ‘wrong on this issue’, she added.

She then reminded Mitting of how the Investigatory Powers Tribunal dealt with this issue in the case brought by Kate Wilson (one of the women deceived by spycop EN12 Mark Kennedy ‘Mark Stone’).

The ensuing judgment from that case was highly critical of the ‘broad, open-ended authorisations’ used by the spycops units. These deployments were speculative ‘fishing operations’ and resulted in extensive collateral intrusion. They cannot be justified.

‘Abhorrent, abusive, cruel and morally repugnant’

The four undercover officers that we’ll hear most about in this set of hearings have still not shown any real remorse, for the impact of what Heaven described as ‘the most abhorrent, abusive, cruel and morally repugnant behaviour in the history of the SDS’.

For example, HN2 Andy Coles ‘Andy Davey’ continues to deny that he – as a 32 year old married man – groomed a vulnerable teenager, Jessica, into a sexual relationship, pretending to be much younger than he actually was. The Met accept that ‘Jessica’ has been telling the truth.

The Inquiry must be sceptical about any evidence it hears from these men. Heaven continued by skewering the laughable idea that these spycops might still have reputations worth protecting.

Coles has claimed that ‘Jessica’ had a ‘father issue’ and was ‘obsessed’ with him. Since his identity was uncovered, by activists, multiple women have come forward to report similar stories of his creepy, predatory, ‘sex pest’ behaviour. He has made denigrating comments about some of these women too.

He was a married man, supposedly trying for a baby with his wife at the same time as grooming and sexually abusing a much younger activist.

HN10 Bob Lambert, after leaving the police, tried to reinvent himself as a respectable academic lecturer.

Coles, described as ‘another aspiring novelist’, went on to become a Tory party councillor in Peterborough, Deputy Police & Crime Commissioner for Cambridgeshire, and even a school governor.

At one point he endorsed a campaign to protect young people from sexual exploitation despite being a perpetrator of it himself.

Unlike Lambert, Coles did not receive an MBE or a Police Commendation for his work in the SDS, and is known to have complained about not being given the recognition he felt he deserved for his ‘sacrifice’.

‘An elite undercover officer’

We have heard about a ‘cabal’ centred around Lambert, a group of men who saw themselves as a superior elite group within a special secret squad, fiercely loyal to each other.

By all accounts, Lambert himself is an over-entitled, self-promoting, arrogant man, described by HN109 as a ‘charismatic attention seeker’ and by former undercover colleague HN11 Mike Chitty ‘Mike Blake’ as ‘a professional liar’.

He has shown no remorse for the cruel and abusive deception of ‘Jacqui’, or the three other women he had relationships with, claiming now that he did not intend to ‘target’ them, just succumbed to ‘weakness and irresponsibility’.

The ‘Category H’ Opening Statement suggests that Lambert may well have been motivated by a desire to seek out extra-marital sex with a younger woman, and notes that he has not returned the awards he was given for his contributions to policing.

Lambert has continued to use his skills of ‘deception and duplicity’ in his academic career. Despite stating that the animal rights movement was a ‘very serious business’, suggesting that these were dangerous people, he used to take his baby son along to meetings with these activists.

Lambert is known as a manipulative figure, who has already used a range of tactics to deflect criticism of his unethical behaviour and try to control the narrative. He is likely to go to great lengths to defend his reputation, and may well try to feign contrition. Hopefully Mitting will keep this in mind when he hears Lambert give evidence in December.

Lambert has hinted that he might publish a book about his experiences one day, and Heaven suggests that the Inquiry investigate the existence of a draft.

Rather than seeking to understand the serious impact the spycops’ actions had on those they targeted, Lambert seems to have treated many aspects of the SDS as a big joke. Even HN5 John Dines ‘John Barker’, probably his closest friend in the unit, said that you don’t get a pointed answer from Lambert ‘unless you ask him a pointed question’.

Lambert rose through the ranks to become an SDS manager, then left the force in 2007. Sir Ian Blair, the Met’s Commissioner at the time, attended his retirement party. We still don’t know how much he and other senior cops knew about the way that Lambert operated, and if they bothered asking questions to find out how the SDS was obtaining its intelligence.

It’s all very well for police lawyers to turn up at this Inquiry with yet more ‘apologies’ for the spycops’ abuses, but we need to hear evidence from these senior officers.

‘Rules are make to be broken’

Dines and Lambert were very close, and frequently praised each other. They seem to have had a lot in common, including a deep-seated misogyny and lack of respect for activists, especially women, or their own wives.

Other officers say that HN5 John Dines was very competitive, a ‘gong hunter’, who ‘wanted to be a gold star SDS officer’ and sought notoriety. It seems likely that this last wish will be granted.

Dines made many disparaging remarks about his time undercover (saying he found it ‘unpleasant, miserable and boring’) and about those he targeted, including Helen Steel. He professed to be in love with her, but coldly stated that he ‘couldn’t give a rats’ about the impact on her of his deception and the way in which he disappeared from her life.

Like Lambert, Dines received a police commendation. He did not want his wife to attend the ceremony in 1992.

Dines has refused to provide oral evidence to this Inquiry, so will not be appearing during these hearings.

Back in 2003, the Met paid out a huge sum of money to enable Dines to relocate his family from New Zealand to Australia. This was due to their fears that Helen Steel – after years of dogged research on her part – would succeed in tracking him down.

It seems that the police knew enough about his misconduct to realise that this could have resulted in a civil claim against the force. The 2003 BBC ‘True Spies’ documentary series had helped to confirm her suspicions about Dines and his true identity.

As well as demanding money for relocation costs, and compensation for the effect on his new career (as an extremely well paid barrister, who often took on cases defending radical activists in the New Zealand courts) Dines asked his former colleagues at the Yard to write him references and help him find new work in Australia.

The fourth officer discussed by Heaven was HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’. He also deceived a woman, Denise Fuller, into a romantic and sexual relationship that lasted around one year. Denise is due to give evidence on 6 January 2025.

Rayner knew that fellow officer Andy Coles had tried to sexually assault a woman, but did not report this incident to the SDS managers.

Loyalty and lies

We’ll be hearing evidence from some of the unit’s managers later in this Tranche (in January 2025).

When SDS officers have spoken publicly about the unit in the past (for example, in ‘True Spies’) others clearly saw this as a ’betrayal’ of the SDS’s secret status.

Heaven commented earlier about officers being ‘selective’ in their evidence and what they chose to reveal to this Inquiry. It seems that many of them still have a strong sense of loyalty to each other.

Their employers, the Met police, have now made it very clear that they consider some of the problems associated with the unit to have been caused by the managers’:

‘failure to lead the SDS properly and effectively’.

They have been admissions of failings in terms of welfare, discipline and misconduct; a lack of proper training; a lack of scrutiny or oversight; a failure to maintain professional standards or to ensure that reporting was appropriate or ethical.

Heaven points out that SDS managers should not allow any perceived loyalty – towards either the Met or the officers they managed – prevent them from providing honest answers to this Inquiry. Some undercovers (including Lambert and Coles) have already made comments critical of their managers, in an attempt to shift blame away from themselves.

One of the managers that we’re due to hear from, at the very end of this set of hearings on 22-23 January 2025, is known to us only as HN109. He applied for anonymity in this Inquiry, and was granted it.

We have since learnt that his reasons for doing so were not any worries about activists tracking him down, but concerns, even in 2023, about the hostility of officers who he had managed, and the risk of them ‘causing trouble’ for him and his family.

We heard evidence about the ‘Scutt incident’ in the Tranche 2 Phase 1 hearings a few months ago. Bob Lambert threatened and physically assaulted HN109, in front of other members of the SDS. It will be interesting to hear what all these managers have to say about each other and how effective or ineffective their individual styles of management were.

Heaven makes it clear that this will be the time for SDS managers to call in the ‘insurance policy’ and make it clear just how much senior officers knew, or didn’t know, about the unit and its officers’ behaviour.

Carlton King, self-styled ‘Black James Bond’

Heaven then moved on to talk about ‘Carlton King’, an image of whom was shown on the screen.

Described as an ‘author and prolific podcaster’, it is unsurprising that a member of the public recognised that this was an alias being used by a man called Trevor Morris, who had been an undercover officer in the SDS, before going on to work in the secret services.

As his costume shows, has cultivated a somewhat ‘glamorous’ image of himself.

As well as producing a regular podcast, he has published a book (‘Black Ops: the Incredible True Story of a British Secret Agent’) which contains an entire chapter about the SDS and more musings about the workings of Special Branch.

He makes no secret of the fact that he infiltrated a number of groups during his deployment, and spied on the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence.

The Inquiry presumably knew about this, but chose not to share this decidedly pertinent information with Core Participants, or the wider public, and when questioned, claimed that Morris needed the protection of a Restriction Order.

Since then, Mitting has made a ruling on this, and it is clear that MI5 and/or MI6 have been involved and told Mitting that he can neither confirm nor deny that Trevor Morris and ‘Carlton King’ are in fact the same man.

Heaven pointed out the obvious absurdity of this approach. The book is on sale to the public, and was published with the agreement of the ‘intelligence community’ and Home Office.

‘Carlton King’ has appeared in mainstream media reports sharing his opinions about events such as the Manchester Arena bombing. Comments left below such reports make it obvious that commenters knew of his true identity.

‘Jenny’ and ‘Bea’ have both been clear that they did not consent to sex with Trevor Morris, and consider it rape.

Morris has been utterly unrepentant about deceiving them in this way. It is noted that at no time (in either his book or podcast) has he divulged that he used his false identity to trick women into having sex with him.

Although he has done a great deal of self-promotion and publicly shared a lot of stories about his time as a spy, when Morris gave evidence to this Inquiry he claimed to suffer from problems with his memory and recall of the past.

Heaven pointed out that there is a risk of this Inquiry’s findings being undermined if it is not able to consider all the evidence that exists, and that the impact on the spycops’ victims could be ‘devastating’.

When he appeared in Tranch 2 Phase 1 hearings, Morris made many uncorroborated, outlandish allegations and displayed a degree of indifference towards the women whose human rights he had abused. Heaven suggested that perhaps his ‘nonchalance about such issues can now be understood better’ by his time in the security services. However this post-deployment history has not been officially disclosed to NSCPs, not even to the two women he deceived.

Understanding the ‘customers’

After this, she went on to discuss some other ‘procedural matters’: information that the Non State group recommend that the Inquiry seek to obtain to help it understand the true motivation and utility of SDS reporting (including more information about the ‘customers’ of this intelligence, and the relationships between the SDS/ Special Branch and others) These may include, for example, private companies, employers, foreign governments, other police forces in the UK and elsewhere.

After this, there were a few closing comments, about the delays in disclosure; the concerns raised by many NSCPs about the Inquiry being in a state of ‘crisis’ (which resulted in a recent letter to the Home Office, and request to meet with the Home Secretary).

Those who were spied upon are being told that they will have a very short time frame (potentially as little as two weeks) between receiving hundreds of jumbled pages of disclosure and having to respond to the Inquiry. This is extremely stressful, and inherently unfair.

She finished by asking that the Inquiry laid out the steps it proposed to take to prevent any ’further loss of confidence and trust’ in the process.

Tranche 2, Phase 2, Day 1

14 October 2024

The first day of the new round of Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings, setting out what to expect in the next three months.

CONTENTS

Introduction
Provisional timetable of upcoming live evidence

Opening statements: Day 1

David Barr KC (Counsel to the Inquiry)
Peter Skelton KC (Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis)
Oliver Sanders KC (Designated Lawyer’s Core Participant Group, HN122; HN1; HN32; HN69; HN39; HN109)
Neil Sheldon KC (Home Office)
Quincy Whitaker (John Burke-Monerville)
Rajiv Menon KC (Richard, Nathan and Audrey Adams)
Charlotte Kilroy KC (The Category H Core Participants)
James Scobie KC (Michael Chant, Lindsey German, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament)

Introduction

The Undercover Policing Inquiry held its ‘Tranche 2 Phase 1’ hearings in the summer of 2024. ‘Phase 2’ has just begun, two weeks later than scheduled, and these hearings are due to continue until 23rd January 2025. There are 39 days when hearings will be held. The Inquiry has scheduled some breaks.

The majority of witnesses will be civilians who were spied on by undercover officers from the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), but we are due to hear evidence from at least four of the undercovers, and five officers who worked in the unit’s back office (four of them senior managers).

This round of hearings kicked off on Monday 14th October 2024. Opening Statements were delivered online over Days 1 and 2.

Provisional timetable of upcoming live evidence

Please note that this timetable is a provisional one and may well change over the coming weeks; it’s already been altered a few times. Check the Inquiry’s website to be sure!

Click on each hearing’s title for more detailed information and timings for each day.
Day 3 (Mon 21 October)
• 2:00 PM: ZWB
Day 4 (Tue 22 October)
• 10:00 AM: Kaden Blake
Day 5 (Wed 23 October)
• 10:00 AM: HN122 ‘Neil Richardson’
Day 6 (Thu 24 October)
• 10:00 AM: Richard Adams
• 2:00 PM: John Burke-Monerville
The Inquiry takes a break for the week commencing Monday 28 October
Day 7 (Mon 4 November)
• 2:00 PM: Martyn Lowe
Day 8 (Tue 5 November)
• 10:00 AM: Dave Morris
Day 9 (Wed 6 November)
• 10:00 AM: Chris Baillee
Day 10 (Thur 7 November)
• 11:00 PM: Gabrielle Bosley
Day 11 (Mon 11 November)
• 10:00 AM: Timothy Greene
• 2:00 PM: Albert Beale
Day 12 (Tue 12 November)
• 10:00 AM: Robin Lane
Day 13 (Wed 13 November)
• 10:00 AM: Paul Gravett
Day 14 (Thu 14 November)
• 10:00 AM: Paul Gravett
• 2:00 PM: Geoff Sheppard
Day 15 (Fri 15 November)
• 10:00 AM: Geoff Sheppard
The Inquiry takes another break during the week commencing Monday 18 November
Day 16 (Tue 26 November)
• 10:00 AM: Belinda Harvey
Day 17 (Wed 27 November)
• 10:00 AM: Helen Steel
Day 18 (Thu 28 November)
• 10:00 AM: ‘Jacqui’
Day 19 (Mon 2 December)
• 10:00 AM: HN10 ‘Bob Robinson’ Bob Lambert
Day 20 (Tue 3 December)
• 10:00 AM: HN10 Robert Lambert ‘Bob Robinson’
Day 21 (Wed 4 December)
• 10:00 AM: HN10 Robert Lambert ‘Bob Robinson’
Day 22 (Thu 5 December)
• 10:00 AM: HN10 Robert Lambert ‘Bob Robinson’
Day 23 (Mon 9 December)
• 10:00 AM: ‘Callum’
• 2:00 PM: ‘Walter’
Day 24 (Tue 10 December)
• 10:00 AM: AFJ
Day 25 (Wed 11 December)
• 10:00 AM: Clare Hildreth
Day 26 (Thu 12 December)
• 10:00 AM: ‘Jessica’
Day 27 (Wed 18 December)
• 10:00 AM: HN2 Andrew Coles ‘Andy Davey’
Day 28 (Thu 19 December)
• 10:00 AM: HN2 Andrew Coles ‘Andy Davey’
Day 29 (Fri 20 December)
• 10:00 AM: HN2 Andrew Coles ‘Andy Davey’
The Inquiry takes a break for the two weeks commencing Monday 23 & 30 December
Day 28 (Mon 6 January 2025)
• 10:00 AM: Denise Fuller
Day 29 (Tue 7 January)
• 10:00 AM: HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’
Day 30 (Wed 8 January)
• 10:00 AM: HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’
Day 31 (Thu 9 January)
• 10:00 AM: HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’
Day 32 (Mon 13 January)
• 10:00 AM: HN115 DCI Tony Waite
Day 33 (Tue 14 January)
• 10:00 AM: HN115 DCI Tony Waite
Day 34 (Wed 15 January)
• 10:00 AM: HN69 DCI Malcolm MacLeod
Day 35 (Thu 16 January)
• 10:00 AM: HN32 DS Michael Couch
Day 36 (Mon 20 January)
• 10:00 AM: HN39 DCI Eric Docker
Day 37 (Tue 21 January)
• 10:00 AM: HN39 DCI Eric Docker
Day 38 (Wed 22 January)
• 10:00 AM: HN109
Day 39 (Thu 23 January)
• 10:00 AM: HN109

Opening Statements: Day 1

1) David Barr KC (Counsel to the Inquiry)

David Barr KC is the Counsel to the Inquiry (CTI), and his written Opening Statement outlines the position of the Undercover Policing Inquiry.

He was the first to address this set of hearings, known as Tranche 2, Phase 2 (T2P2).

Although Mitting and Barr were clearly in the hearing room, Core Participants who showed up were not allowed in and public access to the opening statements was ‘online only’. This was a cruel decision.

CTI’s statement included multiple accounts of predatory undercover officers lying about their ages in order to target and groom very young and vulnerable women. He described ‘cold, calculating emotional and sexual exploitation’, while the victims of these and other officers were denied the opportunity to be together at the Inquiry venue. Instead they were left isolated, listening to disturbing revelations at home.

Barr explained that T2P2 will examine the deployments of 7 ‘open’ former Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) officers (for whom at least the cover names have been made public), 11 ‘closed’ officers (whose real and cover names have been withheld, and who will give evidence in secret) and 14 former SDS managers. It will look at the infiltration of activist groups from 1983-1996. 26 members of the public have made statements and 22 will give oral evidence.

The Inquiry’s work in this period will include:

‘Whether the undercover deployments in question were capable of justification, the sexual deceit of women (both admitted and alleged), reporting on black justice campaigns, the alleged participation of undercover police officers in serious offending, potential miscarriages of justice, failure to declare the involvement of undercover officers to prosecutors or courts, violation of legal professional privilege, alleged participation in torts, the influence of UCOs within groups, the continuing use of deceased children’s identities and officer welfare will be key aspects of our investigation in this phase.

‘So too will the knowledge, attitude, actions, or inactions of managers within the SDS in relation to these and other issues. Standing back from specific events, the culture of the unit will remain an important overarching theme.’

The language Barr used is interesting. The Inquiry will investigate whether these undercover deployments were ‘capable of justification’, not whether or not they were justified. It may already be clear to Counsel to the Inquiry that the actual conduct of the unit cannot be justified. Any assessment of justification must therefore be hypothetical, ignoring the facts of the operations.

It is also encouraging that he appears to have kept the role of managers and the culture of the unit in his sights.

He focused his statement primarily on the 7 ‘open’ officers:
• HN11 Mike Chitty ‘Mike Blake’ – deployed April 1983-June 1987 into the animal rights movement in South London. Chitty will not give evidence. The Inquiry believes he lives abroad. However, interviews he gave to ‘Operation Herne’ will be published.
• HN10 Robert Lambert ‘Bob Robinson’ – infiltrated London Greenpeace, in North
London, and other groups between 1984 and 1989. CTI states ‘his ultimate target was the Animal Liberation Front.’ Lambert will give live evidence from 2-5 December.
• HN87 ‘John Lipscomb’ – successor to Chitty, who infiltrated the animal rights movement in South London between 1987 and 1990, first in Bromley then Brixton. His reporting focused on hunt saboteurs. He provided a witness statement but ‘Lipscomb’ is considered too ill to give evidence.
• HN5 John Dines ‘John Barker’ – infiltrated anarchist groups, including London Greenpeace, 1987 -1991, overlapping with and replacing Lambert. He has made witness statements, but Dines is refusing to give oral evidence. He lives abroad.
• HN122 ‘Neil Richardson’ – infiltrated the West London Branch of the Revolutionary Communist Party and then Class War, 1989 – 1993. ‘Richardson’ will give oral evidence on 23 October.
• HN2 Andrew Coles ‘Andy Davey’ – infiltrated a number of animal rights groups in South London between 1991 and 1995. Coles will give oral evidence from 18-20 December.
• HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ – infiltrated animal rights groups 1992-1996, including London Boots Action Group, London Animal Action, and the West London hunt saboteurs. Based in north-west London, he reported on activists as far afield as Liverpool and Manchester. ‘Rayner’ will give live evidence from 7-9 January 2025.

Barr addressed a number of themes:

Sexual Relationships

This was perhaps the strongest yet from Barr on sexual relationships the officers had. He addressed the relationships each officer had:

On his own admission, Chitty entered into sexual activity with female activists whilst he was undercover. This included a relationship with the woman known to the Inquiry as ‘Lizzie’.

He remained in contact with members of his target group, including ‘Lizzie’, after his deployment had ended, and this was eventually discovered. There is evidence that Detective Sergeant Chitty went so far as to propose marriage to ‘Lizzie’.

Lambert admits to having sexual relationships with at least 4 women while undercover between 1984-1989, including fathering a child with an activist known as ‘Jacqui’. Lambert has told the Inquiry that he informed his manager (DI Barber) of this pregnancy in the pub. Barber allegedly decided not to report it and left Lambert ‘to deal with the situation’. (‘Jacqui’ will give evidence on 28 November)

Lambert went on to have a nearly 2-year relationship with Belinda Harvey starting in 1987. Harvey states Lambert ‘often professed his love for her, expressed a desire to have children with her and had planned with her to settle down in a home of their own.’ She describes being ‘deeply troubled’ when Lambert suddenly claimed he had to flee the country. (Belinda Harvey will give evidence on 26 November).

Dines admits to a sexual relationship with activist Helen Steel while undercover from 1990-1992. Dines claims in his statement that he used Steel ‘to maintain his cover and obtain intelligence.’ Barr pulled no punches, describing Dines’s behaviour as ‘cold, calculating emotional and sexual exploitation.’ (Helen Steel will give evidence on 27 November).

‘Lipscomb’ admits to multiple instances of sexual activity with female activists, including ‘sexual fumbling’ while sharing beds in activist squats.

Coles is accused of having had a sexual relationship with a 19-year-old activist known as ‘Jessica’ in 1992, when he was actually 32 and married. Barr noted that Coles denies this. However his statement went on to give detailed accounts of how he initiated sexual contact and a relationship with ‘Jessica’. (‘Jessica’ will give evidence on 12 December)

Barr mentioned other women who recall unpleasant incidents where Coles ‘lunged’ at them, and chased them around. Fellow officer ‘Matt Rayner’ also confirmed in an interview that a woman he spoke to at the time described Coles as ‘creepy’ in his undercover persona:

‘it felt like she described him with a shudder.’

‘Rayner’ admits to a sexual relationship with activist Denise Fuller from 1993-1995. He describes his feelings as ‘genuine’ despite being married in his real identity. However Fuller draws attention to his contemporary intelligence reports about her which suggest his claims of ‘genuine feelings’ are a lie. (Denise Fuller will give evidence on 6 Jan 2025)

Management knowledge of sexual relationships

A key issue is the extent to which SDS managers knew about and condoned these relationships. Several officers claim managers must have been aware. DS Chitty is recorded as telling ‘Operation Herne’ that Lambert bragged about fathering a child through a relationship whilst deployed. Lambert states he believes managers knew about his relationships with both ‘Jacqui’ and Belinda.

Dines explains in his statement that ‘he believes that his managers knew about his sexual relationship with Steel.’

HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ states relationships:

‘were seen as a grey area – they were not advised or encouraged… but they were not prohibited either. This understanding was reinforced by the fact that my managers were aware of [my] situation and did not tell me to stop.’

‘Rayner’ had quite a lot to say about back-room knowledge of sexual relationships. Barr explained:

‘Rayner’ also overlapped with officers whose deployments will be considered in Tranche 3. HN26 ‘Christine Green’ [was] deployed at the same time as ‘Rayner’ into animal rights circles… ‘Rayner’ states that he knew of her ‘friendship’ with an activist ‘and assumed it was sexual… The office would have known’.

‘Rayner’ further recalls that HN14 Jim Boyling ‘Jim Sutton’ made reference to being in a relationship whilst deployed and acknowledges that he also knew that HN15 Mark Jenner ‘Mark Cassidy’ was having a sexual relationship whilst deployed.

‘Rayner’ later acted as mentor to HN16 James Thomson ‘James Straven / Kevin Crossland’, another officer who went on to form intimate relationships in his undercover identity, albeit ‘Rayner’ denies knowing about them.’

Barr’s account here is quite striking, giving one of the clearest impressions to date of how prevalent sexual relationships were within the SDS, and how generalised and widespread knowledge about them must have been within the unit.

Barr made it very clear that there will be no consideration in this Inquiry of whether these relationships could have been justified:

‘We shall need to examine the utility of the deployment in order to help answer the question whether it was capable of justification. That does not mean that we will be examining whether sexual deception was justified. It was not.’

Identity theft

‘Bob Robinson’ (Lambert) and ‘John Barker’ (Dines) were cover names stolen from the identities of deceased children.

The cover name ‘Neil Richardson’ (HN122) was derived in part from the life story of Neil Robin Martin who died aged 6.

Neil’s mother, Faith Mason, has provided a powerful witness statement which tells his story and describes the impact on her and her family of learning his identity had been used in this way. There is evidence that HN122 traveled to the area where Neil’s family lived.

Coles used the first name and date of birth of a deceased child and added the surname ‘Davey’, to form his cover name ‘Andy Davey’.

HN1 used the identity of Matthew Edward Rayner, who died of leukemia at the age of 4. Matthew’s brother has provided written evidence to the Inquiry and his older sister, Kaden Blake, will give evidence about her brother and the impact the use of his identity has had on the family. (Kaden Blake will give live evidence on 22 October)

Officers committed serious crimes

A major issue to be examined during this Tranche will be about undercover officers who incited or participated in serious crime.

Andy Coles claims he participated in animal liberations and other criminal activity to maintain his cover.

‘Matt Rayner’ is accused by Geoff Sheppard of encouraging him to use a firearm to shoot a vivisector and offering to act as driver.

Bob Lambert is accused of perpetrating an arson attack on a director’s home and writing leaflets inciting criminal acts.

Witness Chris Baillie alleges that Bob Lambert drove him to a butcher’s shop where another activist threw a brick through the window. Baillie was then arrested and convicted, while Lambert was not. (It is expected live evidence about these allegations will emerge throughout the T2 evidence hearings).

Most significantly, Lambert is accused of planting an incendiary device at the Debenham’s store in Harrow on the night of 11 July 1987. Barr noted that DS Chitty is recorded as telling ‘Operation Herne’ that he believed that DS Bob Lambert had led the cell which attacked Debenham’s stores. Core Participant Paul Gravett accuses Lambert of being

‘involved from the start and of being the person who attacked the Harrow branch.’

Geoff Sheppard also states:

‘Lambert was deeply involved and committed the attack in Harrow.’

Helen Steel and Belinda Harvey provide corroborating accounts of Lambert’s alleged involvement. Lambert claims he had no advance knowledge of the action. However, the convictions of Andrew Clarke and Geoff Sheppard for the attacks are currently under appeal ‘based upon DS Lambert’s alleged actions and undisclosed role.’

(Paul Gravett will give evidence on 13 and 14 November and Geoff Sheppard will give evidence on 14 and 15 November)

Undermining the justice system

Barr cited multiple instances where officers were arrested or appeared in court using their false identities, without disclosing their true identity or status to the court.

Lambert was arrested and bound over in court for a protest at a meat market in 1985. Documents show a senior police officer was informed of Lambert’s true identity but there is no record of the court being informed.

Dines was arrested at the Poll Tax riot in 1990 and charged under a false name. Managers directed him to fail to appear in court and ‘cancel all records’, suggesting contact with the court or prosecution.

HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ recalls giving evidence in court as a defence witness for two activists, without disclosing his true identity to the court. His manager Bob Lambert commented he had ‘behaved in a thoroughly professional manner throughout.’

Coles was arrested and charged under a false name at a hunt saboteur demonstration in 1994. His managers instructed him not to appear in court.

Barr noted that:

‘The Inquiry will explore further with SDS managers in tranche 3 [hearings next year examining 1993-2008] what this reveals about their attitude to the criminal justice system.’

He describes the hierarchy of SDS interests:

‘the first and primary interest being to ensure that deployments were not interrupted by overt involvement in the criminal justice system, even if that meant providing a false name to a court, and/or failing to provide significant information to the prosecution or a court (vis. that a defence witness was in fact a police officer).’

There are also concerning allegations about officers’ reporting and conduct towards Black justice campaigns.

The Rolan Adams Family Campaign and Trevor Monerville Defence Campaign, both involved Black teenagers who died in racist attacks. Rather than properly investigating these murders, the SDS sent officers to report on the justice campaigns.

(Richard Adams, father of Rolan Adams, and John Burke-Monerville, father of Trevor Monerville, will both give evidence on 24 October)

The Security Service

The Inquiry is also investigating the SDS’s relationship with the Security Service (MI5). Alongside CTI’s Opening Statement, the Inquiry also published the written statement by someone known only as ‘Witness Y’, on behalf of MI5.

Barr described how the Security Service’s assessment of subversion as a threat declined significantly during the T2 period.

Witness Y explains the Security Service ‘scaled back’ counter-subversion work in three steps in 1988, 1992 and 1996. By 1996, subversion was assessed as a ‘low to negligible level’ threat.

Despite this, undercover deployments into activist groups continued throughout this period. Documents show regular discussions about targeting took place between the two agencies.

A 1989 Security Service briefing described the SDS as ‘sympathetic and responsive to the needs of the Service,’ and stated it was ‘extremely important that everything possible’ be done to maintain SDS coverage of certain groups.

Justification

As noted above, despite recognising that aspects of police behaviour could never be justified, the Inquiry does intend to investigate whether the targeting and infiltration of these activist groups was ‘capable of justification’.

However, Barr noted that several officers’ statements cast doubt on whether the groups posed a serious threat.

HN87 ‘John Lipscomb’ states in his witness statement that he ‘doubted the utility of his reporting’ on animal rights activists.

HN122 opined at the end of his deployment that ‘the threat to national security from CWO and CWF was very low.’

Barr said:

‘the question that arises is… whether he should not have been deployed into these groups at all?’

An SDS report authored by HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ in 1996 asserted there were only ‘about 20’ committed Animal Liberation Front extremists in the UK and stated ‘the overt groups such as LAA [London Animal Action] are only of passing public order interest, not significant in its own right.’

In all, there was a sense in Barr’s delivery that he gave rather short shrift to the police interpretation that these deployments were justifiable. He ended a long list of misconduct allegations in Lambert’s deployment with the observation that:

‘Lambert’s deployment was regarded as an outstanding success by his managers such that he was awarded a Commissioner’s Commendation.’

However, whether the deep irony of that comment was intended is difficult to assess. Barr’s delivery is always very dry; and what the Chair of the Inquiry’s view will be of the justification or not of these blighted operations remains to be seen.

More evidence uploaded

Barr also mentioned several hundred new pieces of evidence being uploaded onto the Inquiry website.

These include correspondence between the United States Air Force and the Ministry of Defence in 1983, on the subject of ongoing protests at RAF Upper Heyford and the potential ‘political repercussions’ if an American serviceman were to shoot a British peace protester on the base.

Another item is a report which lawyers acting for the ‘Category H’ (individuals in relationships with undercover officers) victims had recommended for Mitting’s reading list back in Tranche 1, and the lawyer acting for the Met referred to in the last set of hearings.

Entitled ‘The police in action’, this is a detailed study carried out by academic researchers and published by the Policy Studies Institute in 1983. It describes the pervasive sexism and racism found in the force.

2) Peter Skelton KC

Next we heard Peter Skelton KC deliver an Opening Statement on behalf of the ‘Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis’, ie the Metropolitan Police as an institution.

A longer, written, Statement is available on the website; this was a much shorter, oral, submission.

Skelton only spoke for around 15 minutes, but used much of this time to apologise on behalf of the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) to various Non State Core Participants.

Apology number 1

He began by thanking two more families for speaking about the distress they had suffered after making the shocking discovery that spycops had stolen the identities of their loved ones.

The Met apologised to Francis Bennett and Honor Robson for the theft of their brother Michael Anthony Hartley’s identity by HN12, and to Marva Lewis and Judy Lewis for the theft of their brother Anthony Lewis’ identity by HN78. There were assurances that this sick practice is no longer being used to create cover identities, and ‘will never be used again’.

Apology number 2

There were also apologies for ‘Bea’ and ‘Jenny’, two women who gave ‘moving accounts’ of the impact of discovering they had been deceived into sexual relationships by HN78 Trevor Morris during Phase 1.

According to Skelton, the Met was ‘profoundly disappointed’ by his failure to ‘take responsibility for his actions and to apologise for the hurt he has caused them’.

Apology number 3

Finally, apologies were made to two Black families whose justice campaigns were spied on: the families of Rolan Adams and Trevor Monerville. The Met now say that they were spied on due to undercovers ‘following their existing targets into them’, but admit that this reporting should have stopped earlier and the information gathered should not have been retained.

Smearing the animal rights movement

Apologies over, Skelton went on to talk about the police’s justification for infiltrating animal rights groups. He spoke of a growth in ‘militant’ animal rights activism during the 1980s and ‘90s, describing direct action as ‘serious crime’.

He name-dropped groups such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and Animal Rights Militia (ARM), and suggested that these ‘attacks’ were ‘violent’, ‘prevalent’ and ‘widespread’, claiming this justified the deployment of long-term undercovers in the animal rights movement.

However, he went on to acknowledge that these deployments were marred by officer misconduct, particularly regarding deceitful sexual relationships. Every single officer sent in to the animal rights movement during this period (1983-1992) engaged in sexual activity while undercover.

Apology number 4

The first was HN10 Bob Lambert, whose deployment lasted over 4 years. During this time, he had relationships with at least four women, fathering a child with one of them. The Met now also apologised to that child, now a man known as ‘TBS’, for the distress he has suffered

Details were given of the other officers:

• HN11 Mike Chitty, who had a sexual relationship with ‘Lizzie’ between 1985-87, and has admitted other ‘sexual impropriety’
• HN87 ‘John Lipscomb’ admitted to sexual activity with at least four women
• HN5 John Dines had a serious long-term relationship with Helen Steel
• HN2 Andy Coles had a relationship with ‘Jessica’
• HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ had a relationship with Denise Fuller.

Apology number 5

Skelton reaffirmed that the Met ‘unreservedly apologises’ for these relationships, and the ‘widespread culture of sexism and misogyny’ they represent. Again, there is disappointment about the failure of some of these officers to provide oral evidence and/or witness statements to this Inquiry.

According to the police, and contradicting the level of ignorance claimed by previous witnesses, SDS managers knew, or should have known, about these relationships. There should have been ‘vigilance, critical enquiry, explicit prohibition and training’ but there wasn’t.

More management failures

The Met’s statement details a number of instances of undercovers being arrested, and sometimes charged and taken to court in their false identities.

They now admit that proper disclosure should have been made, to investigators as well as prosecutors and courts, and that miscarriages of justice are the inevitable result of their failure to do so. The unit’s managers failed in their duties and responsibilities, to protect fair trials and not allow courts to be misled.

Skelton also made some comments about the welfare of undercover officers, pointing out that the SDS managers could have been more proactive about intervening to offer them support (perhaps with trained psychologists). He stated that each manager had their own unique style of management, meriting individual examination, but admitted that there were ‘systemic management failings’ that the Met could take corporate responsibility for.

One of these was a failure to intervene when it came to the ‘overall tone and content’ of reporting. Another was what seems to have been an ‘aversion to discipling wrongdoing’, which, coupled with commendations and praise for Lambert, contributed to a growing culture of impunity for increasingly serious misconduct.

Justification

Before ending, Skelton reiterated that the animal rights movement was viewed as ‘subversive’ and dangerous, and the covert infiltration of these groups was therefore necessary. He suggested that any final assessment of the justification and value of these deployments, and the reports they generated, could only be done by consulting the ‘wider intelligence community’, and mentioned the statement from ‘Witness Y’.

3) Oliver Sanders KC

Our final speaker in the morning session was Oliver Sanders KC, who represents the ‘Designated Lawyers’ group of former officers.

These are two undercover officers, whose real names are being kept secret: HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ and HN122 ‘Neil Richardson’.

The rest worked behind the scenes. These were HN32 DS Michael Couch, and three managers: HN39 Michael Docker, HN69 (Malcolm MacLeod), and HN109 (whose real name we don’t know).

Again, there is a much longer written Opening Statement but this was quite a short speech.

Whinging about the Inquiry itself

Sanders began by complaining on behalf of his clients about the Inquiry and how it was being conducted.

To the amazement and disgust of listeners, who reacted furiously on social media, he ended up spending approximately half of his time on this topic. He claimed that the Inquiry was now a ‘two tier process’, and that former officers were being maltreated, ‘belittled and sneered at simply because they served as police officers in a different era’.

They felt that they were being subjected to ‘heavy adversarial challenge’ (translation: they were asked questions, by David Barr on behalf of the Inquiry – unlike most public inquiries, the Non State Core Participants in this one are not being allowed to ask questions, either themselves or via their own lawyers).

In comparison, they thought that ‘civilian witnesses’ (i.e. those they spied on) were being allowed to share their experiences without being challenged at all (which viewers of the Tranche 1 hearings will know is not true).

He complained about the length of time each hearing took, and about the fact that some of the recent hearings in the summer went on past 6pm (going so far as to produce a table in the written document detailing exactly how many minutes each witness spent giving evidence).

He pointed out that many of the officers are now in their 70s and so a long day is tiring for them – obviously many of those they spied on are also getting older now, as is Mitting himself! – and was anxious to tell us how they had ‘voluntarily given up their time’ to provide witness statements.

Many of the Non State Core Participants have still not received any disclosure from the Inquiry, or the police, despite repeatedly requesting their files for the past ten years. As a result, even though they were involved in groups known to have been spied on, they may never find out the identity of the undercovers who infiltrated those groups (because these officers have been granted full anonymity).

In Sanders’ view, it’s a waste of time to give space to anyone who can’t specify which officer reported on them. He tells us that the Inquiry need not bother hearing oral evidence from such members of the public ‘simply for the sake of it’.

He went on to say some stuff about how public order policing wasn’t just about violence and riots, but about preventing any disruption to a ‘tranquil state of affairs’.

Sexual relationships are not the same as each other

He started well, saying that ‘all sexual misconduct’ by officers was wrong, and should be condemned, not condoned. But he quickly went on to tell us that his clients are upset that their sexual activity (described variously as sexual fumblings, one-night stands and oral sex) might be thought of as some kind of ‘sexual relationship’. It seems they are keen not to be seen as ‘on a par with Bob Lambert’.

Spycops campaigners were astounded to hear him use what was quickly termed ‘the Bill Clinton defence’.

According to him, as so far, we only know about six officers committing some kind of sexual misconduct, the other 30 who served in the SDS during these years are therefore all innocent of such deeds. He claims this would have made it harder for managers to spot the problem.

Furthermore, he says his clients don’t recognise the description – of an institutional ‘culture of sexism and misogyny’ – as something they were part of in the 80s (despite the Met themselves using these words).

He went on to talk about more about ‘sexual attraction’, saying it wasn’t just heterosexual male officers who committed sexual misconduct (as we’ll hear about women officers in future Tranches, and there is one known case of a gay male officer infiltrating the far-right).

Tradecraft Manual

Sanders ended by saying that he was keen to ‘dispel any myths’ about the SDS ‘Tradecraft Manual’ that’s come to light since this Inquiry started.

According to him, it’s just an ‘unfinished draft’, and was never ‘officially endorsed’. However one of the authors of this text, Andy Coles, is scheduled to make an appearance as a witness in December, so he can be asked about this.

4) Neil Sheldon KC

After lunch, we heard from Neil Sheldon KC, who represents the Home Office. The Home Office is considered a Core Participant in the Inquiry, and separately is responsible for funding the Inquiry – no conflict of interests there!

We heard that the Home Secretary awaits the findings and recommendations of this Inquiry with great interest, and has noted Mitting’s ‘public commitment’ to wrap it all up by producing a final report before the end of 2026.

Interestingly, the current Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, is the first Labour Home Secretary since this Inquiry was first announced by Theresa May. There have been many reshuffles since then, with six different Tories occupying the post in the intervening years, but as we’ve already heard, many Labour MPs were reported on by spycops, and it’s entirely possible that they targeted Cooper (or her father, a prominent trade unionist) at some point.

Their written Opening Statement is online. This has been written to address both Parts of Tranche 2, citing the 2024 General Election as their reason for not submitting a separate statement for Part 1. They hope to add more evidence before Mitting reaches Tranche 5.

It’s all changed now

They fully agree with Mitting’s earlier comments, that:

‘the arrangements for overseeing undercover policing deployments are now very different from those which obtained in the past’.

In the Tranche 2 era (1983-1992), there was no statute law in place to govern the use of undercover officers. Since then, we have seen the enaction in 2000 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), followed by the Investigatory Powers Act of 2016. The fact that undercover units’ abuses continued well after RIPA came into force shows that it had no real effect on political undercover policing. The problem isn’t what the rules say, but that polce officers ignore the rules with impunity.

Sehldon said that any use of undercovers nowadays must be considered ‘necessary and proportionate’, and be formally authorised at a more senior level than before. Deployments lasting longer than 12 months require the approval of a judicial commissioner.

The law was further amended in 2021, and there is now even more guidance governing criminal conduct by what are now termed ‘Covert Human Intelligence Sources’

The Home Office is keen to prove that ‘the picture is dramatically different today’ from how it was in the years 1983–1992.

Home Office ignorance

Sheldon went on to make a few comments about the evidence seen so far. The Home Office provided annual authorisation – and funding – for the SDS, and correspondence up till 1989 shows that in return they received what he terms ‘a high level description’ of the unit’s work, with reassurances about issues such as officer welfare and supervision, and a few examples of the spycops’ successes.

However, they state that they did not seek to direct or monitor the way the unit worked and had very limited knowledge of the actual operations. It was suggested that ‘operational partners’ deliberately kept any concerns to themselves, as they were anxious to avoid the Home Office examining Special Branch/ the SDS too closely.

He says the Home Office did express a direct interest in two particular movements during this era; anti-fascist action and the animal rights movement. He understands that this set of hearings will focus on the officers who infiltrated the animal rights movement.

He reiterated that the Home Office was not aware of any of the ‘deeply disturbing behaviour and conduct’ (by which he meant sexual misconduct, the theft of deceased children’s identities, and any conduct which might have led to miscarriages of justice).

Back in 2020, the Opening Statement provided by the then-Home Secretary referred to a report produced by Stephen Taylor in 2015. According to this, a small number of Home Office officials knew about the SDS’s operations (especially in 1983-86), the identity of some of the groups being targeted and the type of information being gathered about them.

However they were not aware of the issues listed above, and there has been no new evidence since to suggest otherwise (partly because the Home Office has been purged of every document relating to the SDS).

Requests for the Inquiry

The Home Office would like witnesses who make references to ‘the Government’ to be pressed to clarify which branch of the government they are referring to, and not be allowed to use ‘the Home Office’ as a shorthand for the entire apparatus of the British State.

Sheldon’s final point was about an assertion made by HN78 Trevor Morris ‘Anthony “Bobby” Lewis (also aka Carlton King) in his witness statement, about the Home Office deeming the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) to be a ‘subversive organisation’.

When questioned by Counsel to the Inquiry in July, Morris was unable to provide any evidence of this. The Home Office hopes the Inquiry continues to ‘rigorously test’ and seek corroboration of any such allegations in future.

5) Quincy Whitaker

Quincy Whitaker appeared on behalf of John Burke-Monerville, who has also submitted a written Opening Statement for this Phase.

What happened to Trevor

 

Whitaker began by relating the tragic story of what happened to John’s son, Trevor Monerville. On New Year’s Eve 1986, as a teenager of 19, he went out with his aunts to a nightclub in Hackney. He was seen outside the club, then disappeared, and was found, badly injured and semi-conscious, inside a car parked on a nearby estate.

Instead of taking him to hospital, the police arrested him. His father visited Stoke Newington police station while out looking for his son, and was told he was not there – a lie the police later apologised for.

Over the next few days, Trevor was transferred from custody to Homerton Hospital’s A&E unit and back again several times. Because he was too unwell to attend court, a magistrate visited him in his cell to conduct a remand hearing. From here he was sent to prison – HMP Brixton – with yet more hospital visits, culminating in emergency brain surgery on 6 January.

Medical evidence suggests that his injuries, including the blood clot in his brain, and the memory loss and epileptic fits that plagued him for the rest of his life, were caused by him being beaten ‘multiple times’.

The Crown Prosecution Service finally dropped the charges against him on 8th January, but despite this, Trevor was frequently stopped by the police. By the end of 1988 he had been arrested five more times, although each case was dropped or ended in an acquittal.

His family were so desperate to help him escape this near-constant police harassment that they put out a fundraising appeal to help him leave the country. He lived in St Lucia for a number of years, but had to come back to London when his epilepsy worsened.

In 1994, Trevor was stabbed 10 times on his way home, in front of witnesses, and died as a result. Nobody has been brought to justice for his murder.

Another of John’s sons, Joseph Burke-Monerville, was shot and killed in 2013, but due to police failings, those responsible were never put on trial.

A third son, David Bello-Monerville, was fatally stabbed in 2019, and the perpetrators found guilty the following year.

As Whitaker put it, this family’s entire lives have been ‘blighted by tragedy, stonewalling, and the consequences of endemic racism’.

The family’s campaign for justice

Understandably, the family have been asking for answers, and accountability from the police, ever since Trevor was first injured, all those years ago. They set up the Justice for Trevor Monerville Campaign (JTMC) and campaigned for a public inquiry.

The entire family have suffered police harassment. Even John’s mother, in her 70s at the time, was arrested on trumped up charges, and successfully sued the police for malicious prosecution.

Burke-Monerville met with ‘Operation Herne’ (an internal police investigation into the spycops operations) in 2016, and was shown a document which mentioned the JTMC, listing it as a group which had been ‘directly penetrated, or closely monitored’ in 1987.

They told him that this didn’t mean that officers had infiltrated his family, just attended meetings around the campaign, adding that the SDS might have made it up anyway, to help justify their operations.

According to them, there were no other records relating to JTMC; they had all been destroyed. The Met then sent him an apology for retaining that document, but not for spying on him and his family in the first place.

More reports have come to light since then, making it clear that the campaign was spied on for at least 9 years. These date from March 1987 – a report in which HN95 Stefan Scutt ‘Stefan Wesolowski’ describes the JTMC and its entirely legal aims – up till February 1996 – a report into preparations for a memorial event on the second anniversary of Trevor’s death.

Interestingly, this last report shows that the campaign had now been allocated a Special Branch reference number of the kind given to people with files for active ongoing monitoring – John wonders why.

We now know that another undercover officer, HN15 Mark Jenner ‘Mark Cassidy’ attended the first such memorial, in March 1995, something John considers a ‘gross violation’ of his family’s privacy.

Burke-Monerville also learnt for the first time in 2016 that the inquest into Trevor’s death had resumed in 1996, concluding on the same day. None of the family were there. The police told the Coroner that they could not be contacted, and so they were neither invited nor informed. John had lived and worked at the same addresses for many years, and the intelligence report proves that the police knew exactly where the family were in 1996.

He would like this Inquiry to get to the truth of all of these matters. He wants to know why his family’s campaign was targeted by the police, instead of being assisted in their quest for justice. He is keen to hear from anyone with information about any of his sons’ deaths, describing racism in the police as ‘the rotten thread that mats these tragedies and police failings together’.

Despite what the police have said, it is clear to Burke-Monerville that his family was directly targeted by the spycops. There is no evidence that the campaign posed a threat to public order, or that it had been infiltrated by ‘left wing extremists’ (two reasons they’ve given in the past to explain why such groups might have been spied on).

He believes that police racism ‘was at the heart of the police brutality and corruption that the black community experienced’ and ‘underlay the targeting of black justice groups seeking accountability’ for this.

The police don’t like being criticised or held to account

Whitaker drew the Inquiry’s attention to the Met’s ‘excessive interest’ in any groups which criticised the police, especially those who sought to raise concerns about institutional or individual racism in the police.

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, was reminded that he’d said that he ‘must examine the possibility that the deployments into black justice groups were influenced by conscious or unconscious racism’.

The Inquiry has now published excerpts from the Met Commissioner’s annual reports (covering the years 1983-1994), and these provide evidence of the police’s attitudes towards any groups seeking accountability for police misconduct, who are all seen as ‘anti-police’.

For example, the 1985 report includes a section entitled ‘Divisive Activity’ and later draws a distinction between statutory police ‘consultative’ groups (set up in the wake of the Scarman report) and the other, independent, police monitoring groups, often associated with the GLC Police Committee, described here as ‘purposively hostile to the police’ and not ‘constructive’ enough in their criticism.

Whitaker noted that there was detailed evidence of police officers using extremely crude, derogatory, racist language, and that this went unchallenged, with displays of racist prejudice being ‘expected, accepted and even fashionable’, according to the 1983 report mentioned by Barr this morning. More recent reports (such as Baroness Casey’s review in 2023) find that the Met continues to suffer from a problem with institutional racism.

Now in his 80s, John Burke-Monerville is tired, and considers this Inquiry his last chance for the truth; he hopes it can provide some answers so that future generations don’t have to go through what he has been through.

6) Rajiv Menon KC

Rajiv Menon KC appeared next, representing Richard, Nathan and Audrey Adams, yet another Black family who had been forced to campaign for justice. A racist attack on two of their sons in 1991 resulted in the death of Rolan Adams. Nathan survived this attack, and together with Richard and Audrey, his parents, has submitted a written Opening Statement to the Inquiry.

The origins of racist policing

Menon began by stating that ‘one of the defining features of British policing in the last 50 plus years has been its racism’, and went on to provide the Inquiry with a long and comprehensive list of how this institutionalised racism manifested itself.

He explained that this embedded racism had its origins in Britain’s Empire. A significant number of British police officers in the 20th century – including many Metropolitan Police Commissioners and other senior officers – had backgrounds in colonial and/or military policing.

As Menon pointed out, these colonial police forces were often used to enforce ‘racial, discriminatory and authoritarian laws’. Any opposition to British rule was viewed as ‘sedition’. The police ’had paramilitary training and draconian powers’ and were rarely held to account for abusing those powers.

As the Empire shrank in size, many of these men came back to Britain and took up posts in the Met and other police forces around the UK, binging these attitudes with them.

In Menon’s submissions:

‘Sir Kenneth Newman’s reign as Metropolitan Police Commissioner was a particularly grim time.’

During these years (1982-87) those who opposed racist policing, young black people in particular, were targeted and blamed for the public’s lack of confidence in the force.

Undercover policing was ’blighted by the same racism that blighted every other area of policing’ and there is a danger of this Inquiry ‘reproducing this blight’ unless it starts seriously considering the impact that racism had on the spycops operations.

The attack on the Adams boys

The way that the Adams family were spied on, following the racist murder of Rolan and racist attack on Nathan, are a clear example of the way that racism affected the police response.

A photo of the Adams family was shown on screen, as Menon explained the events of 21st February 1991. Rolan and Nathan (aged 15 and 14) had gone to a youth club in Thamesmead to play table tennis. On their way home, they were chased by a gang of 12-15 white youths, shouting racist abuse, who caught up with Rolan and stabbed him in the throat. Nathan was chased but managed to get away, and came back to find Rolan dying.

This was not the first case of racist violence in the area. Other black boys were attacked, hospitalised and in some cases killed in similar racist group attacks. Community groups, such as the Greenwich Action Committee Against Racial Attacks (GACARA), the local council’s Racial Equality Committee and even youth workers from the youth club, had all tried to raise the problem but the police failed to act, or even to recognise the threat posed by far-right and racist criminal groups.

The gang responsible for this incident – who called themselves the ‘Nazi Turn Outs’ – were all known to the police, and described as ‘something of a British National Party (BNP) youth group’.

Even after Rolan’s murder, they were arrested and released on bail, and only one of them was charged with murder. Menon compared this with the police and Crown Prosecution Service’s enthusiastic over-use of ‘joint enterprise’ against other groups of young people. Nobody was ever charged with attacking Nathan.

The police were reluctant to treat it as a racist crime, insisting that it was some kind of deracialised dispute over territory. However the trial judge recognised that this was a racially motivated murder, and said so in his summing up.

Nathan began to be harassed by the police shortly after the attack: as well as being stopped and searched, he was arrested and told that he was banned from going to Thamesmead. The police demonstrated their hostility towards the Adams family in other ways, for example, stopping friends and relatives on their way to visit them.

The Rolan Adams Family Campaign was set up in the aftermath of Rolan’s murder to support his family as they fought for justice. A campaign leaflet was shown on screen. They organised memorial marches and demonstrations, and campaigned for the closure of the controversial BNP bookshop. They reached out to other victims of racist violence and prejudice.

They did not trust PC Fisher, the ‘Family Liason Officer’ assigned to them. They felt that he only pretended to show any ‘empathy’ and tried to ‘tease out information’ from them when he showed up, unannounced, at their home.

They kept getting threatening phone calls, gloating about Rolan’s death, and just a few months after the murder, were advised by the local council that they were in such danger that they should move house immediately. Why did the police not offer them any protection from these threats?

Richard Adams wants an explanation for why the police chose to spy on him and his wife, parents who had just lost a child, law-abiding citizens who just wanted justice after the murder of their son. He asks if a white family would have been spied on in these circumstances.

He says that they long suspected that they were being spied on and that their phones were bugged, but were told they were being paranoid. Nathan now says ‘learning I had been spied on made me a bit sane again’. He goes on to add:

‘I want the Inquiry to get to the truth, to be transparent and to hold people in high places accountable’.

The Adams family feel let down by the police, the justice system and politicians. They believe that if the police had taken more action to tackle racist violence, they could have prevented other murders, like those of Rohit Duggal and Stephen Lawrence, in the following years.

‘Puzzled and angry’ about this Inquiry

They are ‘puzzled and angry’ about a number of issues. They say they have received so little disclosure that don’t know much more now than they did back in 2019, when they were granted Core Participant status.

They reiterate that there is no way that this Inquiry can possibly ascertain the role and contribution of undercover policing towards detecting or preventing racist crime, something which should be of ‘overwhelming public importance’, unless it openly and publicly investigates the undercover policing of far-right and racist criminal groups.

Mitting previously told them that the issue of racist criminal groups would not be covered in Tranche 2 because the SDS did not infiltrate such groups, begging the question ‘why not?’ SDS managers should be asked to explain their targeting decisions.

They note that the Inquiry’s Terms of Reference clearly state that it will:

‘include, but not be limited to, the undercover operations of the Special Demonstration Squad and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit’ (NPOIU)’

The Inquiry is still due to examine undercover policing by units other than the SDS and NPOIU, in Tranche 5, and the Adams family would like confirmation that this issue will be covered then.

So far we have only heard about one deployment involving a far-right group, and this was about HN56 ‘Alan “Nick” Nicholson’ spying on a ‘fairly inactive BNP branch’ in Essex. Mitting has said that the infiltration of far-right groups will only be discussed in ‘closed’ hearings.

The Adams family contend that it is important to hear from as many spycops as possible in open, public hearings. They says there is no value to Non State Core Participants, or the wider public, in the Chair hearing these witnesses’ evidence in secret, and using Restriction Orders to prevent everyone else from accessing it. They ask again for a proper explanation of this level of secrecy in what is supposed to be a ‘public inquiry’.

Mitting popped up on screen to respond to Menon (as always). He confirmed that the SDS had indeed infiltrated right wing groups from the 1980s onwards, but repeated that ‘for reasons that I would hope would be obvious’ that he still intended to hear about these in closed hearings.

For most of us, it is not obvious why this material cannot be heard in public. Plenty of other officers have been granted anonymity and the Inquiry is using screens and voice modulation to protect some from identification. It is unclear why this cannot be done for these deployments, and what the real risks would be.

7) Charlotte Kilroy KC

Charlotte Kilroy KC represents the ‘Category H’ Core Participants (women who were deceived into relationships by spycops).

‘Married 32-year-old undercover police officer (UCO) Bob Lambert dropped five years from his age when, in 1985, he stole a deceased child’s identity as his ‘undercover persona’. During a four-year deployment… he had sexual relationships with four women, fathering a child…

‘In 1987 Lambert’s close SDS colleague 32-year-old UCO John Dines also dropped five years from his age when he stole a deceased child’s identity to infiltrate the same group of activists. He befriended Helen Steel when she was 22 and pursued her as a 24-year-old with propositions of love for months… eventually persuading her in 1990 to enter into a relationship…

‘Dines trained UCOs Andy Coles and HN1… [who] assumed the names and birthdays of deceased children, also losing more than 5 years from their real age…

‘Married police officer HN1, had a year-long sexual relationship with Denise Fuller in his cover name ‘Matt Rayner’…

‘When aged 32, married police officer Andy Coles had a year-long sexual relationship with 19-year-old Jessica, for whom he was her first boyfriend. He has since risen to high ranks within the police…’

The opening paragraphs of Charlotte Kilroy KC’s written Opening Statement hit like punches to the guts. She outlines the misconduct of SDS officers, one after another, until we were left with the impression of something more akin to a predatory sex ring than a unit investigating crime: officers knocked years off their ages and used their training and trade craft to groom and manipulate young and vulnerable women.

In her oral opening statement, Kilroy looked at the devastating impact of that abuse. Her statement focussed on four women: Belinda Harvey, Helen Steel, Denise Fuller, and ‘Jessica’, all of whom will give evidence in the coming months.

Kilroy highlighted the deeply personal and long-lasting trauma caused by the deceptive relationships, exposing the systemic issues of misogyny and institutional indifference within the Special Demonstration Squad and the Metropolitan Police Service.

Bob Lambert and Belinda Harvey

Bob Lambert, a 32-year-old married officer, fathered a child with a woman named ‘Jacqui’ while infiltrating activist groups, before starting a relationship with Belinda Harvey, who was not involved in any of the groups targeted by the SDS.

Harvey, a 24-year-old aspiring accountant, met Lambert at a party in 1987. Lambert, using the cover name ‘Bob Robinson’, quickly pursued her, initiating a romantic relationship within days.

He manipulated her emotionally, altering her lifestyle and encourage her to abandon her career aspirations. Over two years, Lambert maintained the deception, making Harvey believe she had found her life partner.

SDS managers were fully aware of Lambert’s behaviour. They knew he had fathered a child with another woman during his deployment. Kilroy explained:

‘For the Metropolitan Police and SDS management, Belinda’s life and body had little value’

John Dines and Helen Steel

Dines, another married officer, deployed alongside Lambert, targeted Helen Steel, a 22-year-old environmental and social justice campaigner. Ten years older than Steel, Dines befriended her in 1987, apparently at Lambert’s suggestion, and mounted an elaborate campaign to seduce her.

Like Lambert, Dines used various tactics to manipulate Steel, including fabricating stories about his parents’ deaths and even staging a fake arrest to gain her sympathy. Once Steel succumbed to his advances, Dines showered her with love notes and promises of a future together. The relationship lasted two years.

When the time came for Dines to exit his deployment, he pretended to have a breakdown, drawing out his disappearance over several months, even after his deployment ended, leaving Steel devastated.

Kilroy emphasised the cruelty of Dines’ actions, noting that Steel spent years searching for him, genuinely concerned for his well-being, unaware that his entire identity was a fabrication. The SDS, rather than offering Steel any protection or compensation, assisted Dines by moving him and his family to Australia to avoid discovery.

Dines has shown no remorse for his actions, filling his witness statement with insults and false allegations against Steel, furthering her suffering. Kilroy described Dines as a man with ‘so little empathy for other human beings and so much hatred for women,’ calling for a closer examination of how someone so callous could be allowed to operate unchecked.

‘Matt Rayner’ and Denise Fuller

Like Lambert and Dines, ‘Matt Rayner’ exploited Denise Fuller’s vulnerabilities, using her mental health concerns as a means of gaining her affections. He portrayed himself as caring and supportive, but his reports to his SDS colleagues are filled with sarcasm and contempt.

‘Rayner’ initiated a sexual relationship with Fuller immediately after a traumatic life event, and reported on her continuously throughout that relationship, which lasted more than a year. He was encouraged by his managers and his relationship with Fuller was no secret within the unit.

Kilroy highlighted the ongoing injustice Fuller faced, pointing out that Rayner had managed to conceal his real name from both Fuller and the public, maintaining his privacy while she continued to suffer the emotional and psychological consequences of his deception.

Andy Coles and Jessica

The final case Kilroy discussed was that of Andy Coles, who, at the age of 32, posed as a 24-year-old and began a relationship with ‘Jessica’, a vulnerable 19 year old, having had a difficult childhood.

Coles used manipulative tactics to gain her trust, visiting uninvited and hanging around until he could initiate a relationship. Coles groomed Jessica into an awkward sexual relationship – her first – which lasted a year. ‘Jessica’s’ lack of confidence made it difficult for her to resist Coles’ advances.

Coles had since risen to high ranks within the police, becoming head of training for the Association of Chief Police Officers and later deputy Police and Crime Commissioner, all the while callously denying the relationship with Jessica and trying to discredit her with false claims.

Difficult and uncomfortable questions

Kilroy then went on to discuss the ‘difficult and uncomfortable questions’ arising from the evidence, which go beyond the misogyny and sexism of the police and the culpability of individual undercovers and SDS managers. Misogyny alone cannot explain the way the officers behaved.

There is a further sinister and disturbing dimension: while undercover, officers were liberated from ordinary moral codes and:

‘they indulged themselves in a wide range of fantasies, apparently untrammelled by any sense of moral or ethical responsibilities towards other people…

‘They toyed with their victims’ feelings. They often wielded the extraordinary power they were given with breathtaking cruelty or recklessness…

‘Their experiments with these women have left a trail of emotional devastation which continues to reverberate up until the present day.’

Kilroy made the point that undercover deployment in alternative personae effectively released undeercovers from the moral constraints and supervision ordinarily applied by their communities and families, thereby unleashing:

‘a range of dark behaviour for which the men faced no real consequences.’

The SDS leadership, along with the higher echelons in the Met, the Home Office and MI5, should all have been aware that the serious dangers inherent in this kind of undercover operation means such long-term deployments are unlikely to ever be appropriate. They certainly could never be justified in the context in which they were used by the SDS.

It is deeply concerning that they experimented with the lives of the general public and either were not aware, or did not care enough to avoid the obvious dangers.

Kilroy concluded:

‘the Commissioner suggests that the SDS’s infiltration of what he describes as the militant aspects of the animal rights movement was justified, but marred by the misconduct of its officers. He also suggests further justification comes from the evidence of Witness Y, for MI5.

‘This is wrong. It indicates the Commissioner still does not appreciate the serious inherent risks involved in these kinds of long-term deployments. Such deployments are too intrusive and too dangerous ever to be justified in this kind of context.’

The ‘James Bond’ effect

Kilroy also highlighted the role of MI5 in ‘soliciting and perpetuating the conduct of UCOs which led to the abuse of women’.

MI5 were ‘eager and appreciative consumers’ of SDS intelligence and ‘they must have been aware of the tactics used’.

She argued that MI5’s encouragement caused officers to believe they were domestic James Bonds:

‘There is no doubt though that many revelled in the perception that they were a “secret and reliable source”. The idea that they could, like Mr Bond, play fast and loose with both women and the rules seems to have been a powerful fantasy for more than one UCO.’

The culture of ‘backing up’

Kilroy notes that many undercover officers:

‘continue to conceal their own sexual misconduct or that of their colleagues. To this day they feel little or no remorse or empathy for the Cat H CPs [women deceived into relationships by undercover officers].’

She notes how much other undercovers and managers must have known about the relationships and the fact that:

‘the longstanding culture of “backing up” which requires police officers to cover up for each other, even when there has been wrongdoing, continues to take priority over the public interest’.

Eliminating this culture must become an Metropolitan Police goal.

Apologies

The women deceived into relationships are critical of the lack of genuine apologies or acceptance of responsibility from most of the undercover officers.

Coles denies the relationship occurred, Chitty and Dines have declined to cooperate with the Inquiry. Trevor Morris refused to apologise when given the opportunity to do so. Even those who have offered apologies, like Lambert and ‘Matt Rayner’, have done so in ways these Core Participants consider insincere or inadequate.

They welcomed the apologies and admissions made by the Commissioner for the Metropolitan Police in his opening statement, including accepting that at least nine SDS undercovers, including all the officers targeting animal rights campaigns, had engaged in sexual activity with women in this period, which were, in the Met’s own words:

‘a gross violation of the women’s dignity and human rights’.

However, Kilroy noted it:

‘should not have taken until 2024, well over a decade since the revelations about police misconduct became public, for these apologies and admissions to be forthcoming.’

Taking a trauma-informed approach

Kilroy ended her statement by highlighting the profound trauma caused to the women by engaging engaging with the Inquiry itself. It was always going to be hard to read and respond to the evidence of the undercovers who abused them, and to confront their abusers in hearings.

But this inevitable pain has been compounded by lengthy delays followed by extreme pressure to produce evidence in short time frames.

They have been distressed by strict rules prohibiting them from communicating with each other, disregard for their privacy concerns, and disparities in the approach taken to police witnesses.

They are disappointed that no panel members with relevant experience will be appointed to consider recommendations.

They do not consider that the Inquiry has taken a trauma-informed approach, which recognises their special need as victims for fairness and due process. They have suffered as a result.

‘They continue to hope that improvements can be made to the Inquiry process which properly recognise their status as victims, and accord them the special care and respect they need.’

8) James Scobie KC

To end the day, we heard brief opening submissions from James Scobie KC, representing the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), a former leading member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Lindsey German, and Michael Chant of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). The Inquiry has published a written Opening Statement.

Scobie already made opening submissions on behalf of these clients in Tranche 2 Phase 1 hearings earlier this year, and plans to make more in future. Today’s submissions relate to CND, specifically addressing the continued attempts by both the security services and the police to justify the infiltration of this group.

Those justifications are not supported by the evidence that has now been released. The security service witness, known only as ‘Witness Y’, weakly claims that CND was assessed to have been infiltrated by communists and that it took MI5 until 1985 to work out this wasn’t true.

However, the SDS assessment in February 1982 was that the Communist Party’s influence within CND, and in particular its national council, had waned quite dramatically and was unlikely to grow again. MI5 agreed with that assessment. Witness Y conceded that MI5 did not consider CND to be a ‘subversive’ organisation. So why were they still being spied on?

Witness Y tries to imply that spying on the peace movement was more acceptable then than it would be nowadays. But as early as 1963, Lord Denning said that for most British people it would be:

‘intolerable to us to have anything in the nature of a Gestapo or Secret Police, to snoop into all that we do’.

Spying on CND would have been considered an unacceptable intrusion, a waste of resources and an egregious example of state interference in the democratic process, even at the time.

The most damning proof of that, Scobie asserts:

‘is the Security Service’s own collusion in deceiving the public by stating that they and the Special Branch did not cover law-abiding non-violent activities like CND activities. They plainly did.’

Scobie highlighted the ‘evidential void’ surrounding the decision to target CND:

‘The senior police officers in charge of the SDS between 1981 and 1986 have not assisted the Inquiry. Most of the officers who managed CND deployments have passed away. The documents associated with their period as managers disclosed by the Met Police and Security Services are silent as to both justification and authorisation.’

Chief Inspector Malcolm MacLeod – who has now said that the infiltration of CND was not justified – referred at the time to the decision to target CND ‘coming from his masters’. Those masters were clearly not MI5, because he used that term in documents addressed to them.

Scobie notes that:

‘MacLeod claims that he cannot now remember who he was referring to. In respect of CND, whoever was pulling the strings was bypassing MI5.’

Scobie looked in some detail at internal discussions between the SDS, Special Branch and MI5 about the deployments into CND from 1984 on, particularly the fact that MI5 requested a new officer, ‘Timothy Spence’, be deployed into the SWP. Very unusually, the SDS refused MI5’s request, and insisted he be sent into CND. Once again the ‘masters’, whoever they were, were bypassing MI5 on CND targeting.

The Home Affairs Select Committee set up an inquiry into Special Branch’s activities in 1984, and a number of other incidents around that time raised serious questions about the targeting of CND.

There was widespread public denunciation of the investigations into Madeleine Haigh. Haigh was a CND supporter who wrote to her local newspaper protesting about the cancellation of an anti-nuclear event in Worcester. Shortly afterwards she was visited by two policemen who claimed to be investigating a mail order fraud, but turned out to have come from Special Branch.

Cathy Massiter was an MI5 intelligence officer who was tasked with investigating left-wing subversive influence within CND, and became a whistle-blower after leaving the job. In 1985 she appeared in an episode of Channel 4’s 20/20 Vision programme, entitled ‘MI5’s Official Secrets’, saying:

‘We were violating our own rules. It seemed to be getting out of control. This was happening, not because CND as such justified this kind of treatment but simply because of political pressure; the heat was there for information about CND and we had to have it.’

Chief Inspector Wait claims not to recall any discussions with senior Special Branch managers about the justification for infiltrating CND, and not to recall why he refused to go along with MI5’s requests to deploy ‘Spence’ into the SWP.

Astonishingly, there is no mention of Cathy Massiter in his statement, even though he acknowledged the breach of SDS security in an Annual Report at the time, and as Scobie says, the impact of her revelations would have caused ‘unforgettable’ panic within Special Branch at the time.

Scobie asserted that the Inquiry has received ‘no assistance’ from SDS managers ‘on the issues of justification and authorisation’.

The Met has offered two outlandish suggestions as possible justification:

‘concern that CND could be infiltrated by communist groups and the KGB’ and ‘venturism around the US air bases could lead to protestors being shot.’

Neither assertion is backed up by the evidence. If evidence does exist, the Commissioner should look to the Met Police’s own documents and disclose them.

Scobie then reached the heart of the matter:

‘The Commissioner submits that the Metropolitan Police Special Branch was obliged to monitor the CND, linking that obligation to significant government and military interests in the 1980s. That is the firmest indicator yet of where the authorisation for the CND deployments came from. Government targeting.’

Scobie examined relations between the Met Police and the Home Office in the early 1980s, and described a rift which developed around 1983.

That year, Special Branch produced a report with the title ‘Political extremism and the campaign for police accountability in the MPS district’, about the efforts of the Greater London Council (GLC) police committee and others to hold the police accountable for their actions. The report was politically partisan, and the response from the Home Office expressed ‘very serious concern at the breadth and tone of, and market for, that report’.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Hewett replied on 4 March 1983:

‘We are dealing here with a broader concept of public order intelligence, and on this particular aspect I probably had gone as far as the Special Branch should go.’

There was nothing in the report that could be said to relate to public order. The Home Office saw that the response did not stand up to examination, and it was Hayden Philips’ view that Special Branch had gone too far, by looking into legitimate political activity which could not be considered subversive.

What is most interesting about this is that the most senior Special Branch officers had decided not only that they could use Special Branch resources, including the SDS, to resist lawful attempts by a democratically elected council to make the police accountable to the community they were supposed to be serving, but also that they could do so despite having been told by the Home Office that they could not, and having said that they would not.

Scobie made clear:

‘This was a wilful assault on democratic activity, acting beyond police powers with knowingly unsustainable justification, in contravention of an order from a Government Ministry…

‘They would not have acted in this manner unless they were confident of support from an authority higher than the Home Office.’

There is evidence that in February and March 1983, Special Branch were engaging directly with the highest levels of government. Margaret Thatcher made a direct and specific request to the police in respect of intelligence on the police accountability movement.

The same appears to be the case for CND. Chief Inspector Martyn MacLeod has indicated that he would not be surprised if the Prime Minister had a role in tasking because ‘the whole thing became very politicised’.

National Archives releases from 1983 show a government scared of losing the battle of public opinion on disarmament. The Prime Minister’s office was devising ways of neutralising CND.

It seems MI5 let the Government down by rightly refusing to cooperate on party political issues targetting law-abiding groups. The evidence now suggests that the Met stepped into that void.

This evidence comes on top of the arguments outlined by Scobie earlier this year in his opening statement to Tranche 2 Phase 1 about the creation of the Ministry of Defence DS19 Propaganda Unit, and Michael Hessletine’s use of SDS intelligence to undermine opposition to the government in the general election of 1983.

The 1984 SDS annual report has a section on CND, but its focus was not on public order or subversion; it was on (a) membership numbers; (b) the political position, noting the Labour Party’s official espousal of unilateral nuclear disarmament; and (c), that:

‘CND has skilfully manipulated public opinion over issues about which people are genuinely concerned.’

He ended his submissions with some comments on disclosure, or rather, the lack of it.

The evidence provided MI5 is ‘woefully inadequate on an issue of such importance.’

In respect of the Met Police, there is evidence of ‘a high level Special Branch directive that led to all files on CND being destroyed. While there may have been some justification on the basis of the Home Office guidelines for destroying files on the individuals, there can be no justification for the destruction of files on policy, liaison, authorisation and justification.’

Scobie urged the Inquiry to investigate this political interference further and to focus not only on the role of the Home Office but also on the engagement between the Met and the Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office and the Prime Minister’s office, noting that:

‘[CND] had hundreds of thousands of members in local branches and nationally. The CND was a mass democratic movement of ordinary people, but like governments before, and since, the Thatcher Government was terrified of two things: first, a mass movement of people; and, secondly, democracy itself.’

Tranche 1, Phase 3, Day 10

20 May 2022

Witness:

Trevor Charles Butler (officer HN307)

 

This was the last day of the 2022 round of the Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings, which have examined Special Demonstration Squad managers 1968-82.

The day began with the Inquiry’s Elizabeth Campbellon reading out summaries of evidence relating to three men who worked in the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) back office towards the end of this period covered by this ‘tranche’.

Richard Reeves Scully (officer HN2152) joined Special Branch in 1968. He’s not entirely sure when he was sent to work in the SDS back office, but it’s thought to have been around 1977. His role was handed over to Paul Croyden in 1979.
Witness statement of Richard Reeves Scully

Paul Andrew Croyden (officer HN350) served in the SDS for two years, from July 1979 to August 1981.
Witness statement of Paul Croyden

Christopher Skey (officer HN308) was also part of the SDS for around two years, and then spent a year as Liaison Officer between Special Branch and the uniformed public order unit (aka ‘A8’). Skey provided two witness statements, one in 2020 and another in 2021 which added a little more detail about his time as a Liaison Officer.

The Inquiry also published documents relating to two deceased senior officers:

Ken Pryde (officer HN608) was described as “the Detective Chief Inspector in charge of the SDS from November 1977 till early 1978” – although this doesn’t correspond with what the Inquiry has told us elsewhere.

Mike Ferguson (officer HN135) is said to have run the unit from January 1978 until February 1980, having spent time undercover himself ten years earlier (reporting on anti-apartheid campaigners like Peter Hain).

Trevor Charles Butler (officer HN307)

On this final hearing of 2022 the Inquiry heard oral evidence from one man: Trevor Charles Butler OBE (officer HN307). He was recruited to the unit in 1979 and left in 1982. He was questioned by David Barr QC, Counsel to the Inquiry.

This was a notably reticent witness, who favoured one-word answers (and often that word was “no”).

In his witness statement, Butler referred to True Spies, the 2002 BBC documentary series that detailed the work of the SDS, as:

“an earth-shattering breach of the ‘need to know’ principle”

It’s clear he sees the Inquiry in the same light. Safeguarding a ‘need to know’ principle is his vocation, and he treated the Inquiry as a violation of that.

Butler claimed to remember very little about events that took place in the 1970s, including his time in the SDS and in other parts of Special Branch.

Butler attended police training courses, and learnt about the main principles of police powers, but freely admitted not bothering to consider these while he was in the SDS.

He said that he didn’t think normal police discipline regulations – covering, for example, sexual misconduct – applied to the spycops as they were:

“experienced, trustworthy men, who I had no concerns about.”

He was happy to go along with existing day to day practice, and very happy with the SDS’s method of unfiltered reporting (hoovering up as much information as possible and putting it all on file). He doesn’t seem to have gone out of his way to question anything, to consider doing things differently, or to actively review deployments or assess their value.

He had no qualms about officers stealing dead children’s identities, and said he had no idea that other undercovers had been issued with British Visitor Passports, which did not require a birth certificate.

Butler recalled little contact with the senior managers above him, saying:

“We were left to our own devices”

This was due in part to the move of the SDS office out of New Scotland Yard to Vincent Square. He also professed to be unaware that some of them had previously been involved in running the unit.

He couldn’t recall why the SDS 1979 Annual Report said that “covert policing is being subjected to increasingly close and critical scrutiny” or any concerns at this time about the spycops’ relationship with the Security Service (aka MI5).

There were a lot of subjects that he claimed no recollection of at all.

SUBVERSION

He says that he didn’t receive any training of the type listed in the 1979 ‘Initial Training for Special Branch Officers’ Agenda. He relied on his own “common sense” to guide his understanding of what was or was not ‘subversive’.

He didn’t recall seeing Special Branch’s 1970 Terms of Reference, and its definition of the word ‘subversion’, before. During this period, the Security Service actively tried to expand the working definition of ‘subversion’, and a slightly different definition appeared in a Circular sent out to Chief Constables in 1974 (referring to industrial disputes) . Butler says he doesn’t recall seeing this either.

A similar Circular, referring to subversive activities in schools, was sent out in 1975. Butler does not recall any sensitivity around reporting on school-children, or the School Kids Against the Nazis.

COMPREHENSIVE COLLECTION OF DATA

What were the most important things the SDS did?

According to Butler’s written statement, the main aims of the SDS were public disorder and collecting information to update Special Branch’s files.

Addressing the second of these, Barr asked him to explain why this was so important, and what such information was used for – for example, was this related to public order?

According to Butler, after some waffle, such details weren’t always immediately important, but might have what he called “latent value” – meaning they might

“possibly be relevant at a future date.”

Might the information be used for vetting purposes?

In paragraph 129 of his statement, Butler admits that “parts may seem unacceptable in today’s context” and Barr quoted the whole thing, ending with:

“I do not believe that individuals finding their names on a Special Branch or Security Service file is too high a price to pay for comprehensive intelligence coverage, providing that those individuals were not unlawfully discriminated against because of this.”

Barr asked him to explain what he meant by this, and Butler admitted that he must have been referring to people losing their jobs or being blacklisted – he says this is “unacceptable” but insists that it would only have happened if such information was ‘leaked’ from Special Branch, and he doesn’t believe this happened:

“I’m convinced that Special Branch records were properly maintained and there was no leakage.”

We saw the kind of information that was kept on file for its ‘latent value’ – contact details copied from the address book of “a leading member of the Freedom Editorial Collective”.

Having established that ‘N/T’ stands for ‘No Trace’ – it is clear that the majority of these names have not already come to the attention of Special Branch. These names were retained for decades and Butler doesn’t see it as a problem.

Asked to explain how gathering intelligence on individuals assisted with public order, he claimed that this would enable the police to make arrests after disorder had occurred. The SDS were quick to claim their public order ‘successes’ but nowhere is this kind of success mentioned.

PLAYING SQUASH WITH THE BOYS

Trevor Butler liked to play squash with his colleagues. Because of something Barr said today, we now know that he also played squash with the guys from the Security Service as well (a minor detail that was redacted – and replaced with the word ‘sport’ – in one of the documents released by the Inquiry).

He says he got to know the officers:

“some of them very well, others not so well, but reasonably well, all of them”

The unit was an all-male environment. Butler remembers banter and jokes. Were any of these of a sexual nature?

“I can’t remember, but probably”

However, he insists that he heard no suggestion of spycops being the subject of sexual advances, and nothing about sexual contact actually occurring. He said he didn’t consider this to be a risk:

“they were married men with a stable background who I trusted not to get involved sexually outside of their marriage.”

He says he never asked them if they had come under “pressure to indulge in sexual activity” never mind asking directly if they’d engaged in any form of sexual contact.

If this is true, then the lack of curiosity exhibited by him and other managers clearly demonstrates a culture of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ within the SDS. He didn’t remind them not to engage in sex on duty, consider setting up ‘cover girlfriends’ or finding other ways of reducing the risk.

Rick Clark (‘Rick Gibson’, officer HN297, 1974-76) is known to have had at least four relationships; he was investigated by the group he infiltrated, Big Flame, and was exposed as a result. Butler claims he can’t remember anything about this.

Similarly, he says he didn’t hear any gossip about ‘Jim Pickford‘ (officer HN300, 1974-77), withdrawn after falling in love with an activist, who he went on to marry.

BARRY’S GIRLFRIEND

Another incident was discussed in more depth. ‘Barry Tompkins‘ (officer HN106, 1979-83), in his witness statement, details a ‘platonic’ relationship with a woman that he met while undercover. He says they were just friends, and he slept in her home – supposedly in her child’s bedroom with a noisy hamster – a few times, rather than driving home drunk.

This woman was often referred to as “Barry’s girlfriend” amongst those he was infiltrating. Tompkins says that he was asked by his manager, Trevor Butler, to account for an intercepted phone call in which an activist had talked about storing “items from Ireland” at “Barry’s girlfriend’s place”.

“I think Trevor said something along the lines of ‘You’re not going to get us in trouble, are you?’ and I simply said ‘no, it’s nothing like that’.”

Butler says he does not recall this at all. He categorically refuses to accept that this may have happened but he forgot about it (like everything else). He is adamant that Tompkins must have confused him and another manager from the office.

Asked what he thinks he might have done if these events had occurred as laid out in Tompkins’ statement, he says “my outlook was probably different then than it is now”, yet goes on to say that he can’t remember what his outlook was then.

Barr was somewhat flummoxed by this and points out that if he doesn’t know what his outlook was before, how does he know it’s changed?

“Now, I think I would have insisted that he ended such a relationship. Then, I might have been more tolerant.”

Butler explained that he has become less tolerant since becoming “older and more disagreeable” (his words, verbatim).

In those days, he goes on, he wouldn’t have been concerned about a platonic relationship like this. Would he have investigated to find out if more was going on?

“That’s a hypothetical question. It didn’t happen.”

But he added:

“I would have investigated very thoroughly.”

Would a sexual relationship have led to disciplinary action? Butler says he would have made sure the officer left the SDS, but agreed that there might have been difficulties taking formal disciplinary action, and that decision would have been ‘above his pay grade’.

Another exhibit was shown: a Security Service note about a visit to the SDS – in the shape of senior managers  ‘Sean Lynch‘ (officer HN68) and Dave Short (officer HN99) – in June 1982, after Butler had left. It contains the remarkable line:

“Information on this subject may be bedevilled by the fact that HN106 [‘Barry Tompkins’] has probably bedded [privacy] and has been warned off by his bosses.”

Does he know what this refers to? Is is something he told Dave Short? Unsurprisingly, Butler can’t help with this as, yet again, he can’t recall. (NB: Tomkins himself says that this refers to a different woman, who the Security Service wanted to use as an informant, and who he denies sleeping with).

In his witness statement Butler says that he knew ‘Barry Tompkins’ was married with young children at the time.

“I would have reminded him about his obligations to them and to the job in fairly strong terms if I had even the slightest suspicion that he had or was tempted to stray.”

Barr put it to him that this demonstrated consideration of the possible impact on this marriage, and of the risk to both the SDS and the wider Met, but none for the woman who ‘Barry’ had formed this close friendship with. Butler confirmed that he did not or would not have given her any consideration at all.

NO CONSIDERATION FOR WOMEN

Other officers that are known to have had sexual relationships in this era include Vince Harvey (‘Vince Miller’, officer HN354, 1976-79), with four women; officer HN21, with one woman; and ‘Paul Gray’ (officer HN126, 1977-82).

Butler says he gave zero consideration to the harm that any of these women may have suffered as a result.

He said he knew ‘Phil Cooper’ (officer HN155, 1979-84) quite well, but

“he didn’t give me any reason to suspect that his behaviour was cause for concern.”

He added that Cooper wouldn’t have confessed to doing sex and drugs to Butler anyway as it would have led to trouble for him.

Barr read out a declaration from Butler’s statement:

“As far as I was concerned, then and now, the SDS provided a terrific service’ trouble-free”

Did he still think that, in light of all this evidence?

Butler asserted that:

“I considered I was extremely lucky. I had a couple of years working with a very successful team who presented no problems and I suspected were doing nothing untoward.”

The strength of his loyalty to the SDS is very clear throughout. Pressed about the sexual misconduct that has come to light, the most critical comment he could make was to say that he was “disappointed”.

REPONSIBLE ROLES

Butler’s statement refers to undercovers not “crossing the line between acceptable recording and unacceptable direction setting and incitement”, so Barr explored this topic.

In his witness statement, ‘Mike James‘ (officer HN96, 1978-83) said that he’d been advised by colleague ‘Geoff Wallace’ (officer HN296, 1975-78) not to get too involved, or become too prominent, in the groups he was infiltrating.

However, he was elected to the Hackney District Committee of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and chaired meetings of the Party’s Clapton branch, becoming their ‘District Book Organiser’.

The same officer was then encouraged by his bosses, in around 1980, to get more involved in the Troops Out Movement (TOM), and ended up being elected as TOM’s Membership and Affiliation Secretary.

He didn’t get a chance to discuss this with his managers beforehand – the nomination “came out of the blue” – but says he told them as soon as he could and they were “pleased” with this news.

Butler cannot recall being one of those managers. However he agreed that this would have been seen as “a good thing” as it gave the SDS much more access to information.

He didn’t view this position (which came with a seat on the TOM’s national steering committee) as a problem. He says he wouldn’t have interfered, just trusted the officer’s judgement as to what he felt “comfortable” with.

‘Paul Gray’ (officer HN126, 1977-82) also spied on the SWP, rising beyond branch roles to join its North West London District Committee. This was also “a good thing”, according to Butler.

Surely this meant he could be voting on things and influencing the direction of the group? “I don’t know what they did” was Butler’s response.

Asked if he, as the manager receiving information, he tried to find out what they did, Butler simply answered “no” as a sentence in its own right. Again.

SPYCOPS’ WIVES

Before new undercovers went out into the field, Butler would visit their wives at home. He would explain that their husbands’ working hours and appearance would change, but nothing more about what this “important work” actually entailed.

He says he wanted to ensure they “were happy to support their husband in the role” and “understood the difficulties” – i.e. the disruption to family life caused by long, irregular hours. He agreed that the SDS asked a great deal of these officers’ wives.

ANTI-RACIST ACTIVISM IN 1981

‘Barry Tompkins’ (officer HN106, 1979-83) reported on a meeting that took place in Walthamstow in August 1981, organised by the Winston Rose Action Committee.

They were campaigning for a public inquiry into the death in custody of Winston (a 27-year-old boxer, who had been born in Jamaica) a month earlier.

One of the speakers was Fran Eden, of East London Workers Against Racism (ELWAR), a group which Tompkins had infiltrated. Butler was asked what he thought the policing value of this reporting was.

Barr ventured to suggest that sending an undercover officer to spy on such a meeting might not be good optics for the Met, and could risk “doing more harm than good”. If he’d been discovered, might that not have served as a catalyst for the community to take to the streets, as they had done in Brixton and other places around the country already that year?

Butler’s said “that could probably be said of every report that an undercover officer submitted”, doubling down on his opinion that “it was wholly justified and a fine report”.

He had no concerns about Tompkins reporting on a Revolutionary Communist Tendency meeting that took place in Brixton directly after the riots, on 16th April, about setting up South London Workers Against Racism, organising legal defence for members of the local community, involving legal representatives.

Also in April, Tompkins reported on ELWAR holding an election meeting in Stoke Newington Town Hall, as one of their members was standing as a candidate in the upcoming local elections.

Barr suggested that electoral activity isn’t exactly subversive.

But in Butler’s view, if a group’s worth reporting on, then it’s worth reporting on every single thing they do:

“my attitude was always it’s far better to report too much than too little.”

BLAIR PEACH

Just like the other managers we’ve heard from at the hearings, Butler said he barely remembered the events around police killing Blair Peach and the subsequent justice campaign. It is yet another stretch on his credibility.

According to the SDS 1979 Annual Report, there was “a sustained campaign to discredit and criticise the police” after Peach’s murder. Butler admitted that he may well have written this.

The SDS reported on these campaigners, but Butler insisted that the Metropolitan Police’s only interest in such intelligence would be due to potential disorder, nothing to do with collecting information about people who were critical of the police.

Barr pointed out that there was “very little trouble indeed” from the justice campaign, and asked why the Friends of Blair Peach were described in that way.

Butler ended up in another awkward dance, trying to avoid the point that the justice campaign was deliberately targeted for calling for accountability from the police. He did at least concede it was inappropriate to take photographs of mourners at Peach’s funeral.

MESSED-UP PRIORITIES

The SDS 1980 Annual Report said that “anti fascist activity continued to tax the resources” of the police.

Butler explained that when it came to confrontations between the far right and the far left, the police tended to blame the anti-fascists for causing (or as he re-worded it, ‘creating’) serious disorder, for “attacking those they opposed”.

He said the police were also “a good target” for the demonstrators.

He grudgingly admitted that the far right were responsible for lots of serious street violence, but said it wasn’t the SDS’s job to predict or prevent racist attacks, who were “more interested in large scale social disorder”.

His attention drawn to the section of the SDS 1981 Annual Report headed ‘Security’ (on page 7). Operational security is described as always being “of paramount importance” for the unit – both for the “personal protection of the field officers and to prevent embarrassment to the Commissioner by its existence becoming public knowledge” – and the “political sensitivity” around the SDS operations is mentioned.

Squeezing blood from the stone, Barr got Butler to admit that such ’embarrassment’ would stem from the public learning that undercover policing tactics weren’t restricted to drugs gangs and serious criminality, but were also being used in a political way, “to manage public disorder”.

Barr went on to note that the Report says that all infiltrations had to be fully justified on the basis of the Commissioner’s responsibility for the preservation of public order.

Under the heading ‘Coverage’ (on page 4) is a list of groups whose infiltration would be hard to justify on these grounds, such as Womens Voice, the Freedom Collective, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).

Butler claimed not to know who the first two were, but even he couldn’t pretend not to have heard of CND, a hugely popular campaign that held protests hundreds of thousands strong.

Instead, he suggested that CND demonstrations were often ‘infiltrated’ by “extremists”, and then added another explanation for spying on them: that the SDS didn’t have enough undercovers to infiltrate all of the groups, but many of those people attended CND events.

We now know that CND was infiltrated, in its own right, by John Kerry (officer HN65, 1980-84) but Butler claimed he wasn’t involved, saying this must have happened as he was leaving. However Kerry joined the unit in 1980 and Butler didn’t leave until 1982.

HOME OFFICE: PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY

In his statement, Butler recalled meeting for “a beer and a lunch” with a relatively senior Home Office official every month.

His bad memory returned when he was asked about these meetings – he couldn’t remember their purpose or anything about what business was discussed at them, but says that he knew that it had no influence over the unit’s work.

The SDS was set up by the Home Office in 1968, and was directly funded by them for twenty years. Funding had to be applied for and renewed annually.

The 1976 authorisation for the Special Demonstration Squad’s continued existence was signed off by Robert Armstrong, later Baron Armstrong of Ilminster. He was Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service. It is difficult to imagine a more highly placed civil servant.

The Security Service’s ‘Witness Z’ has previously told the Inquiry:

‘the pressure to investigate these organisations often came from the Prime Minister and Whitehall’.

Put simply, the existence and functioning of the SDS was known of, and authorised, at the very top.

There is nothing embarrassing to the police or Home Office about preventing crime. But the destabilising of democratic movements, the wholesale and widespread intrusion on citizens, and their exploitation for political advantage? That is worth keeping secret.

Every annual application for funding refers to the officers fully recognising ‘the political sensitivity’ of the unit’s existence. Authorisation is only ever granted ‘in view of the assurances about security’. In other words, as long as you can promise us we will not get caught, you can carry on.

There appears to have been a lot of careful work to ensure no proof of the link survives. After the spycops scandal broke, in 2015 former Audit Commission director Stephen Taylor looked into the links between the SDS and the Home Office. His report said the ‘investigation did not identify any retained evidence available in the Department of any correspondence, discussions or meetings on the SDS for the 40 year period’ that the unit existed. Nothing. In the entire Home Office.

Time and again Taylor found reference to a file, catalogue number QPE 66 1/8/5, understood to have covered Home Office dealings with the SDS. It has disappeared. It would have contained material classified Secret or Top Secret, which would have strict protocols around its removal or destruction, yet there is no clue as to what happened to it.

They physically searched all storage facilities in the Home Office. It’s gone. Taylor couldn’t make allegations but rather pointedly said ‘it is not possible to conclude whether this is human error or deliberate concealment’.

Butler appears to be well acquainted with the Home Office’s stipulation that details of their involvement must never come to light.

DRINKING ON THE JOB

Finally, Barr asked Butler some questions on issues raised by the Inquiry’s Non State Core Participants (ie, victims of spycops).

One significant issue had been about the spycops’ consumption of alcohol whilst on duty.
Butler was asked about their expenses claims, and clarified that they were not allowed to claim for alcohol they’d drunk, unless it was as “part of a substantial meal”.

He admitted that they could have claimed for drinks consumed by other people, which would have “been shown as an incidental expense”, but had no recollection of any of them doing so.

In his words, most of the officers “drank regularly but not excessively”. He contradicted other witnesses by saying they “usually had a beer” when they met at the safe house.

He went on to explain that they wouldn’t want to drink so much as to be drunk in their activist group, or be caught drink-driving (as having a driving licence was important for their jobs). This contradicts countless reports from the people who were infiltrated.

He had no concerns about anyone drinking to a level that impaired their judgement or affected their long term welfare.

Was he concerned about them buying lots of drinks for those they were spying on? No. He assumed they would buy rounds when out with activists, but “you wouldn’t buy excessive drinks just because you could afford to.”

DEPARTURE

The last thing we heard about from Butler was about his leaving the SDS. He was told by Commander Wilson that he was being moved on, ostensibly on the grounds that he was getting too close to those he managed and losing his objectivity:

“he said that it was time for me to move on to another role before I unquestioningly took the side of the UCOs [undercover officers] in all matters.”

It seems likely that had something to do with him fighting their corner on the issue of overtime payments, possibly another illustration of his loyalty to the undercovers. He continues to insist that they did an “excellent job”.

WHEN WE MEET AGAIN

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, then closed this round of hearings with the line:

“When we’ll meet again remains to be seen.”

The next set of evidential hearings (covering ‘Tranche 2’, the SDS 1983-92) are not due to take place until 2024. In the meantime there may be an interim report from the Inquiry to look forward to.

Witness statement of Trevor Butler

Transcript, video of the morning and afternoon the day’s hearing

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<<Previous UCPI Daily Report (19 May 2022)<<

Tranche 1, Phase 3, Day 9

19 May 2022

Witness:Angus McIntosh (officer HN244)

 

The penultimate day of the 2022 Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings, dealing with spycops’ managers 1968-82.

Today, we first heard about Richard Walker (officer HN368), who worked in the SDS back office for over three years. He was not called to give oral evidence, but provided the Inquiry with a witness statement, so a summary of this was read out by a member of the Inquiry team.

The Inquiry then introduced documents relating to Lesley Willingale (officer HN1668), who is now deceased.

Only one witness gave evidence at the hearing: Angus Bryan McIntosh (officer HN244), the Detective Inspector who served as second in command of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) from mid 1976 to late 1979.

Lacking the polished veneer of his colleague Geoffrey Craft (officer HN34) the previous day, Angus McIntosh (inadvertently) gave more insight into the attitudes of the unit towards those it was targeting. A number of his statements caused outrage.

Otherwise, what we encountered was not dissimilar to much of the other live evidence so far. A mixture of truth and dissembling; though more forthcoming than others, he also had inexplicable memory lapses on important issues.

He was a teenager when he joined the police, moved to Special Branch in 1964, and continued to be promoted, up to Commander level – moving to National Coordinator of Ports Policing when it was formed in 1987, and staying in this role until he retired from 11 years later – very much a career Branch man.

TRAINING

Rebekah Hummerstone, barrister for the Inquiry, began by questioning him about his understanding of the law around policing.

McIntosh recalled attending police training courses at Bramshill and Hendon during this time, but these were general, and didn’t cover anything to do with undercover policing.

He was asked how he understood police powers to apply to undercover work, and admitted that they hadn’t given much thought to this at the time.

He suggested that if officers were invited to enter a private home or premises – even if this was under false pretences – they did not need a warrant, and suggested that in fact, not accepting an invitation might raise suspicions and therefore jeopardise their cover story.

He says his role entailed him applying his common sense and instinct – it was about “careful people management” of the individual officers to ensure their morale and safety.

His Special Branch background provided useful knowledge of the groups being targeted, the style in which reports were created, and some of the possible pitfalls. However the unit’s tactics were new to him, and he says there was no manual, and no specific SDS training course in those days.

In his statement he says that he introduced tutoring for SDS officers so they could take their ‘promotions exams’, and felt that his role included providing informal training for them, including the new recruits, who joined the office team first.

He says that he just learnt on the job, as was standard practice in those days, and adopted the unit’s existing practices.

CRAFT WORK?

Yesterday’s witness, Geoff Craft, couldn’t remember working with McIntosh in the SDS. Bizarrely, today McIntosh could not recall working with Craft either. The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, has asked both men to explain why, as the timeline prepared by the Inquiry shows significant overlap.

McIntosh’s only theory to explain this confusion is that he knows that he was away on various training courses for months, during which time someone else – probably Lesley Willingale (officer HN1668) – would have been acting up to cover his Inspector role.

MIKE FERGUSON

He did remember Mike Ferguson (officer HN135). He says that he first learnt the details of what the SDS (or ‘Hairies’ as they were known within the Branch) did from Mike, before he joined the unit himself.

He actually recalled an incident that took place during Ferguson’s undercover deployment, in which he infiltrated the Anti-Apartheid Movement.

Ferguson turned up one day at McIntosh’s home, ‘seeking refuge’ – his wife didn’t recognise him but Angus recognised his voice and let him in.

“He visited my flat in his undercover appearance and clothing before I was part of the SDS. He wanted to be in a safe place and took refuge in my flat. I do not know what it was that he was seeking refuge from, but he wanted to be off the street.”

Later on, when they worked together – Ferguson became Chief Inspector of the unit in early 1978, so was effectively McIntosh’s boss – he remembers them as close, Ferguson as able to give practical advice to the officers, based on his own personal experience of going undercover, and seems to have shared a lot of his knowledge with McIntosh.

THE BLACK FOLDER

Despite saying “there was no training manual”, McIntosh clearly remembered the ‘black loose-leaf folder’ that others have mentioned, which contained SDS tradecraft and knowledge that had built up over the years.

He described it as “full of good advice for the new officers”, but at the same time claimed that he never looked inside himself. Unfortunately, this contradiction was not picked up on.

He was asked if managers ever checked the contents, to ensure that suggestions of bad practice were removed, but seemed to think this wasn’t needed.

TASKING AND SUPERVISION

McIntosh would expect requests for information – including those from the Security Service – to come in via a Special Branch Squad, usually C Squad which dealt with left-wing activism.

The SDS managers met daily with their line manager, an S Squad Superintendent, and such requests could be discussed then. Sometimes they turned them down, if they didn’t have a source in a suitable place.

Referring to A8 (the uniformed public order unit) McIntosh said:

“We fed them; they didn’t feed us”

That is, although the SDS provided them with plenty of information, they didn’t receive any requests from them.

Sometimes this information was delivered via a phone call, especially when it was urgent news about an upcoming demo.

The unit’s managers had a lot of autonomy and made a lot of important decisions without any external input. They would keep the S Squad Superintendent informed, but not always give them all the details. They wouldn’t necessarily report any problems that arose.

NO SPYING ON THE FAR RIGHT

McIntosh said he was too junior to have been party to a “high-level policy decision” like the one not to infiltrate the far right. However he recalls that it was thought it would be too difficult and dangerous for an undercover to be sent in, as these groups were so very violent, and prone to criminality.

This is another glaring contradiction. Ever since the spycops scandal broke in 2010, the police have denfended it by saying they had to infltrate groups in case they were planning anything violent or criminal. But McIntosh says it wasn’t safe to infiltrate groups who were violent or criminal, so they focused their attentions elsewhere.

He then added that the police didn’t need to spy on the far right to keep an eye on them; they could obtain good information about them from the left-wing groups who monitored fascist activity, with much less risk to officers.

This is something we learned at one of last year’s hearings. Several spycops said that, despite the far right waging campaigns of violence and murder, they weren’t regarded as much of a problem. Only one SDS officer infiltrated the far right in the 1970s, and he did so inadvertently.

‘Peter Collins‘ (officer HN303, 1973-77) infiltrated the Workers Revolutionary Party who, in turn, sent him in to spy on the fascist National Front.

THE SECURITY SERVICE

McIntosh suggested that his lowly position as a Detective Inspector meant that he had very little contact with the Security Service (aka MI5).

However, this is somewhat contradicted by a document he was shown; a summary of the contact that took place between the Security Service and the SDS in 1979.

It shows that he and Ferguson attended a meeting in February on behalf of the SDS, and the Security Service were keen for these meetings to become regular monthly events.

HOME LIVES

It was considered essential for undercovers to have stability, an ‘anchor’, and so almost all of them were married men. McIntosh made a point of always visiting the partners of new recruits before deployment. He said the main reason for this was to introduce himself, gain her trust, and ensure she had a way of contacting him if she had any problems. He says hardly anyone ever rang the telephone number they were supplied with.

He would use this opportunity to tell the officer’s partner what to expect: long absences, working evenings and weekends, etc. Although they wanted to asses the officer’s domestic situation, they “certainly didn’t investigate”.

It was left to the officer to ‘use his judgement’ about how to explain his changed appearance and new job to his spouse: “rightly or wrongly, we left it to them to deal with it”.

The welfare of these women was of very little concern to the managers of the SDS, the only thing that mattered to them was maintaining the secrecy around these operations.

He also referred to the wives and families in the context of overtime, saying he was concerned that officers weren’t spending enough time at home, at the same time claiming the long hours of overtime were important for maintaining their cover stories.

STEALING IDENTITIES OF DEAD CHILDREN

McIntosh was asked about spycops’ theft of dead children’s identities to create undercover backstories or ‘legends’.

He seems genuinely aggrieved by this – not regretting the practice as such, but the fact that it was exposed by activists:

“I think it is most unfortunate that this Inquiry has enabled the poor families and relatives to realise that this has happened. In normal circumstances, it wouldn’t have happened. I mean, it’s extraordinary.”

WELFARE

Undercovers were expected to phone the office before 11am every day to ‘check in’. The meetings at the SDS safehouse also served a social purpose – as we’ve heard before, they offered an opportunity for the officers to relax together and be themselves. One of them would cook lunch, but the office staff did not join the undercovers at the pub.

We have heard about a dysfunctional drinking culture within the SDS. McIntosh was asked of the officers were given any guidance on drinking; he says no beyond no drink-driving.

SEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS

Again, as previously, the Inquiry spend considerable time on officers deceiving women they spied on into sexual relationships, as McIntosh oversaw a number of undercovers who did this.

The Inquiry asked about the comments of ‘Graham Coates‘ (officer HN304) about the sexist banter at the meetings. McIntosh remembers the banter but does not recall jokes about Rick Clark’s sexual prowess (see below). He says he was out of earshot most of the time, having individual talks in the other room.

Like Richard Walker (officer HN368), another manager who has given a written statement, McIntosh says that what banter he heard, he did not take particularly seriously.

McIntosh felt he was able to build close relationships with the undercovers and that they could have approached him for help with problems, but if these problems were what he called “self-induced” he suspects they may not have been entirely honest with him as a senior officer. Particularly, he couldn’t see any of them confiding in him about a relationship in the field as this could have affected their career.

Asked if Ferguson was someone they felt they could confide in, he said yes, “he was a man’s man.”

McIntosh was also agreed that the risk of relationships was a real one and meant a serious a security risk to the unit. However, he did not view it as a case of an officer abusing his power; in his view “things happen” and it was a personal, individual matter, security risks aside.

SPECIFIC OFFICERS

The Inquiry then asked McIntosh about a number of officers whose problematic behaviour has been frequently discussed at the hearings.

Vince Harvey (aka ‘Vince Miller’, officer HN354, 1976 -1979)

When joining the SDS, Harvey had been in a long term relationship, but that had ended. McIntosh was not aware of that fact, but would have dealt with it as a matter of welfare.

McIntosh said he was “amazed” at learning of Harvey’s sexual relationships while undercover, which had only come to his attention through the Inquiry.

Had he known, he says he would have taken this to Superintendent level and expects that Harvey would have been withdrawn.

Richard Clark (aka ‘Rick Gibson’, officer HN297, 1974-76)

Clark was exposed after the group he infiltrated investigated him and confronted him with his stolen identity. He also had multiple sexual relationships while undercover, which contributed to this exposure. McIntosh recalls Clark being withdrawn from the field, but claimed not to know many of the details.

However he says he was part of the surveillance team who sat outside the pub while Clark was being confronted by his suspicious comrades, just in case things turned nasty for the officer. He thought that Craft was there with him; yesterday Craft testified that he was there, but with Superintendent Derek Kneale (officer HN819).

McIntosh’s vague memory is incredible, given the severity the threat this represented to the secrecy of the entire unit.

This officer’s compromise doesn’t seem to have prompted any particular evaluation around security and processes. New officers were trained in exactly the same way as Clark, complete with the stolen identity that could lead suspicious comrades to a damning death certificate.

He described Clark as “very outgoing… the type that would brag about anything.”

He said he’d had no idea about Clark getting involved with at least four women while undercover, and sounded quite upset about Clark’s conduct:

“His behaviour has let everyone down.”

Not because of the possible impact on the women though but, extraordinarily, blaming Clark for everything, including this Inquiry being set up and a spotlight being shone into the workings of the SDS.

He sounded genuinely distressed that things had ‘unravelled’ and the unit was no longer a secret, saying:

“One of the proud things of SB was that the SDS was run without the general knowledge of the Branch let alone the police force or anyone else. Now the whole thing’s been exposed, unravelled, and that’s why I think it’s a great shame.”

‘Jim Pickford‘ (officer HN300, 1974-77)

McIntosh described Pickford as a “strange character” but also claimed to be unaware of his reputation as a womaniser. Another officer has told the Inquiry that Pickford confided in him that he had “fallen in love with” a female activist, prompting him to go straight to one of the unit’s managers (in his words, “the one with a Scottish name”).

This led to Pickford being withdrawn from the field. McIntosh denies being this manager, and insists that he knew nothing, and just thought Pickford’s deployment came to its natural end.

He said that if he had known about this, he would have gone to more senior management, and Pickford would have had to leave the Branch (as this would have affected his vetting status). Craft also denied knowing about this situation at the time.

However, Sir John Mitting said that in the Inquiry’s ‘closed sessions’ where certain officers have given evidence without the public present, he heard very detailed and convincing testimony from an undercover about them telling management about Pickford.

McIntosh expressed surprise that Pickford’s subsequent marriage (to the same activist) saying it was “amazing that rumour control kept it a secret”. He again suggested that this might all have happened while he was away from the unit – perhaps Leslie Willingale had been the manager?

Perhaps conveniently for McIntosh, the Inquiry is unable to check this as Willingale is dead.

THE PRINCIPLE OF SEXUAL DECEPTION

McIntosh didn’t think officers had to be reminded that sexual conduct on the job was a breach of police regulations.

He said he never “probed”, or asked them if they were engaged in such activities it would have been pointless to do so as they were unlikely to tell him, their supervising officer, that they were breaking the rules.

He denied that such relationships equated to an abuse of position or power. He viewed this as “sexual contact between consenting adults”, not something he gave a “green light” to but only because it was against police regulations.

He was asked if he considered this to be deceit:

“I can’t really answer that”

Instead, he posed a counter-question:

“Does everyone say before they have a sexual encounter, what is your occupation? And if it’s a certain one, do they say ‘Definitely not, because you are a policeman, or postman?’ So no.”

Which, again, is starkly reminiscent of what his colleague Craft said yesterday, leaving a strong impression that the managers are coached as to what to say, or got together to straighten out their stories.

SPYING ON BLAIR PEACH’S FUNERAL

The Inquiry has heard that another former undercover was advised by his managers not to attend the April 1979 demonstration against the fascist National Front in Southall, because it was known that the uniformed police was going to ‘clamp down’ on the protesters.

McIntosh denied being that manager, or having any knowledge of this, but understood why the warning would have been passed on:

“Well, we don’t want our officers arrested. We don’t want our officers involved in violence.”

Despite him saying this warning represented a “fairly unusual statement” he was not pressed to explain the rather curious fact that, according to officer HN41, a decision had been taken beforehand to crackdown on the protesters.

Likewise, McIntosh could not remember that the SDS had arranged for an undercover to be smuggled into Scotland Yard to make statement about the death of Blair Peach. Chuckling, he replied:

“Not on this occasion, but we used to smuggle in officers for various reasons”

Again, he wasn’t asked to explain.

An undercover who was infiltrating the Anti-Nazi League, officer HN21, was tasked with attending Peach’s funeral. McIntosh says he can’t remember if it was him, or another manager, who gave this instruction.

McIntosh provided his justification for spying on the mourners, claiming it was necessary to “identify disorder” and normal to cover such events of interest:

“because the whole reason of the funeral was for a person involved in extreme left wing politics and demonstrations, that’s all.”

Even HN21 has said that there was no known risk of public disorder at this event. Faced with this, McIntosh dismissed his officer’s professional judgement as a “subjective one”.

Sir John Mitting then intervened, suggesting that:

“many people might think it distasteful for a police officer, whether undercover or not, to attend the funeral of someone who had died in the circumstances we now know and record the names of all of those capable of being identified who have attended it.”

Mitting’s choice of phrasing, ‘died in the circumstances we now know’, is very telling. Blair Peach was killed by police officers. The police investigation showed this at the time, and identified Inspector Alan Murray as being highly likely to have been the killer. Yet even now, Mitting seems incapable of describing it in this way.

At last year’s hearing on the anniversary of Peach’s death, the Inquiry held a minute’s silence. In his preamble, Mitting avoided all mention of the police, and merely referred to Peach being killed by ‘a blow to the head’. In doing this, he insults all victims of spycops and underlines his partisan nature that is draining the Inquiry of its potential to get to the truth.

The comments made by McIntosh in response were the most outrageous yet:

“I can understand some people being upset by it, but, however, in public disorder … I’m quoting Northern Ireland for instance, funerals are often a hotbed of problems, and it wasn’t the friends and relatives of the person whose funeral it was, it was because there was an opportunity of demonstration against… it would be anti-police, in one way or the other.”

It is an extraordinary rant, with the bizarre suggestion that the National Front might have demonstrated at the funeral.

“Unfortunately, sir, I don’t think there’s a lot of respect in those circumstances for the real reason of the occasion.”

He didn’t see the irony in his comments.

Undercovers are known to have spied on the Blair Peach campaign at other events over the years. In one of last year’s hearings, we saw internal documents showing they were still spying on vigils for Peach on the 20th anniversary of his death.

In his written statement, McIntosh said that he did not believe they were reported on because they sought to discredit or criticise the police.

However, today he told the Inquiry something different, and was asked to clarify his views – why did he think those people had been reported on?

One of the excuses he gave was that if an undercover was sent to cover an event, they understood it was their duty to report the names of those present, without any filtering. It’s more likely that they would have included activists’ names on the list as the officers are more likely to have recognised those people.

He then claimed to not recall the full details about the demonstration where Blair Peach was killed. Which was maybe the first time ever that a police officer used those words, acknowledging what has actually happened.

Witness statement of Angus McIntosh

Transcript, video of the morning and afternoon the day’s hearing

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The current round of Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings, focusing on Special Demonstration Squad managers 1968-82, continue until tomorrow, Friday 20 May.

<<Previous UCPI Daily Report (18 May 2022)<<

Tranche 1, Phase 3, Day 8

18 May 2022

Witness:
Geoffrey Craft (officer HN34)

The eighth day of the 2022 Undercover Policing Inquiry‘s hearings examining spycops managers 1968-82 was devoted to the evidence of just one man: Geoffrey Craft (officer HN34).

Craft was a Detective Inspector with the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) from May 1974 to October 1976, when he was promoted to head the unit as Detective Chief Inspector, which he remained until October 1977. In 1982 he returned to oversee the spycop unit as Chief Superintendent of ‘S’ Squad.

The pattern of questions remained the same as previous days, starting with his training and understanding of the law. Craft was a much more capable witness than Derek Brice, who gave evidence on the previous day. He was able to responded quickly to questions, many of which clearly irritated him.

On some points he was quite open, but like other officers he suffered inexplicable amnesia about highly significant moments and could not recall the characters of any of the undercovers deployed during his time.

He came across as very much loyal to Special Branch and found little fault with it, and clearly believed that he himself had done nothing wrong, although he did express disappointment in learning about the behaviour of undercovers under his watch. He claims no contemporary knowledge of any of that wrongdoing and appears to characterise himself as naive.

TRAINING AND THE LAW

There was no training or thought given to the lawfulness or ethics of what the SDS was doing, or the intrusion into private life that came from it.

When he joined the SDS, there was no real handover, Craft moved in as second in command to Derek Kneale (officer HN819) who told him what he needed to know. Intelligence was gathered to support public order policing and secondary to that was reporting on subversive activities, material which C Squad  – the department concerned with left-wing activists – then channelled to the Security Service (aka MI5). The undercovers’ targets were chosen following discussions on which groups were involved in public order issues at the time.

In an incredible piece of double think, when asked if he had considered back then whether the public would approve of what the SDS was doing, Craft said he had concluded that the public as a whole are happy to live in a parliamentary democracy and public demonstrations were part of that, so the police naturally needed intelligence to ensure appropriate policing.

SUBVERSION

As with previous witnesses, considerable time was devoted to Craft’s understanding of the term subversion. It was clear that he had just gone along with existing practice, and like so many other things had given it little or no consideration.

Basically, he and other Special Branch officers would have absorbed what they needed to know as junior officers and he was comfortable in his own mind what was subversive or not.

This also brought up the issue of spying on school children, covered in previous hearings. Craft’s position was that they would have only been interested in school children if they were involved in one of the organisations they were monitoring for public order purposes.

They would have reported on School Kids Against Nazis because they were supported by the Socialist Workers Party, he said.

This contrasts with the evidence specifically highlighted by lawyers representing ex-undercover officers that this was done at the specific request of MI5 who were interested in ‘subversion’ in schools.

TARGETING

Who an undercover officer should target was a matter for the Chief Superintendent responsible for the SDS, who had to bear in mind it was primarily for public order purposes. However, there would be coordination with the Secret Service (via C Squad) and other squads to avoid duplication, and their views were taken into ‘consideration’ – especially as it was C Squad that had to produce the threat assessments. The SDS was simply a support service in that, albeit a major one.

Craft never considered whether there were alternative ways to get intelligence as that was not ‘S’ Squad’s responsibility – that was down to ‘C’ Squad. Like other managers, he speaks of a cordial relationship with the Security Service, in which the SDS tried to accommodate requests for further information.

Craft was later questioned about the decisions to target a number of specific organisations (see below). What stood out most in his responses was the suggestion that groups were targeted “just in case” and that this was standard practice for the SDS:

“We tried to be ahead of the game, certainly”

USE OF REPORTING

Intelligence gathered by the SDS was passed on to C Squad, who sent it to A8 (Public Order Branch) or the Security Service. In his recollection, a great deal of the intelligence that eventually went to A8 in the form of a C Squad threat assessment was likely to have originated in the SDS. It was unusual for the SDS to have more direct contact, except perhaps at weekends when an undercover may phone in an urgent bit of intelligence during a protest.

A8 and C squad had other sources, but the SDS brought to the public order picture the intentions of the revolutionary groups – especially as those groups tended not to cooperate with the police. Craft repeated the line that it was equally important to reassure A8 that there was not going to be any trouble, to keep policing to a minimum. Otherwise, uniformed police would be pulled off other duties to the detriment of the people of London.

Craft like other mangers said filtering of what intelligence the undercovers provided was not his problem – others decided that. Barr pointedly noted that C Squad, where most of the intelligence went first, did not seem to do a great deal of filtering either. “You’re probably right”, Craft conceded.

Asked why Special Branch wanted reports on individuals, Craft replied it it was for the Security Service. Pushed, he accepted that the intimate personal details recorded were for the Security Service and were not simply a result of lax attitudes. It was not, according to him, used for Special Branch vetting as they only dealt with vetting relating to Irish Republicanism.

FEAR OF THE MEDIA

Craft told the Inquiry that the operational security of the SDS was paramount. This meant that, should the operation become public, the Commissioner needed to have a strong defence: “that the police were acting as the police were sworn to act, in the preservation of the Queen’s peace.”

Asked what he feared, Craft was very clear: the media. More specifically “the attack upon the police by the media, for acting undercover to achieve the result we did.” How he could square that with taking instructions from the Security Service on infiltrating groups that were acting perfectly lawfully but considered ‘subversive’, was a question he failed to answer.

SPILLING THE BEANS

As part of the questioning on the relationship with the Security Service, Barr drew the Inquiry’s attention to document [UCPI0000027451] which discussed the knowledge of the SDS as an undercover unit among other police forces in 1976.

It turns out it was quite well known after a Special Branch course run by the Metropolitan Police Special Branch had included a lecture on the SDS and its successes, given by the unit’s founder Conrad Dixon.

This was later considered have been a mistake and the subject was not supposed to be mentioned again. Craft expressed surprise, saying this was all new to him and he should have known about it.

COVER IDENTITIES

The practice of stealing dead children’s identities to create cover stories was already in place when Craft arrived on the scene and he did not consider the ethics of it at the time, he just assumed it was legal.

He claimed that because the SDS was a top secret operation it seemed inconceivable that any family would find out.

In hindsight, of course, that isn’t the case, and he says his view now is that bereaved families had suffered enough:

“anything the SDS did to exacerbate that was very sad.”

Barr, for the Inquiry, reminded him that Richard Clark had been exposed by discovery of the death certificate for his stolen identity. Craft elaborated on how difficult it must have been for the activists to find this. However, he did not revisit the utility of the tactic in light of these events.

SUPERVISION & SEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS

The Inquiry came next to the issue of supervision of the undercovers, and – importantly – the managers’ awareness of the sexual relationships. Craft denied knowing anything about the sexual relationships officers had indulged in on his watch.

He was asked about various officers who served under him, many of whom are now known to have engaged in intimate relationships while undercover. Rick Clark (‘Rick Gibson’, officer HN297, 1974-76) and ‘Jim Pickford‘ (officer HN300, 1974-77) came up multiple times during the day, mainly because they were singled out in previous evidence as womanisers who had sexual relationships with women in their target groups.

Craft denied knowing anything of their reputation, and said he did not know any reason why they should not have been undercovers.

Other officers mentioned included:

• ‘Alan Bond‘ (officer HN67, 1981-86)
• Mike Chitty (‘Mike Blake’, officer HN11, 1981-86)
• ‘Barry Tompkins‘ (officer HN106, 1979-83)
• ‘Paul Gray‘ (officer HN126, 1977-82)
• ‘Phil Cooper‘ (officer HN155, 1979-84)

Craft claimed not to be aware of their relationships, nor to have had any concerns about their behaviour. Indeed it made him wonder how well he actually got to know the members of his team.

We heard about the great meetings held twice a week, where allegedly everything was discussed, the camaraderie, how they called each other by their first names, and rank was not an issue.

As he saw it, these get-togethers should have served for the spycops to realise they were still in a police operation, although why he felt that a friendly get together where everyone used first names and rank was not an issue would remind officers it was a police operation was not clear.

Pressed on why he never gave any guidance that sexual relationships were off limits given that the undercovers were young men being put into potentially tricky situations (not least Clark being put into Goldsmiths College), he answered:

“The thought just never crossed my mind.”

However, earlier in his evidence he stated that it was drummed into all police officers that sex while on duty was cause for dismissal and he was even able to cite a case going back to 1830 in support of this.

FILTH

Barr asked Craft to elaborate on a point from his statement where he expressed why he was so against undercover officers having sexual relationships. In his answer Craft started with the risk of disease, and then went on to talk about the wife, the family and marriage. Finally, he referred to things they might have let slip while having sex “which could have damaged the operation”.

Pressed on this, he said that the threat to the family he was thinking of was the risk of sexually transmittable disease and the break-up of the marriage.

The matter-of-fact-way that Craft said this brought home the extent to which female campaigners were viewed as filth, merely potential spreaders of sexually transmissible diseases, rather than human beings with their own rights and dignity. It’s the Met’s contempt for political dissent compounded by their institutional sexism.

Asked about consideration for the woman deceived, Craft said he is not happy about the relationships, musing:

“But what is the alternative? Because accepting that rape is not involved, does all sexual activity in terms of modern moral attitude require a legally endorsed exchange of CVs before sexual activity takes place?

“And so, to the extent to which the man concerned is operating under false colours, is that something which one could prevent? I don’t know.”

Specifically, Craft was not happy with Rick Clark (‘Rick Gibson’, officer HN297, 1974-76) and said as much. Clark never said anything to Craft about the multiple sexual encounters he had had while undercover, which – according to what he told contemporaries – had contributed to his exposure.

Craft also did not like the fact he had not picked up on that at the time – clearly seeing it as a his own failure, though only in hindsight. At the very end of the day, in further questioning, he was asked how come he didn’t have the same opinion of Rick Clark, and another officer, ‘Jim Pickford‘ (officer HN300, 1974-77) that other witnesses have shared with the Inquiry?

His response may have actually contained some truth:

“People that are good at putting up a front can sometimes confuse one.”

In this, he is effectively claiming that both men had concealed their misconduct from their bosses, and blaming his own naïvety.

He claims no memory of Vince Harvey (‘Vince Miller’, officer HN354, 1976-79) coming to him for advice about the “amorous” attentions of an Socialist Workers Party member.

BOB LAMBERT

Even more unlikely, he stated that he never came across Bob Lambert (‘Bob Robinson’, officer HN10, 1983-88).

One of Lambert’s colleagues, whistleblower Peter Francis, has spoken of the unparalleled regard Lambert was held in long after his undercover deployment:

“He did what is hands down regarded as the best tour of duty ever”

Lambert was involved in the most shocking activities of the spycops. He stole the identity of a dead child, was prosecuted under his false identity, acted as an agent provocateur (allegedly burning down a shop) and deceived women he spied on into sexual relationships, including having a child with one.

Lambert later went on to run the SDS in the 1990s, deploying other officers to act similarly.

‘Who is Bob Lambert?’ – talk given by COPS, March 2015

Bob Lambert is one of the pre-eminent figures in SDS history, and his exposure in October 2011 was one of the pivotal moments in the spycops scandal.

Craft said:

“I wouldn’t recognise the man.”

He also says he was shocked to discover that Lambert had fathered a child with an activist:

“One wonders how he had the time.”

Asked what he would have done had he learned about an undercover having sex, Craft confidently declared he would have removed the undercover from the field.

At this point the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, intervened, asking whether the undercover would have been formally disciplined. Craft answered in theory yes, but there would have had to be a hearing, which would potentially expose the secret unit, so probably not.

WIVES & WELFARE

The thinking behind using married officers, according to Craft, is that the home life gave them something stable to return to, away from the stress of undercover life. It was all about stability, not about preventing sexual relationships.

Craft was asked about the officers’ wives. He said he didn’t always visit the wives of new recruits; they were invited to Christmas parties. He admitted that – despite the importance of these officers being married and enjoying stable home lives – there was no ongoing monitoring of their marriages, and not much care and attention paid to their wives. In retrospect, he sees that the job would have had an impact on them, and says the police should have done more to look after them.

He explained the reason for deployments tending to last four years, and said that the concerns he had about lengthy deployments were about the officers’ well-being but not because he considered any risk to family life, or an increased risk of what he termed “transgressions”.

POSITIONS OF RESPONSIBILITY

Craft claimed that undercovers he was supervising did not rise high in the ranks of the groups they were targeting. However, it quickly became clear that they did.

Richard Clark rose through the ranks of the Troops Out Movement (TOM) to become National Convener. Craft said he would not have approved of this.

Clark got involved in factional in-fighting – why wasn’t that stopped? Craft doesn’t know, and he can’t explain why he did nothing.

However he does seem to have approved of Vince Harvey (‘Vince Miller’, officer HN354, 1976-79) becoming both Treasurer and Secretary of Socialist Workers Party branches – agreeing that this represented a “fantastic opportunity” as “it clearly gave him access to all the membership”.

‘Phil Cooper‘ (officer HN155, 1979-84) and ‘Colin Clark’ (officer HN80, 1977-82) – also held “significant positions” within the Party and had access to the Party’s headquarters.

Would Craft have considered it proper or improper for someone to take or copy documents?

“Proper” was his prompt response – it was a “jolly good thing” – he would have completely approved and seen their work as very valuable; he still doesn’t consider that anything these officers did was illegal.

‘Gary Roberts‘ (officer HN353, 1974-78), in his witness statement, tells how he got involved in the student union at Thames Polytechnic, becoming Vice President, and attended National Union of Students conferences as an official delegate. Why didn’t Craft tell him not to take up this position?

Craft’s only respoded:

“It had happened so we were stuck with it.”

POLICE ARRESTED

We heard about a number of officers who were arrested during Craft’s tenure.
‘Desmond “Barry” Loader’ (officer HN13, 1975-78), was arrested and prosecuted on two occasions.

Loader’s first arrest (described on page 12 of this ‘Minute sheet’) took place on an anti-fascist march from Ilford to Barking in September 1977, which he attended with his ‘comrades’ from the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist). He was arrested under the Public Order Act, allegedly while “shielding two children” from the police, and is said is have been “somewhat battered”.

The case was complicated by an arresting officer having served with this undercover years earlier. This led to concerns about him being recognised in court, blowing his cover.

Craft went along to Barking Magistrates for a conversation with this Constable and met with a magistrate and a “helpful” clerk. Later entries show the SDS remained in contact with these officials. The trial eventually took place in 1978 – by this time Craft had moved on, and his successor, Ken Pryde, was in post.

We also heard about ‘Michael Hartley‘ (officer HN12, 1982-85) being arrested for fly posting on Holloway Road, alongside a ‘comrade’ from the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG).

Craft denied remembering this case, or considering the fairness of the other RCG member being prosecuted. This report was signed off by Craft and sent to the Commander of Operations.

UNDER CONSTANT REVIEW?

In a covering letter attached to the 1976 annual report we see the claim that the SDS was engaged in “constant review”, with reference to a small working party examining the unit’s work in detail, and increasing its effectiveness as well as shrinking the number of personnel required (to 12 deployments, which is said to be the minimum required to gather the necessary level of intelligence).

This working party was the only formal review of the SDS that Craft can recall. Barr pointed out that it was therefore a bit of an exaggeration to call it constant review. “I think it’s painting a slightly strong picture” admitted Craft

After seeing some letters of thanks and appreciation – such as one from Lancashire police following a demo in September 1976 and another one from 1977 – we heard more about the results of the Watts working party in 1976. The review found that, though public disorder at protests had declined since the SDS’s formation, police and the Security Service thought the SDS should continue its work.

WHAT WAS THE POINT?

Why couldn’t the police just monitor open sources and talk to activists? Craft claimed that undercover tactics were essential because the people they were spying on would never have told the police what they were up to.

“Accurate, timely intelligence was vital for proportionate policing and for keeping the peace”.

He insists that the SDS made a considerable difference to the policing of public order. The benefits for the Security Service are described as ‘off-spin’.

Craft was promoted in mid 1981, to run S Squad, and so had oversight of the SDS for the next three years – he calls it a “fairly close” relationship and says he sometimes visited the office and had discussions with those in the field.

What did they talk about? Just general stuff.

Does he recall any problems or welfare issues arising? What about new officers? Were you involved in discussing deployments? Probably not – Craft claims this would probably have been a conversation between the SDS and C Squad

RED LION SQUARE

Barr read an excerpt from the unit’s 1974 Annual Report (paragraph 20 on page 13) – about the death of Kevin Gately on 15 June during mounted police charges into a crowd at an anti-fascist demo at Red Lion Square, London.

Craft may have written this paragraph, but he isn’t sure. It mentions the SDS giving the uniformed police:

“forewarning of both the size of the demonstration and the possible disorder which might occur.”

However, while Craft knows that the SDS had undercovers deployed in most of the left-wing groups involved, he can’t remember any specifics about what intelligence the unit was able to contribute, nor how they did so. The Inquiry has failed to find any other evidence relating to this.

WHO TO SPY ON?

A number of Barr’s questions examined the motives behind the targeting of specific groups or events.

In reference to the far-right, Craft spoke about how “essential” it was to collect intelligence about extreme groups at both ends of the spectrum if the police were to successfully keep the peace between them. He confirmed that he did offer the SDS’ services for this purpose, but ultimately it was C Squad who decided.

When it came to the anti-racist groups, he said those who cooperated with the police were of no concern; those who didn’t were seen as a problem.

Asked why the Anti-Apartheid Movement was reported on (before his time in the unit) he said they were involved in disorder and criminal damage, referencing the direct action taken by the Stop the Seventy Tour campaign.

He admitted that the group had been “very thoroughly infiltrated” as a result of a reputational “hangover”, even though it was run by Young Liberals, rather than ‘ultra Left’ types.

Barr also asked about the Troops Out Movement (referenced in the SDS’s 1976 Annual Report). Craft admitted that TOM wasn’t seeking to overthrow the State and wasn’t really a public order threat. He attempted to justify their infiltration – describing them as “an umbrella movement” who might be infiltrated or ‘manipulated’ by the ‘ultra Left’, or attract Irish Republican support – it was here that he expressed the opinion that it was best to infiltrate them “just in case”.

In relation to the various anarchist and situationist groups, Barr pointed out that that Roy Creamer (officer HN3903, who gave evidence earlier in the week) had painted a benign picture of – for example – the Freedom Press.

Craft said he was “happy to bow to Roy Creamer’s expert knowledge” rather than attempt to distinguish between the various groups – it was “quite beyond me”.

In 1976 Richard Clark’s cover was compromised. The group he was infiltrating, Big Flame, is listed on page 4 of the Annual Report, described as a “sinister” organisation, albeit one with no known illegality. It is reported that members are “well-educated” and have links to the Angry Brigade. It is also credited with “practical ingenuity” in the field of security consciousness, compared to other ultra-Left groups:

“There is little doubt that this organisation has more to hide, and hence more to fear, from the police than some of the others”.

Craft says he’s “hesitant” to talk more about this paragraph now. This was possibly a reference to his slip-up, saying something that should have been restricted, earlier in the day.

DUBIOUS DEPLOYMENT DECISIONS

Was it Craft who instructed one of the undercovers to attend the funeral of Blair Peach, who was killed by police on an anti-fascist demonstration in 1979?

He doubts it, but can’t be sure. He agrees that Peach’s death and inquest were “bad news for the Met police” (the inquest found that Peach had been killed by a police officer). Did the SDS take a special interest in the campaign? Only in that it would have been wise to keep an eye on them in case of disorder, Craft asserts.

Why was the Campaign for Nucelar Disarmament (CND) targeted? Obviously a male officer couldn’t have infiltrated the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common – in Craft’s words, they needed “a lady” for this.

Craft claims this is the only time that the SDS had any interest in CND, however the Inquiry already knows that John Kerry (officer HN65, 1980-84) infiltrated CND itself.

What about animal rights – why were you interested in spying on them? Craft talked about firebombs, attacks on research centres, “quite akin to terrorism”. He went on to say that he thought this whole thing “started with one policeman in Essex who was keeping an index” and the Branch took this over, realising the movement was “dangerous”.

The SDS’s 1974 Annual Report describes the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) as a “highly disciplined organisation” that has not caused any public order problems (paragraph 28, page 15). Their interest in “industrial unrest” is mentioned, and Craft openly admitted that this would have been purely for the benefit of the Security Service.

Several spycops infiltrated the WRP but these deployments ended in Craft’s time – does he recall why? He doesn’t, but imagines they were no longer considered a threat to public order. (Former WRP member Liz Leicester gave evidence to the Inquiry last week.)

The Inquiry noted that Craft signed off on every Annual Report during this era, and always endorsed them in glowing terms, in the knowledge that these went to the Home Office and were instrumental in securing the go-ahead (and funding) for the spycops operations to continue.

PRAISE FROM THE HIGHEST LEVEL

Craft still believes in the immense value of the SDS’s work. He remembers the Commissioner visiting the SDS while he was running the unit – he visited the safe house, met the undercovers, ate lunch with them – “he was chatting to everybody”. Craft remembers “it was good for morale”.

He was similarly positive about another visit paid to the SDS safe house by the Home Secretary, accompanied by the Met Commissioner, Sir Kenneth Newman, while he was at S Squad.

This means the Inquiry has now heard that every Commissioner from the squad’s inception in 1968 until 1993 was personally involved and approved.

• 1968-72 – John Waldron
  Rajiv Menon QC told the Inquiry Waldron gave officers champagne after an October 1968 Vietnam War protest
• 1972-77 – Robert Mark
  Spycop Graham Coates told the Inquiry Mark visited the safe house to congratulate officer
• 1977-82 David McNee
  Spycop Roger Harris told the Inquiry Mark and McNee both visited the safe house
• 1982-87 – Kenneth Newman
  Geoff Craft told the Inquiry Newman visited with the Home Secretary
• 1987-93 – Peter Imbert
  Imbert was previously a Special Branch officer, spycop ‘Sandra Davis’ told the Inquiry Imbert personally recruited her to the SDS

Additionally, before the Inquiry began, whistleblower officer Peter Francis described how the Commissioner he served under (Paul Condon, 1993-2000) visited the safe house and gave out bottles of whisky as a token of his gratutude.

This completely demolishes the Met’s earlier claims that the SDS was some kind of ‘rogue unit’ that senior officers were unaware of.

However, the Inquiry will not be hearing evidence from Sir Kenneth Newman, nor David McNee or Peter Imbert. All three of them have died since the Inquiry began.

It’s not enough to know what the spycops did. We need to know who authorised and sanctioned these operations. We need to know why. The loss of testimony from those Commissioners, who were ultimately in charge of the SDS for a third of its existence, is one of the effects of the colossal delays the police have inflicted on the Inquiry process.

FINAL QUESTIONS

Craft was questioned more about ‘Phil Cooper‘ (officer HN155, 1979-84). According to a Security Service note from a meeting with Detective Inspector ‘Sean Lynch‘ (officer HN68, 1968-74) in the summer of 1982:

“despite his misdemeanours, Cooper has not been withdrawn as an SDS source”.

‘Lynch’ is said to be worried:

“because Cooper’s position in the Right To Work movement gives him regular access to Ernie Roberts MP and meetings at the House of Commons”.

We know that ‘Cooper’ was having marital difficulties at this time; it sounds as though anything about his work becoming public could have had serious consequences, and been highly embarrassing for all concerned. Craft agrees that he too would have been concerned – this was “too close” to what he calls “legitimate politics”.

Craft was asked if he had ever heard the term “Wearies” – used to refer to the activists spied on by the SDS – and he denied ever hearing it, then or since, adding “I don’t even know what it means”.

There was one final lasting confusion. Craft does not recall Angus McIntosh (officer HN244) working in the SDS office as his deputy. But as far as the Inquiry knows, their time in the unit definitely overlapped. We’re due to hear McIntosh’s evidence tomorrow, on Day 9, so perhaps this mystery will be cleared up then. Craft has repeatedly said he’s “confused” by this:

“It’s amazing – I know him very well – but have no recollection at all of working with him in the SDS”

Craft has submitted two written witness statements to the Inquiry:
First witness statement (December 2020)
Second witness statement (February 2022)
Documents referred to are listed in the Inquiry’s Bundle for the day.

Video of the morning and afternoon the day’s hearing

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The current round of Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings, focusing on Special Demonstration Squad managers 1968-82, continue until Friday 20 May.

<<Previous UCPI Daily Report (17 May 2022)<<

>>Next UCPI Daily Report (19 May 2022)>>

Tranche 1, Phase 3, Day 7

17 May 2022

Witness:
Derek Brice
Statement from:
Anthony Greenslade

Today’s hearing of the Undercover Policing Inquiry saw only one live witness, Derek Brice (officer HN3378), who deserves a prize for most evasive answers in the Inquiry so far.

It also featured the publication of written evidence from Anthony Greenslade (officer HN2401) who was apparently brought in to boost “low morale” among the spycops of the Special Demonstration Squad.

Derek Brice (officer HN3378)

Brice was a Detective Inspector in the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), from around May 1973 to October 1974.

Brice had been allocated an entire day as he is the only SDS manager of his era who is alive and in sufficient health to give evidence – or so it was thought. His tenure covered a number of important aspects – it is the period of the first known sexual relationships between undercover officers and people they spied on, the early use of dead children’s identities and the significant public order event that was the 1974 anti-fascist protest at Red Lion Square that resulted in the death of Kevin Gately.

A good 90% of the hearing was an exhausting litany of failures to remembering anything, even the basics, interspersed with monosyllabic answers and claims that he had no awareness of stuff going on around him at the time.

After several years on Special Branch he was brought in as an officer with considerable expertise, although he had not been involved in any undercover work personally. He had served on the Bomb Squad, set up to investigate the Angry Brigade where he had been on the surveillance team – along with Greenslade. He continued to do work for the Bomb Squad after he was appointed to the SDS.

However, the exact relationship between the SDS and the Bomb Squad is not clear, and Brice did not leave us any the wiser. He stated that Conrad Dixon had been a senior manager at the Bomb Squad yet claimed not to know that Dixon had set up the SDS, nor – being shown a handwritten organisational chart [MPS-0737402] – that both teams were being jointly supervised at that time.

Of his time at the SDS he said he was asked to join but not interviewed, that he never received any guidance from the then-head of the SDS, officer HN294 (1970-1973), on what the team was about or what his job entailed. As with the undercover officers, he said he learned on the job.

Describing his work as ‘welfare officer’ (or ‘quartermaster’ in his statement) he failed to explain what that entailed. Making sure the officers felt safe on the job, and had not reached the stage of having enough of it yet – that was about it.

CONVENIENT AMNESIAC

He claimed not to have known about the use of dead children’s birth certificates as the basis of the false identity adopted by undercovers. This stretches credulity, especially as many officers prepared their cover story while he was serving on the squad. Brice simply cant recall much discussion about this.

Among the many things he could not recall or was not aware of was the SDS’s relationship with C Squad, which monitored the left wing more generally. Nor was he aware of how information was transferred to A8 – the public order branch of the Met Police.

Things became slightly ridiculous when Brice said he was unaware of the close relationship with the Security Service (aka MI5). He was shown a document [MPS-0735753] which put him at a meeting with the Security Service, where the latter spoke about setting up a new department (F6) to also gather intelligence on left wing groups and subversion.

The SDS was asked for support, to share information and to help out if secret agents would get in conflict with the law. Brice had no recollection.

ANOTHER PUSH FOR ANSWERS

Despite the frustrating evidence, there were a few hints here and there which led to follow up questions at the end of the session, many put in by the other legal teams present.

There was a bit of exploration about officer HN294, now deceased, who Brice served under. HN294 is a key figure in the unit as it was in his time that many of the unit’s abuses first appear. Theway he appears to have run the unit and its relationship to the rest of Special Branch remains obscure and unexplained.

Brice let it slip that HN294’s successors were more approachable. It had also been noted that HN294 ran the SDS as his own ‘fiefdom’. Pressed on this, Brice admitted that that HN294 was “fairly dour” and “kept things to himself”. We are given an insight into a manager who kept to himself and apparently did not even visit the undercovers at their safehouse.

He had previously denied that two undercovers of the era, Rick Clark (‘Rick Gibson’, officer HN297) and ‘Jim Pickford‘ (officer HN300) were widely known as womanisers. Asked about whether such a reputation would have affected their selection for undercovers, Brice says he never thought about the risk of officers forming inappropriate relationships. He thought that (inadvertently) the practice of forming the relationships was lowered by recruiting married men.

However, when pressed over whether knowing that officers had a reputation as “womanisers” would have impacted on his own thinking regarding recommendation for being an undercover, he was unwilling to say it would have ruled them out.

RED LION SQUARE

The last question came directly from the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting. He drew attention back to the events of Red Lion Square and summoned the 1974 SDS Annual Report [MPS-07930906] to point out the line:

“Fortunately, the SDS gave forewarning of both the size of the demonstration and the possible disorder which might occur.”

Red Lion Square was the biggest public order event of its era and the first death on a protest in decades. The Chair noted that Brice was the only senior SDS officer alive from the time and asked for help in understanding the claim in the Annual Report.

Brice’s position is that it was at the end of his time in the SDS (actually he still had four months to serve in the unit when Kevin Gately was killed) and, in line with the rest of the day, he said he couldn’t be of assistance as he barely remembered the event.

Mitting noted the Inquiry also can’t find any written evidence to back up the SDS’ claim – and wonders would the information have been communicated orally? Brice confirms that such information would have been committed in a written report.

With this mystery left unsolved, the day finally came to an end. As with the missing material around the anti-fascist demonstration in Southall and the death of Blair Peach five years later, the SDS seems to have made big claims but the evidence to support it’s reason for existing is remarkably lacking – a topic which the Inquiry and core participants on all sides will no doubt return to.

Witness statement of Derek Brice

Anthony Greenslade (officer HN2401)

The day also saw the publication of the written evidence of Anthony Greenslade (officer HN2401). He joined the police in the mid-1950s, and Special Branch in 1960.

He worked at Britain’s seaports, and after a spell in Anguilla, returned to London in 1970 to work in a section that was concerned with Black Power for around a year. He said Conrad Dixon wanted to get rid of him from the Black Power desk.

BOMB SQUAD & SDS ADMINISTRATOR

He was then posted to the Bomb Squad from 1971-74, and during this time had dealings with the SDS, in late 1973 (for six months) but did not at first consider himself a member of the unit.

At this time the Bomb Squad was conducting surveillance of the Angry Brigade; he worked alongside Brice (see below). He served the unit as a DI towards the end of 1973, working in an admin role. He helped the SDS by purchasing 12 cars for the undercovers to use and setting up second safe house for the spycops.

SDS RECRUITS – BOTTOM OF THE CLASS

It seems that the SDS ‘Class of 73’ had a problem with passing exams. as Greenslade was tasked with improving the spycops promotions exam record – he ran weekly classes for them at the safe house that lasted 3-4 hours. Only three of his six students passed these exams.

Interestingly, he states that low morale was a known issue in the SDS, and he was not the only officer brought in to help solve this problem.

‘KINGPIN’

He says people were recruited in a random way, at the time by HN294 who he describes as the unit’s ”kingpin”, running the unit as a “fiefdom”.

He says he wasn’t involved in choosing targets or the officers’ reporting, or any liaison with outside agencies like the Security Service.

He says he doesn’t know about many of the other key issues we’ve heard former officers being questioned about this week, such as the use of deceased children’s identities, sexual relationships with targets (which he thinks would have been unacceptable), or tradecraft. He knew nothing about the any ‘incidents’ in the SDS.

He said that personal details were routinely included in Special Branch reporting – there was nothing unusual about the material that the SDS were including in theirs.

Greenslade simply repeats that the SDS contribution to policing was that they provided advance warning in demonstrations, something that Roy Creamer brought into doubt yesterday.

He said:

“Information about trade unions would have been reported because of the effect of trade unions on the economy.”

About overtime, he noted that members of the SDS received fairly high overtime payments, and remembers that ‘Phil Cooper‘ (officer HN155) was the “highest paid” Detective Seargent in the Met at the time”. However, he doesn’t think this money affected the length of time they spent on the unit or their reporting.

Greenslade retired in 1987 at the rank of Chief Superintendent.

Probably the most interesting thing in Greenslade’s statement is his negative view of undercover policing:

“The only matter I want to add is that I wish to add if that I disagree fundamentally disagree with the principal of Undercover Policing, it was damaging to individuals many suffered from the work, and some left the police afterwards. I think some people are psychologically unsuited to that kind of work, as I am.”

Witness statement of Anthony Greenslade

Transcript and video of the morning and afternoon the day’s hearing

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The current round of Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings, focusing on Special Demonstration Squad managers 1968-82, continue until Friday 20 May.

<<Previous UCPI Daily Report (16 May 2022)<<

>>Next UCPI Daily Report (18 May 2022)>>

Tranche 1, Phase 3, Day 6

16 May 2022

Witnesses:

Bill Furner
David Smith
Roy Creamer

The sixth day of the Undercover Policing Inquiry hearing evidence concerned with the Special Demonstration Squad’s managers 1968-82 began with a summary of William Furner’s statement being read out. He was a founding member of the Squad in the summer of 1968.

This was followed by live evidence from David Smith (officer HN103). The afternoon was taken up by Roy Creamer (officer HN3093), present by video link.

The Inquiry also published many documents today relating to other early managers who are now deceased: Conrad Dixon (officer HN325, founder of the Squad), Phil Saunders (officer HN1251), and Riby Wilson (officer HN1748).

Bill Furner

In his first statement, Bill Furner (officer HN3095), a founding member of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) had helped the Inquiry to identify people in photos taken at the SDS Christmas party in 1968. His second statement dealt with his job in the back office of the SDS.

Furner supported the first group of undercover officers, who infiltrated left wing groups preparing for the October 1968 demonstration against the war in Vietnam. Based at Scotland Yard, his job was administrative.

For instance, he checked officers’ expenses against their diaries, made sure they “paid their rents and that it was all genuine and above board”. He did not deal with cover identities, cars or houses.

He was present at the meetings held at the undercover flat, which all officers came to in order to hand over their diaries and reports, and to talk about who was attending upcoming events.

Occasionally, he also attended meetings and demonstrations, remembering ones at Trafalgar Square and at Twickenham. For these, he was simply part of the audience to make notes; he did not change his appearance other than to wear a scruffy coat.

In his written statement, asked what the SDS achieved for the benefits of policing, his response was that these deployments:

“meant that we had the people under observation and different organisations completely and utterly tapped. They did not make a move that we did not know about. The obvious benefit is that we knew what their aims were.

“For example there was one group that decided to chain themselves to the rugby posts at Twickenham when South Africa were playing. We knew about this, and uniformed police were told to be present with bolt cutters.”

Bill Furner is one of the few officers who says that information from the Security Service (aka MI5) came into their office, implying it was not a one-way street. The next sentence in his statement was gisted as “Reading this information was a major part of my job.”

The SDS had a very close liaison with the Security Service – “we helped each other”.

As Furner added:

“Special Branch were the arm to make enquiries… [we] had the power to effect arrest… The Security Service was divorced from police work.”

First witness statement of Bill Furner

Second witness statement of Bill Furner

David Smith

The appearance of David Smith (officer HN103) as a witness was marked by his ability to recall seemingly mundane administrative details about the SDS and an equal inability to recall anything which might be controversial.

He spent considerable time in his post as back-office sergeant in the SDS – from 1970 to 1974, giving him substantial knowledge of the unit’s administrative side.

Like almost all other police witnesses, Smith claimed he knew nothing about the sexual relationships that officers had whilst undercover. When queried on this – and characteristic of the roundabout way he answered questions – he started musing about there being fewer women involved in radical groups in those days, with the exception of the Women’s Liberation movement.

In his witness statement, Smith was more critical, saying it was “wrong and foolish”, as it posed a risk to the Squad – and obviously had an impact on the other parties.

“Some more wrong than others, but it was wrong, full stop.”

Unlike some of the witnesses we have (and will) hear from in this set of hearings, Smith was adamant that the SDS decided which groups they would target – and that the Security Service did not tell them what to do. He suggested that there was not much interference from outside the SDS. “We knew what we had to do” – “in many ways” the operation ran itself.

Special Branch relied heavily on the two senior SDS managers to oversee the unit – they decided on who was targeted, according to Smith. Unfortunately he wasn’t pressed on this topic, even when he contradicted himself, saying that Special Branch’s C squad advised on tasking.

Later, Smith said he often took Special Branch Registry files about individuals to the safe house, with a note asking the officer in the field if they could assist with information about these people.

Smith also says that right wing organisations weren’t appropriate targets for the SDS at that period in time, not worth infiltrating. However, by the time he had become a Chief Inspector in C Squad in the late 1970s and early 1980s and was responsible for right-wing and animal rights groups, that had changed and he had “put up” an argument for spying more on far-right organisations. Any final decision about targeting would have been made by the Chief Superintendent or similar.

“COMMON SENSE”

As with most officers, when asked whether there was any proactive attempt to advise officers not to become sexually involved with their targets, Smith said it was simply “common sense” not to do so. Obviously, not for everyone.

While there was no official training, Smith said the main thing that was “hammered home” to SDS officers was to avoid being an agent provocateur:

“We wanted them to be a fly on the wall not to be taking a leading part in things.”

He also said there were some organisations which were “pretty common throughout” meaning they were always spied on), then others “sort of came and went”. They adjusted their coverage accordingly, with “the advice of the rest of the Branch … it naturally evolved”.

Most of the undercovers had already spent three or four years in the Branch, so had a good idea about the organisations being infiltrated. He described their “rolling programme” – those whose deployments were ending could give very valuable advice to those whose time undercover was about to start.

The SDS was well-established by the time he joined in 1970: it had become a permanent unit subject to annual review. He was not worried about it being curtailed, saying:

“I thought it would go on as long… as it remained a secret”.

In Smith’s view, if a tactic is proven to be effective, you do not get rid of it.

ENDS JUSTIFY THE MEANS?

Smith said the SDS was necessary because it ‘sharpened’ things to get accurate numbers on demos to inform public order policing levels.

He then explained that joining a less extreme group, such as the Young Liberals, could provide a useful “stepping stone” and give some “street cred”, which would enable an officer to join more radical groups without seeming suspicious.

One officer, ‘Michael Scott‘ (officer HN298, 1971-76) did so and went on to infiltrate anarchist and Irish groups and the Workers Revolutionary Party, for example.

Next, Smith was asked how SDS reports were processed. He told the hearing that he received bundles of handwritten reports from the spycops. Sometimes information also came into the office by telephone. His job was to collate and put them in the standard format for typing up by the typing pool (which was next door).

He denied doing any “sanitising” or analysing – he says he was aware enough to recognise if anything “needed to be expedited.”

The next moment he said that sometimes he did “slightly sanitise” reports, getting rid of some specific details and making them “less precise” in order to send them to A8, which was outside of Special Branch. He said this was his “common sense” – nobody needed to tell him to do this, he just “instinctively knew”.

C Squad, the part of Special Branch which oversaw operations against left wing groups, prepared threat assessments for A8, which dealt with public order. The Inquiry suggests that they did 600-700 of these per year – this would have equated to 10+ every week. Smith was not surprised by these figures.

SDS intelligence would have been “woven into” these assessments – he says the unit helped by “padding out the juicy bits,” and being able to provide more precision in terms of numbers and the likelihood of violence. (The role of Special Branch Liaison officer was created at some point around this time, to “help A8” understand enough and act appropriately, while protecting the source of the information.)

Smith thought that about 50-60 SDS reports would have been written in the course of a week, of which around 75-80% went to the Security Service, adding “we didn’t send them the Irish stuff”.

He agreed with Geoff Craft (who we will hear from on Wednesday) that no other police officers were more closely monitored than the SDS officers. Monitored for what exactly? we may ask!

Unconvincingly, Smith says he cannot recall what happened at Red Lion Square in 1974. He was slightly too fast to say the name rang a bell, but that was all. It is quite unlikely that he can’t remember the death of Kevin Gately at a demonstration against the fascist National Front. Gately was the first person to die on a demonstration in England for decades – and to prevent such public order problems was the SDS’ ultimate reason for existing.

PICKFORD AND CLARK

‘Jim Pickford‘ (officer HN300) and Rick Clark (officer HN297) were both recruited as Smith was leaving the unit. Both men were known as ‘womanisers’ within Special Branch. Had he known at the time, he would have advised against recruiting them to the SDS, he now says.

Asked for his view about the sort of person who was suitable for undercover work, Smith said they needed to have a “balanced, calm disposition.” Otherwise, he kept his opinions about the spycops he worked with to himself.

Smith wasn’t hugely concerned about spycops being arrested and going to court – it didn’t happen very often – he can only recall one incident of an officer ending up in court and testifying under a false name. He agreed that “technically” this did constitute misleading the court, but also talked about “different degrees” – and drew upon an unconvincing analogy about speeding to suggest it was not all that serious.

Smith returned for some supplementary questions after lunch but said nothing of consequence.

Written statement of David Smith

Roy Creamer

Roy Creamer (officer HN3903) was an eagerly anticipated witness in this phase of the Inquiry. Originally, the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, had not planned to call Creamer to give live evidence. But after representations were made by non-state core participants (ie victims of spycops) Mitting relented and agreed that we should hear from him.

Though the former Special Branch manager is in his 90s, Creamer was well able to provide a detailed account of his time, his memory often better than younger colleagues.

He was questioned by Counsel to the Inquiry, David Barr QC.

BACKGROUND

Creamer was involved in the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) at its formation in 1968, when he worked closely with Conrad Dixon. He was later active with the Bomb Squad, where he is best known for having investigated and arrested alleged members of the Angry Brigade. This topic was not touched on today. Later, he returned to C Squad (which deals with left wing activists) as a Detective Inspector. He retired in 1980.

Whereas, so far, many witnesses were relatively new to Special Branch when they encountered the Special Demonstration Squad, Creamer was already an experienced officer of ten years before the SDS was set up in 1968.

He spent much of the decade prior to the founding of the SDS, working on the left wing desks (B / C Squad). This work involved being sent to meetings, to report back on what was heard and look for the next opportunity to report on. At that time, the main focus was on the Communist Party of Great Britain, not the ‘ultra Left’ groups, which were not seen as much of a threat or considered worthy of police attention. This changed as those groups grew in size and strength.

ANARCHISTS

Creamer was particularly interested in the anarchist milieu. Rather than just reporting, he actively went out to talk to them and find out what they were about. In his justification, he said that anarchists openly boast about assassinating leaders, so it was important to find out who might be likely to try that. This interest led to him being called the ‘dialectician of dissent’ by a leading anarchist of his time, Stuart Christie.

The officer talked about his open approach to talking to anarchists, not hiding that he was from Special Branch. This lead to uneasy relationships with Christie, Albert Meltzer and others. He visited Meltzer’s bookshop to read the notices in the window on upcoming anarchist activities.

Creamer said that in his conversations he got very little on the anarchists themselves, but what he did learn about was their attitude to other groups which provided insight into how the different politics intersected with each other.

Barr noted that while the Angry Brigade was clearly of interest to Special Branch, what about Freedom Press, the anarchist publishers? Creamer was clear they were not targets for public order purposes. They were not a force to be reckoned with and were not really up for a fight.

There were ‘so-called anarchists’ who he considered hooligans, who didn’t want to obey anyone including protest organisers and so were a public order issue. He summed up anarchists as difficult to keep an eye on:

“I don’t think we were up for it. They were cleverer than us in many ways.”

TROTSKYISTS & THE ‘EXTREME LEFT’

Next, Barr explored Trotskyists groups such as the International Marxist Group (IMG), International Socialists (IS, later Socialist Workers’ Party) and the Socialist Labour League (SLL, later Workers Revolutionary Party).

Creamer described them in terms of how disciplined they were and their ability to discipline their members or the protests they organised. They could be difficult to infiltrate, but if you did you would learn a lot about what was going on. Other groups were easier to infiltrate but one learned less.

The SLL were the most disciplined group which actually meant they were much less of a public order issue. On the other hand, the IMG were not prepared to discipline themselves and did not have the will or numbers to particularly marshal their protests. The IS were a threat to public order, but only in the sense they were prepared to organise large demonstrations – which is what mattered from a policing point of view.

On the Maoists, he said that some of them were from the Far East themselves, and there was an uncertainty about their cultural norms. They could be quite loud and emotional on protests, but how much that came from anger over injustice or how much was their natural way was unclear. Given their numbers were small, he wrote that they were noisy and boisterous, but not dangerous, suggesting that a competent group of police could handle any of their demonstrations.

PRE-SDS PRACTICE

He briefly spoke of the far-right in his pre-SDS work. Then they were a mostly discredited group of little interest. Their demonstrations only received attention when attacked by the left.

Barr asked Creamer about the right of entry into a private home, a recurring legal issues in these hearings. Creamer admitted that in normal police work an officer would not go into a house without a warrant. This was the official line, including when Special Branch officers were sent to monitor meetings. Sometimes it did happen that a plain clothes officer got in, but it happened so rarely people did not think about it as an issue.

They next moved on to an extensive exploration of the usefulness of infiltrating many groups on the left. Creamer in his written statement had been quite critical of the role of the SDS and the unrealistic nature of what it was being asked to in terms of identifying public order issues.

Overall, it was Creamer’s assessment that prior to 1967, the standard Special Branch approach to public order and answering Security Service queries was sufficient, especially given the culture of the time. He was critical of the inefficient organisation and thought the lacklustre reporting back on protests was very weak. The latter was something Creamer actively tried to improve.

In particular, he noted that following a demonstration at the house of the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, his commanding officer Victor Gilbert was slammed for not being able to identify those responsible and explain their motivations. Something Creamer resolved.

He also took on Gilbert’s request to improve the quality of intelligence being sent to A8 (the uniformed police’s public order division):

“I felt it was my mission to do that.”

He sought out ways to write reports that would give A8 the correct impression, while noting that it was not possible to quantify the information they wanted, without offending them. For instance, if he thought a protest was going to be ‘lively’, he would up the estimated numbers so there would be sufficient police.

Special Branch’s attitude towards protests changed after the March 1968 anti-Vietnam War protest, which led to the founding of the Special Demonstration Squad.

SPECIAL DEMONSTRATION SQUAD

Creamer was hand-picked by SDS founder Conrad Dixon to play a part at the very beginning of this new Squad. His was almost exclusively a back office role – he says that he refused to be sent undercover, because he preferred to do things in an open way and because he clearly could not have got away with it, being known and recognisable to so many on the left.

He described Conrad Dixon as someone who took on setting up the SDS as an adventure, to Dixon it was difficult work but something he felt he could do. Creamer, in his words, was there to restrain him from ‘doing anything stupid’ – this was a tacit agreement between them.

Creamer helped Dixon with the reports and attended bigger meetings so he had the big picture – which meant that Dixon could tell those higher up the right answer:

“I knew what I had to, and he knew what to expect from me.”

Barr wanted to know if Dixon took legal advice on operating an undercover unit. Creamer was certain he that didn’t and it wouldn’t have been in his nature to do so:

“[Dixon] saw this as a challenge and he didn’t want to be inhibited by any scruples that other people might have because he trusted himself to be scrupulous as the situation demanded, no more and no less, and to be honest, that’s the situation.”

As to his role within the SDS, Creamer did admit that he looked out for the undercovers and helped them with advice. He particularly wanted them to avoid getting arrested, taking drugs, or contracting illnesses (in his words).

Though he conceded the subject was serious, Creamer spoke of the levity the spycops enjoyed as they spied on people and undermined campiagns:

“when we were in that squad, it was a lark in many ways, it was an adventure, and there was no ill will towards the people we were penetrating or whatever. It was an experiment to see if it could be done. That was the theme of Conrad’s police.”

REPORTS

Barr took him through a number of reports which bore his name. Creamer said that while reports were signed by him, that might be a cover for the undercover sourcing the material. Barr pointed out on that the language in the report on the Anti-Imperialist Solidarity Movement was very much the language used by Creamer.

Creamer noted that the two sets of minutes from meetings of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign’s working committee dated December 1968 could not have been obtained by traditional Special Branch methods.

Of a report which noted that the attraction of the Maoist leader Abhimanyu Manchanda was based on him being willing to take the most revolutionary line, he said that he had to pass on the ‘germ of the ideal’. In fact he thought it would not lead to much, but at that point in time the people around Manchanda fell under the list of groups capable of ‘doing a mischief’.

One unusual report that discussed internal political divisions within the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign coalition remains a bit of a mystery. It was not from an undercover, or an informer, but by a source who knew what was going on. Creamer didn’t want to say more about it, though he clearly knew the origins. He also noted that was of a much higher standard than either he or Dixon could have produced.

VALUE OF THE SDS

The SDS had been established after the police were unprepared for the disorder at a March 1968 demonstration against the Vietnam war. The unit was established to gather intelligence and prevent any repeat in a further demonstration in October 1968.

Barr asked if undercover policing made a difference to the handling of the October demonstration. Creamer was of the opinion that it did in the run up to the day, as A8 received a higher standard of information. But on the day itself, no. It mainly came down to reassuring the powers that be that there was not going to be a violent protest.

Creamer’s most trenchant criticism, both in statement and orally was that the SDS were being sent out to look for evidence of pre-planned violence, which was never going happen. It was an unrealistic request.

He was firm that the SDS should have packed up after October 1968. As far as he was concerned, the unit was ‘hedged around’ with all sorts of difficult problems. Instead, management should have started again properly, picking out the good bits and getting rid of the bad bits. In any case, in his eyes the ‘battle had been won’ in October 1968.

However, the problem was the police were very reluctant to cancel demos outright – it was viewed as more trouble than it was worth. So protests were going to happen in any case. That attitude did not change until the violence at the August 1977 ‘Battle of Lewisham‘ clash between fascists and anti-fascists – which clinched it for Creamer that undercovers were no longer needed.

LATER LINKS WITH THE SDS

After leaving the unit, Creamer had little to do with the SDS directly. He did accept, however, that in his time as a Detective Inspector on the left wing desk in C Squad, he received intelligence that he recognised as emanating from the undercover unit.

Creamer is clear that C Squad did not influence the tasking of SDS undercovers – they had influence, and perhaps a veto, but to the best of his knowledge, C Squad did not use it.

Though he had his own thoughts on how things should be or could be improved, Creamer notes multiple times that any interference from him wouldn’t have been welcomed, so he stayed in his lane. He didn’t want to make waves and didn’t dare interfere with what the later SDS was doing; a fact that’s very iluminating about about Special Branch culture at the time.

Written statement of Roy Creamer

Transcript and video of the morning and afternoon the day’s hearing

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The current round of Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings, focusing on Special Demonstration Squad managers 1968-82, continue until Friday 20 May.

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Tranche 1, Phase 3, Day 5

13 May 2022

Witnesses:

Elizabeth Leicester (former member of the Workers Revolutionary Party)
Barry Moss (undercover officer 1968, manager 1980-82)

Today was the second day of live witness hearings in the Undercover Policing Inquiry’s current phase examining managers of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) 1968-82.

The first testimony came from Liz Leicester, a former member of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

We also heard the testimony of a central figure in the spycops scandal, Barry Moss, who was an undercover officer in 1968 and then a senior officer responsible for the SDS between 1980 and 1982.

He went on to be Commander of Special Branch during the time that undercover officer Peter Francis was deployed against the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence’s, and several officers under his management had sexual relationships whilst undercover. Frustratingly, questions today were limited to the Tranche 1 era – 1968-82 – by the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting.

Elizabeth Leicester (former member of the Workers Revolutionary Party)

First we heard from Elizabeth Leicester, who was part of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) – originally known as the Socialist Labour League (SLL).

Leicester lived at White Meadow (aka The Red House), the WRP’s training centre in Derbyshire, between 1975-1978. Her former husband and WRP comrade Roy Battersby was a film director, and also a prominent member of the party.

We heard about Leicester’s involvement in the SLL – she worked in its Clapham office, on its paper, the ‘Workers Press’. Her and her husband were both part of the outer London branch. It was an unusual branch: is well known that Corin and Vanessa Redgrave were members but other prominent actors such as Clive Dunn, Spike Milligan [MPS-0747833] and Frances de la Tour were also involved.

Leicester said the open aim of the WRP was to establish a socialist state. It had a chain of bookshops and a film production company. Like yesterday’s witness Lindsay German, Leicester said that the WRP did not envision themselves being a vanguardist organisation – it was up to the majority of the working class to have a revolution.

She described the many strikes of the 70s, a “real upsurge of workplace democracy” – and made it clear that “we worked as genuine trade unionists” – rather than covertly infiltrating those unions. While they were inspired by the Russian revolution, the WRP used constitutional, non-violent and lawful means to advance their aims.

Amusingly, part of the WRP election manifesto was read out, with an unfortunate slip-up by the Inquiry’s lawyer – who accidentally said ‘conservative’ instead of ‘communist'(!)

WHITE MEADOW

Initially purchased by the actor Corin Redgrave supposedly as a “drama and arts centre”. Leicester is asked whether that was ever its real purpose – or was it always going to be a college of Marxist education? She said that the aim was to protect it from adverse attention from fascists – and not to alarm the locals.

A police raid took place at White Meadow on 27th September 1975. This seems to have resulted from a meeting between The Observer Newspaper and Special Branch officers a couple of days previously [UCPI0000034744]. Leicester also recalled that an aerial photo appeared on the front on the Daily Telegraph – presenting the WRP as a serious threat to the public. The WRP sued the editor of The Observer for libel.

A seven-page Special Branch report probably written by ‘Michael Scott‘ (officer HN298, 1971-76) [UCPI0000012240] gives many details on the White Meadow Centre. Dated 25 February 1976, the report describes the founding of White Meadow the previous summer. It also claimed 900 students had attended the centre in the previous six months. Leicester said that the figure was massively exaggerated.

Additionally, the report lists several financial costs associated with the centre. Leicester says there is no way an undercover could have gleaned that information by attending the centre – and suggest the intelligence might have come from ‘Peter Collins‘ (officer HN303, 1973-77) who also infiltrated the party.

SECURITY MEASURES

Understandably, after the police raid, security measures were increased. Leicester and Battersby searched students on entrance to the centre after the police raid. They also worried about electronic surveillance and found many listening devices. During a summer camp set up by the SLL, there was a concern about a police raid. For security Leicester says she took the membership and financial docs to London with her.

Leicester said the measures were to guard against both state and fascist infiltration. Some of the students who attended their centre were from Greece, Portugal and Spain all of which had fascist dictatorships in the early 1970s.

CONCLUSION

The Special Branch report also listed the subjects taught. As you would expect, these revolved around classic Marxist texts. Leicester jokingly wondered how the undercover got on with “Lenin, Vol. 38 – not an easy read!”

Leicester said it was outrageous that her family home – and two children – were spied upon. The WRP were not a public order threat – and the police knew that – and they were spied upon anyway.

She notes that ‘Michael Scott’ (HN298), whose time at White Meadows was described by a senior officer as ‘his swan song’, was ordered not to go there but went anyway. He could have dropped out of attending without raising any suspicion, raising a glaring question Leicester asked aloud:

“So why did he choose to go there?”

Leicester finished by saying that it’s a shame that the WRP are not core participants at the Inquiry, and that Collins’ infiltration is not being investigated more. Former WRP members don’t have the full disclosure they deserve.

Witness statement of Elizabeth Leicester

Barry Moss (undercover officer 1968, manager 1980-82)

BACKGROUND

Barry Moss was one of the first undercovers of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), deployed for three months in 1968. He used the cover name ‘Barry Morris’. This period was covered in his first witness statement.

On leaving the SDS he took part in the accelerated promotion scheme, moving around all the main Special Branch squads. He also spent time outside of Special Branch in CID before returning in February 1980 to become Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) for the SDS, where he remained for a year before being promoted to Superintendent of ‘S Squad’ with oversight of the SDS.

After a period (1990-1991) as a uniformed Commander with responsibility for North East London, he became a Commander of Special Branch. In 1995 he was Commander of Operations which included responsibility for the SDS. In 1996 he became overall head of Special Branch until he retired in 1999. He helped establish the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, the second major spycops unit after the SDS.

In his capacity as head of Special Branch, Moss gave evidence to the Ellison Inquiry into police corruption surrounding the murder of Stephen Lawrence. He told Ellison that he had no knowledge of the workings of the SDS, a claim that, given his extensive career with the unit, cannot possibly be true.

However, the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, has refused to allow questions about this later period in this evidence, which deals only with his role as an SDS DCI (in the Inquiry’s Tranche 1 Phase 3 period, ie 1968-82).

LEGALITY OF UNDERCOVER POLICING

The evidence began with David Barr, Counsel to the Inquiry, diving straight into issues raised in the opening statement of Charlotte Kilroy, QC, on behalf of women deceived into relationships by spycops.

Barr wanted to know about the training Moss had received – any on race or sexual equality, or on human rights more generally? None.

What about the powers of entry which police officers had? Moss received some training on this at the beginning of his police career and later while with CID.

Barr sought to explore what grasp a senior commander such as Moss had of basic policing principles. Moss struggled quite a bit to answer on this. There was no sense he had ever given much thought to the reasons for doing things, particularly their necessity or purpose, let alone their lawfulness.

The complete lack of training or guidance given to managers and undercover officers was a recurring theme throughout the day, as was an utter disrespect for, and lack of interest in, the law. It was only from what he had picked up from the Inquiry that he realised they had been breaking the law.

Barr looked at intelligence reports Moss had authored as an undercover officer, including a meeting of Maoists in a private home. Moss admitted he was not given any guidance on the legality of entering a home without a warrant.

“I think my understanding of the rules in normal work would have been fairly clear. I had no idea that this may have been illegal, as I’ve seen from Ms Kilroy’s submission earlier to this Inquiry.

“We were there to garner information (…) it might have been illegal in one way or another, I did not think of it.”

When pressed, Moss admitted there was no consideration given to its legality at all.

INTERPRETING REPORTS & OTHER MATERIALS

The Inquiry also addressed time Moss spent serving with C Squad, the part of the Met’s Special Branch that dealt with left wing activists.

This included an important point where he interpreted the annotations next to dates on the Special Branch Registry File index of Diane Langford, as coming from an old government classification scheme.

He was able to say C meant Confidential, S was Secret and SP was Secret ‘Pink’ – meaning material accessible to anyone in Special Branch. He also described a further category, Secret ‘Green’, for top secret material.

He admitted that while at C Squad he had written several threat assessments on demonstrations and described the process by which these were constructed. Asked if he could tell if intelligence reports feeding into the assessment came from the SDS, he replied:

“Yes, the preamble usually gave an indication that it came from SDS, if you understood the system.”

When Barr returned to this point later on, Moss took him through how the intelligence gathered – such as lists of members – fed into constructing a threat assessment. If a group or branch was organising a demonstration, the starting basis was how many people were they, what sort of people were they and what links did they have to bring in other groups or branches which would bring in numbers.

Barr also had Moss explore the SDS’s relationship with C Squad, the part of Special Branch which oversaw operations against left wing groups.

From Moss’ evidence it is clear that C Squad was very important in terms of setting the agenda for the SDS. This included guidance on which groups should be targeted. Moss confirmed that C Squad was as a key ‘customer’ of SDS intelligence, and the main conduit for passing SDS reports on to the Security Service.

There was no regular contact with C Squad, but there did not need to be as, given their long relationship, the SDS was pretty much producing what they wanted anyway. Knowing what to report as an SDS officer was developed for the most part through having been an officer in the wider Special Branch.

MANAGING THE SDS

Moss took over from Mike Ferguson (a former undercover himself) as Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) in what appears to have been an abrupt transition. He received no handover from Ferguson and had to find his own way. He learned on the job, reading reports by undercovers, and relied heavily on his deputy, Detective Inspector Trevor Butler, who had also been deputy under Ferguson, and who Moss described at one point as a “mentor”.

He also relied heavily on his brief time as an undercover, 12 years previously. Asked whether he knew about misbehaviour by a number of previous undercovers, he denied knowing anything other than that Rick Clark had been exposed.

LITTLE CHANGE

Mostly Moss continued with practices that were already in place. The only change of note is that he considered the unit had too much coverage of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and when he became manager he directed a newly deployed undercover (‘Malcolm Shearing‘, officer HN19) to look at a different milieu.

He accepted it was up to him to review the justification of deployments but it was hard, because undercovers were deeply entrenched in groups and difficult to move around. He gave very little consideration to the legality or justification, or alternative ways of gathering the intelligence. As far as he was concerned the system he inherited was a good one:

“The SDS already existed, so why not use it?”

He did not assess the level of intrusion against what was actually produced. As far as he was concerned, it all served some purpose or another.

Asked if operational security was of paramount importance he replied:

“Yes, no other organisation in the country, or even in the world was doing what we were doing.”

This is ironic, given the extensive propaganda criticising political policing in Eastern Bloc countries. There were clearly many agencies doing exactly what they were doing, in dictatorships all over the world.

He was firm that the primary reason for the SDS was to gather intelligence on public order issues, and the intelligence for the Security Service was ‘ancillary’, although he belied some of his points on public order by admitting that putting an undercover into the anarchist newspaper Freedom Press would have been a stepping stone to get to another group.

INTRUSIVE REPORTING

Barr took Moss through a number of reports that he had signed off, and was responsible for as head of the unit.

His response was a mixture of not remembering the details, shifting the responsibility to others – whether individual undercover officers he was overseeing, or the ‘customers’ of the SDS – C Squad, A8 (the Met department delaing with public order) and the Security Service.

Moss did not compile or assess reports, but did sign them off – well, sometimes at least. The reports were disseminated as C squad saw fit, he had no influence on that. The SDS approach was to hoover up as much intelligence as possible, which was to be considered and analysed by others.

In a few, very few, cases (such as a 1980 report on an individual who had just joined the SWP that included his job at the General Post Office, his address and bank account, the fact that he was gay and was an avid reader of Gay News), Moss reluctantly agreed that with hindsight he should have been more cautious in signing it off, as some reporting was not appropriate; but hey, those were different times.

Barr then pulled up a long report dated August 1980, about a woman, her activities, relationships, where she lived, and with whom, Barr read out a long quote:

“In the last week [she] has intimated that she wishes to fall pregnant again, and for this purpose has ceased to take ‘the pill’ on a regular basis. She is however, not quite sure at the present as to who will sire this latest socialist offspring.”

Discussing her political involvement the report says that such:

“would not include an interest in Irish orientated groups … as her main interest, culturally, politically and personally is with the black races and persons of similar ethnic origins”.

Barr asked Moss:

“You signed it, so you would have read it?”

Moss replied:

“Yes.”

And he did think the content was relevant, because this individual would probably ‘settle down’ and be less active in the ‘ultra left’ if she had another child – adding sexism to his racism.

Barr pressed on:

“Did you consider the tone appropriate?”

Moss started stuttering:

“I — I — I thought one of the sentences was — was a bit odd, and I’m not sure I’d — in — in today’s light — I haven’t got it in front of me any more — “

Although Moss said he understood that the tone of this report would be unacceptable now, he was very reluctant to accept that the extraordinary level of detail was inappropriate – insisting that such details were of relevance to the Security Service, and therefore he would pass them on.

STEALING DEAD CHILDREN’S IDENTITIES

Moss said that at the time, he didn’t consider if using the birth certificate of dead children was lawful or not, but he did not see any other way for the undercovers to obtain documents in their cover names. He left it to his officers to create their fake identities, saying he wasn’t personally involved in this himself.

Moss accepted there was a risk, as Richard Clark (officer HN297) had been confronted with the death certificate of Rick Gibson, the dead child whose identity he’d stolen. However he said he thought “the chances of it happening again were probably remote”, because this had only happened once.

FAR RIGHT

The far right were not infiltrated in the same way as the left wing groups.

The SDS did not target them, something Moss says he and Butler discussed, due to a policy decision from a higher level – “because they were too violent, and we were concerned what the officer may have to do to prove his credentials”.

RELATIONSHIP WITH THE SECURITY SERVICE

Moss describes a cordial, good relationship between the Special Demonstration Squad and the Security Service under his management. They had meetings every few months and they appeared to be genuinely grateful for the intelligence supplied, particularly the intelligence on the SWP who in the Security Service’s mind had replaced the Communist Party of Great Britain as the main subversive group. He wanted to be as helpful to the Security Service as possible, provided it did not cut across the public order mandate of the SDS.

In these hearings, and earlier ones, we had heard there was almost no formal training or guidance for undercover officers, but today Barr brought out a syllabus from 1979, for a Special Branch training course that ran over three weeks.

Later in his career Moss held responsibility for organising these courses for Special Branch officers from all over the country, which ran parallel with courses by the Security Service for their staff. In conjunction, they would provide lecturers for a number of topics.

He supposed that the Security Service would have liked to have even more influence over the SDS than they did, saying:

“if we could accede to their requests without detriment to ourselves, then we would oblige them… it wasn’t quite a two way flow of information – we probably gave them more than they gave us”.

Asked if undercover officers took risks in order to gather intelligence for the Security Service, he said he left it to his officers to judge whether the risk was worth it – the priority was to maintain their cover in the group. Much of the communication with the Security Service was mediated by C Squad.

The names of the groups being infiltrated were given to the Security Service. Moss at first claimed that the officers’ cover names would not have been shared, then admitted that this may have happened, claiming their real names certainly weren’t though.

SUBVERSION

Discussion of the Security Service led to a long and technical discussion about the definition of ‘subversion’. It was clear that Moss had given no serious thought to what it meant, and made a lot of assumptions.

The nearest he had to any training on this was during the Security Service induction session for junior Special Branch officers, when there was some discussion of what ‘subversion’ was.

It was pointed out that several Special Branch Annual Reports said SWP were not really a threat, he responded that the Security Service certainly saw them as subversive.

BLAIR PEACH

After anti-fascist Blair Peach was killed by police on a demonstration in April 1979, a police internal investigation identified the officers reponsible, yet none face any charges and the report remained secret. There was a concerted public campaign for truth and justice. As with so many similar justice campaigns, it was spied on by undercover police.

Moss maintained that the main reason for gathering intelligence on the Friends of Blair Peach was the potential risk to public order.

Barr asked about the SDS Annual Report for 1979 which said:

“The culmination of the virulent anti-fascist demonstrations was the death of the Anti-Nazi League supporter Blair Peach and the subsequent campaign against Police.”

Moss admitted that this was “unfortunately phrased” and came from “a rather defensive mindset”.

Barr pointed out that in his own witness statement, Moss had referred to “the SWP piggybacking on to Blair Peach’s death”.

As Peach was an SWP member, Barr asked “wouldn’t it be fairer to recognise that Blair Peach was one of their own?” and further enquired:

“Would you accept that this was a justice campaign which ultimately did secure some justice?

Moss replied:

“I would.”

Moss said the SDS never received any requests for intelligence on the Blair Peach campaign, or any other similar justice campaign. This didn’t stop them from indiscriminately hoovering it up anyway.

THE NATIONAL FRONT

The SDS Annual Report for 1980 shows that the counter demonstrations organised against the fascist National Front were a major theme when Moss was Head of SDS. He claimed there was

“always a matter of debate within the police service how far the police should go to facilitate free speech.”

Moss was of the opinion that “it was the Left that caused the disorder in those circumstances” – and in his dubious logic, he suggested they should be banned from demonstrating:

“So what I’m saying, in rather a lengthy way, is, if the National Front had just been allowed to demonstrate and the left wing hadn’t turned up, there probably wouldn’t have been any disorder, in my opinion.”

Barr asked:

“What would have happened if the left and right had been allowed to appear without a police presence?”

Moss was sure:

“Oh, it would have been mayhem.”

RELATIONSHIPS

Almost all of the officers who were deployed undercover were married, yet their cover identities were of single men. Moss said it never crossed his mind that this might increase the risk of sexual activity occurring.

Was there not a risk of undercovers forming such relationships to protect them from suspicion and enhance their cover stories? In Moss’s view, this would have been such a “silly thing to do” that they wouldn’t have contemplated it, so he never felt the need to give them any advice about this.

We heard about the conversations Moss had with his officers when he met them at the unit’s safe houses (twice a week) – to check in about their welfare and their work. They were able to bring up any issues and discuss anything they wanted. However it seems that Moss never brought up the issue of sexual relationships with them.

Barr took Moss through a long list of undercover officers who had, under his watch, got intimately involved with women they were spying on; officer HN21 (cover name not published), ‘Barry Tompkins’ (officer HN106), ‘Paul Gray’ (officer HN126), and ‘Phil Cooper’ (officer HN155). Moss said he’d had no inkling of any of this at the time.

We also heard about some significant contradictions in how the SDS dealt with relationship issues. ‘Jim Pickford’ (officer HN300) confessed to falling in love with an activist (who he later married), and was removed from the SDS in the 1970s.

We’d heard earlier about Moss’s feelings about a Special Branch officer who was known to have been unfaithful to his wife – by indulging in an affair with a civilian colleague in New Scotland Yard – who he blocked from joining the unit.

However, when an officer already inside the unit (‘Paul Gray’, HN126) decided to live with his affair partner, another police officer, in the Met’s married quarters, Moss didn’t have a problem with it.

He went so far as to pay a personal visit to the wronged wife of this officer, presumably to put pressure on to keep her quiet, as she’d threatened (in an anonymous letter) to spill the beans about the entire operation of the ‘Hairies’, as the spycops were known.

We heard more about ‘Phil Cooper’ (HN155), and his wife. Moss said he “did not treat her well”, and upon questioning, admitted that there was some kind of domestic abuse going on, and possible violence.

Did that not give him concerns about Cooper’s suitability as an SDS officer?

“It probably should have done – if it was physical, but I can’t remember if it was physical or mental, if I can use that word. He was a larger-than-life-character.”

That chilling apology for domestic abuse ended Day 4 of the current hearings.

Transcript and video of the day’s hearing (Elizabeth Leicester on screen, Barry Moss audio only)

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The current round of Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings, focusing on Special Demonstration Squad managers 1968-82, continue until Friday 20 May.

<<Previous UCPI Daily Report (12 May 2022)<<

>>Next UCPI Daily Report (16 May 2022)>>

Tranche 1, Phase 3, Day 4

12 May 2022

With the current Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings’ opening statements concluding yesterday, today saw the first day of evidential hearings. Testimony came from Dr Lindsey German, a witness who knew several undercover officers from the period covered in Tranche 1 of the Inquiry (1968-82) from her time in the Socialist Workers’ Party.

Dr Lindsey German was active for 30 years in the International Socialists (later the Socialist Workers’ Party or SWP). She was made a full-time student organiser in 1975, became the District Organiser for Central London in 1977 and was appointed to the Central Committee in 1979. She later helped found and lead the Stop The War Coalition.

However, today’s evidence focused only on the Inquiry’s Tranche 1 period (1968-1982). A detailed account of German’s political background can be found in her written statement to the Inquiry.

At least 24 undercover officers have spied on the SWP, recording such personal details as physical appearances, holiday plans, weddings, sexuality, and childcare arrangements.

INQUIRY OR TRIAL?

Before German’s questioning began, the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, responded to her witness statement, in which she addressed various common misconceptions and preconceptions about the SWP’s aims and tactics.

Mitting was keen to assure her that he and his team do not have any preconceived views. However, their approach to questioning, and their loaded use of the word ‘revolutionary’, showed they clearly do.

At times it seemed like German was on trial, to the extent she observed that:

“A lot of the questions this morning have been about my politics, rather than the role of the undercover police, which is the aim of the Inquiry.”

She was not put off by this, using it as an opportunity to correct the Inquiry and share her views of how a more just and democratic society could come about.

Nevertheless, the Inquiry’s hostile approach to questioning members of the public who were spied upon could put off future witnesses. This concern has been raised by a number of victims of spycops’ abuses, who do not want, and should not have to, defend themselves against the Inquiry’s preconceived views and thinly-veiled attacks.

IMPROVING DEMOCRACY

Under questioning from David Barr QC, Counsel to the Inquiry, German talked about the aim of the SWP to replace Parliament with things like Workers Councils: “a higher version of democracy than we have now”. However, in her opinion, these revolutionary aims were never close to fruition in her time with the SWP.

Barr asked a series of questions about whether the SWP sought to “escalate” industrial disputes and “confront” fascism. He questioned German’s “critical view of the police” and the security measures taken by the SWP at their National Delegate conference [UCPI0000013228] in 1978.

German responded that a more assertive attitude by workers was the best strategy, something that had also been trade union policy, as well as the SWP. She gave context about the growth of fascism and how her relatives had fought fascism in World War Two.

She explained that the SWP’s security stemmed partly from fears of state surveillance and blacklisting – fears, that it turned out, were entirely justified – and added the threat from the far-right.

POLICE BIAS

German explained her views of police bias, in terms of crimes prosecuted and the fact that they are used as a force of repression. These views are backed up by the evidence currently before the Inquiry, which shows the police planning to attack demonstrators and treating the far-right much more favourably than the left. In her view, she confirmed, the institution of the police does not benefit the working class.

Barr made a large jump from that statement to ask if that meant she thought the police were “fair game” for physical violence in the streets. He asked whether if the police outside outside Conservative Party conferences – for example those who policed the Right to Work demonstration outside the one in Brighton in 1980 – [UCPI0000015888], were fair game for protecting the elite? Was it therefore legitimate to push through their cordons?

He pressed this point several times. German calmly argued that the question implied a misconception about whether people planned violence at demonstrations. They didn’t.

INTERACTION WITH OTHERS

Barr then went on to ask about a number of other organisations: School Kids Against the Nazis (SKAN), Women’s Voice, Rock Against Racism, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and armed Irish republican group the Provisional IRA(!)

We’ve already heard how the spycops of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) targeted youth organisations like SKAN at the Security Service’s direction.

German agreed the SWP was involved in SKAN, however she said that it was a broad front and ‘larger groups’ joined the fight against fascism. The SWP were a minority in that organisation.

Women’s Voice was different, it was not a broad front type organisation, it was an organisation of socialist women. While Rock Against Racism was different yet again, formed by a small group of people in reaction to racist comments made by Eric Clapton.

Barr asked if the SWP had a “surreptitious” approach to “controlling” the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). She dismissed the claim, saying the SWP was open about and localised in its approach to CND.

She did agree that the SWP wanted CND to be “more militant” – not by doing more direct action (something that CND already did, and continue to do, a lot of), but by making more links with trade unions and the working class, and being more collective.

ARMED STRUGGLE

Barr then pressed German on the SWP’s support for “the armed struggle” [UCPI0000015994], particularly in Ireland. She replied that the SWP supported the Provisional IRA’s aims but not their bombing campaigns; she could support attacks on military infrastructure but not the bombings of pubs or other targets.

We were shown another Special Branch report [UCPI0000019543] about a party held at the home of SWP organiser Chris Harman. Somebody who attended the party, a former IMG member who had lived in Belfast, allegedly ‘while somewhat the worse for drink’, spoke of being ‘trusted by’ the Provisional IRA and ‘fully sympathetic to their cause’.

Barr asked how common such views were within the SWP.

German didn’t think this report was true. This person was involved in the H blocks campaign, seeking political status for IRA prisoners, and in supporting the hunger strikers – something that enjoyed wide support at the time.

Ironically, we know that if the SWP really were directly involved with the Provisional IRA, they probably wouldn’t have been spied upon; the SDS’s 1976 Annual Report stated it was policy not to infiltrate groups directly connected with the Provisionals as this would be too dangerous for the spycops.

CONFRONTING FASCISM

After a break, Barr’s questions moved to the relationship between the SWP and the far-right. He started with events in Red Lion Square in June 1974. The fascist National Front had booked Conway Hall for a rally, and a broad range of organisations organised a counter-demonstration to stop them.

At the time German was a student at the nearby London School of Economics, a short walk away. She recalls that journey, and the huge number of police vans she saw on the way:

“I’m not surprised that somebody died on that day. It was very very heavily policed and in a very violent way”.

The police pursued demonstrators, attacking them with truncheons and even throwing some over the railings into the underpass on Theobalds Road. During charges into the crowd by mounted police, Kevin Gately, a young student from Warwick, was killed.

German said:

“We didn’t go looking for trouble, we weren’t the people who created the trouble.”

Rather, the police had put a huge operation in place because they were determined to ensure the fascist event would go ahead.

Barr mentioned Lord Scarman’s inquiry after the event, saying that he “fairly and squarely put the blame on the IMG [International Marxist Group]” who “assaulted the police in an unexpected, unprovoked and viciously violent attack”.

German disagreed: “that’s not an accurate description”, pointing out that Gately was an IMG member, and:

“they were demonstrating perfectly acceptably.”

THE BATTLE OF LEWISHAM

Barr next cited a report from a 1976 meeting about racism in Hackney which described how a “negress in the audience” had said that Black people in Brixton were arming themselves with “knives and coshes”.

German pointed out that the “bizarre” report should be taken with a big pinch of salt, especially as there is no other evidence of this. It was down to her (not Barr) to comment on the language used by the author, saying “even in the 70s people didn’t talk like that”.

She also reminded Barr that this was a dangerous time for socialists, as well as Black and Asian people – fascists would attack people on the tube for wearing anti-racist badges. The SWP believed that combatting racists should be done collectively, involving the trade unions and wider groups.

“We were very careful, we didn’t want this to become a kind of individual gang fight between left and right”.

Barr had brought this up because he wanted to ask German about the August 1977 events that became known as the ‘Battle of Lewisham‘, and the SWP Central Committee’s attitude towards the anti-fascist counter-demonstrations that had been planned for that day.

German was at a by-election in Birmingham at the time of the Lewisham demonstration, and was not a member of the SWP’s Central Committee until 1979. Nevertheless, she patiently explained why it was so important to oppose a fascist demonstration that had deliberately chosen to walk through a multicultural community. It was a consciously provocative and intimidating act.

Indeed, not seeking to prevent the fascists marching would have been a mistake, as the consequence of not coming out on the streets (in Lewisham or anywhere else) would be more attacks on Black people – much, much worse.

Pressed, German provided more detail on the SWP’s approach to demonstrations, explaining that the SWP had an extensive stewarding operation:

“We wanted to make sure people could get to marches safely, that they would take place in a collective, disciplined way and not descend to individual fighting. We put a lot of effort into that.”

When asked about their use of obstruction as a tactic, she explained that they would occupy the road in order to prevent fascists from marching into areas where they might cause trouble. There were more than 50 racist murders of Black and Asian people in those years and the SWP felt strongly about this issue. There should have been official recognition that the National Front marches were unacceptable.

Nobody wanted the National Front in Southall – pretty much the entire community there were very clear about not wanting the fascists in their area, yet the police went out of their way to let that rally happen in 1979. There was a huge counter-demonstration, which SWP members attended, and this is when the police killed Blair Peach, who was a member of the Party.

Eventually, the Met banned all National Front marches in 1981.

German also gave examples of successful community resistance to the National Front such as occupying the space at the top of Brick Lane to stop them selling fascist papers there, painting over racist slogans, dealing with racism in ‘low-level ‘ways in workplaces, etc.

SPYCOPS IN THE PARTY

Finally, towards the end of the morning, Barr’s questioning moved to the activities of some of the spycops themselves. German was involved in the Right To Work campaign. In 1981 she spent three weeks on a Right To Work march – as did an undercover officer using the name ‘Colin Clark’ (officer HN80, 1977-1980).

She says that Clark put himself very much at the centre of the operation – “presumably to find out as much information as he could”. He took part in most of the day to day decisions, about money for food, etc, but also important discussions such as how to avoid dangerous situations or prevent young people who joined the protest march from being arrested.

Looking back, German said:

“It’s very disturbing that he was in this position… I feel uncomfortable, it’s disquieting…I find no justification for it whatever.”

After a brief detour to ask his characteristic questions about “trouble” during that Right to Work march (spoiler: there wasn’t any), Barr cited a 1982 report [UCPI0000015888] containing details of donations (including small ones) made to the campaign. This information was meant to be confidential, but it was hoovered up by the SDS.

The Inquiry sought a better understanding of the way the campaign (and the SWP) was organised and how these donations were dealt with. There were a number of questions about the office and headquarters, about the different positions within the SWP structure, and what these levels meant in terms of access to information and involvement in decision-making.

German explained that although some people in leadership roles worked from home, they would also come in to the office. Those who worked in the office would come along to meetings and social events, trips to the pub, etc.

She remembered some of the spycops – she says they attended social events and generally kept a fairly low profile. Some, like ‘Phil Cooper’ (officer HN155, 1979-1984), although not on the SWP’s Central Committee would have had some influence over what was going on. Of most concern, though, is the level of access to information of all kinds – people’s names and personal data, Party finances, etc – that he would have had. [UCPI0000011563]

TRIPE

Barr then moved on to a series of reports from October 1977, 1979 [UCPI0000013669], 1980 [UCPI0000013961], and 1983 [UCPI0000015986], all of which mention German by name.

TThe spycops had reported back about her appointment as a new District Organiser, and then her promotion to the SWP Central Committee and role of as ‘Women’s Organiser’. They reported on her attending a Blair Peach demo on the first anniversary of his death.

One exhibit said that the photo they had of her on file was no longer a good likeness, and requested a new one. The last detailed her new address and living arrangements.

Barr wanted German’s reaction to all of these. She described the last report as “tripe”, dismissing it as inaccurate and pointless. She said these reports represented a completely unjustified level of intrusion, and pointed out that much of the information they contained was in the public domain. Events such as the SWP National Conference at Skegness were advertised publicly.

Blair Peach was her neighbour, someone she regularly saw and spoke to. The demo where he was killed was described by someone she knew as “the most violent demonstration he’s ever been on”.

“We know that Peach was murdered by the police”.

That the spycops reported the SWP used his death “for their own ends” was a “complete disgrace”, saying more about the mindset of the undercover police and their attitudes towards those who demonstrated.

German said this Inquiry must address the “appalling way” the police treated “people who were going about perfectly legitimate political activity”.

SPYCOPS AT THE PARTY

After lunch, Barr pulled up more reports, from the Easter rallies the SWP held in Skegness in 1980 [UCPI0000014551] and 1982 [UCPI0000018180].

According to German, these weekend-long events in Skegness were part holiday/ social, part political. Many of those who attended were not party members or politically involved – some “just went there because the wanted a good time” – others accompanied their partners – many people brought their children.

These two reports contain long lists of attendees’ names (running to 50 pages). Barr pointed out the words “no trace” after many of the names – suggesting that Special Branch ran searches on all the names and this was the first time that many of these people had come to their attention. Some of them were only there as paid entertainers, comedians and the like.

German confirmed that these lists of names, as well as other documents displayed by Barr, containing internal Party statistics [UPCI0000016148], and the phone numbers of the SWP secretariat [UCPI0000016582] would have been confidential, as would the level of detail in thereport of the SWP’s 1980 National Delegate conference [UCPI0000016619].

German stated that there was no justification for this level of intrusion from the police. She concluded the police “simply wanted to put the Left in a very bad light.”

Notably, there was no such infiltration of the National Front, an obviously political decision.

Asked for her reflections on the spycops operation, she said it represented a big effort and a lot of public money for very little results.

Mitting had a few questions for her at the end of the day. He noted that electoral candidates – even the National Front – were legally permitted to hold election rallies in public buildings , to make some kind of point:

“I accept that you objected to it, but you knew that the law of the land actually provided that they were entitled to make use of these places?”

The Inquiry’s Chair then thanked her for her time, inviting her back for Tranche 2 – covering 1983-92, expected to occur in 2024 – “health and intellect permitting of course – that goes for both of us”, he laughed.

With that slightly disturbing ‘joke’, suggesting that ongoing delays to the process will continue to result in many witnesses, and perhaps even Mitting himself, being too dead, infirm or mentally incapacitated to take part, Day Four of this round of hearings came to an end.

Follow Lindsey German on Twitter: @LindseyAGerman

Witness statement of Lindsay German

Full list of associated publications

Video and transcript of the day’s hearing

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The current round of Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings, focusing on Special Demonstration Squad managers 1968-82, continue until Friday 20 May.

<<Previous UCPI Daily Report (11 May 2022)<<

>>Next UCPI Daily Report (13 May 2022)>>

Tranche 1, Phase 3, Day 3

11 May 2022

The third day of the 2022 Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings concerning the management of the Special Demonstration Squad 1968-82 included opening statements from:

Rajiv Menon QC (representing Tariq Ali, Piers Corbyn and Ernie Tate)
Dave Morris (activist, Inquiry core participant)
Kirsten Heaven (representing Other Non-Police, Non-State Core Participants [through the co-ordinating group])
Summary of Evidence of ‘Madeleine’ and Julia Poynter

Rajiv Menon QC (representing Tariq Ali, Piers Corbyn and the interests of Ernie Tate)

NB: Ernie Tate sadly passed away in 2021, without receiving any meaningful disclosure from the Inquiry.

SECRET HEARINGS AND MASSIVE REDACTIONS

First of all, Mr Menon spoke about the secret hearings that have been held during the last year, known as the ‘T1P4 hearings’. In his view, it is “fundamentally wrong and unfair” to conduct closed hearings as part of a so-called ‘Public Inquiry’.

The transcripts of those hearings have been heavily redacted, and we are told that this is being done “in the public interest”. Evidence was taken from five officers in T1P4, but we are not being told their real or cover names. Instead of being supplied with copies of their evidence, we have a document of ‘Unattributed Excerpts‘.

This was especially ridiculous in the case of officer HN21:

“an officer who was perfectly willing 20 years ago to speak openly about his undercover role in the BBC documentary True Spies, is unable to give evidence in open session to a Public Inquiry.”

This is someone who admitted having a sexual relationship with at least one woman, but we have not been permitted to question him or find out more about this.

It is estimated that 50% of the evidence gathered during T1P4 has been redacted, and might therefore remain secret forever. Menon repeated the request he made last year – that the Inquiry reconsider the need for such redactions, and commit to regularly reviewing decisions about disclosure, so that names and information can be made public in future if circumstances change.

POLICE VIOLENCE

This secrecy was also wrong in the case of officer HN41 who is of great importance to understanding what happened at the anti-racist demonstration in Southall on 23rd April 1979, when Blair Peach was murdered by the Met’s Special Patrol Group and Tariq Ali and many others were severely beaten by police officers.

HN41 says that he was warned by senior Special Branch officers not to go with his target group “because the uniform police were going to clamp down on the demonstrations” and “management considered the dangers were more than normal”.

Mr Menon states there is no doubt uniformed police were under secret orders to use violence at anti-fascist demonstrations. Meanwhile intelligence from the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) seemed to heighten a view within the police that all anti-fascist demonstrators were subversives so fair game for police truncheons.

POLITICAL BIAS

According to DI Angus McIntosh (officer HN244), there was a “high level policy decision” not to infiltrate extreme right-wing groups. This confirms what we already knew about the prejudiced nature of SDS surveillance. Yet, given HN41’s observations, who exactly made this decision and why?

Mr Menon asks us to bear in mind that the SDS was an integral part of the secret state. Senior offices and politicians were well aware of the SDS’ existence, something borne out by the disclosure we have had.

He also lets the comments of SDS manager Geoffrey Craft (officer HN34) about “mob rule”, “lefties” and “scruffy, hairy so-and-so’s” speak for themselves, having described it as “classic ‘Reds under the Bed’ stuff with a dose of McCarthyism thrown in for good measure” [Inquiry document number MPS-0747446, not yet published on the Inquiry website].

GOOD – FOR NOTHING?

Following up on his earlier points on HN41, he addresses the claimed success of SDS in combating public disorder by asking:

“Are Red Lion Square, Grunwick, Lewisham and Southall supposed to be police ‘successes’? If so, perhaps this gives the measure of what the police were trying to achieve at the time”.

Really “scraping the justification barrel” is the suggestion that the unit’s usefulness includes working out that some groups pose no threat at all, by infiltrating them for long periods of time (which we see in many of the SDS Annual Reports).

ALTERNATIVE INTELLIGENCE GATHERING METHODS

He next looked at whether there were less harmful ways of collecting intelligence, using the case of SDS officer Roy Creamer and the anarchist scene of the late 60s/ early 70s. DI Creamer was described by noted anarchist Stuart Christie as “the Yard’s dialectician of dissent.”

Creamer was curious as to what made anarchists tick. He was the epitome of what Menon called the ‘direct approach’, as opposed to the ‘oblique approach’ developed by Conrad Dixon and the other spycops.

Instead of going undercover, he established friendly relationships with targets and talked to them. The barrister suggested the ‘direct approach’ was a proportionate and less damaging approach to the gathering of intelligence than the SDS method.

However, we at the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance strongly recommend you never talk to coppers, especially if they seem friendly!

SDS & MI5

Menon next moved to a theme of increasing importance in the Inquiry – the relationship between the SDS and the Security Service (aka MI5) [see Inquiry document MPS-0747446 when they upload it to the Inquiry site].

He emphasised the Security Service’s interest in this new unit from the moment it was founded. They recognised the Squad’s potential value as a long-term intelligence gathering operation against all those it deemed ‘subversive’. If anything;

“MI5 were the organ grinders, and SDS were the monkeys. Only the monkeys did not know to whose tune they were really dancing.”

Even Craft says that: “the Branch were the legs of the Security Service… SDS was only a development of that”, and that the SDS provided the Security Service with “a huge base of information for their vetting activity”.

Opening statement of Rajiv Menon QC

Dave Morris (representing himself)

This was a relatively short statement from Morris, who has already given several previous opening statements to the Inquiry and a witness statement.

His name appears in multiple SDS reports released by the Inquiry. He was active in various anarchist and environmental groups:

“I have been involved since 1974 in a range of groups and campaigns trying to encourage the public to support one another and empower themselves where they live and work, to challenge injustice, oppression and damage to the environment, and to make the world a better place for everyone.

“The various groups I have been involved in over the decades have been open and collectively-run, and engaged in the kind of public activities which the public are invited to join in or to replicate for themselves, and which are essential if humanity is to progress and survive.”

These groups challenged the government and powerful companies, as well as ruthless and unaccountable elites which were ‘subversive of society and people’s real needs.’

Morris said:

“I am proud of the many groups and campaigns I have been involved in and believe that such efforts should be supported, not undermined.”

One of those campaigns which is now known to have been infiltrated was the Torness Alliance anti-nuclear campaign.

Having noted that the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, had been furnished with an education in Trotskyism from Tariq Ali, Morris correspondingly provided Mitting with a primer on anarchism, explaining that some institutions simply cannot be reformed but must be replaced by genuine democracy.

He helpfully provided a list of books for the Chair to read in order to better understand anarchist thinking:
Anarchism – A Very Short Introduction by Colin Ward
Demanding the Impossible by Peter Marshall
On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky
and just in case Mitting was partial to science fiction, Ursula Le Guin’s classic The Dispossessed.

Morris mentioned one spycop, ‘Tony Williams’ (officer HN20), who became treasurer and secretary of the London Workers Group and whose reporting was no doubt passed on to the Security Service for blacklisting purposes. Apparently the SDS told the Security Service they considered Williams’ withdrawal from the field ‘no great loss’ as he had not been ‘particularly productive’.

Morris criticised the Inquiry for continued delays and other problems to do with the publication of documents – some of which were released so late in the day that there was insufficient time for anyone to process them properly.

Morris was particularly critical of the police and the Inquiry for failing to prioritise the welfare of the spycops’ victims. He made the point that those undercover officers had a duty of care towards the public. The police’s sudden championing of privacy and human rights, when it came to applying for anonymity, was hypocritical and self-serving, and only because they themselves were now being exposed to public scrutiny.

Finally, in a slightly surreal moment, Mitting asked Morris which book he would select from his list if he could only pick one. Dave unhesitantly went for Peter Marshall’s Demanding the Impossible, although he warned that it was a “weighty tome”.

Opening statement of Dave Morris

Kirsten Heaven (representing the ‘Non State Non Police Core Participants, through the coordinating group’)

In previous hearings we heard shocking evidence of what Heaven described as “an unjustifiable, unlawful, and profoundly anti-democratic system of surveillance that was fundamentally flawed”.

Managers are now in the spotlight to answer for that regime. However:

“The witness statements disclosed in this Inquiry contain a litany of denials and an apparent unwillingness to accept responsibility or admit knowledge on key decision making and events. The managers appear reluctant to give a full and honest explanation of why things went so badly wrong within the SDS in the Tranche 1 era (1968-1982), and beyond.”

Basically, if they retain a sense of loyalty to the police, it is deeply misplaced, Heaven said, referring to the recent appalling exposures:

“This is an institution which has been found to be institutionally racist, institutionally corrupt and marred by a culture of toxic masculinity, homophobia, misogyny, and sexual harassment.”

OVERSIGHT

These managers emphasised to their funders at the Home Office how robust their supervision of the undercovers was. Yet there was no code of conduct or formal training.

“Did the managers conceal these practices from their political masters or was it – as the non-state co-operating group suspect – that the cover-up went to the highest political level?”

In order to understand the problems of the SDS we must understand who controlled the unit, and the extent to which the SDS was being directed by the likes of other parts of Special Branch and the Security Service, referred to as the ‘customers’.

Worryingly, there is disclosed evidence that although they were aware of the problems, the Home Office and senior police officers all turned a blind eye. This meant there was no effective external oversight of the SDS, or of wider Special Branch.

Additionally, both the Home Office and the Security Service knew that the SDS activities of the time were unlawful. This was the reason for shrouding it in secrecy, a secrecy that allowed the abuses to flourish.

As raised in other Opening Statements, a problematic definition of ‘subversion’ was used to justify reporting on pretty much anything and anyone. The Security Service was able to exercise its influence over the affairs of Special Branch to shape how the unit operated.

Senior police officers were willing to go along with this, and ignore the lack of public order benefits of these deployments. Claims that the SDS benefited and improved the police’s attitudes to public order simply don’t stand up. Heaven used the events of Red Lion Square, Southall and Lewisham as examples. The Brixton riots of 1981 demonstrated just how useless the unit when it came to predicting or preventing public disorder.

There was no real attempt to evaluate the usefulness of the unit more generally. Annual Reports were written up in order to justify its existence and ongoing funding. It was the duty of the managers “to consider the threat to freedom of speech and democratic principles posed by the SDS”, and they failed to do this.

MANAGEMENT OF THE SDS

Heaven noted that the SDS was managed loosely and wonders whether the early ‘free and easy’ style became the blueprint for the future. Despite claims of close supervision, the managers remained blind to the various sexual relationships, and the sexist banter, of these officers.

As to the standardisation of the lengths of deployments to four years, she wants to know if there was a “positive and considered managerial decision to extend all deployments well beyond twelve months”, adding:

“It is not rocket science that the longer a UCO [undercover officer] is deployed, the greater chance there is of collateral intrusion, the development of close personal ties, sexual and intimate relationships, misconduct and abuse of power and trust”.

The lack of training given to both undercover officers and their managers is concerning. The Inquiry must look at what basic police training was at the time to understand how much they knew about legal principles such as entering private property without a search warrant or conduct issues such as sexual relationships while on duty. How did the managers reconcile this with the activities of the SDS?

DODGY REPORTING

As previously evidenced, there is much reporting which is distressing and inappropriate, peppered as it is with racism and misogyny. Nobody pointed it out at the time. The SDS managers all now say that these reports were produced for others to comment on, evaluate and use.

However, these senior officers were responsible for the unit’s work, and as such have a duty to explain this reporting along with the other practices that took place under their watch.

CONCLUSION

The SDS, as an operation, was never lawful. These abuses were aided by the Home Office sanctioning and maintaining the unit’s secretive existence, leading to a “catastrophic failure of policing at the heart of British democracy”.

The way that the unit acted during this period (1968-1982) paved the way for the abuses committed later – we were told that their “abhorrent practices survived and even flourished following legal reforms.”

Opening statement of Kirsten Heaven

‘Madeleine’ and Julia Poynter: Written statements

These written statements, from two ‘civilian witnesses’, were published in full today. The Inquiry prepared a short summary of each, and read it out loud. We prepared our own, below:

‘Madeleine’

‘Madeleine’ was deceived into a relationship with an undercover officer known as ‘Vince Miller’ (officer HN354), who infiltrated the Walthamstow branch of the Socialist Workers Party (1976 -1979). Since then Vince’s real surname (Harvey) has been released.

It turns out that he reached the level of Superintendent before retiring from the police, and went on to a top job, National Director at the National Criminal Intelligence Service. The Undercover Research Group have published a summary of Vincent Harvey’s post-undercover career.

(‘Madeleine’ had already provided the Inquiry with a written statement in February 2021, and gave compelling evidence in hearings of May 2021. Also see Charlotte Killroy QC’s statement on her behalf this week)

COLD AND CYNICAL TACTICS

In her statement, ‘Madeleine’ recounted the stressful and “excruciating” nature of her live witness testimony at the Inquiry in May 2021, where she suffered “intrusive questioning”.

This was so bad that other women from ‘Category H’ suffered “such significant distress that they were unsure if they would be able to continue their participation in the Inquiry”. This raises serious questions about the treatment of witnesses, who are in effect sexual abuse survivors.

‘Madeleine’ mentioned Vince sending her a postcard at the end of 1979, after he disappeared from her life, giving her false hope about him. She now knows that this was “a cold and cynical tactic”, perpetuated on other women by other undercovers who’d disappeared in similar ways.

MANIPULATED BY THE INQUIRY

She then recounted how she’d generously acceded to the Inquiry’s request not to demand Harvey’s real name, in order to ‘protect’ one of his family members.

However, she then found out more about his long career in policing, which involved many public appearances. She was shocked to learn that while Harvey was its Director, the National Criminal Intelligence Service had responsibility for the Animal Rights National Index (a forerunner of another undercover political policing unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit) and the National Domestic Extremism Database:

“I think it is imperative that he is required to provide evidence relating to this role in later tranches.”

Perhaps most disturbing for ‘Madeleine’ was the revelation that Harvey had been in charge of a child sexual abuse investigation, Operation Pragada, saying she felt “physically sick” and “turned her stomach” on finding this out.

‘Madeleine’ now feels manipulated into the decision she made not to demand his real name. The Inquiry would have known about his later senior policing roles. It is a disgrace that they allowed this to happen.

INCOMPLETE RECORD OF REPORTING ON ‘MADELEINE’

Madeleine has always maintained that the 23 Special Branch reports in her witness pack could not be a complete record of the reporting on her.

Having now come across a report of a meeting that took place at her home, but did not mention her name, she believes that Harvey purposefully omitted her name from the list, due to his involvement with her.

‘Madeleine’ now wants to check all 175 reports produced by Harvey – which the Inquiry has chosen not to publish – to see if they refer to events that she attended with him. All reports thought to have been authored by this officer should be disclosed.

Opening statement of ‘Madeleine’

Julia Poynter

Julia is also a former member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and knew both ‘Madeleine’ and ‘Vince Miller’ back in the day. She has come forward and was able to collaborate her old comrade’s accounts of the time. Poynter also knew ‘Phil Cooper’ (officer HN155) who infiltrated the SWP (1979-84) after ‘Vince Miller’ had ended his deployment.

Poynter was shocked that the Inquiry held 62 reports which mentioned her name. She described her political trajectory, going from being a disillusioned Labour Party member to joining the SWP in 1975, where her “main focus was anti-racism work through my involvement with the Anti Nazi League”.

MISSED OPPORTUNITY

Poynter says that when she attended a Trade Union Conference on Undercover Policing in November 2019, she saw ‘Vince Miller’s name on a document listing all the undercovers, but did not connect this with the man she knew. If only the Inquiry had released a photo at that time, she would have been able to identify him:

“I could then have provided this evidence to the Inquiry at a much earlier date.”

Two years later, listening to the 2021 hearings, Julia realised that ‘Madeleine’ was an old friend of hers, who she had not seen for many years. She was shocked that Harvey was still maintaining that this had only been a one-night stand:

“It was clear to me at the time that it had been a significant relationship for her.”

‘PHIL COOPER’

Poynter went on to discuss her interactions with ‘Phil Cooper’, who she met through her boyfriend. Cooper and her then-partner set up Waltham Forest Anti Nuclear Campaign (WFANC) in about 1980. Cooper said in his written statement that he had not formed any significant friendships in the group.

However, Poynter recalls that:

“[her boyfriend] and Phil got on very well and were good friends. WFANC would meet at our house and Phil would attend those meetings. My memory of Phil is that he was a real laugh, very much into drinking and having a good time.”

Cooper drank heavily, and smoked weed regularly. On one occasion, she says he was so inebriated that he fell off his chair and broke it.

Poynter addressed many of the Special Branch Reports which mentioned her name. One such report describes a 1981 SWP branch meeting – a fireman contact has offered to help carry out a personal investigation, following a spate of racist attacks on Asians in the area.

According to the report:

“The SWP intend to use this information to stir up further unrest within the Asian community in Walthamstow.”

She does not accept this cynical interpretation – what’s been left out of the report is what had actually happened – in early July petrol had been poured through the door of an Asian household in the area, killing Parveen Khan (28) and her children Kamran (11), Aqsa (10) and Imran (2). She stated:

“The community were rightfully angry and we were reaching out and helping to build alliances in the community. It is offensive that the police were spying on us carrying out this work rather than spending resources identifying the murderers, who as far as I am aware have never been caught.”

Opening statement of Julia Poynter

Transcript of the full day’s hearing

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The current round of Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings, focusing on Special Demonstration Squad managers 1968-82, continue until Friday 20 May.

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