Tranche 3 Phase 1, Day 5
20 October 2025

INTRODUCTION

Spycop boss HN143 Dennis ‘Ben’ Gunn gave evidence to the Undercover Policing Inquiry on 20 October 2025 at the International Dispute Resolution Centre in London.

Though the Inquiry has started its ‘Tranche 3 Phase 1’ hearings, examining the final 15 years of the Special Demonstration Squad 1993-2008, Gunn was actually a holdover from Tranche 2, which covered 1983-1992.

Gunn was commander of operations for the Metropolitan Police Special Branch from February 1988 to November 1991. This meant he had oversight of all the operational work of the various Special Branch squads, including the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS).

The Inquiry’s page for the day has video and a transcript.

The Undercover Policing Inquiry (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.

Gunn has provided a witness statement to the Inquiry [MPS-0749634]. Questioning him was Sarah Simcock, her first appearance as Counsel to the Inquiry.

Gunn is in his 80s but comes across as someone still sharp, though there are some blanks in his memory. He demonstrated the attitude of someone certainly used to wielding authority, not used to being questioned. He is not afraid to express his opinions on matters.

He could also be quite patronising and talked down to Simcock when she drilled down into the version of events that he wanted to present.

This is a long report, use the links to jump to a specific topic:

The Man and His Mission
Gunn’s career and outlook

The Scutt Affair – Reputations At Stake
Stefan Scutt, the spycop who went off the rails. His breakdown and the desperate measures taken to protect the secrecy of the unit

Spycops Methods
Oversight, stealing dead children’s identities, operating beyond the law

Relationships
Officers deceiving women into long-term intimate relationships

Criminal Spycops
Officers arrested under false names, deceiving courts, and their managers’ efforts to protect them

SDS Targeting Strategy
Who they spied on and how they justified it

Public Disclosure
The True Spies documentary and the public inquiry

The Man and His Mission

As commander of operations for the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch (February 1988 to November 1991) Gunn was in charge of many intelligence gathering units, including the SDS. He had not formally played a role in the SDS prior to this, but that did not stop him having very firm opinions about it all.

It is worth nothing that from the outset at the Inquiry, Gunn exhibited a tone that we have not seen before. He wasn’t combative, but at times he bordered on the aggressive, leaning forward and displaying anger. Particularly so when lines of questions took him into areas where he had strong views on the appropriateness of matters.

Repeatedly, he would return to restate points such as how upset he was that interviews given to Operation Herne, the Metropolitan Police’s internal investigation into the spycops scandal, had been given to the UCPI.

GUNN RIDES TO THE DEFENCE OF THE SDS

Gunn’s took the position it was only ten or so officers who had let the side down, and the Inquiry was simply not hearing about all the great stuff the SDS had achieved to prevent the collapse of civilisation.

He was determined to be the voice of all the SDS officers he considered as having been wronged. It became clear that he is following the Inquiry closely, listening to much of the testimony.

If officers such as HN10 Robert Lambert ‘Bob Robinson’, or HN78 Trevor Morris ‘Anthony “Bobby” Lewis’ came off as tone deaf, Gunn took it another step forward. It was difficult listening. However, in his eagerness to defend the SDS, he also let a lot out of the bag in the process, demonstrating the value of hearing such witnesses live rather than just taking written statements.

Being questioned about events from forty years ago while now an elderly man, Gunn could be expected to have poor recollection. There were things he could firmly answer, but there were quite a few topics where he simply had no recollection whatsoever, not even vaguely, which he said bothered him. However, he was clear he stood by his decisions at the time and the minutes that went with them.

PROTECT THE POLICE

He didn’t shy away from anything in this respect and felt able to justify why decisions were made as they were back then. Pretty much that came down to the need to protect the police, the Home Office and government more generally from embarrassment had certain matters being made public at the time – which included even the existence of the SDS.

This embarrassment was another regular theme of his: he was determined to ensure that the good, honest, hard-working police officers of Special Branch were not going to take the blame for just doing what they had been told to do by their political masters.

It was clear he had come with points to make, and he would make them at every opportunity. In the process, he would demonstrate his annoyance with the questions coming from Simcock that made him repeat what was so obvious to him. For him, it was all part of the Inquiry having the wrong approach and not considering all the laudable work that the SDS had done.

One came away from his evidence with a sense that there is disquiet among the former Special Branch managers that the Metropolitan Police has been shifting its stance to condemn the SDS.

At the outset of the scandal, the MPS relied on the ‘rogue agent, bad apple’ excuse. However, as more became exposed, it was the undercovers to blame. As the managers gave evidence, even that limited damage control became untenable with the managers increasingly shown to be incompetent or turning a blind eye.

Finally, the Met seem to have begun washing their hands of the entity of the SDS as the evidence has become overwhelming. At the beginning of Tranche 3 they conceded it was ‘a dysfunctional unit’, an admission forced by the Inquiry’s publication of the Met’s damning internal Closing Report [MPS-0722622] written when the SDS was shut down back in 2009.

Now the senior managers from the time, such as Gunn, can apparently see the spotlight slowly shifting to them, and with it the entire reputation of their dearly beloved Special Branch. As such, his fighting approach can be seen in this context.

OPENING SALVOS

The first question from Simcock is whether Gunn spoke to other current or former police officers before making his witness statement.

Gunn is quick to set the tone, rushing ahead with:

‘If I could just explain: I was a coordinator of a group of former senior Metropolitan Police Special Branch officers. That group, of which there were 15 of us when we started, sadly there are only seven left, that group was formed and I coordinated it to help this Inquiry with factual information of the background to the SDS.

Under no circumstances did we collude in any way, shape or form on the evidence presented or would be presented by potential witnesses.’

He added he had spoken to Piers Doggart, Solicitor to the Inquiry, to whom he had:

‘made it absolutely clear that whatever we discussed in terms of former colleagues it was not about the evidence, it was about process, facts and help.’

This included his close friend and colleague HN587 Peter Phelan. A Special Branch officer who was Gunn’s predecessor as Commander of Operations, for a time Phelan was directly above Gunn as Deputy Assistant Commissioner – Specialist Operations/ Security (DACSO).

Phelan was due to give evidence in the same week as Gunn but was withdrawn due to ill-health. We have been told he will be rescheduled.

Gunn says he is in contact with Phelan:

‘but under no circumstances would either of us talk about the evidence. And we were absolutely sacrosanct in making that distinction when we spoke to one another. We are friends and former colleagues, but under no circumstances did I collude in any way talking about the evidence that either he or I give.’

Simcock then points out that the Inquiry asked both Gunn and Phelan the same questions about knowledge of relationships.

Gunn’s responses to them are at paragraphs 131 to 133 of his statement, and Phelan’s at 144 to 146 of his statement [MPS-0749627]. She notes that they are similarly worded and in fact, bar one word, the middle paragraph is identical.

Gunn says he’s unsurprised because the question was the same, and again denies any collusion with Phelan.

CAREER

Gunn had been Detective Chief Superintendent in charge of R Squad, that part of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch which dealt with policy, communications and statutory powers.

Unfortunately, this is all we learned as, despite questions being submitted by core participants, the Inquiry didn’t feel the need to explore this aspect more.

It is hard to see how R Squad is not relevant, as this department was not just responsible for overseeing policy and statutory powers, but was also where top-secret policy files were kept. Even if it is not of direct concern, why it didn’t play a role in oversight of the SDS ought to have been explored.

Following this Gunn did a stint as a uniformed Chief Superintendent in Area 6 (West London) from 1986 to 1987. This was something senior officers did as part of their progression to higher positions.

From February 1988 he succeeded Phelan as Special Branch’s Commander of Operations.

In late 1991, Gunn left the Metropolitan Police, having been appointed Deputy Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire Police – going on to become Chief Constable. There, among other issues, he dealt with hunt saboteurs and animal rights campaigns, particularly in relation to the notorious vivisection laboratories at Huntingdon Life Sciences.

COMMANDER OF OPERATIONS

It is Gunn’s time as Commander of Operations that is of most relevance to the Inquiry. He is the first officer to give testimony who held this senior position.

He did not really have a handover from Phelan, but didn’t need one as they had worked closely together for 30 years and he knew what the job entailed. If he had any questions, they had adjoining offices so could speak at any time. Had there been anything sensitive to know about S Squad, they would probably have discussed it, but he doesn’t recall any specifics.

At the time the Deputy Assistant Commissioner – Security was the Head of Special Branch, with the Commander of Operations (also at this time at commander rank) being the effective deputy.

Commander Ops, as it was known, had responsibility for all operational work carried out by the Met’s Special Branch. This included the SDS, which sat in S Squad but moved to C Squad (which monitored left wing political activism) in 1988. Alongside him was Commander Administration – at that time HN295 Don Buchanan who would later succeed Gunn as Commander Ops.

Every morning at 10am, all the senior managers, including Phelan, Gunn and Buchanan, met with the Detective Chief Superintendents of each of the Special Branch squads. Also there was George Churchill-Coleman, the Commander of SO13 Anti-Terrorist Branch. They discussed the business of the day as it affected the different squads, and made decisions (this was the ‘prayer meetings’ mentioned by other senior Special Branch managers).

Gunn is questioned on who would have known of the SDS at this rank. He replied that until an officer reached Commander rank, most Special Branch officers ‘did not appreciate the full remit or the existence of the SDS’.

He is certain the senior ranks of Assistant Commissioner, Specialist Operations (ACSO) and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police were aware of the unit, in the sense of what they were doing, though not about the day-to-day running or the techniques and tactics used.

It is at this point, only 15 minutes in, that Gunn makes a statement he would return to repeatedly:

‘And don’t forget we did this work on behalf of the State. We were asked to do this by the Home Secretary in 1968, when the febrile atmosphere of demonstrations and extremism in this country was much greater than it is today.

And I don’t know how many of the Inquiry team were experienced and understand what we went through in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. But it was important that the Commissioner, who was asked by the Home Secretary in 1968 to get our act together on the intelligence side, we were performing those duties on behalf of the State. For the State.

And don’t forget, we had no statutory power to do what we were doing at the time. We were operating in a statutory vacuum – and that meant we had to make decisions on what we did from our own pragmatic knowledge, staying within the law.’

OVERSIGHT OF THE SDS

The SDS, a small unit in itself, was accordingly a relatively small part of Gunn’s responsibilities as Commander Ops. He had other issues such as terrorism to deal with. He didn’t ignore the SDS, but left it to the Chief Superintendent of S Squad to inform him of operational and reputational matters.

Hence, Gunn did not involve himself in the day-to-day management of the SDS, but had an oversight role. Asked that that oversight meant, he replies:

‘Well, the oversight of the SDS was demanding that they stayed within the law, that they perform their duties properly. Both from a discipline and criminal law aspect and any matters that affected the reputation of the Metropolitan Police would obviously need to be brought to my intention…

But I would have been informed in any matters that affected the reputation and the operational credence of such a unit.’

Hence, he only became involved in SDS matters when they were referred to him. He didn’t have a daily meeting with the Chief Superintendent of S Squad about the SDS (HN103 David Smith, HN115 Tony Wait), and Gunn had sufficient confidence in them to be telling him what he needed to know. They were in charge and he, Gunn, relied on their operational judgement.

Matters he would expect to be referred to him were:

• any arrest of an undercover, whether in real or cover identity
• any prospective disciplinary issue
• any substantial increase to the public risk to an undercover officer, whether as a result of suspicion by targets or otherwise
• any welfare issues that required the support of the wider Met or outside agencies

It is only 19 minutes in, and Gunn interjects into the questioning to make the second of the points he was determined to hammer home throughout his evidence:

‘Could I just put into context some of what you are asking? The matters of the SDS, it was a highly sensitive and secret operation [redacted] and it was on behest of the Government and the Home Office that we performed such duties.

An overriding consideration for all matters affecting the SDS was the reputation of the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office and the Government, that these very sensitive issues are not traded about daily so that it would become an embarrassment to the Home Office and Government.

We were operating under that pressure, when everything we did we had to bear in mind the fact: was the reputation of the Metropolitan Police going to be in jeopardy if information leaked on some of the things we were doing?

And that to some extent explains some of the rationale that I put later when dealing with the arrest of people, undercover officers and/or informing or not informing the court.’

He is asked who within the Met would see the SDS Annual Reports. Phelan did, and if necessary the Commissioner himself. Ask why the Commissioner would see them, he is back on his hobby-horse:

‘Because, as I explained, the delicacy and sensitivity of much of the work we were doing on SDS was unique. It had not been done before. It’s helpful to the Inquiry to distinguish between undercover policing as we knew it at the time and the new form of undercover, deep-cover policing, that occurred with the SDS.

The two are different and I am not absolutely sure that this Inquiry has entirely understood the difference between what we started to do uniquely in 1968 and what was going on in terms of the normal undercover work in respect of crime.’

Gunn brushes over the fact that the SDS had been going twenty years by the time he came along, and predated the formalisation of undercover work elsewhere in policing including the Met. But the point he wants to drive home here, as well as later, is that the Inquiry doesn’t understand how special and unique the SDS were.

The Scutt Affair – Reputations At Stake

 

Even by SDS standards, the actions of HN95 Stefan Scutt, ‘Stefan Wesolowski’, was one of the lowest points in the unit’s history. Infiltrating the Socialist Workers Party in 1988, this undercover went off the rails spectacularly.

His withdrawal from the field appears to have tipped him over the edge, causing him to act erratically and eventually leading to him retiring on medical grounds – rather than facing disciplinary proceedings for his actions.

It created an existential crisis for the SDS, which it ought to have learned lessons from. However, such lessons were not really learned. As such it has been a point of focus by the Inquiry when questioning multiple officers, particularly how decisions were made and especially what motivations underlay choices made by senior managers.

 

Gunn was closely involved at the time as Special Branch sought to contain the fall-out. However, he states he has no recollection of it whatsoever. He doesn’t deny he was involved in the decision making process and involved in the aftermath, but just doesn’t recall any of it and he cannot understand why he does not remember, and is troubled by that.

However, having read the documents, he does not think he would have done anything differently. Regardless of this, he’s asked questions and his responses are illuminating in their own way, not least in how his answers demonstrate his mindset as a manager.

Issues such as possible criminality by spycops, welfare and disciplinary matters would have been decided as a whole rather than being compartmentalised. They would be part of the totality of the decision-making process.

Counsel to the Inquiry asks if there was generally a prioritising of SDS operational security and the secrecy of the unit over potential disciplinary or criminal investigation of an undercover.

‘Ms Simcock, as I mentioned in an earlier answer, there was an overriding concern that the secrecy of the SDS and the classification of the work of the SDS should be kept to an absolute close need to know. And, yes, it would have been a consideration in making judgements on whether or not a discipline or a criminal case would follow a particular incident.’

Counsel does not rise to his patronising tone, and asks whether there was a concern that if the Scutt affair became public there was a risk the SDS would have been closed down.

‘Well, it just wasn’t Scutt. Any detail in respect of the work of the SDS – and I can’t emphasise highly enough it was a top secret unit operating in a statutory vacuum at the behest of the Government/Home Office.

And as far as the [Special] Branch were concerned, any handling of SDS information, intelligence, et cetera, had to be at the highest and most discreet level because of the embarrassment it could have been caused to the Home Office and to the Government if the work and understanding of the SDS had been made public at that time.’

Pressed on this, he says that maintaining the secrecy and operational security of the SDS was not a deciding factor in decision-making, but it was a significant one. He and the head of S Squad would have taken into account:

‘the need for the utmost secrecy of this operation. And I can’t emphasise that enough. And that was not our doing, that was the Government and the Home Office wish.’

COVERING UP CRIMINALITY

Counsel asks about whether there was a concern that a culture of covering up criminality had developed in Special Branch, and whether that was a necessary consequence of the level of secrecy.

Gunn says no, he doesn’t think there was such a culture of secrecy to avoid doing things or admitting things. Rather the culture of secrecy was about the very existence of the work of the SDS:

Q: But if criminality or misconduct on behalf of undercover officers became public, that secrecy would be in jeopardy and therefore the unit itself and its existence could be in jeopardy?

A: Obviously. And that was part of the decision-making process that I and others had to make when it came to the delicate area of undercover officers committing criminal offences.

And we had to take into account not just the circumstances of the case, the overriding need of the interests of justice, but also the overriding need of the Government and the Home Office that whatever action we took should not jeopardise the publicity of SDS activities. And I can’t emphasise that enough.

Asked why he would have recommended Scutt be removed from the list of authorised firearms officers, he explains:

‘Well, obviously, we were taking into account the risk [Scutt] posed to himself and to the organisation in respect of the activities or alleged activities.’

It’s extraordinary seeing a high ranking police officer admit that the SDS was operating outside of any legal basis, its officers were permitted to commit crimes because disciplining them would risk them becoming disgruntled and exposing the unit’s existence, and yet he talks about this as if it were all right and proper.

TO DISCIPLINE OR TO RETIRE

Gunn stands by the judgement to let Scutt retire on an ill-health pension rather than following a disciplinary route. He states that welfare considerations at the time in the police were not sophisticated, and they didn’t know the potential psychological damage undercover work was doing to the officers. That said, he suspects they wouldn’t have dealt with Scutt differently if they’d known, but they would have been forewarned.

It’s also clear from his contemporary minutes to Phelan that Gunn preferred to take the medical route rather than disciplinary in dealing with Scutt. This was apparently less about the welfare needs of the troubled undercover, than, as Gunn recorded at the time [MPS-0740892]:

‘the very real possibility of compromising his position in his covert role and possibly other S Squad activities. I did not feel it prudent indeed practical to launch into a discipline investigation at that time’.

Counsel asks about the thinking behind him writing that, to which he responds:

‘Well, I think as I have already explained in some detail, there was an overriding need to protect the security, sensitivity and classification of the SDS’s activities. It would have been a feature and a very strong feature in my decision, as indeed was shown by the minutes…

I felt it was best for Scutt and it was best for the Metropolitan Police, and, I have to say, it was best for the Home Office and Government, that he should be allowed to retire in a dignified and quiet way, rather than the paraphernalia of a discipline case which would have attracted huge publicity.’

He is pressed if publicity was an overriding factor. He says no, but it was nonetheless a powerful factor in the consideration.

Could he have done both disciplinary proceedings and ill-health retirement at the same time? No, he responds, because it would not have solved the issue of publicity. It was agreed by him and other senior managers that ill-health was best for all concerned. And he wouldn’t change that now.

It is clear that Gunn has, in his own mind, made a distinction between cover-up and keeping things secret – the latter being the way he can justify dubious decisions – and he will not deviate from this. It is his version of plausible deniability that he will rely on to justify his management of situations as the issues on his watch mount up.

It’s noted that after this decision was made Gunn met with medical professionals involved with treating Scutt. He says he would not have brought pressure to bear to go down that route, and that would have been ‘wholly improper’.

OUR SIDE OF THE BREAKDOWN

Counsel notes that Gunn had minuted to Phelan that he had spoken with the consultant psychiatrist treating Scutt and emphasised ‘our side of the case’.

He is asked what that might mean, to which he answers that would have been about the sensitivity of what Scutt had been doing.

‘I don’t think he would probably have been aware, but the sensitivities of explaining the background to the work the officers were doing, which I say again was unique, we haven’t done this before, we were on the rim and the outside of the law on many occasions and these issues had to be based upon judgement taken in good faith at the time.

And 40 or 30 years later, trying to rewrite history and/or reassess the circumstances that we were under then I think is not particularly fair.’

There he is again, even more clearly admitting that he knew the spycops’ remit was unlawful, but claiming it’s unfair for the Inquiry to objectively judge what they did.

Continuing with Gunn’s reaction to Scutt’s breakdown, Counsel notes that he recorded at the time:

‘I reiterated to the doctor our concern in this case both about the sensitivity of the issue… and the need to protect our continuing operations. I also mentioned our concern about the alter ego problem.’

The note recorded that a consulting psychiatrist, Dr Farewell, had told Gunn that given his condition, Scutt should not be seen by any police officers until further notice.

Counsel points out that he ignored this advice and got Phelan’s permission for SDS manager HN337 to visit Scutt to recover documents relating to his cover role.

She said that the Inquiry understood their recovery was necessary to prevent compromise of Scutt’s undercover work and SDS operations more generally and to protect the safety of his colleagues still deployed.

She asked if that was right, to which he answered:

‘I think that’s entirely sensible.’

Once HN337 had successfully done this did Gunn instruct that no other police officer should contact Scutt, as he was concerned about Scutt’s mental health and welfare.

Gunn met with the Met’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr Bott, and the consulting psychiatrist, Dr Farewell. Following this meeting, they agreed [MPS-0740892]:

‘The pressing operational need to assess potential damage limitation factors overrode potential concern for Scutt.’

Gunn recorded that Dr Bott was happy with Special Branch’s actions to date in a memo to Phelan, adding:

‘I am now confident that adequate damage limitation measures have been taken to protect SDS activities and I am hopeful that that aspect of the Scutt affair has been resolved.’

ABSCONDING TO YORK

As part of his breakdown on being told his deployment was ending, Scutt vanished, only to turn up in a distressed state in York. He was detained by local police there, who found his Met personnel assessment paperwork.

Gunn visited North Yorkshire Police to find out what they had on Scutt. He is troubled he cannot remember this, but thinks he must have seen someone at assistant chief constable level or higher, and have been driven to Yorkshire and back.

He adds:

‘But whatever happened it would have been for the specific purpose of maintaining the security of the SDS in respect of the reputation of the Metropolitan Police and the need to know.

And if we had information around Scutt’s activities in North Yorkshire or elsewhere, then we would need to verify and/or try and minimise the damage that could potentially have been caused from that.’

Counsel notes that records say North Yorkshire Police agreed to destroy records. Gunn doesn’t recall that, and doesn’t know why he would have wanted the paperwork destroyed:

‘We weren’t trying to hide anything. But again, if I said that, I can’t recall why.’

He agrees that he likely sought assurance that they wouldn’t disseminate anything they’d been told further.
Shortly afterwards, Gunn adds:

‘It is unfortunate that Scutt not only broke his cover but also reprehensibly gave details of the nature of his SDS work to unauthorised persons.

I fear that little will be achieved in pursuing any disciplinary action against Scutt. Indeed, we have more to lose.

Suitable damage limitation has been taken in respect of North Yorkshire Police Force and I feel this particular facet of the Scutt saga must rest there.’

Why did you consider there was little to be achieved by pursuing disciplinary action? Again, Gunn is emphatic that going down the disciplinary route would risk the severe downside of publicity.

‘I stand by the judgement I made in respect of the sensitivity and security needs of the work that Scutt was involved in, and the potential for that matter becoming public with the huge danger and difficulty it would create both politically and police-wise for us and Government.’

GOVERNMENT INVOLVEMENT

It’s only an hour in to his day at the Inquiry, but it is already apparent that Gunn is very keen to bring the Government in whenever he can.

He does however accept that the reputation of the Met would have been an issue for making that judgement and agrees that if the Scutt affair had become public the SDS’ existence would have been in jeopardy.

In a regular feature of his evidence, he immediately adds:

‘The efficiency and effectiveness of the SDS at the time in terms of the information it was providing, the intelligence it was providing, was crucial to the Home Office, to the Government, to the Security Service at the time.

So it wouldn’t just have been a question of the SDS folding. That vital intelligence that we were asked to gain – which we did over the years – would have gone. Where is the vacuum that would have filled that? And I think we are viewing some of that today with the mismatch between intelligence and public order problems.’

We see again his determination to defend the SDS and what it was doing, bigging up (without ever substantiating) the value of its work.

Gunn’s eagerness to say that the government directed the spycops is startling. Other police witnesses at the Inquiry have downplayed everything and refused to point the finger of blame higher up the command chain.

Gunn is so emphatic that it’s easy to read it as an attempt to avoid the blame, and maybe that’s all it is. But then again, it does fill a few of the major blanks.

The big question, far beyond what the spycops did, is who ordered it. The Home Office set up the SDS and directly funded it for the first 20 years. It received annual reports detailing what was done. The funding was renewed annually.

Right at the start, government documents showed that they felt the secrecy about the SDS’s existence was paramount, fearing ’embarrassment to the Home Secretary and HM government’.

So, they knew the public would be outraged, and they knew they wanted plausible deniability.

Despite two decades of working for the Home Office, a search of all Home Office archives found that not one document about the SDS has been retained. This can only be to ensure that if – as has happened – the public did find out about the SDS, the blame stays with the police rather than their paymasters.

AND MI5 TOO

It’s not just the government that Gunn has his eye on. When the interest of MI5 in the Scutt affair is raised, he cant recall the detail, but is quick to declare:

‘The Security Service knew exactly what we were doing in the SDS. They lived off the product. They enjoyed the product. They even targeted and helped targeting. So it’s important that the Security Service were part of the equation when it came to decision-making process on all matters dealing with SDS that might affect the Security Service work.

And it is no good saying, “I was upstairs collecting fares at the time”. They were involved in most of the work of the SDS, particularly in the early days when we were dealing with subversion, extremism left, which was the Security Service’s province.

And I think I have to say, having listened to each of the tranches, every bit of evidence that’s been delivered to this Inquiry so far, I don’t see much from the Security Service in terms of supporting or justifying what we did in those days. And I think that is a matter of concern.’

Gunn doesn’t like to miss an opportunity to make criticisms of the Inquiry’s approach to things. It’s clear he has been following the Inquiry’s progress avidly and is not happy with its conduct, not least because the fine men of the SDS are not getting the credit he thinks they deserve, while the government and MI5 don’t get the same scrutiny.

Counsel ask if, at the time, there was any consideration that the influence secrecy and security of operations had over decision-making was setting a dangerous precedent?

‘Well, Special Branch had many experienced and diligent officers at all levels. Although you would be surprised thinking it from some of the details that have been presented to this Inquiry.

But the experience of the Special Branch officers – particularly the managers – in conjunction with the Home Office, in conjunction with the Security Service, there was a common agreement. And I can’t emphasise this enough.

There was a common agreement that the secrecy and confidentiality and knowledge of the work of the SDS should be kept to an absolute need to know. And that need to know, I don’t think has fully been explained yet to this Inquiry.’

Gunn is the man to do that, apparently. Though no other manager has said nearly as much as he has done. In his determination to defend the SDS and by extension Special Branch, he is content to throw everyone else under the bus. Seemingly, as we’ll see, because in his eyes that’s what’s happening to them.

Before the Stefan Scutt debacle, there had been the case of HN155 ‘Phil Cooper’, who was also retired on ill-health. He had infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party 1980-84, and was on close terms with some MPs. He wrote a letter to the Commissioner complaining about his treatment in his disciplinary case.

Gunn is asked about whether there would have been a concern about someone like this raising a disciplinary matter with the Home Secretary.

He answers that it was not about the individual case but any disciplinary inquiry would have been public and hence the exposed the SDS:

‘It was about the circumstances that the Home Office would need to have known if there was a reputational issue coming their way.’

SCUTT, MI5 AND THE HOME OFFICE

Counsel returns to MI5’s interest in the Scutt affair, and a note of a meeting they had with SDS managers. In it they note that nobody was going to say anything about the matter to the Home Office [UCPI0000030663].

In his written statement to the Inquiry, Gunn said Scutt would have been an operational matter for the Met police not the Home Office whose role was just policy and funding, so Scutt’s removal and welfare concerns were matters that were solely the concerns of the Met.

He adds, unprompted:

‘And I think it underlines again what I tried to say earlier, that the Security Service were head and shoulders and above dealing with these matters in respect of keeping the secrecy of this operation sacrosanct and we, in addition to the Security Service, would take into account the position of the Home Office and Government in making those judgements. And that, I believe, is the clear implication of those minutes.’

Counsel presses whether the real reason is the Home Office would have cut funding if they found out. Gunn doesn’t like the question.

‘No, that’s your judgement and I don’t agree with it. It would have been an issue. And, as I’ve said, the Home Office was very sensitive about the activities of the SDS and how we controlled the need to know.’

He doesn’t think it would have necessarily cost the SDS its funding, adding:

‘The [Home Office] knew that these were very sensitive, difficult operational matters. So the line between operations and policy in respect of the police, the Security Service and the Home Office was a thin one, but it was very important.

And we had to take into account the sensitivities of each of those players, if I can put it that way, in respect of any action that was taken by the SDS.’

He’s asked directly if the Home Office should have been told of the Scutt affair. He tries to manoeuvre around the question. Counsel does not let go, saying that given it was known in Special Branch that the secrecy and operational security of the SDS was a primary concern to the Home Office, surely they should have been notified.

Gunn caves and says once more that he was between a rock and a hard place, and made that judgement, though he doesn’t recall it. Again, he doesn’t think he would have changed the decision he made at the time.

At the end of the morning session, the Inquiry Chair, Sir John Mitting, intervened to ask questions. He had picked up on what Gunn said about details of the Scutt affair being detailed up to the Deputy Assistant Commissioner level and beyond. He wanted to know who he meant by ‘beyond’?

Gunn says depending on the seriousness and jeopardy it would have gone up the line of command in the Metropolitan Police. He cannot recall at all, but thinks in the circumstances it would have gone as high as the Commissioner, or very close to him.

Mitting notes that the Commissioner at the time was Sir Peter Imbert, prompting Gunn to state:

‘Ah, well, I would have thought almost certainly it would have gone to Sir Peter because he was a former Special Branch officer. He would have been trusted and understood the security of the operation of the SDS.’

Gunn probably didn’t realise how big a statement he just made, both on knowledge of issues in the SDS, but that there was corollary to his words, that Commissioners might not have been trusted. But that Special Branch men trusted one another to a degree that wasn’t extended to outsiders, even if they were their superior officers.

That is quite a position to have, demonstrating the sheer arrogance of Special Branch towards the rest of the Metropolitan Police, let alone the rest of the human race.

 

Spycops Methods

 

Following the Scutt affair, Gunn had asked HN39 Eric Docker, then the Detective Chief Inspector running the SDS, to conduct a review [MPS-0726998].

Docker’s report made a number of recommendations, among them was one for psychiatric testing of SDS candidates at the recruitment stage, and of former undercover officers as part of the post-SDS procedure.

Gunn says that was a sensible reaction to the Scutt affair, that he was trying to learn lessons and correct things.

In his reponse to Docker’s review [MPS-0726998], Gunn had expressed concern about the ‘necessarily long reins of supervision given to field officers’ and said they needed to be tightened. Counsel wants to know what the concern was here.

OVERSIGHT ISSUES

Gunn responds that normal undercover work was short-lived and focused on getting evidence to charge someone. The SDS deployments were different.

‘It was built upon the same – this is a point that’s not necessarily I think been understood by the Inquiry. Undercover policing is all about deception, deceit, intrigue. I am sorry, but that’s the reality of what undercover policing is.

When you have officers dealing with that, there is a sensitivity that they should understand the problems that they are going to face, which we tried in terms of management, but the SDS officers who were undercover were out on their own in the field, sometimes in dangerous circumstances, and their command was back in the office.

I thought at the time, was there some way we could put at management level or a supervision level to shorten the lines of communication between the poor – the undercover officers out there on their own in dangerous circumstances and the back office in respect of supervision.’

Gunn wanted closer links between the back office and the undercovers, not just for the officer’s welfare but also overseeing some of the behaviours:

‘I mean, these officers were out on their own and sadly some of them transgressed. That’s a matter of huge regret, but it happened. If there had been a closer supervision from the office to the field, it is possible we could have obviated the need for the distress that that caused.’

He adds that one shouldn’t expect someone who’s at the head of the organisation, as he was, to know all the details of the SDS’s operational activities. They inevitably had a lot on their plate. With a bit of buck passing, he reiterates that he relied on all the levels of the chain of command that stretched between him and the undercovers.

In a telling way, as he answers this point it’s clear he sees those undercovers as somehow victims in all this:

‘But the idea in that minute of closer supervision was to shorten the line of command between those in a difficult position and those in the office.’

This tightening of the leash never took place. Instead, as Gunn acknowledged in his witness statement, the intended level of senior oversight never materialised. He attributes that to a looser attitude towards supervision at that time, in the SDS chain of command and higher up.

THE VALUE OF THE SDS: THE REDS ARE STILL UNDER THE BED

Docker wrote at the time:

‘Officers of the Special Demonstration Squad are in a prime position to be able to report on any threat from London’s principal subversive groups and it is therefore essential that the SDS be allowed to continue its role as hitherto.’

Gunn agreed with that and had given no consideration to closing the unit down. In any case, such a decision would have involved the Commissioner, the Home Office and the Security Service.

Counsel drew attention to a 1988 MI5 briefing on the reduced threat from subversion. Gunn recalled it followed a change in the definition of subversion to the ‘Harris Definition’:

‘Those which threaten the safety or well-being of the State, and which are intended to undermine or overthrow Parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means.’

MI5 took the view that they would not be so interested in public order issues in future. Special Branch command, including Gunn, took a wider, more pragmatic view of public order.

‘We did not accept that certain elements of the activity that caused public order wasn’t described as subversion.’

He then cites the current Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Jonathan Hall KC (Inquiry watchers may recall him as the barrister for the Metropolitan Police in 2017 and a keen proponent of anonymity for the undercovers) who recently said there should be a new law against subversion.

Gunn is passionate about this:

‘It is still a matter that was burning into our souls at the time that we were taking on, without necessarily the support or encouragement of the Security Service, on public order matters.’

DEAD CHILDREN’S IDENTITIES

Gunn says that the theft of dead children’s identities as the basis for undercover personae was a well established practice when he became Commander Ops.

He’s asked what he understood about the legal basis of this. He says the subject troubles him greatly, but then goes on a historical digression in order to demonstrate that Special Branch didn’t invent the tactic. They didn’t invent burglary or mugging either, but those would still be crimes if they committed them. A crime doesn’t become legal just because it’s committed by a police officer.

He understands the distress it would have caused the families had the information got out at the time, something that’s hard to justify.

Similarly, the current distress they have is, he says, a matter of personal regret for him. He acknowledges some of the evidence heard by the Inquiry from the families affected, calling it heartrending, and ‘that’s a great burden’.

Gunn could have stopped there, but he wants to defend the SDS. He says the practice was ‘necessary because we needed secure legends for our undercover officers’.

He points out that the decision to adopt this practice was made before his time, saying he believes that two or three undercovers using purely fictitious ‘legends’ had been compromised as a result. This method was judged to be better for for the interest and safety of the officers. Gunn makes it clear that he considers this to have been the right decision: ‘necessary operationally’.

Asked for more details about these compromised undercovers, Gunn says he can’t remember the details. He says he was aware it was part of the rationale that the use of birth certificates as officers had been compromised in the past.

There is no evidence to show these ‘two or three’ exposed officers existed. However, the fifth SDS officer to steal a dead child’s identity, HN297 Richard Clark ‘Rick Gibson’, was investigated by suspicious members of the group he’d infiltrated and confronted with ‘his’ death certificate. Despite this, the tactic continued for another 20 years, into Gunn’s time and well beyond.

Counsel points out that HN56 ‘Alan Nicholson’, an undercover deployed during his period as Commander Ops, had used a completely fictitious identity. Gunn says he can’t remember him.

Gunn isn’t stopping with that fictional excuse for identity theft. He adds that it was 40 years ago, without issues of computerisation. He marches on with his tone deaf defence, blaming the fact that this secret eventually got out as the real cause of the families’ pain.

‘And if I could just say, we did not believe with the secret nature of the work and the tactic, we did not believe that would ever get into the public domain. It didn’t get into the public domain from the SDS or the police. And I will leave the judgment as to how it got into the public domain for others to make.

But it was that that caused the stress, hurt and unhappiness of the poor families. Not our particular specific use of the tactic, although obviously the use exacerbated the problem.

But it was a very difficult and a very stressful time for officers and commanders and senior officers, and with the benefit of hindsight we would never use it again. We wouldn’t need to use it again. And I personally apologise to the families that were involved in that, because there were some heartrending cases.’

NO LEGAL BASIS

He’s asked what the legal basis for the tactic and he responds with one of the stand-out quotes of his already spectacular evidence:

‘Well, there was no legal basis for it, as I understood. And indeed there was no legal basis for a lot of the work we were doing…

We had no statutory backing for what we were doing until the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, in 2000. We had no authority, legal authority, to have covert human intelligence sources until that Act. We were operating in a statutory vacuum.

We had very little statutory backing for what we did. It was fly by the seat of your pants and make judgements on difficult political operational decisions in everything we did.’

Gunn is on a roll, back where he wants to be, defending the brave SDS, constantly referring to them as ‘we’, as he identifies himself with them.

‘And, I think in 40 years of activity, I think we did that. We achieved – and this is another thing that I don’t think this Inquiry has fully covered – the importance of the work and the results that were achieved by our brave officers, who didn’t go off piste, who didn’t engage in sexual relationships, and that’s regrettable and should never have happened.

Where have we heard about all the excellent undercover operational work that took place for 40 years? Where have we heard that in this Inquiry?

I accept entirely that much of it is secret and will probably be held in camera, but that will never reach the public domain.

What the public have heard and will hear is the mistakes, the cock ups, the faults, the damages of the people who did wrong. And that’s wrong, and I take full responsibility as Commander Ops for whatever happened on my watch.’

Counsel notes his 2013 statement [MPS-0723255] to the Met’s own internal spycops investigation, Operation Herne, on the topic where he said:

‘I am not aware that the identities of dead children were used in creating the false identities and do not believe that to be so.’

After going off on one about Herne (see below), he claims that this was incorrect and he had said so at the time. In his written statement, he tries to explain this away by saying that to the best of his knowledge, he had never signed off on an application for a birth certificate of a dead child while he was Commander Ops.

He tries to claim that his straightforward, unequivocal, total denial actually just meant he didn’t believe he answered any queries about it or approved any applications.

He doesn’t recall when he first learned of the tactic, but he can say it was not common knowledge in Special Branch. He accepts that as Commander Ops he could have ended the practice but the issue was never raised with him.

He is asked why he would need to wait for the issue to be raised with him.

He replies that it was considered operationally necessary, plus it hadn’t leaked into the public domain and caused any problems, so seemed the most suitable method. He says if the legality or propriety of it had been raised, he would have taken inquiries, but it wasn’t and hence it wasn’t a burning issue, and he never thought to question the legality of identity theft himself.

He accepts that with hindsight it would have been better had he taken a closer look, but can’t help having another dig at the Inquiry for having exposed the tactic.

NO ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Earlier Gunn had raised the case of Vaclav Jelinek, a Czechoslovakian spy who also stole an identity in this way.

Jelinek received wide publicity when he was exposed in 1977, and it caused huge distress to the family of the child whose identity he’d stolen. Why did that not give Gunn pause for thought to its moral and ethical implications?

As usual when he’s annoyed, Gunn employs Counsel’s name in a patronising way:

‘Well, as I have tried to explain, Ms Simcock, it was morally wrong. We shouldn’t necessarily have used that tactic in terms of the distress and hurt that it has caused, and I accept that entirely.

All I can say is in terms of the torrid period we were in, in the 1970s and 1980s and some of the 1990s, the security and safety of our officers undercover was of great importance.’

He says that judgement is supported by the fact that not only did everyone think the tactic would never would get out, but also that it shouldn’t have got out.

Counsel ask what might have happened if in the process of unmasking an undercover the tactic was discovered by activists. Was that consideration at the time?

‘Yes, it was a constant concern and the matter was continually considered as to whether or not the tactic should remain.’

The careful listener probably picked up on this inconsistency in his evidence. For someone who didn’t have involvement with SDS until he became Commander Ops, and said that he left all such matters to the Squad’s managers, Gunn betrays here and elsewhere a deeper role than he wants to let on.

Such a review of identity theft was because of its unethical nature and the Met would do everything in its power to keep it secret. If they could have done without it, they would have.

This is nonsense. In the early years of the SDS officers simply made up names. Then the tactic was described in spy thriller book and film The Day of The Jackal, after which SDS officers started doing it.

CHANGE TO CREATION

From the mid 1990s onwards, they reverted to making up names. They themselves proved they could do without it.

Gunn says that at the time it was an appropriate and necessary means to protect undercover officers:

‘We did take into account, I am absolutely certain, and I was at the time troubled if this ever got out it was going to be extremely embarrassing, not just for the police but for the Home Office and the Government. But it didn’t get out.

Now that’s not justification, I understand, for using it. But it is a consideration in terms of context and proportionality of the risk that we faced and how we deal with that risk.’

So the concern at the time was only for state actors, not for the bereaved families.

He reiterates his apology to the families. It is clear this topic troubles him a lot, but he cannot stop himself trying to square it with appeals to necessity and the belief it would never get out to the public. Even though it had done so, thanks to both the Jelinek case and The Day of the Jackal.

Our attention is taken to the 1990-1991 SDS Annual Report [MPS-0728958]. It noted that creating cover backgrounds became increasingly difficult as public records were computerised.

Was this not an opportunity to reconsider the necessity of the theft of dead children’s identities? Gunn says he would have seen the report, but was busy dealing with Irish and international terrorism. However, he accepts, with hindsight, that he should have acted on it.

He can’t say if he knew whether the Home Office was aware of the tactic. He says he doesn’t recall them being involved with the SDS while he was Commander Ops. He states that Home Office support of this tactic would have helped clarify the judgement of the officers who took the initial decision on the use of stolen identities. He says that given that the unit existed for 50 years, the Home Office must have been aware of these undercover operations.

He says he can’t confirm the exact degree of knowledge officers above him in the Metropolitan Police hierarchy had. However he finds it difficult to believe that they didn’t know about the spycops unit, particularly the ‘Assistant Commissioner Specialist Operations’.

HORRIBLE HERNE

Operation Herne is another bugbear of Gunn’s, and he is determined that the Inquiry will hear his views on it repeatedly. Herne was the Metropolitan Police’s own investigation into the spycop scandal, set up when the story first broke in 2011 and focusing on the SDS.

Counsel draws his attention to the statement he gave Herne in 2013 [MPS-0723255]. Gunn is glad she’s raised this as apparently Herne has been troubling him, and other officers involved in the Inquiry, ‘quite considerably’.

He points out that when they gave their interviews to Herne’s investigating officers, it was to provide them with a history of the unit, because they had no idea. It was done from memory, without looking at any documents, and they made ‘mistakes’. Gunn is very upset that the details have since been released into the public domain by the Inquiry.

‘They were notes of interviews that were never, ever signed by the officer who made them. That is wrong and I don’t believe it should have happened.’

This is odd, as every page of his own Herne statement has a line at the bottom marked ‘witness signature’, and on each page it has been signed. He put his signature on it seven times. The Inquiry has redacted the signature but marked it as his.

He is not the first officer to be upset at the Herne statements being used in the Inquiry and made public.

It seems a lot of officers lied to Herne because they didn’t think anyone would check the plausibility and veracity of their claims, such as Gunn’s blanket denial of the theft of dead children’s identities.

Others went the other way and, in being interviewed by fellow police officers, were more frank and forthcoming than they’ve been at this Inquiry.

The Herne statements were, Gunn said, made for a different purpose and a different reason and not under caution. Counsel points out that he signed it with a statement of truth.

Later in the hearing he will bring this subject up again, referring to the statements (which he refers to as ‘unsigned notes’) and the outrage he feels about them appearing in the public domain thanks to the Inquiry.

Relationships

Another of Docker’s recommendations was:

‘Whenever possible, only married officers with a stable family background should be selected for SD duties. Although there should not be a total bar on the recruitment of single officers who may be deemed especially suitable.’

Gunn supported these recommendations at the time, and emphasised:

‘Only in wholly exceptional cases should single officers be considered, and then only after prior discussion with the candidate’s squad chief superintendent and Commander Ops.’

He doesn’t recall it.

Earlier, Counsel had pointed out that at the time of the Scutt affair, Gunn had stressed [MPS-740892] that:

‘There was a concern that the role of having an alter ego as an undercover became an easy excuse for any SDS officer to put forward whenever he experienced a professional/domestic problem.’

She asks about what sort of domestic problem such a defence would apply to.

Gunn explains that the undercovers were operating under extreme stress, but that it wasn’t really understood at the time:

‘They were living a lie. They were living a different world to their home life with their family, and we didn’t fully understand that, I am quite sure. It is a matter of regret, but it’s a fact of life 30, 40 years ago, I am afraid.’

He’s pressed about whether the reference to ‘domestic problem’ meant undercovers having sexual relationships outside marriage.

‘Yes, well, obviously. There was obviously a risk that any extra-marital sexual relationships of the undercover officers would affect their marriage. And taking into account the interests of the family was part of the process. But it probably didn’t — obviously didn’t work, because it wasn’t good.’

Pressed again whether it was an acknowledgement of the risk of deceitful sexual relations, he answers:

‘I don’t think it’s an acknowledgement. I think it’s an accepted risk.’

He didn’t explain what the difference was. Once again, the nuances that are apparent in Gunn’s mind are lost on the rest of us.

ANOTHER SPYCOP BOSS WHO DIDN’T KNOW

He claims that he wasn’t aware of any allegations of sexual relationships by undercovers at any time during his tenure as Commander Ops.

He says it was wrong and had he known it would hopefully have been stopped. He says ‘hopefully’ because he’d have had to take into account the circumstances.

‘And I apologise again, as everyone else seems to apologise, but I do it sincerely in respect of the sexual activity.’

But he wants to immediately add ‘context and proportionality’:

‘Nine or ten people allegedly transgressed in my period. What about all the dozens of other good, brave, intelligence-gathering undercover officers who didn’t go off piste, who didn’t go on a journey of their own and commit sexual offences. When have we heard about those?

All I am saying, Ms Simcock, is there is some balance that is not being drawn upon this and I want to put the context and balance, without in any way justifying the activity. Because it shouldn’t have happened.’

He is clear that when one of his chief superintendents was alleged to have known of a sexual relationship that officer should have told him. And likewise, that such knowledge should have been passed up the chain to him more generally. He is definitive that it was known to be wrong:

‘It is self-evident that that behaviour jeopardised the security and classification secret of that operation. The dangers that those officers exposed themselves to by that behaviour was paramount in terms of the whole exercise being revealed.

You don’t need police discipline regulations to know that unauthorised sexual activity in the job, when we were dealing with targets, is wrong, not right. They knew that. They must have known that.

But each one had circumstances which may or may not have put a different shade to it. I am not saying that. I am not suggesting that it justified the behaviour at all. But it should have come to the knowledge of Commander Ops.’

He is declaring the relationships to be wrong because of the operational problems they might cause for the spycops. There is, even this late on, still no consideration of the harm that was done to the women.

Counsel notes that Scutt had alleged that another undercover was having a sexual relationship, but the investigation of his claim was left to two SDS managers. And given all that had happened, they were unlikely to have believed him.

Gunn’s answer is telling. He asks what the alternative would have been, asking if he was supposed ‘to bring in an outsider into the SDS to deal with matters that were highly secret’. For him it was proper to do the initial inquiry in-house, to see if there was anything behind this allegation. He doesn’t recall how this inquiry concluded.

It appears from contemporary documents that the undercover was exonerated. No action was taken.

However, Gunn accepts that this could have been because of the need to keep SDS operations secret. Such a decision would have to happen at commander level, but he doesn’t recall it coming to him.

Asked what he’d have done at the time, he says he would have considered all of the circumstances and sought the views of the SDS managers and line-managers. He would have made a judgement, ‘taking into account the wider issues involved, including reputation, security and all the other matters’.

It’s a non-answer with no actual action described, but given his earlier emphasis on the need to keep the SDS secret and avoid officers being disgruntled, it’s easy for us to imagine what he would have done.

SYMPATHY FOR ABUSERS

He’s taken to his Herne interview again (which he moans about some more). It gives an impression that he sympathised with the undercovers who entered into deceitful relationships:

‘I am conscious of the extreme pressures on the undercover officers and it may well be that, to maintain their deep cover, some officers may have engaged in sexual activity.’

Gunn disagrees, saying he didn’t sympathise, and repeats that this conduct was wrong and shouldn’t have happened. He does acknowledge that there was a risk of it happening, that had to be analysed alongside all the other risks.

He says his response would have depended on the circumstances. He claims that if the allegation was true, the undercover would likely have been removed from the field. Their continuing such a relationship could have risked not just their own cover, but the security of the entire spycops operation. Again, there is no mention that these officers were violating citizens they were supposed to protect.

Counsel points out that HN10 Bob Lambert and HN5 John Dines both had long-term sexual relationships on his watch. Gunn claims not to have been aware of this sexual activity at the time. Why does he say (in his witness statement) that he doesn’t consider this to be ‘a failure of oversight by senior managers’?

He accepts that, again with the benefit of hindsight, this issue should have been treated more seriously, but he wants to remake his point that the Inquiry is concentrating here just on the ‘miscreants who misbehaved’.

‘In terms of context and balance, all I can say is it is regrettable, seriously regrettable, that these officers went off piste and engaged in that behaviour. But there are so many others that did not, and I cannot emphasise that enough in terms of balance, proportionality and context.’

Counsel notes that Lambert disclosed his relationship to his manager, HN115 Tony Wait, at the time, and the latter took no action. Was that a failure of oversight?

Certainly, say Gunn. He adds that he should have been told at the time and would have done something. Counsel then asks how does he know that was an exception, as Gunn seems to rely on, rather than standard practice for managers?

Gunn admits he can’t be certain, but that doesn’t mean that senior managers would have known of the other relationships. He points out that the undercovers may not have all made such disclosures to their managers; after all they must have known these relationships were wrong. He claims to find it ‘distressing and almost unbelievable’ that he had no knowledge of this when he was in charge.

Later it is brought to his attention that, in his evidence, Wait said he reported Lambert’s relationship to his superior HN113 Ray Tucker. Gunn says he does not recall Tucker being associated with the SDS.

DECEIT, SUBTERFUGE, CONFUSION

In his written statement, Gunn states that the undercovers were aware that if such inappropriate sexual activity was discovered, the consequences could well be ‘career-ending’ for them. He says that this, combined with their skills in subterfuge, explains why they ensured that their managers didn’t discover these relationships.

Surely the managers should have overseen the deployments more closely, precisely because the undercovers had those skills in subterfuge?

‘Yes, well, I have already said, the whole essence of undercover work is based upon deceit, subterfuge, confusion. And it is quite clear that officers who had the skills and the ability to do that sort of work don’t grow on trees. But it is also quite clear that they all knew that they had to stay within the boundaries of the law.

But I have also explained, the boundaries of the law as far as SDS was concerned in the first 30 years of its operations were very sketchy. And you don’t need a law to say officers on duty shouldn’t engage in unwanted sexual behaviour.’

He accepts, though, that there was a risk. For him, this is yet another opportunity to make a point about how the Inquiry is failing to recognise how great the undercovers were for not commiting even more sexual misconduct!

Gunn is certain that the undercovers really suffered, repeatedly using words like ‘extreme’ to characterise their deployments. Bear in mind he’s largely talking about people leafleting McDonald’s and going to Socialist Workers Party meetings.

He does not excuse the officers who did engage in deceitful relationships, but he wants the other undercovers to be recognised for managing not to:

‘If you put a man and woman together in the circumstances that these officers were actually acting under, it was clearly a risk. These officers were going to squats, sleeping on mattresses, rooms full of individuals. The context of exactly what happened has not been properly discovered by this Inquiry, as far as I am concerned.

The circumstances – we put those officers in that position. We must take the responsibility for that. Not because they misbehaved – they should not have misbehaved – but we put them there and they behaved in the vast majority of cases properly, with integrity, with honesty and not a little bravery. And I don’t think that has been understood.’

In his statement, he says such relationships would have fallen under the definition of ‘disreputable conduct’. Does that not understate the seriousness of it?

‘Yes, it does. But let’s go to context again, Ms Simcock. I am trying to illustrate the boundaries within which managers’ and officers’ work within the SDS were very close to the limits of the law.’

The world was a different place back then, he reminds us.

MARRIED MEN ONLY

Counsel returns to the recommendations made in Docker’s report, especially the one about not deploying single men except in exceptional cases. Gunn agrees that the rationale for this was to mitigate the risk of sexual relationships, admitting that at the time, it was acknowledged as a risk that needed mitigation.

He agreed with Docker that a stable family background was an important anchor for the undercovers. Inappropriate sexual activity was not foremost in his mind but it was a consideration. It was not a priority for him. He says he had other concerns, especially in the aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing in December 1988.

Shouldn’t it have been acknowledged that some risk still existed, even if officers were in a supposedly stable relationship, such as marriage? Gunn claims this must have been considered, but agrees that they got it wrong.

He doesn’t recall any other action being taken to mitigate the risk of inappropriate relationships. He doesn’t think these could have been prevented by additional training, and says that any closer supervision would have meant undercover monitoring of the SDS undercovers.

Later on he’s asked whether he would have taken any steps to inform the woman being deceived, had he discovered such a relationship? He says that’s a difficult question, falling back to say that he would have needed to take all the circumstances into consideration first.

He says again that such relationships were wrong and shouldn’t have happened. He adds that he watched the recent TV show on the women affected, The Undercover Police Scandal: Love and Lies Exposed, and it was clear that the women were hurt, and this tugged at the heartstrings.

However, in their cases the relationships were not casual. He says the undercovers were certainly not directed to seduce the women in order to gather intelligence. It’s clear from how he says it, that for him there is a difference between a sexual encounter and a long-term affair.

Criminal Spycops

Every week, Gunn signed the diaries of the undercovers. He told Herne that the spycops’ accounts and expenses were strictly controlled. In testimony, Gunn says this was not unique to the SDS, it was ‘part of the general operational supervision in Special Branch’.

Every Friday, Branch officers submitted their diaries, which recorded what they had been up to, as well as their expenses claims. Usually it was signed off at Chief Superintendent (head of Squad) level, but for the SDS it went higher, to Gunn, because of the sensitivity involved. This was also done by Gunn’s predecessor as Commander Ops, Peter Phelan.

Could a more thorough examination of this kind of administrative paperwork have helped mitigate the risk of relationships and/or lead to their discovery? Gunn says it’s possible but notes that he had a lot of responsibilities:

‘And some of the matters you are raising in the cold light of day here – which are important and I don’t decry that – but actually they may pale into insignificance slightly when you’ve got a Lockerbie.’

ARRESTS OF UNDERCOVERS

Home Office Circular No. 35 from 1986 [MPS-0727412] sets out unequivocal rules:

‘The police must never commit themselves to a course which, whether to protect an informant or otherwise, will constrain them to mislead a court in any subsequent proceedings.

If his use in the way envisaged will or is likely to result in its being impossible to protect him without subsequently misleading the court, that must be regarded as a decisive reason for his not being used or not being protected.

The prosecution should be informed of the fact and of the part that the informant took in the commission of the offence.’

Gunn says he was aware of all this at the time. He says it applied to the SDS but that it was guidance only. He says there were only two undercovers who were arrested on his watch. One (HN4) was for drink-driving.

The other was HN5 John Dines, who was not only arrested in the 1990 Poll Tax riot but also wrote an article bragging about it.

In his written statement, Gunn said that as a starting point, the undercovers were supposed to avoid involvement in criminality, and anything beyond that was supposed to considered and authorised by managers.

Did that always apply, irrespective of the kind of group or activity the undercover was being deployed into?
Gunn responds more broadly:

‘Well, it was in part consideration of the circumstances involved in each incident. I had to make a judgement as Commander Ops as to whether or not the guidance was followed to the letter or whether the guidance was followed to the spirit.

On occasions I found myself between a rock and a hard place. John Dines was a classic example of a rock and a hard place, not so the previous drunk drive.

But I took the action I took in the best interests (1) justice, (2) the reputation and safety of the officer, (3) the reputation of the Metropolitan Police. And I had to make a judgement.’

IMMUNITY FOR SPYCOPS

He goes on to note that recent legislation – the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021 (aka the ‘spycops bill’) – recognises that undercovers could commit criminal offences for reasons of national security.

‘We never had that. But I had to do and take the spirit of the recognition that sometimes you are on the edge of the law.

And I was on the edge of the law but made that decision in the full cognisance of the guidance, my judgement against the circumstances of the time.’

The controversial law was opposed by many human rights advocates including Amnesty International, Reprieve, the Pat Finucane Centre, Privacy International and the Centre for the Administration of Justice.
Gunn says he was not aware of an acknowledgement within the SDS at the time that those targeting animal rights groups would inevitably need to participate in criminal activity.

He says he doesn’t recall any discussion with the Security Service about the difficulties of infiltrating the animal rights movement. Or the possibility that doing so might necessitate committing criminal offences, in order to gain acceptance from ‘hardened activists’.

He agrees though that this is highly likely, as animal extremists were seen as a much greater threat than many other target groups:

‘Not too many people remember the febrile atmosphere there was in this country at that time concerning animal extremism and the threat and risks that this country faced from those elements at the time.

They were extraordinary circumstances and we had to use extraordinary measures to deal with them. And animal extremism in respect of potential for criminal offences would have been top of the list.’

He rejects Counsel’s suggestion that perhaps there was an acknowledged risk that in such cases, the Home Office Circular’s directions wouldn’t necessarily be followed.

‘What I did was take into account the principles of the decision and the guidance, match it against the principles of the circumstances, and come to a judgement. And as I said: sometimes it’s a rock and a hard place.’

In his written statement, Gunn says he believed that the SDS had a process in place (to assess the involvement of undercovers in criminality) that appeared to work. Undercovers would inform the SDS if they were arrested and the managers would monitor the case as it went through the judicial system. They would report to the S Squad chief. Gunn says that as Commander Ops he would expect to also be made aware of the case.

He maintains that this process was entirely appropriate, even though it meant that the police got to decide what the courts were allowed to know. Gunn is not happy about such abuses of the judicial system being regarded today as ‘miscarriages of justice’:

‘As I have said, we were faced with circumstances that we had to deal with according to the law as it stood at that time – and I emphasise “at that time” – and the circumstances of the offence. And I go back to what I said earlier this morning about the need for security of the operation in respect of the Government, the Home Office and others.’

Essentially, he seems to be saying that if the law didn’t allow them to do what they wanted, then they’d ignore the law and do it anyway, because it was the law that was wrong.

TELL ME ABOUT IT

Gunn says he would expect to be informed of criminal activity carried out by an undercover even when it didn’t lead to their arrest. He cannot think of any offences or arrests Commander Ops should not have been told about, or any circumstances that would warrant not telling him.

In this, he includes criminal activity which the undercover was involved in, or on the periphery of, which led to the arrest of other people. He says he would expect to be informed of any charges or prosecution which followed, and if any undercover was expected to appear as a defence witness.

He states (in his witness statement) that if operationally necessary, it was acceptable for an undercover to commit minor offences, such as bill posting. However more serious offences were unacceptable.

When would it be considered ‘operationally necessary’? What would you have classed as ‘more serious’?

He says this means ‘offences which involved public safety, injury to others, serious criminal damage’, then, exhibiting another one of the nuanced differences that exist only in his head, adds:

‘The circumstances of the offence is pertinent to the decision on whether or not to follow the strict guidance of the Home Office or the spirit of the guidance of the Home Office.’

In this, he evidences how he and Special Branch granted themselves and the SDS a lot of latitude, which they clearly took up whether or not they were allowed to. Sadly, this is something Counsel did not really go into.

Any decision not to take action against an undercover had to be made by an officer of appropriate rank (thus Commander and above) and properly recorded. He claims there was no culture of turning a blind eye, as his actions in the Scutt affair showed.

When might they have decided not to take action? He gives the now familiar response: that where there was a danger of exposure to the work of the SDS or a threat to the safety of the undercover, these would be taken into account.

But any action against an undercover presented a danger of exposure. And indeed, we’ve already seen from a vast number of other witnesses that this is precisely why SDS undercovers were allowed to violate laws and citizens with impunity.

Gunn affirms that it was SDS policy for undercovers to give their cover names when they were arrested, in order to maintain their cover. And that Commander Ops would retain discretion over what to disclose and to whom.

This also applied to cases when the undercover was involved in criminality but not arrested, but would depend on the level of criminality. Commander Ops would have to make a decision, balancing the risk to the SDS of an undercover appearing in open court versus the interests of justice and the seriousness of the offence.

Gunn seems to miss the point:

‘There are circumstances where it’s a fact of life: undercover officers may get caught up in the criminality and/or public order issues of their colleagues’.

He is plainly going against the Home Office guidance, which required him to either withdraw the officer from the group or have them admit their identity to the court.

He then added the incredible justification – and this as someone who served as a Chief Constable – that deceving the infiltrated group was more important than being honest with a court:

‘I tried to explain earlier that undercover policing, its very essence is deceit, deception and subterfuge. It is unsurprising that those undercover officers give the name which would be deceitful to the criminal justice system, but which for their compatriots and co-extremists was essential, because they are hardly likely to turn round, “I am Police Constable Bloggs”.’

THE PROBLEM OF JOHN DINES

Gunn says he was not aware of the relationship between HN5 John Dines ‘John Barker’ and Helen Steel. He says that her name and contact details appearing on Dines’s vehicle rental didn’t prove anything, although he concedes that ‘possibly’ it should have prompted some investigation.

He is not aware of ‘Operation Muscat’ [MPS-0706718], in which the police were still watching Steel as she began her efforts to trace Dines after his disappearance from her life.

In 2002, she tracked him down to New Zealand and the Met, aware of her journey, spent taxpayers’ money relocating him to a different country.

DINES’ FIRST ARREST

Gunn was in office when Dines was arrested at an animal rights protest targeting a livestock transporter in Herefordshire on 6 December 1988. Dines was prosecuted and convicted as ‘John Barker’.

Documents from the time show Gunn was briefed and kept informed throughout [MPS-0526792]. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Phelan was also informed.

Gunn does not recall this incident, but stands by what was written at the time and the decisions he made as Commander Ops. As he has said so often, this involved weighing up the issues: an undercover facing prison for his actions or the definite exposure of the SDS in court hearings.

In Gunn’s mind, Dines’ criminality was not serious, so his accepting a bind over from the courts was fine.

He acknowledged that the SDS managers did not declare an interest to the courts or otherwise intervene, and it was good fortune the prosecution did not offer any evidence. He feels that the matter resolved itself.

He would have discussed it with Phelan as he was in the next room. This was a serious matter as it could potentially cause reputational risk for the police, or, even worse, the exposure of the SDS.

Did he consider the rights of the other arrestees? Gunn ‘would like to think’ that he did, and that he ‘hopefully’ also considered the law and the Home Office guidance. However it is clear that he believes it was fine to sometimes ignore this guidance.

‘Q: Because the guidance would have directed that his identity should be disclosed?

A: Yes. But there is no guidance in my submission that can cover every eventuality of the sort of situation we were in, extraordinary situation dealing with extraordinary threats to the country. No guidance from the Home Office or anywhere else can cover every aspect of that.’

He’s talking about a very minor offence that the court felt warranted no more than a promise to behave in future. His follow-up response tells us a lot about Gunn. For him, it was a war:

‘We have to deal with the circumstances we are faced with at the time and sometimes in the heat of battle decisions are made that you might change later. On this occasion, I wouldn’t have changed it.’

He simply does not recognise how his own mindset coloured so many of his actions.

Counsel asks whether he saw this lack of disclosure to the court as problematic?

‘In the circumstances of the incident, no. The greater good – the greater risk of disclosure in that case to me didn’t match the activity alleged.’

He asserts that he does understand that misleading the court is problematic, because in a previous case, that of an undercover drink-driving, he took action which recognised exactly that.

The activists arrested with Dines made an official complaint, which resulted in West Mercia Police needing to interview all the arrestees, including the undercover. Gunn agreed to this interview taking place, as it was the only viable option if Dines was to maintain his cover.

He says he can’t tell us what else he considered at the time, as he can’t now recall this incident. Was telling the West Mercia force the truth about Dines an option? He agrees it was an option, but insists that this risked exposing Dines and the entire SDS.

DINES’ SECOND ARREST

On 31 March 1990, Dines was arrested again, using a different false name, ‘Wayne Cadogan’, at a Poll Tax demonstration. He was charged with threatening violent disorder for assaulting uniformed police officers.

Gunn agrees that this constitutes a serious offence. Dines stated his intention to go to court and plead not guilty. However, Gunn and Phelan authorised him to instead skip bail. He notes that Dines could have been sent to prison if found guilty:

‘We were going to prejudice possibly the interests of justice, whichever course of action we took. If John Dines had been allowed to go to court in his cover name, that’s misleading the court. If John Dines skipped bail, that’s misleading the court.

But the lesser of those two evils, given into account all of the issues we had to consider and I keep coming back to the range of issues that we had to administer in these circumstances, the lesser of those two evils in my judgement was he skipped bail.

So, there was an implicit interference with justice on that occasion, but not as implicit as putting him before the court and going through a whole trial with duff details.’

He says it was ‘a rock and a hard place’ again, ignoring the fact that there was a third place – telling the truth. He stands by his decisions right or wrong:

‘Sometimes you have to make decisions which in the cold light of today may not appear justified. Well, so be it.’

Unfortunately there are redactions which cover the reason why he approached Detective Chief Superintendent Ramm, overseeing the investigations, to have the warrants against Dines cancelled. Gunn is able to confirm that Phelan knew all about this case too; he recalls that dealing with this arrest ‘severely’ taxed them.

PROTECT THE CRIMINAL

Gunn personally supervised the actions needed to protect Dines from legal repercussions, particularly in light of the redacted issue. This included discussing his approach with Deputy Assistant Commissioner Meynell (head of Area 8, overseeing the Poll Tax prosecutions) He says they took ‘an appropriate and principled approach to an intractable problem’.

Asked what principle this was, he replies:

‘Well, the principle was the greater evil would have been for John Dines to have appeared before the court. So the principle was accepting and acknowledging that whatever decision we took on that was going to, in some sense, transgress and almost alter – not alter but go against – the Home Office guidance. Again, we had to make a decision.’

Gunn tries to justify this dishonesty and lack of integrity. He insists that sometimes when making decisions about the SDS, he found himself ‘on the boundaries of the law’, but claims to have operated with ‘honesty, commitment and integrity’. He then doubles down, saying that on this occasion, he didn’t think he got it wrong.

Counsel presses Gunn on whether revealing to the court that Dines was undercover was an option.

‘There was an option, and there was a consideration, and if it had been normal undercover policing in respect of usual crime, as opposed to this extraordinary version of undercover policing that we had, that’s what happened.

You normally inform the court and the court makes the decision as to whether or not it progresses, and the prosecuting authority makes the decision as to whether they pull the case.

In essence, what I was doing was short circuiting that and pulled the case. Now, I accept in the strict letter of the law that shouldn’t apply.’

It is a remarkable admission for a chief police officer, that he is in effect acting as judge and jury, that he feels he had the right to circumvent due process whenever it was more convenient to do so.

That he does not reflect on what this says about how police viewed things, that it was okay to mislead the court, is equally extraordinary and telling.

Did he consider disciplining Dines for the behaviour that led to his arrest in the first place? This provides us with more insight into Gunn’s approach: he felt this was a war, in which rules needn’t apply, as your side’s survival is all that matters:

‘Well, I come back to what undercover policing is all about. It’s not pussy footing around in terms of a court proceedings; it’s about being out in muck and bullets flying with circumstances and potential risks and threats to the individual according to whatever they are doing.’

In Gunn’s world, the undercovers were constantly at risk of serious harm and violence (when not inflicting it themselves on uniformed officers). This is why they need him to stand up for all these brave agents, who could do no wrong.

It is unclear if this is really how he saw it at the time, or whether this is just a persona he’s presenting to the Inquiry to justify the egregious decisions he made.

Either way, and unfortunately for him, his world-view does not match with the evidence of the undercovers and the paperwork. And even if that was the case, where was the close oversight that such risk ought to have entailed?

He doesn’t realise that the reverse side of this approach is that it demonstrates how reckless they were to send undercovers out, with such poor oversight. It is clear that, despite all his protestations that everything was considered, the reputation of the police was always going to trump in his decision-making.

‘WAYNE CADOGAN’

Though he’d already stolen the name and identity of John Barker, a boy who’d died of leukaemia aged 8, Dines also created ‘Wayne Cadogan’ as a second false identity some time prior to his arrest. It is known that Gunn was aware of this as he mentioned it to DACSO Phelan [MPS-0526796].

Gunn is asked if he had a problem with this? Yes, Gunn is definite:

‘The policy was quite strict in fact on undercover identities. With all the rigmarole and security measures we put into place to create a cover identity, it wouldn’t seem a lot of sense or point to change that identity on a whim.’

He speculates:

‘I suspect this was John Dines thinking on his feet when approached by his cohorts, giving another false name against his false name. And he wasn’t the only one that did that.

In animal rights activity, extremism around the country at the time, I understand that it was common practice that if you got nicked by Old Bill you didn’t give your right name, you gave a different name. Well, his right name wasn’t his right name, it was a wrong name.

But Dines at the time that he was at the Poll Tax demonstration, when there was absolute mayhem as you may or may not remember, it’s not surprising that he used that tactic. Wrong, but not surprising.’

This wasn’t just making a name up on the spot though. Counsel mentions that it too was stolen from a dead child, and Dines already held a driving licence in this name. He had clearly set it up quite some time beforehand.

Gunn accepts that this wouldn’t have been authorised at the time. He doesn’t recall how this was dealt with, saying it would have been something for the Chief Superintendent of S Squad to handle. He goes on to claim that if other undercovers had created and used unauthorised false identities, they’d probably been withdrawn from the field. And yet Dines wasn’t.

But Gunn is keen to excuse Dines for going against the law, Home Office guidance and SDS policy all at once:

‘I keep coming back to the fact, the essence of undercover policing is deceit, deception and subterfuge.
And the tactics that go with that in terms of operational, at-the-coalface police activity, necessarily mean that some tactics aren’t quite as comfortable in the cold light of this room.

And I have to say also when judging those matters, we didn’t get it all right. But we neither got it all wrong.’

Counsel makes the point that when Dines was instructed to skip bail, those he was arrested with would have understood it meant he was going on the run due to the outstanding warrants. She notes that Helen Steel certainly understood it that way.

Gunn says he was unaware of who Helen Steel was at that time, and had no idea there was a sexual relationship between her and Dines, or that she was being targeted by the SDS.

HN4 DRINK DRIVING

This charming undercover has been granted full anonymity in the Inquiry, despite admitting that he is not at risk from the people he spied on. We are not given his real name, his cover name, the group he infiltrated, nor even the years he was deployed (apart from ‘late 1980s and early 1990s’). The Inquiry has not divulged its reasons for this level of secrecy.

HN4 was arrested in his cover name, for drink-driving. He gave his real identity at the police station. Coincidentally, 20 years earlier HN339 ‘Stewart Goodman’ had done the exact same thing during his deployment spying on anti-apartheid activists.

Gunn was called at home, at 3am, to be told about HN4. When the case reached trial, Gunn attended in person and spoke with the stipendiary magistrate, explaining the circumstances. They agreed HN4 could appear in court in his cover name as he would be accompanied by his ‘fellow extremist demonstrators’:

‘That it was in the interests of the safety of the officer and also I explained, without going into the detail, the secrecy of the operation to the stipendiary magistrate.

The stipendiary magistrate discussed it with his chief clerk, I think, and they agreed that they were happy to hear the case in the cover name.’

HN4 pled guilty, using his cover name, and was disqualified from driving for a year. Gunn confiscated his real licence for that period.

As standard by now, he added his view of being comfortable as all arms of the judicial process:

‘It’s an example, if I may put it, of pragmatism against strict legal process – but a lot of the work we were dealing with, I am afraid, was on the boundary.’

Counsel points out that Gunn and Pheland discussed this case, and the risk that if HN4 lost his job, he might turn against Special Branch. It was proposed that representations be made to John Howley, Assistant Commissioner of Specialist Operations, that no disciplinary charges should be brought against the officer.

Gunn accepts that this was an example of them prioritising operational security and secrecy over disciplining this type of behaviour. As the Goodman case had shown barely two years after the SDS was formed in 1968, this was fairly standard spycops practice. Gunn doesn’t consider the court to have been misled.

DEBENHAMS

In 1987, spycop HN10 Bob Lambert had helped create an Animal Liberation Front cell which placed timed incendiary devices in branches of Debenhams department stores that sold fur.

They were set to go off in the dead of night and create just enough smoke to trigger the sprinkler system, which would douse the stock and render it unsaleable.

Three stores were targeted on the same day, with Lambert planting the device in the Harrow store. The men who planted the other two, Geoff Sheppard and Andrew Clarke, were later arrested, thanks to Lambert’s intelligence and evidence, and they both received lengthy prison sentences.

Gunn says he was aware of the case but was not involved in the disclosure decisions or the prosecution of Sheppard and Clarke. He knew from reading the paperwork at the time that Bob Lambert was involved in intelligence gathering. As with all these things, he claims that he doesn’t really recall it now.

He asserts that the Metropolitan Police Special Branch had no involvement in the prosecution, as it was the operational responsibility of Anti-Terrorist Branch. Likewise, Gunn, as Commander Ops, had no role in the prosecution itself or any disclosure relating to it.

Counsel asks why, given all he has said today about the role of Commander Ops in decision-making, he was not more involved in the case.

‘Because there is a demarcation line between intelligence and evidence. Intelligence is the role of the Special Branch. Evidence was the role of the Anti-Terrorist Branch and there is a corridor of air between the two so that intelligence can be protected and the propriety of the evidence given in a criminal trial is not jeopardised by intelligence issues.’

And if you believe that, we’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Counsel didn’t follow this up, though it raised the question what the intelligence was actually for. Given that Debenhams led to one of the SDS’s supposed greatest successes, an actual prosecution of an ALF cell, Gunn’s account glib demarcation really does not have the ring of truth to it.

Should he have had greater involvement, given Lambert’s role? He accepts that, with hindsight, closer involvement would have been prudent.

SDS Targeting Strategy

Gunn was aware of the various groups and fields that undercovers were being deployed into. The Met would have had reasons for targeting organisations, but he confirma that the Security Service absolutely influenced the spycops’ targeting.

He was not routinely in receipt of SDS intelligence. He expected the Chief Superintendents (and those below them) to deal with any inappropriate material.

He says he was kept updated by the SDS Annual Reports. He didn’t see anything in them that he considered unjustified or inappropriate. He didn’t think it was necessary for Commander Ops to be involved in that layer of decision-making, saying cases would only be referred to him if there was a particular concern about a target. However he can’t recall this ever actually happening.

Gunn is happy to maintain the fine Special Branch tradition of passing the buck to someone else, as we’ve seen so many managers do at the Inquiry.

What action would you have taken had you thought that the targeting of a particular group wasn’t justifed? He says that he would have sought more information about why this decision had been made in the first place, by the commander of S Squad and other ‘experienced Special Branch officers’ (a phrase we’ve heard multiple times from other managers). He would not be consulted.

Groups that the Annual Reports said were infiltrated when Gunn was in post included:

• Animal Aid
• Birmingham 6 campaign
• Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament
• Freedom Collective and Bookshop
• Guildford 4 campaign
• Lambeth Anti-Apartheid Group
• London Greenpeace
• OutRage!

Gunn didn’t query any of these. He seems to believe they all deserved it.

Counsel raises the fact that Eric Docker’s report noted that final decisions regarding targeting rested with the Chief Superintendent of S Squad in consultation with Commander Ops, namely Gunn. She also notes that HN115 Tony Wait told the Inquiry that Gunn would have been consulted, and effectively authorised decisions on targeting. Gunn can only respond with: ‘That’s not unfair’.

However, in his witness statement Gunn claimed he was only ‘rarely, if ever, required to intervene’ in SDS targeting decisions. He says he had confidence in his senior officers and their ability to make such judgement calls; he doesn’t recall ever querying their justifications.

He now accepts that he might in fact have had more involvement than this, which is what other managers have said. However he claims not to properly recall. He says it would have been exceptional for him to get involved. This wasn’t something he did as a matter of course or practice.

The main criteria for a group being targeted for infiltration by an undercover would have related to the ‘coverage’ already in place, and risks to public order. Gunn repeated that there was an intense febrile atmosphere in the country in the 1970s and 1980s. Public order was a major problem.

In Gunn’s mind, the public disorder seen at the racist British National Party’s headquarters in Welling proved that the police:

‘needed to have extraordinary measures to deal with extraordinary problems, and that’s what happened.’

You have to wonder what existential threat he imagined was posed to the state by CND, London Greenpeace, et al, that justified extraordinary measures. For all his bombast, Gunn simply never addresses the many groups which were plainly inappropriate targets for SDS reporting.

Instead, he gets out another of his axes to grind. He’s not happy that the current Metropolitan Police Commissioner has apologised for the targeting of justice campaigns. Like others, he tries to re-write things:

‘I agree in principle they shouldn’t have been targeted and they weren’t targeted. It was the extremist groups and agitators around those justice campaigns that were targeted. And there is a misunderstanding that we targeted the justice campaign itself. We did not.’

Gunn fails to see how the reports of his own era contradict his own point. And one has to wonder what political activity wasn’t extremist in his worldview. At this point, he comes across as someone who would report you as ‘subversive’ for reading The Guardian or The Mirror.

WE DON’T NEED NO GUIDELINES, WE KNOW BEST

Counsel is not deterred by Gunn’s increasingly narky manner and sense of entitlement. She points out that the 1984 Home Office Guidelines for Special Branch [UCPI000004584] state:

‘Senior officers must exercise strict control over the selection of targets for investigation when the current activities of an organisation are legitimate and peaceful.’

Gunn addressed this contradiction in his written statement by claiming the guidelines clearly only referred to mainstream inquiries rather than undercover intelligence operations. Once again, the rules simply didn’t apply to the SDS. This was nothing to do with their work being dangerous. It was simply that the unit was reactionary, paranoid, and primarily concerned with its own perpetuation.

Gunn is unperturbed by the SDS apparently assuming greater powers than it should have had. He claims that they were gathering intelligence for the ‘safety and security of the state’. He once again tries to dodge the issue by appealing to the words of Jonathan Hall on subversion.

However, Counsel is not having it, and asks him directly why the 1984 Guidelines shouldn’t have applied to the SDS.

The former Commander Ops fell back on the ‘I knew best’ argument, demonstrating his very poor skills in self-reflection:

‘Well, I am not sure whether the Home Office fully understood at that time exactly the operations of the SDS…

All I would say in respect of those matters is we targeted what we felt was necessary. The SDS was a completely new range of activity. And I don’t think that has been completely and fully understood and, it’s not for me to say, it may not have been understood at the time the Home Office made those guidelines, the extraordinary activity that the SDS was involved in. I don’t think that was fully understood.’

But, an undeterred Counsel points out, the 1984 Guidelines were not precluding undercover policing. Rather, they specifically addressed the work:

‘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.’

That applies to SDS undercover deployments, doesn’t it?

In response, he says yes, claiming the guidelines were applied. Counsel points out that the SDS were involved in pretty sensitive fields, and Gunn has to agree with her.

She continues to press her point, quoting another paragraph of the Guidelines:

‘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.’

Gunn says he agrees with this too. So then, Counsel asks, was the risk of interference recognised at the time? Wasn’t there a risk of interference with civil and political liberties?

Gunn fudges, trying to create a straw man argument rather than deal with the point face on:

‘Well, sometimes there is a thin line drawn between protest legal and protest illegal, and public order problems, and it’s not always possible to delineate exactly where the line is.’

EVEN IF WE WERE WRONG WE WERE STILL RIGHT

But Gunn does agree that there was a risk. He also acknowledges that ‘collateral intrusion’ or ‘damage’ (reporting on non-targets, just because they’re adjacent to the target) was a real risk, given the nature of SDS activities.

Gunn says he is confident that this issue would have been considered by the SDS, and if necessary referred to him as Commander Ops. Funnily enough though, the SDS managers haven’t seen it like that.

What guidance was given to the spycops about where that line was drawn? Gunn is narked:

‘This again – and it’s been a recurring theme in this Inquiry so far – doesn’t entirely understand intelligence gathering as it was in those days. What appears to be, as it has been remarked many times on SDS reporting, why do you need to report that, what’s to do with the colour of their eyes, what’s this – each scrap of information needs to be brought together, assessed, collated.

All intelligence is information. But all information is not intelligence. And the process for dealing with intelligence, in gathering scraps of information that go together and form a jigsaw, a puzzle that comes together maybe much later than the apparent information that’s been offered, is something which I think has not been understood.

There is an assumption that intelligence-gathering only involves and should have only involved pure intelligence. Well, it’s not. It’s about information that is converted to intelligence by an assessment made by others. And that’s the back office.

The officers and the squad, they had their experience in Special Branch to go on. But they did not make the decision as to whether the information they were reporting was intelligence or information that needed to be assessed.’

To be fair, Gunn is right on this, we’ve seen very little of what actually happened with the SDS intelligence in the Inquiry.

However, he – like many Special Branch undercovers and managers – is content to rely on the gathering of information in case it might be useful, to speak in terms of generalities and suppositions. They’d be far better providing examples of where it was actually used, but there might be an uncomfortable reason for why any evidence of this is so thin on the ground.

For a unit which had so many resources poured into it, on which so much time was spent, all apparently at such great risk to the reputation of the Met and the Government, there is remarkably little to show.

Gunn would have been better reflecting on the Met’s own internal Closing Report into the SDS [MPS-0722622] and its damning conclusions.

HOME OFFICE

Gunn is asked about what influence the Home Office had on targeting. As this has been one of the points he’s been at pains to emphasise, it’s not surprising that we get a nice long answer.

He talks about the Home Office, along with the police and other agencies, being members of a national security committee. They would not necessarily have a role in operational matters. However, this provided them with a way of raising with the police any political concerns about activity which threatened the state.

He says such ‘advice’ would be taken into account but the targeting decisions were made elsewhere (by Special Branch and the Security Service). He doesn’t accept that the Metropolitan Police Special Branch deferred to that sort of influence.

He notes that both the Home Office and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were aware of the SDS and its stressful work.

Apparently, in June 1988, Thatcher was talking to her Principal Private Secretary Robin Butler about the threat of animal rights activism. She was glowing in her praise of the police, but wondered if they had considered mounting undercover operations.

Gunn describes the scene:

‘Happily, we were able to tell the Home Office, who were also involved in the tripartite chat, that we had been doing it for 25 years. And actually, thank you very much for your support.

That is why at Prime Minister level, at Government level, they knew – and you didn’t have to be at Prime Minister level, because the threat to the street to the fur trade, to the calf trade, all sorts of things, was indicative of the need for some form of intelligence to combat the threat…

I read Margaret Thatcher’s enthusiastic praise as being a tick in the right box.’

Later, Gunn recalls giving a briefing on the SDS to the senior Home Office official John Chilcot, probably on an issue of funding.

He may have mentioned the case of HN155 ‘Phil Cooper’ (see below) while there. He says he only went to the Home Office two or three times in total.

He repeats:

‘Because the SDS was an operational police unit, but because it was part funded by the Home Office, there was a Home Office interest. And I have to say also, as I have said repeatedly today, the sensitivity of the work of the SDS was considerable. Political damage that could have been done by exposure of the work was ever present.’

Counsel notes that HN295 Don Buchanan, who succeeded Gunn, told Operation Herne that he and Gunn had stood up to the Home Office, and as a result, were not popular there.

Gunn goes off again on the Inquiry’s use of Herne statements. Asked again about the accuracy of Buchanan’s words he sulkily replies: ‘I have no comment at all.’

POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY GROUPS

He is also asked about the targeting of police accountability groups and a notorious 1983 Special Branch report which emerged in Tranche 2, profiling such groups: ‘Political Extremism and the Campaign for Police Accountability within the Metropolitan Police District’ [MPS-0748355].

Gunn said these groups were in danger of crossing the border from political activity to disorder, disarray and subversion, because there were left-wing groups involved. And where that alleged disorder arose, the police needed intelligence. He is completely unapologetic about this.

He seems incapable of recognising that these groups were not giving rise to disorder but responding to police violence.

Unfortunately, Counsel didn’t ask him for any examples of police accountability groups causing such terrifying violence.

He admits that such groups would have been of interest to Special Branch because of the nature of what they did – they wanted to watch and report on Metropolitan Police activity – and this would have influenced undercover deployments.

He insists that this was about public disorder, and other activities threatening the state were being brought in for political reasons. He maintains that reporting on such groups was justified solely on grounds of public order, not that they were anti-police.

Eventually he is directed to the fact that in 1988 the Security Service said they were not interested in receiving more reports on such groups as they were not considered subversive.

Once again he falls back on a ‘we knew best’ reply which, having already put the SDS at odds with the courts, the Home Office, and the law itself, now put the unit at odds with MI5 too:

‘Well, I have tried to explain that in previous answers. They may not have been overtly subversive in the definition strictly as it stood, which is why the Security Service stood back from public order problems.

But a more pragmatic view of these issues by Special Branch and by our uniformed colleagues indicated there was still a need to go for intelligence on areas which were a threat to public order. And if that included police monitoring groups, so be it.’

TARGETING JUSTICE CAMPAIGNS

In his written witness statement Gunn says:

‘A targeting decision had to fulfil either the policing requirement of preserving the Queen’s peace or supporting the Security Service in its counter-subversion task.’

What care was taken to ensure that Special Branch weren’t ‘investigating and reporting on the legitimate expression of views’, rather than fulfilling ‘a proper policing purpose’?

Gunn claims they did not target the social justice campaign itself. Then he goes back to talking up the disorder supposedly created by extremists in the 1970s and 1980s, groups who latched on to such campaigns for their own political or extremist causes.

But, Counsel presses, what consideration was there to safeguarding against collateral intrusion into those social justice and defence campaigns?

Gunn repeated the line that many managers have used in the Inquiry, that they could rely on the rectitude and integrity of their men.

‘Well, the operational directions and the nous of the individuals that were undertaking this work understood that there were boundaries that they had to stay within.

Sometimes they may have strayed outside. Obviously they did from some of the details presented to this Inquiry. But they understood their role. And it was, as far as possible, dealing with extremism, subversion and those issues. Not social justice.’

It is a significant gap in the Inquiry’s exploration around this that we have seen very little of the actual training that Special Branch officers had at the time. It is clear from other evidence that the undercovers and managers had no real training in the SDS, so what understanding they had was coming from elsewhere in Special Branch.

One also has a sense that Gunn’s confidence in his work being valid and right rests on a very idealised image of the officers under him, or perhaps he’s frightened of acknowledging that one of the places where the buck stopped was actually with him and his fellow senior managers.

SPYING ON VICTIMS OF RACIST VIOLENCE

When it came to racial justice campaigns, Gunn says the reason for reporting on them was the fringe groups and individuals that latched on to those organisations.

He is also asked about his awareness of racist violence in London at the time. He says it was there from way back, endemic in society. However, Special Branch was tasked to provide intelligence on extremism in whatever form it reared.

Counsel follows up by asking whether or not he was aware of the criticisms made of the Met’s (inadequate) responses to racial violence. Gunn says there’s no way he couldn’t have been aware of this.

What steps did you take to address those concerns?

‘Well, I would reiterate with the Chief Superintendent and the teams to tell the troops when they were being at meetings, advised on the areas where they go and importantly areas where they don’t go.

So, there were personal briefings from the team in the back office to the front-line officers and they would then use their own initiative as to when that may have happened or not.’

He agrees that a high incidence of racially motivated crime was understood to represent a particular public order risk when he was Commander Ops. And that would make policing more difficult and dangerous for uniformed police.

Asked if it was in everyone’s interest to address these concerns, he gives the rather strange response:

‘I think the Welling demonstration in 1991 illustrated that amply. Because there was a racial influence from the Anti-Racist League [sic] in there and the [British National Party] bookshop, where there was mayhem, absolute mayhem.’

He was aware that racism was something police needed to deal with sensitively, properly and firmly, but he says never saw any overt racism in Special Branch or when a uniformed chief superintendent at Ruislip. There clearly was some, but he never witnessed it personally.

He is asked about HN593 Bob Potter, the racist Chief Superintendent. He goes off on one, clearly annoyed, on how ill the man was and once he had to save him from jumping in front of a tube train.

‘I will not accept Bob Potter being used as a thrust to demonstrate that there was racial activity in Special Branch, just because one man who was seriously unwell did what he did, which was an outrageous behaviour if I remember it rightly.’

He wasn’t aware that reports from Family Liaison Officers at the homes of bereaved Black families were being passed to Special Branch and the SDS. When pressed, Gunn admits such a practice would not have been justified.

SPYING ON ELECTED POLITICIANS

In summary, Gunn reckons spycops reporting on elected politicians was valid if what they were saying came within the definition of public order, subversion or something untoward.

‘Then, where the safety or security of the State may have been threatened, whatever the person’s status as an elected representative, they still had a responsibility to comply with the law. And the police had a responsibility to report where there was potential threat to the law.’

He then says some of the politicians’ comments were on the borderline of stirring up unrest.

However, in all the reporting of elected representatives carried out by the SDS and Special Branch, there is nothing that illustrates this ever happening. Counsel doesn’t point this out though. Gunn is clearly simply assuming a post-facto justification for what was obviously standard Special Branch practice.

It would have been interesting to specify what Gunn’s own politics were, as the way he constantly spoke about extremism on the left the listener with a sense that he really didn’t like the left-wing, and that this coloured all his decision-making.

This became clear when he was asked about Ken Livingstone, saying he considered Livingstone to ‘espouse some extreme views at times’.

Livingstone was a Labour MP who went on to become Leader of the Greater London Council 1981-86, then Mayor of London 2000-2008.

Gunn claims that reporting on him would have been justified, but:

‘Only if it threatened public order or was subversive. And I keep repeating, we did not and should not have interfered with the genuine political activity of Members of Parliament or elected members of councils.’

The Inquiry misses this opportunity to ask Gunn to explain what he considered to be ‘genuine political activity’, and how he was made such judgements. Almost all of the spycops’ reports on Livingstone and other polticians fails to meet that definition. It is clear that the police regarded any advocating of significant social change as a form of ‘subversion’.

A lot of things seem to have slipped through on Gunn’s watch. How much did the ideological outlook of officers such as him shape the environment around the SDS, its managers and its reporting?

MCLIBEL

Gunn is also asked a few questions about the McLibel case and the implications of the police’s collusion with the McDonalds corporation.

The tiny London Greenpeace group had produced a leaflet entitled ‘What’s Wrong With Mcdonald’s?’. This was co-written by one of the spycops who’d infiltrated the group, HN10 Bob Lambert. It was then passed to McDonald’s, who threatened to sue for libel.

Two of the group, Helen Steel and Dave Morris, refused to back down. McDonald’s pressed ahead and it became the longest trial in English history.

Just before the writs were served, another spycop inside London Greenpeace, HN5 John Dines, deceived Steel into a long-term intimate relationship. The role of spycops – indeed, their very existence – was kept secret from the defendants and the court.

Gunn is condescending, praising the defendants then justifiying the spying:

‘I take my hat off to Helen Steel and Dave Morris for their tenacity, because it took nine years to solve that case…

But let me say this: it was good practice for police in possession of intelligence about threats to industry, commerce and whatever, to share that information with those potentially affected.’

He says there is no mention of him or of Special Branch in that matter; he’s not saying he wasn’t involved but he can’t recall it.

What he knew he mostly learned afterwards, most of it through this Inquiry. He says he only became interested in the topic after Dave Morris gave evidence. This evidence included that SDS reporting was passed to McDonald’s, the corporation knew Dines was an undercover, and that it had campaigners followed by private investigators.

He sneers about Morris giving evidence and:

‘waving a bit of paper in the air like Chamberlain, as if it was damning evidence of something’

Having tacitly admitted it was the SDS’s role to undermine campaigns because they threatened corporate profits, Gunn claimed this was also about damage to property, citing firebombs supposedly being set in Oxford Street.

The relationship between Special Branch and private companies that were the subject of protests was not, he said, a commercial arrangement, but a security decision to prevent harm. Decisions around it would have been made at the Chief Superintendent level, not at his level. It might have been referred to him if it was something contentious.

Gunn says he didn’t know that the Met had intervened to stop spycop Dines being named on the writ of defamation served by McDonald’s in 1990, on Helen Steel, Dave Morris and other activists, which led to the trial.

Counsel reminds him that spycops manager HN115 Tony Wait said that this would have needed Commander Ops authorisation. Gunn says he doesn’t recall seeing it. As ever, any decision would have considered the reputation of the Met Police, the Home Office and the Government.

McDonald’s security department at the time was run by Sid Nicholson and his deputy, Terry Carroll. They had both previously been senior Met officers, based in Brixton.

Nicholson told the McLibel trial that everyone employed in the security department was a former police officer, and that this helped them to access information (illegally, from the police). Gunn denied knowing either Nicholson or Carroll.

Public Disclosure

TRUE SPIES

Counsel asks about the 2002 BBC documentary on the SDS, True Spies, which revealed a huge amount of detail about the unit, its methods and history.

It is immediately clear that Gunn has a lot he wants to say on this topic.

‘I have waited 25 years to have an explanation of what went on on the True Spies, which was grossly distorted because of the lack of actually what happened as opposed to what people thought happened.

I have lost a few friends in the past because they considered my decision was wrong. It may well be, with the benefit of hindsight, but I stand by it, because the greater evil would have been not to have cooperated with the programme.’

He says he was approached by Peter Taylor of the BBC’s premier documentary programme Panorama, who he had worked with previously on Irish terrorism. In fact, he was probably the first person to be approached by Taylor:

‘Peter had never let me down and I trusted him’

However, what Taylor said on this occasion made Gunn’s jaw drop.

‘I was terrified at what he was telling me and it was clear he had been well briefed by somebody connected with the SDS either past or present…

Some of the information that he was passing to me, not just the fact that they were known as the hairies, everybody I think probably knew that by that time, but some of the information of the contacts, the informants, if that had been published would have done lasting damage not just to us but to the Government, to the Security Service and to us.’

He took the position that they had to either cooperate with Taylor to minimise this or let his programme go ahead and do the damage.

He discussed it with both the Assistant Commissioner Specialist Operations HN144 David Veness and the then-Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, John Stevens, telling them all held would break loose and bring down the government:

‘It was that serious.’

Of course, Gunn doesn’t let on what could be so powerful about the SDS that it could bring down the government of Tony Blair.

They were able to influence Taylor sufficiently, to ensure that the most damaging parts were left out. He was not aware of any other meetings within the Metropolitan Police about it, as by this time his role was as Chair of the Association of Chief Police Officers’ Terrorism and Allied Matters Committee (ACPO-TAM). This oversaw the other main spycops unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit).

Taylor asked Gunn if he would contact former members of the SDS to see if they would cooperate with the programme, to which Gunn said absolutely not.

 

 

He says there were two officers – one from Metropolitan Police Special Branch, the other from West Midlands – featured on the programme who ‘went off piste’, in a way which was potentially damaging.

THE COMMISSIONER’S APOLOGY

At the end, Gunn raises the issue of the Commissioner’s apologies as given in the Opening Statements.

This has clearly been bothering him. He provides the following lengthy response:

‘The Commissioner’s statement, at the end of last Monday, I thought was sad and unnecessary, and not in any sense denigrating his rightful say of apologising to all and sundry. That was right. And I join his apology in that.

What the Commissioner didn’t say – and this is grievous in respect of the truth – of the other side to this story, the other part of the story, all those officers that put their lives on the line in the interests of the state has not been discovered.

And for the Commissioner to say that the SDS was a dysfunctional unit carte blanche, for 40 years, when we know the Home Office funded it for 25. We know the Security Services and the Home Office were complicit in most of what they did I think is an appalling stretch of the truth.

And I fear that that damning statement that it was a dysfunctional unit was grossly unfair and there are a lot of people that have contacted me from the undercover officers who feel grievously hurt that their reputation has been traduced and besmirched by, sadly, a Commissioner giving half a story.

I know Mark Rowley [the Commissioner], he’s a very fair and reasonable man. But he didn’t, sadly, use the whole – or inform the whole story. He threw us all under the bus for the sake of eight or nine miscreants. That’s unfair.’

Tranche 3 Phase 1, Day 13
13 November 2025

On the afternoon of Thursday 14 November 2025, the Undercover Policing Inquiry heard evidence from Dan Gillman. He is a teacher, socialist, social justice campaigner and blacklisted trade unionist.

The Inquiry’s interest is because in the 1990s and 2000s he was part of Youth Against Racism in Europe, No Platform, and other anti-racist groups. Gillman was spied on by several Special Demonstration Squad officers, particularly HN104 Carlo Soracchi ‘Carlo Neri’.

At the time of writing a lot of the related documents are not yet published on the UCPI website. The Inquiry is very behind on this. Soracchi himself is not scheduled to give evidence until the week of 2 March 2026 and the documents will probably go online then.

The Undercover Policing Inquiry (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.

Gillman has given the Inquiry a written witness statement [UCPI0000037751].

He was questioned for the Inquiry by Sarah Simcock. The Inquiry’s page for the day has video and a transcript of the live session.

BLACKLISTING

Gillman became an active trade unionist as soon as he started working and has been a member of numerous unions over the years.

When he was 15 he worked for the company with the contract to clean the carpets at Chequers, the official country residence of the Prime Minister.

His boss was contacted and told that Gillman was active in anti-apartheid and CND campaigning, and the company would lose the Chequers contract if they continued to employ the teenager. It was then that Gillman realised the scope and scale of employment blacklisting.

It’s well established that Special Branches across the country illegally gave personal details of political activists to employment blacklists. A company called The Consulting Association ran a construction industry blacklist. It was raided by the Information Commissioner’s Office in 2009 and, among its 3,213 files, was one on Gillman.

Gillman later found out that he has been on that blacklist since 1999. That is odd, given that he has never been a construction worker. His file was purely about being on demonstrations in 1999. Who could have known about that and supplied it to the blacklist?

Gillman believes he was on the blacklist due to information from Special Demonstration Squad officer HN15 Mark Jenner ‘Mark Cassidy’, who spied on union activity. Jenner’s fellow spycop HN43 Peter Francis has said he believes his intelligence also ended up in Consulting Association files.

The illegal collusion of spycops with the equally illegal activity of blacklisting is being practically ignored at the Undercover Policing Inquiry. Blacklisted worker Dave Smith is the pre-eminent authority on the scandal, and yet the Inquiry is refusing to call him to give evidence. Smith has launched legal proceedings to force them to hear his testimony. Gillman says Smith should be sitting in the witness’s chair in his place.

When the Information Commissioner’s Office raided the Consulting Association, they only had a warrant to seize the construction industry files. Those for other industries were left alone. Gillman believes that if he was put in an unrelated industry like construction then he was presumably in the files for other industries too.

Despite being a qualified teacher, every time he applied for a job in his borough he was turned down. This happened so many times that he applied for a job outside his borough and was immediately successful and has held the position ever since. This indicates that someone had told the local authority not to employ him.

The police claim spycops weren’t meant to spy on unions but it was clearly a routine part of the job. HN15 Mark Jenner was a member of builders’ union UCATT. HN104 Carlo Soracchi mentioned Gillman’s membership of the National Union of Teachers in secret reports.

Gillman’s involvement in the trade union movement had nothing to do with public order, proving that the spycops had other reasons for their spying.

Gillman’s blacklist file at the Consulting Association had references to ‘the Socialist Party Away Team (SPAT)’. This is not a name those involved ever used about themselves. It was only used by the spycops. This surely shows that the spycops were the source of the entry.

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, asks Gillman about it. Mitting is conscious that his remit only covers the SDS, not the whole of the police. He needs to be sure that the information on the blacklist came from SDS officers. He says that all but one entry could be from uniformed police (who may have been prompted by SDS reporting).

Quite how uniformed police might have recognised Gillman and report their sighting to Special Branch isn’t explained.

YOUTH AGAINST RACISM IN EUROPE

Gillman was a member of Militant Labour (later called the Socialist Party) from 1993 to 2015. He was active in the party as a branch secretary, national committee member, youth organiser, chief steward and local election candidate. This led to him stewarding at demonstrations by Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE), whose leadership included Militant members.

Asked about the stewarding role, he explains that because YRE were encouraging people to come on demonstrations, they had a responsibility to ensure those people were safe. Stewards are there to defend the demonstration and make sure people are looked after, keeping to the agreed route with ready access to first aid care and legal advice.

‘They have a very committed, clear picture of what you need to do to run protests properly and efficiently and not get assaulted by the police and by fascists. So it was about being very proactive in your defence. That means you have your stewards at your meeting and then stewards also watching just down the road to make sure your meeting is going to be safe.

So it is a really good professional approach to stewarding that other groups didn’t have. That’s what attracted me towards Youth Against Racism in Europe.’

Gillman explained that the stewarding was never about attacking anyone. It was just about defending communities and one another, spotting problems before they happened and keeping things running smoothly. The YRE was made up of thousands of young people and Gillman says stewarding was comparable to the safeguarding role he currently has as a teacher.

YRE activists would work with other anti-fascist groups including Anti-Fascist Action, the Anti-Nazi League and others. They were regulars in the notably multicultural Brick Lane in East London where the fascist British National Party (BNP) would often make its presence known.

Gillman says he was involved in challenging canvassers for the BNP during election campaigns, telling them to leave the area. He rejects the idea that he was involved in attacking anyone. He says it was necessary to physically challenge fascism. If you politically oppose it, they will assault you; you have to defend yourself.

Gillman was an active member of Kent Anti-Fascist Alliance committee, which he says was largely run by YRE people and had a broader agenda than some other organisations. They used the slogan ‘jobs and homes not racism’, seeing that basic material security diminished the fear that contributed to racist sentiment.

Talking about the No Platform network, Gillman describes it as a coming together of various anti-fascist groups. There wasn’t any vetting, and they didn’t tell each other what to do. Despite it being made up of separate groupings, it was still much smaller than the YRE.

With the Inquiry repeatedly asking the same question about whether they were ever instigators of violence, Gillman explains it as a core principle:

‘The point about being a socialist is you believe in social justice and in fairness above all else. Assaulting someone is not fair. That is why we are socialists, because we are against unfairness and using violence. So you wouldn’t be a socialist if you were out there to cause violence.’

Seemingly unsatisfied with Gillman’s explanations, Simcock quotes from his written statement to the Inquiry:

‘Fascists are only interested in winning power through violence. In the end, they can only be opposed in the same way and that fighting fascism politically by the very character of its ideology means that you have to be prepared to fight it physically too.’

Ignoring the statement’s point about it only ever being a reaction to fascist-instigated violence, Simcock asks if it means that YRE was pre-emptive with violence. Displaying admirable patience, Gillman explains:

‘You have missed out the context of that paragraph. The point is that Churchill wasn’t a pre-emptive violent person. My grandad wasn’t. They were forced into that situation by the nature of fascism.

Millions of men and women died in the wars against fascism because people hadn’t earlier on clocked on you had to stand up to them.

So, the nature of fascism means unless you challenge them, unless you stop them giving out their racist and fascist filth, they just grow and they grow and they grow, and the earlier you intervene, the less disruptive they are, the less death there is.’

THE AWAY TEAM

Gillman is asked about the ‘Away Team’. He says it was never a formal group, just a term for the YRE stewards who were willing taking the risk of being attacked by fascists or the police.

Gillman says that the away team, such as it was, was predominantly male. Though the wider stewarding group was more mixed, he says he feels a bit guilty about how male dominated it was. He sadly acknowledges that the labour movement is dominated by men.

A report [UCPI0000034442] contains a supposed list of away team members, describing it as:

‘The Militant Labour stewarding group which can be called upon if trouble is anticipated. All away team members are trusted street activists.’

Gillman says it’s accurate, but with misleading implications:

‘Take out the word “street”, I think street has connotations about street violence. But the word about “trusted”, people who have been stewards week in week out, know what to do in a difficult situation, are prepared to put themselves in the line of risk, that is fairly accurate. It is informal.’

A spycop report by Soracchi [MPS-0071194] claims the away team was:

‘A stewarding group that worked closely with AFA [Anti-Fascist Action] on its actions and had been involved in mass disorder…

The away team also undertook actions on its own initiative, usually involving small BNP [British National Party] electioneering groups. The group would attack canvassers, destroying their material and using violence to convince the extreme right-wing activists of the error of their ways.’

Gillman flatly denies attacking, saying they only ever took defensive action.

‘We never attacked canvassers. We didn’t use violence. But if you ever tried to have a conversation with a fascist, it never goes very well.

There is no political debate you can have with a fascist. You don’t say “excuse me young man, you can’t give out your racist material” because they just punch you.

So if we were in community campaigns, defending communities from fascists spewing their racist filth through letterboxes, you would approach them and say “you need to not do that down this street, mate. You are not welcome, racists aren’t welcome here, you need to move on.”

The fascist response is to assault you. That is the nature of fascism. So you are put in a situation where you self-defend yourself. You defend the community you are in, you defend your other stewards with you, you defend yourself.’

We’re shown a clip from a World in Action documentary, ‘Violence With Violence’, broadcast on 15 November 1993. It shows a YRE and Anti-Nazi League protest across the road from a British National Party presence in Brick Lane amongst its Bangladeshi community.

At the protest a group of antifascists were thought to be fascists by the police and steered towards the BNP. The antifascists promptly chased the fascists off.

Simcock says that some of away team were ‘dressed as fascists’ there. Gillman says he has short hair and is wearing normal clothes, the same as those men. The police just made wrong assumptions about stereotypes of working class men.

Gillman squarely rejects the idea that the BNP were being attacked. He says the BNP were attacking the community in Brick Lane. Anti-racists drove the BNP away from the streets. This is not violence.

‘Youth Against Racism in Europe and all the antifascist groups were in Brick Lane for week after week, because the Brick Lane community were trying hard to eject the racists and fascists from their community.’

Gillman has continued to support antifascist groups such as Unite Against Fascism and has been a steward for Searchlight and Hope Not Hate. He has acted as chief steward for Black Lives Matter and for protests opposing the English Defence League.

An SDS report by Soracchi [MPS-00073304] says that Anti-Fascist Action was very successful in preventing any Nazi music gigs from happening in London. Gillman says it’s true, and he is proud that he helped prevent fascists from having a relaxing bonding session after a day of being violent thugs.

SPYCOP SORACCHI’S CATALOGUE OF LIES

Special Demonstration Squad officer HN104 Carlo Soracchi ‘Carlo Neri’ homed in on Gillman and filed numerous reports about him.

One Soracchi report, dated 19 December 2000 [MPS-00004904], described a fascist protest outside the Cock Tavern pub in Euston. It claimed Gillman and another person from No Platform ‘expressed satisfaction at the recent attack by their group on the right-wing demonstration’.

This simply isn’t true, says Gillman. On the contrary, No Platform defended the pub at the request of the landlord when an Irish music event was happening there and fascists had amassed outside in opposition. Police had arrived but were doing nothing to defend the pub from the fascists.

‘When they are about to throw bricks and things through the window and about to assault the pub, you stand in front of the pub and say “this is not going to happen. You are not going to attack this community pub. We have been asked here by the landlord to defend this event. This is a completely legitimate event. We are here to defend that event.”

When the fascists attack it, you stand in the way. But when you stand in front of fascists they start to assault you…

As I keep saying, if you are committed to promote the labour movement and communities and defend them from fascism, the nature of fascism means that they are going to assault you. And so, violence erupts because the fascists bring that violence with them.’

Soracchi submitted a report on 13 January 2001 [MPS-0004991] describing No Platform activists meeting outside a pub to ambush a National Front demonstration. There is no exaggeration in this, says Gillman. Rather, it is a complete fiction, it did not happen at all.

Four days later, on 17 January 2001, Soracchi reported [MPS-0004993] that No Platform would not be stewarding the Bloody Sunday march as there was going to be a major police presence. This is just more rubbish. Gillman says they didn’t go because the organisers said they would not be needed.

Soracchi’s claim that they were discouraged by police presence is clearly intended to imply they only attend to commit crimes. It is yet another smear. Soracchi’s running theme of YRE and No Platform seeking pre-emptive violence is undermined by a paucity of reports of them ever actually doing it.

Soracchi filed a report on 9 February 2001 [MPS-0005305] claiming that Gillman, as a supposed leading light of No Platform, was approached by Irish Anti-Fascist Action to provide security for a benefit gig they were organising in Brixton on 10 February. Soracchi says Gillman agreed ‘as he is keen to develop closer links with Anti-Fascist Action.’

‘That’s just not true. We ran it. It was our event. We got all the proceeds… We stewarded it. We booked the bands. It was nothing to do with Anti-Fascist Action.’

Anti-Fascist Action were seen by the SDS as the more confrontational group. This report appears to be Soracchi providing yet another example of a spycop inventing links between the people they spied on and the groups who were perceived as dangerous, in order to make their deployment look more valid.

Gillman says he was never willing to join Anti-Fascist Action because they were prepared to put themselves in a higher level of risk than he was. He was only interested in safe events, and defending community and himself where necessary.

Soracchi made a report on 4 May 2001 [MPS-00005831], detailing antifascist activity against a National Front march in Leicester. Gillman says this too is nonsense. The march was actually the first Gay Pride in Leicester. They stewarded the march to protect it from fascist attack. The report is pure fiction.

SORACCHI LYING TO PROTECT HIS CUSHY JOB

Another Soracchi report, dated 18 June 2001 [MPS-0006121], claims Gillman wanted to gather intelligence in order to target and attack far right activists. This is made up nonsense, says Gillman.

It’s Soracchi once again trying to justify his deployment by reporting things that sound dangerous. Gillman completely rejects the idea they would incite violence from neo-Nazi group Combat 18:

‘If you have ever seen Combat 18, the last thing you want to do is provoke them into a fight. No, we have never tried to provoke these great big Nazi thugs into a fight. It is just not a wise thing to do.’

Asked why Soracchi would want to paint a dishonest picture, Gillman points to the self-interest:

‘What a cracking job. He’s getting paid to go out drinking with his mates and having fun. He has to justify the millions of pounds being spent on him and his nice flat and everything else spent on him.

He has to justify that, so he has to create this picture that’s just not a real picture. It is just there to try to justify the immorality of what he’s doing.’

On 8 October 2001, Soracchi reported [MPS-0006937] about a No Platform action to oppose the far right on Remembrance Sunday:

‘The leading faces in NP such as Dan Gillman and ‘Mario’ will be used as a decoy for the police spotters by going to an unconnected location, possibly Hyde Park or Green Park.

Dan Gillman will use his phone, which he believes to be monitored, to suggest that the NP meeting point will be at this unconnected location…

It is hoped that this will give the NP the breathing space away from police attention that they need to organise an attack on the right-wing.’

This too is twaddle. Gillman explains that Soracchi has described the actual plan and added an invented secret plan for violence that never happened:

‘That was the meeting point! We were going to meet at Green Park, which is just around the corner from the Cenotaph and we were, as antifascists do every single year, going to protest at fascists celebrating at our Cenotaph.’

Asked if he did believe his phone to be monitored, Gillman says there was no element of mere belief, he was certain. His phone number, and his wife’s, were recorded by spycops and illegally passed to employment blacklisters. Why else would the police do that?

He says he was nonetheless happy to use his phone. They never did anything illegal, none of them were ever arrested, and they had nothing to hide.

Soracchi reported on 31 March 2003 [MPS-00011626] that they’d attacked a BNP meeting in Crouch End on 4 February 2003. This is batted away by Gillman who points out that they never attacked any BNP meetings.

In fact, they prevented the BNP attacking left wing meetings. It was common for the BNP to attack many kinds of meetings: socialists, trade unions, LGBTQ, Black and Asian community meetings, all sorts of things.

On this occasion, he was outside the town hall to defend a left wing meeting which fascists had threatened to turn up to.

In the end the fascists never showed. Not only was there no BNP meeting, there were no BNP people. The report is more inflammatory lies and nonsense.

Gillman addresses the continual theme in Soracchi’s reports about him: the allegations that he sought out members of the far right for personal violence. He points out that there is no evidence of him ever doing anything violent, despite Soracchi being beside him for the whole period in question.

A spycops report [MPS-0004158] about ‘No Platform’ is shown, describing Gillman and Frank Smith leading a group of 20 to 30 No Platform activists to an anti-fascist protest in Berlin. Gillman says it was actually only three people – him, Frank and Joe Batty – going to a Committee for a Workers’ International event, a meeting of socialist parties of which they were all members.

On 9 August 2001, Soracchi filed a report [MPS-0006444] claiming No Platform was going to disrupt the BNP’s Red White and Blue festival in Wales. It said they were going to take advantage of the fact that BNP leader Nick Griffin would be away at the festival as an opportunity to attack his house. Soracchi seems unaware that the festival was actually held at Griffin’s house and land.

Gillman confirms that No Platform did intend to disrupt the festival, but there was no violence planned. He admits some damage was intended, but says the report is a massive exaggeration. The more lurid claims, such as intent to sabotage the water supply, are simply lies.

Gillman highlights that this was the same time that fascists were planting nail bombs which were killing people in London. It was ridiculous that police were driving from Wales to his house in London to serve notice on him for protesting a fascist festival.

He adds that the far right had a website, ‘Redwatch’, that had lists of names and photographs of left wing activists to attack. There was no such version run by the left to attack the far right.

THE FIREBOMB PLOT THAT NEVER WAS

Gillman says Carlo Soracchi tried to convince him to petrol bomb a fascist-owned shop. Soracchi claims it was all Gillman’s plan.

Soracchi told Gillman he had been involved in the Red Brigades in Italy, a communist group responsible for murder, kneecapping and kidnapping. The group was just beginning a resurgence at the time. Soracchi said he was up for some more extreme action.

During a party on New Year’s Eve 2002, Soracchi took Gillman and some other partygoers to a charity shop owned by Italian fascist leader Roberto Fiore, who was using the shop as a fascist front. Soracchi told them of the link and suggested petrol bombing it. The friends said that wasn’t their style at all, and they were more interested in going back to the party.

A few days later, Soracchi encouraged Gillman and Joe Batty back to the shop. Asked why they went along, Gillman explained:

‘If you try to organise left-wing groups or antifascist groups, getting active enthusiastic people is a really hard thing to do. We had a really enthusiastic keen young man wanting to help and get involved, so you want to nurture that, you want to go with that.

So we didn’t want to knock it on the head there and then. We wanted to encourage his enthusiasm, but then you would use your political persuasion in that conversation to sort of direct him, that that isn’t really what we do.’

It appears that Soracchi reported every single conversation he had with Gillman, apart from the one where Gillman told him not to petrol bomb a shop.

This sort of scheme was not unusual in the Special Demonstration Squad. Soracchi’s boss was HN10 Bob Lambert who, when he was undercover, entrapped people he spied on with a plot to put incendiary devices in shops. HN16 James Thomson, one of Soracchi’s contemporaries, invented a gun smuggling plan to try to frame hunt saboteurs he spied on.

MOVING ON

Gillman quit being chief steward for No Platform in 2002 when his teaching career and family responsibilities made him less comfortable with taking personal risks. Carlo Soracchi became chief steward in his place.

In a report of 16 October 2003 [MPS-0029382], Soracchi said Gillman was being an ordinary steward; he wasn’t getting involved in any criminal activity because he was now a teacher and was being pressured by his wife.

Gillman says it’s nonsense on several levels – his partner has always been supportive of his political work, and he’s never been involved in criminality.

A written operational review of Soracchi’s deployment by supervising ‘cover officer’ HN9 [MPS-00748418] says Gillman had been effectively removed from active political organising due to SDS intelligence. Gillman says this is nonsense. He just got a new job, and continued to be politically active which indeed he is to this day.

Soracchi even reported later activity, such as Gillman stewarding at a 2005 Stop the War demonstration [MPS-0064059]. Though why Soracchi would do this is another matter, as Gillman noted:

‘These are massive demonstrations, completely legal. I don’t get why he’s bothering to make reports on them.’

Gillman takes issue with the personal details in the spycop files that have no policing value. In April 2006, Soracchi reported the fact that Gillman and his partner were expecting their first child [MPS-0064264]. Another report gives details of his family moving house. A further report records his wife’s phone number.

‘What on earth has my family or my wife got to do with Carlo’s placement, that he’s publishing her phone number to a bunch of misogynistic sexist policemen?’

Two other spycops reported on Gillman, HN15 Mark Jenner ‘Mark Cassidy’ and HN43 Peter Francis ‘Peter Black’ / ‘Peter Daley’ / ‘Peter Johnson’. While Gillman was at events with them, he wasn’t close to either.

DECEIVING DONNA

Gillman and his wife were very close friends with the man they knew as ‘Carlo Neri’, the spycop Carlo Soracchi. They took his fake persona at face value.

They had no reason to doubt his story that he was a locksmith. Saying it was a favour to his comrades, Soracchi upgraded their locks, and those of some of their friends. It meant he and Special Branch had keys to the houses of many Socialist Party activists.

Soracchi had a year-long relationship with Socialist Party member ‘Lindsey’, starting soon after his deployment began.

Shortly after that ended, Gillman introduced Soracchi to his good friend Donna McLean. McLean wasn’t an activist. Soracchi started a sexual relationship with her very quickly. They had a whirlwind romance.

Only three months after meeting, Soracchi proposed to McLean at the same New Year’s party where he tried to get Gillman and others to burn the fascist’s shop. Soracchi and McLean got engaged and moved in together. In reality, he was already married.

He then used the relationship with McLean to get closer to Gillman and his wife. Gillman is clearly emotional as he describes feeling guilty and responsible for Soracchi’s abuse of McLean. If she had not been his friend, she would never have suffered the colossal emotional and sexual abuse from Soracchi.

In 2023, McLean published a book about her experience, Small Town Girl: Love, Lies and the Undercover Police. She is due to give evidence to the Undercover Policing Inquiry in February 2026.

IMPACT

Soracchi betrayed Gillman on a deeply personal level. It has not affected his political beliefs, but it has destroyed any faith he might have had in the commitment of the police to keep families like his safe.

Gillman ends his evidence with a moving and insightful prepared statement. This is the text in full:

‘I want to say it because I think I have answered all your questions and I felt there was a direction they kind of went. The direction was to try and present me and others as a bunch of thugs; and the more that we were seen as a bunch of thugs, the more you could justify the social and sexist abuse of young women, the spying on us, the using dead children’s identities, the blacklisting of us, and the spying on victims of racial abuse rather than protecting them.

And yet, I am proud of what we have done. I am proud of all the things we talked about today. I have tried to explain: we have never chosen violence, never chosen criminality; it has always been forced upon us by the fascists.

When we all, 10,000 people, went out on to Hoe Street in Walthamstow recently, we didn’t choose violence, we didn’t choose criminality, but every single one of us was breaking a public order law, every single one of us was prepared to put our body in the way of a fascist boot or a fascist fist. That is No Platform. That is anti-fascism. But when you stand there, the fascists don’t turn up. They disappear into the ether.

Again, I think I said today that I have always defended democracy. I have not firebombed it, like Carlo tried to make us do. It is a different democracy to what Carlo believes in. It is a democracy where we defend families of colour who want to go out on the streets, rather than defending the fascists when they goosestep up and down Whitehall. It is a democracy where we arrest the fascists. We don’t arrest a thousand old ladies who are in Palestine Action T-shirts.

I am a history teacher and I teach 1000 years of mostly British history. Most of it the kids find a bit annoying and it is a bit embarrassing, nothing much I am proud of. But I am proud that this country has a proud history of standing up to fascism. I think I am a small part of that.

No Platform didn’t achieve much but we had a go, we picked up the baton, and if I see my grandads, I can say well, I did my bit. I am not sure Carlo, Mark and Peter can say the same.

No pasaran!’

This drew a round of applause from the public gallery.

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, thanked Gillman for his evidence.

Tranche 3 Phase 1, Day 13
13 November 2025

Content warning: this report contains descriptions of severe interpersonal violence, killing, and misogynist abuse.

INTRODUCTION

On the morning of Thursday 14 November 2025, the Undercover Policing Inquiry heard evidence from Lois Austin.

Austin is a lifelong socialist and social justice campaigner. She’s a member of the Socialist Party (formerly Militant Labour) and works with us, Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance.

In the early 1990s she was part of Youth Against Racism in Europe and was spied on by several Special Demonstration Squad officers, particularly HN43 Peter Francis ‘Peter Black’/ ‘Peter Daley’ / ‘Peter Johnson’. Hence the Inquiry’s interest in her now.

She is one of a number of activists being called to give evidence to the Undercover Policing Inquiry ahead of Francis’s appearance in the first week of December.

Austin gave powerful, sincere and candid testimony challenging specific falsehoods. She unambiguously explained the politics, process and culture of the campaigns she was involved with.

The Undercover Policing Inquiry (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.

Austin has given the Inquiry a written witness statement [UCPI0000037774].

She was questioned by Sarah Hemingway, Second Junior Counsel to the Inquiry.

The Inquiry’s page for the day has video and a transcript of the live session.

BACKGROUND

Austin grew up in Welling, South London, as part of a socialist family. She was politically active from the age of 14 or 15 with the local branch of the Labour Party Young Socialists, alongside her younger sister.

The 1984-5 miners’ strike galvanised her political spirit. She was outraged at the police violence and biased media reporting. She was active in many of the prominent campaigns of the day including anti-apartheid, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. She wasn’t shy about taking on active organising roles and doing media work.

The Thatcher government set up the Youth Training Scheme (YTS), in which young people had to work full-time hours for unemployment benefits. In 1985, Austin organised a school strike in opposition to plans for the YTS to be made compulsory. She made numerous national media appearances talking about it.

She was on the Labour Party Young Socialists’ London regional committee and the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee youth sub-committee.

THE BNP IN WELLING

Austin was asked about the far-right British National Party (BNP), the main racist organisation on the rise in Britain at the time. The BNP moved into a residential street in Welling in 1987, calling their operational base a ‘bookshop’.

They chose Welling due to its history of far-right support. Austin remembers a 1981 National Front march several hundred strong coming down the High Street.

The BNP went into youth clubs, recruiting new members. The area immediately experienced a huge rise in racist attacks, including murders of young Black men. One Asian family in particular was singled out. The police weren’t interested, so the campaigners organised a rota of visitors:

‘We wanted the British National Party to see that this was a family that had support, the whole of the community, black, white and Asian, and we made sure there was people in and out.

Sometimes people had to stay there overnight because we wanted to send a signal that this is a family that is being protected, it is being defended by the community and you need to stay away.’

In response to the BNP’s presence in her neighbourhood, Austin helped to co-ordinate opposition among trade unionists, socialists and other anti-racist community groups to form the Bexley and Greenwich Labour Movement Campaign Against Racism and Fascism.

The group petitioned the council to use planning laws and the Race Relations Act to have the BNP ejected from their ‘book shop’ headquarters. From 1987 to 1993 they lobbied every full meeting of Bexley council, and had sympathetic councillors present motions to the meetings.

Austin recalls how upsetting it was to hear Bexley council, the police, and the press saying the left were just as bad as the BNP. The BNP were trying to create hatred and division whereas they were doing the opposite.

The campaign also did street stalls for outreach, something that was dangerous given the presence of the violent far-right group Combat 18. Austin was singled out. Neo-Nazi Combat 18 activists were asking around in local pubs about ‘that commie slag Lois Austin’, wanting to know where she lived. She ended up on a Combat 18 hit list.

Asked if she accepted the BNP as a legitimate political party with a right to campaign, she was clear and blunt.

‘No. I would not accept that. Because the British National Party were openly fascist. They said that… They said “We are a Nazi party and Hitler was right”.’

Even Combat 18’s name is a Nazi reference – the 1st and 8th letters of the alphabet are Hitler’s initials.

On 8 May 1993, in the aftermath of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, an anti-racist demonstration was held in Welling. As always, the Inquiry was keen to find out about anything that might be construed as violence from the people who were spied on. Austin says some placards were thrown at the BNP office but not much else.

The main disorder was caused by police who waded in with horses and riot gear, attacking people. This was not a one-off, and Austin is emphatic that the Inquiry needs to examine the actions of the police in attacking demonstrations.

ENTER SPYCOPS – THE OCTOBER 1993 DEMO

HN43 Peter Francis was deployed on 27 September 1993, shortly before a large anti-racist protest in Welling on 16 October 1993. He was tasked to infiltrate Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE), which had been formed in 1992 in response to rising racist attacks across the continent. Austin became one of the UK leaders.

Austin rejects the claim in spycop reports that YRE was merely a front for Militant Labour. She says there’s a long history of socialists setting up broad organisations (Eleanor Marx was involved in setting up the GMB!). The biggest contingent on the October 1993 march was unaffiliated local people.

She explains how her specific role on 16 October 1993 was to lead the demonstration with the banner. They found the planned route blocked by riot police with mounted officers behind. They were not being permitted to go past the BNP office, but nor were they given an alternative. They were penned in with no exit, an early example of police ‘kettling’ that increased at protests over the following years.

We are shown a clip from ‘Violence With Violence’, an episode of the ITV political documentary series World in Action which alleges the existence of a secret violent group with YRE. The footage shows police blocking the 16 October march.

Austin says they were affronted at being blocked from marching past the BNP, because it breached their democratic right to protest.

A spycop intelligence report [UCPI0000025694] claims that the night before the demonstration activists were confident of destroying the BNP headquarters during the protest. Austin says this is a wildly fictionalised account of a meeting that just had stewards planning logistics to keep it safe and orderly.

Francis says there was a Class War plan to burn down the BNP bookshop. This seems to amount to little more than a notice in that group’s provocative anarchist publication.

‘I think Class War were probably not even seriously putting that forward. Because I think “Lewis” described yesterday, their magazine being the sort of Beano of the left… “Eat the Rich” and stuff like that. So nobody really took them seriously.’

Austin says she never heard of such a plan at the time and would have been stridently opposed if someone had actually suggested it.

She dismisses the idea as ridiculous on several levels. Not only was it wholly beyond the ways and methods of YRE, but the BNP HQ was a heavily fortified building next door to a residential house and a fire would have put people at risk.

‘And that, quite frankly, is ridiculous. Because the method of Youth Against Racism in Europe, and the Anti-Nazi League as well, actually… was to build a mass political campaign. That is how you defeat fascism.’

Austin describes how she was charged by police and knocked on the floor then saved by YRE stewards:

‘If it weren’t for the Youth Against Racism in Europe stewards, people like Dan Gillman and others who jumped on my back when the police were trying to batter me and they took the blows on their backs, if it hadn’t have been for that, I honestly believe I would have ended up like Julie Waterson who was whacked across the head by a police truncheon.

And I can see her on my left. I am negotiating with the police. Police keep charging us and I can see Julie Waterson in her white jacket covered in blood. I was saying to our stewards, “They have got Julie, they have got Julie, you have to go over there, you have to assist.” That was what was going on. That was the reality of Welling.’

She asks again, why did the police block the exit at Lodge Hill that would have taken everyone away from the BNP and up to the park? Every exit route was blocked. The inescapable conclusion is that it was a police trap so they could attack the crowd.

Austin points out that riot police chased protesters across fields as they were trying to leave the area, beating people up as they were leaving.

THE OCTOBER DEMO IN WELLING – ANALYSIS

The spycop report of the march, apparently by Francis [UCPI0000025694] claims the march was a group of hoodlums bent on violence, prevented by seeing the might of their adversaries:

‘The physical presence and appearance of large numbers of fully equipped riot-police was the single most persuasive deterrent to the ill-intentioned mob on that day. The second major factor was the choice of battleground by the police.’

Austin not only rejects the allegation but also the wider mindset of it being akin to a military conflict. The police are mounting gladiatorial opposition to people exercising their democratic rights, and people shouldn’t be portrayed as violent just because they protest.

She says the police intimidation and violence were part of a strategy of scaring people away from protesting, and this is totally unacceptable in a democracy.

Austin also dismissed the World in Action documentary’s characterisation which, while talking about a secret plan for anti-racist violence, only actually shows police attacking protesters and the crowd reacting.

Given how closely the World in Action perspective matches the fictions of the spycops, this suggests that the SDS may have been the source of the programme’s information.

Similarly, the spycops report said ‘stewards were instructed not to carry weapons’, which is a way of admitting they were unarmed but still crowbarring in an implication that they were wanting violence.

‘We didn’t have to say to our stewards “don’t carry weapons” because we didn’t carry weapons… the idea that we were violent, that we were carrying weapons, that we were up for a fight and all of that, it’s just not true.’

The spycops report claims ‘coloured youths of murdered families and a holocaust survivor were being used as stooges’ by YRE activists. Austin is disgusted at this. Again, it characterises activists as inauthentic, having a nefarious desire for violence rather than genuinely holding the moral position that they’re always talking about.

It shows the police find it hard to believe anyone could actually be actively anti-racist, and believe there can be no legitimate opposition to racism.

But more, Austin points out, it shows a racist basis to their thinking:

‘The fact that the police report it in that way shows their racism actually, and their prejudice, that Black families, Black members of the community, have to be led or can be in some way manipulated by activists, socialists, trade unionists. It is absolute rubbish.’

The spycop report talks about how ‘actual fighting was started by 60-100 ‘crusties’’ (members of a scruffy anarcho-political youth subculture of the time) who the stewards were powerless to control. It says they were hunt sabs and anarchists, two favourite bogeymen of the spycops and conservative state. It doesn’t say how they were able to ascertain this.

Austin is asked if it is true, and she flatly rejects it. When people were penned in and shoved by police there were people pushing back, but the overt violence was started by the police.

Though the day was fraught, the sustained campaigning won in the end, which Austin says shows that both the cause and the method were vindicated. They had been lawfully campaigning for the law to be applied and a danger to public order to be removed; things the police should support, yet the police had treated them as the problem.

‘What ultimately happened was that our campaign was successful. The political campaign that we had in the area, the mass pressure from everything that we did, along with other groups, meant that the authorities eventually did set up a planning inquiry…

I wrote the evidence for Youth Against Racism in Europe where I linked issues around planning and detriment to the community to the Race Relations Act and incitement to racial hatred, and I said that the Race Relations Act is relevant to planning law and that is a reason to close it.

And the judge included our submission and that point in his reasoning as to why the British National Party headquarters should be closed down. So our mass political campaign won.’

TARGETED FOR WANTING CHANGE

The intelligence report of the 1994 Militant Labour AGM [MPS-0745874], filled with the characteristic disdain of the spycops, says:

‘A debate of some interest took place on the Sunday afternoon, when the question was raised as to whether Militant Labour should conceal the fact that it is really a revolutionary group, bent on the overthrow of the capitalist state.

Given its relationship with the Labour Party had been severed so unceremoniously, it was perhaps no surprise when it was decided that the message should be shouted from the rooftops in true Trotskyist tradition.

This apart, the weekend offered little to interest a normal person.”

Austin responds with a fundamental truth, that everyone says there is something wrong with society. She is a socialist who wants to transform society, at the time focused on – as the reports show – anti-racism, jobs and housing.

In November 1995 the Security Service (aka MI5) are recorded [UCPI0000027223] as asking the SDS for information on specific members of Militant Labour. Austin says this proves the political policing extended well beyond the SDS, and that MI5 should be being investigated as part of the Inquiry.

‘There is nothing in our paper, in our magazines that doesn’t say what we are, who we are and what we stand for and why we want people to join us. Again, it’s political policing and it’s the state, the Security Services, operating in a biased way…

Why are the Security Services getting involved with Special Branch to infiltrate and subvert organisations which are supposed to be tolerated in a democratic society?’

MILITANT ISN’T VIOLENT

For the Inquiry, Sarah Hemingway once again suggests Youth Against Racism in Europe was part of Militant Labour. Austin explains that while there were Militant Labour members, YRE was a broad organisation 20,000 strong.

From there, Hemingway asks what the term ‘militant’ means, suggesting there is something intrinsically violent about it. Austin gives a comprehensive and eloquent answer:

‘When we use the word militant or militancy in a labour movement context, that is language of the labour movement, and if somebody is raising it to suggest that it means violence or something they don’t really understand the labour movement.

I would describe myself as a working class militant. I work for a campaigning trade union and when an employer says we are going to make job cuts, or we are going to rip up your terms and conditions, or we are going to outsource you to a rotten private company, then we take militant action. We build the union. We organise for ballots for industrial action, we set up strikes and picket lines.

So that’s what it means in the context of the labour movement, and it’s a term that’s always been there.’

Hemingway isn’t really listening and interrupts to ask:

‘Does it mean confrontation? Does it mean violence?’

Austin patiently replies that no, it doesn’t.

Hemingway is certainly having a peculiar day of it. She comes across as disorganised and flustered. She is clearly keen to not overrun and so interrupts Austin’s longer responses, seemingly unaware that she’s just heard the answers to questions she’s about to ask.

NOT VIOLENT ANYWHERE ELSE, EITHER

Hemingway asks Austin if she has ever been violent on a demonstration.

‘I have never been arrested and brought before a court and I do not have a criminal record and I have never been violent. So why do the Metropolitan Police and the secret services have a huge file on me?

It is completely and utterly wrong. It is disgraceful and it is something that should never, ever happen in a so-called or supposedly democratic society.

And I think what goes to the heart of all of this, and again it needs to be said at this Inquiry, is that this is political policing. This is the police, the secret services and British State saying “anybody that criticises the state and what it is doing is a legitimate target”, and that is completely and utterly wrong.’

This underlines Austin’s fundamental theme of the day: the spycops were not about preventing disorder, they were political police units aimed at those whose political beliefs were deemed unacceptable.

Hemingway interrupts again to ask Austin if the Youth Against Racism in Europe logo of a fist smashing a swastika was violent, noting that more recently it’s just a swastika going in a bin. There is laughter from the public gallery, and Austin seems a tad surprised that she has to explain that the fist is symbolic.

A spycop report of 9 November 1993 [UCPI0000033071] talks about an event called ‘Smash the Nazis’ organised by Austin. Hemingway asks if this was a sign that she was violent. Austin once again points out that there is no evidence of them ever attacking anyone. She explains, again, that YRE was a political campaign using petitions, lobbying and marches.

Austin says they would use slogans like ‘smash the BNP’ but this didn’t mean bodily smashing individual BNP members. It certainly wasn’t taken that literally by anyone she ever worked with, and on a practical level such violence would have been counter-productive, discouraging people from joining the campaign.

Hemingway quotes spycop Peter Francis’ witness statement [UCPI0000036012] which says that the YRE used the slogan ‘no platform for fascists’ and that they wanted to ‘hit the BNP’ whenever they could. Might this, then, be proof at last that YRE was violent?

Austin points out that Francis, despite all his embellishments, gives no evidence of any violence ever occurring with YRE.

She has to explain the concept of ‘no platform’ meaning kicking the fascists out of their headquarters, and banning them from using public premises like libraries for meetings. This is not the same as the tooled-up street fights Hemingway seems so keen to imagine.

‘No platform means that we need to use a political campaign, we need to use the community, the mass, as many people as we can, to ensure that they are not platformed. That’s what we mean by that.’

THE AWAY TEAM

Hemingway asks about the ‘away team’, named in the World in Action documentary as YRE’s secret violent core.

Austin explains that it was just a loose term for YRE members who stewarded at meetings and marches to try to ensure safety and prevent people from being attacked by fascists or police. It wasn’t a formal organisation, let alone the clandestine street-fighting squad that the spycops and World in Action describe.

Austin explains that they were asking lots of people to come to demonstrations against the BNP, so they had to take stewarding seriously. Protesters had been hospitalised by fascists and police, so they organised well-disciplined stewarding to defend themselves and keep it as safe as possible.

Stewards would ensure people kept to the agreed route, they would spot fascists up ahead and ensure the two sides didn’t meet. They would also put themselves between police batons and marchers, and prevented some terrible injuries from happening.

Asked again if the away team was a secret self-organised group within Militant Labour, Austin has to explain how they organised as a hierarchical party and that sort of thing would not happen. She reiterates it was an open political campaign.

Austin is challenged on saying the away team was never formalised. We are again shown a spycop report about the 1994 Militant Labour conference (the same one that said they were going to declare themselves bent on overthrowing the state) [MPS-0745874] that says there was a motion passed confirming the official formation for the away team.

Austin says there is no evidence any such motion took place. It appears to be yet another spycop fairytale invented to shore up the story of derring-do in the face of danger, created to impress their managers.

Peter Francis says in his witness statement:

‘Part of my deep cover involved convincing my targets that I was interested in the confrontational side against the BNP. We as a group certainly instigated violence with the BNP. I, as part of that group, attacked people. That was the role. The role was agreed with management.’

Austin gives it no credence whatsoever:

‘I don’t think there is any truth in this at all. I am not aware of that at all. We were not involved in pre-emptive attacks. We were involved in lobbies, protests, mass demonstrations, counter protests. If the British National Party were having a protest we would have a counter protest. But we were not involved in pre-emptive attacks.’

Francis also claims that there were ‘dawn raids’ on BNP members by people he spied on, with swastikas painted on houses and dog excrement pushed through letter boxes. However, Francis himself admits he never saw them actually happen. Austin rejects the entire accusation outright too, saying it simply never happened.

BRICK LANE

Austin is asked about an incident where the BNP were on the streets in the notably multicultural Brick Lane on 19 September 1993, three days after the BNP had a councillor elected. She can’t remember if Peter Francis was there.

We are shown another clip from World In Action, shot on the day. There are Anti-Nazi League banners and Austin is visible as part of the static protest behind railings, in a police-approved pen on the opposite side of the road from the fascists.

The World in Action voiceover refers to it as the sinister ‘away team under the ANL banner’. A group of anti-fascists were mistaken for fascists by police and guided across to the BNP side of the road, where they chased the fascists away.

Austin accepts that the group who rushed the BNP paper sellers included YRE stewards. She says she had no knowledge of any premeditated plan to rush the BNP. She puts it in proportion, pointing out that worse goes off at West Ham matches on a Saturday, never mind the horrendous racist attacks of the time.

Hemingway brings her back to the point, that this was surely a confrontational attack. Austin doesn’t disagree, but sets it in terms of self-defence. Again, the footage is at odds with the commentary. There is no evidence of a secret violent group in YRE, and chasing fascists down the street is hardly riotous disorder.

Peter Francis claims that the YRE had ‘an appetite for violence’. Austin rejects that entirely. It was a mass organisation made up of trade unionists and teenagers. There was no public disorder at the vast majority of events they were involved in. The spycops can’t see it as anything other than a small, violent group when it was actually neither.

Austin says YRE always had pre-event negotiations with the police. For every single event, including small matters like lobbying of the council, they always got permission.

THE EARL’S COURT ATTACK

The Inquiry then turned to a genuinely horrific incident at Earl’s Court tube station on 15 January 1994.

Neo-Nazi band Blood and Honour were due to play a gig in a pub in Becontree, East London. There was an anti-fascist protest to try to stop the gig. Austin thinks they contacted police about it in advance.

As she was approaching the location, a van of riot police drove alongside at walking pace with its side door open. An officer called out to Austin by name, saying ‘we know all about you’.

‘I was targeted by the police on that day. And my question again for the Inquiry, which needs investigating, is what role did undercover police officers play in trying to create an image that I was a violent person that needed to be contained, which was just not true?

What role did they play in setting all of that up? And what did undercover police officers say to the uniformed police and the riot police on that day that meant that I was targeted?’

Asked how they intended to prevent the gig, Austin explains that they would have liked the antifascists to have has sufficient numbers to prevent the gig, although in the event it was cancelled anyway.

The police surrounded the protesters and told them were not allowed to leave. The spycop report [UCPI0000029708] says the police told the group that the police had laid on a special train to take them to Bow Road where there was a fight going on with fascists, and that Austin ‘rather naively’ accepted the offer.

Austin angrily dismisses this ludicrous fiction:

‘They said, “you can only get out of this area by getting on this train. There is no other way we are going to let you go. You can only get out of this area by getting on this train, and you are going to Victoria and you can disperse from Victoria.” That’s what was said.’

The train went non-stop through 22 stations, and people were very nervous. It was very packed. On arrival at Victoria, the doors weren’t opened. They could see ordinary passengers outside, and several people were banging on the window trying to let people know that they were trapped inside the train.

After a while, the train went on to Earl’s Court. On arrival, the doors opened and there was relief because people believed they were going home. They were very wrong indeed.

There were riot police on all platforms and escalators. It was a trap. Austin remembers an officer seeming to recognise her and grinning.

At the top of the escalators, they found the gates out of the station had been closed and the general public had been cleared out. A great mass of police were hitting people on their heads with batons. A gang of them rushed towards Austin and beat her to the floor. While they were kicking her, they were shouting insults:

‘They were battering me, booting me and kicking me and whacking me with truncheons, and while they were doing it they were calling me a fucking cunt, a fucking slag, calling me the worst misogynistic, sexist abusive names you could possibly imagine.’

The gates were opened, and Austin was among the protesters who managed to run out onto road. They turned round to see the gates being shut and police batoning those still inside.

Shortly after, the gates were opened again and the police charged out. Austin was battered on the top of her head. She was left with a large wound and blood streaming down her face.

She feels she was personally targeted. The signs all points towards it. The earlier intimidation of ‘we know who you are’, the grin on the escalator, the number of officers who made a beeline for her as she got to the top, and the fact that Dan Gillman (who gave evidence to the Inquiry on the same day as Austin) was assigned to her that day as a steward to protect her but was arrested just before she was attacked.

Austin wasn’t doing anything to draw attention to herself at all. She was targeted as organiser of these antifascist protests.

‘Again, that’s political policing. That is outrageous in a democratic society. Why are we not allowed to protest without being in fear of our lives in terms of police brutality?’

Hemingway inevitably asks if the protesters were being violent towards the police. Austin says not at all, and recounts the sickening violence by the police against them. She is impassioned, and visibly upset recalling her trauma from the experience.

There is no doubt that the attack at Earl’s Court was planned well in advance. To have had so many officers ready and kitted out in riot gear, to have a dedicated tube train ready and waiting, to clear the station and close it to the public, all must have taken a great deal of preparation, under instructions from high up.

RISKING KILLING – AGAIN

Austin was one of about 30 people who needed hospital treatment. The nurse who attended to her said ‘why are they hitting you on the head, do they not know they’ll kill somebody doing that?’

It was no exaggeration, but a very real and present risk. Metropolitan Police blows to the head have killed many people in the past, including anti-fascist protesters.

Kevin Gately was a 20 year old student protesting against the National Front in Red Lion Square on 15 June 1974. At 6’ 9” tall, his head was well above the level of the crowd when mounted police charged through, batoning anyone they could reach. He died of a brain haemorrhage.

33 year old teacher Blair Peach was killed when police hit him over the head with an unauthorised weapon at an anti-fascist protest in Southall on 24 April 1979.

Barely a year after police attacked Austin and the YRE protesters at Earl’s Court, on 3 May 1995 police stopped Brian Douglas in Clapham. Although walking backwards away from the officers with empty hands, they hit him on the head with one of the Met’s then-new long acrylic batons. He died of a massive brain haemorrhage.

The officer who killed him lied to the inquest, saying he’d merely hit Douglas’s shoulder. Douglas’s loved ones campaigned for justice, for which they were spied on by Peter Francis.

No police officer was ever charged for any of these killings.

In the aftermath of the Earl’s Court attack, the spycop report of 18 January 1994 [UCPI0000029708] mildly describes the violence as nobody’s fault, and praises the police for setting up the situation:

‘There was some confrontation with police at Earl’s Court station, and at least seven members of the group, including Lois AUSTIN, sustained injuries.

The special train ploy to remove this violent group was brilliantly conceived and executed.’

Austin has never been able to trust the police again.

It’s incredible that the Inquiry regards chasing fascists down the street one time as violence while ignoring the premeditated attacks by police.

Imagine if YRE had tooled up with batons and armoured clothing, locked a load of police in an enclosed space and battered their heads, leaving dozens hospitalised. The name of the incident would still be general knowledge all these years later.

The attack did not become legal just because it was committed by police officers. Criminal prosecutions should have followed. But because police were perpetrators it’s just accepted, nobody hears about it. Nobody is held to account and we just move on.

Austin brought a civil claim against the police for it, and received a settlement.

PERPETUAL SPYING

As a person of interest, Austin continued to be subjected to intrusive personal reporting by spycops that had no policing value at all. The fact of being spied on in the past meant you were going to be spied on in future.

A spycops report of 1 October 1996 [MPS-0246670] gives details of Austin moving house. It says she is ‘always moving house’. She points out she was a young woman living alone at the time and a group of men were secretly keeping tabs on where she was living:

‘If I had known about this at the time, I would have been frightened.’

A further spycops report of 26 November 1996 [MPS-0246858] describes Austin attending protests around the country, including an anti-deportation protest in Manchester and a memorial event for Ken Saro-Wiwa, a West African campaigner against Shell’s environmental devastation in the Niger delta.

We’re shown a spycops authorisation for HN104 Carlo Soracchi ‘Carlo Neri’, deployed 2000-2006, [MPS-0069948] which says that the Special Branch ‘Red Desk’ is asking for more information about Lois Austin.

The Inquiry then showed a document from Operation Herne, the police’s internal investigation into spycops [MPS-0721975]. Officer HN73 said that comprehensive reports on people would be commissioned on individuals once they had come to be ‘of interest’, often at the behest of MI5. Austin notes that many of these reports are stamped ‘Box 500’, meaning copies had been given to MI5.

EXIT THE SPYCOP

Austin is asked about when spycop officer Peter Francis was nearing the end of his infiltration and money was raised for him by the Hackney branch of Militant Labour, where he had risen to the post of secretary.

As was standard for spycops, he feigned a mental breakdown to provide him with a credible excuse to vanish from everyone’s lives.

And, as was also standard, this lie caused a great deal of worry among the friends he’d spent years cultivating friendships with.

Francis claims in a spycop report that he sold all his furniture at a car boot sale and gave the proceeds to Militant Labour. Austin doesn’t think that’s true. Her recollection is that people visiting his flat noticed how sparse it was, felt sorry for him and had a collection among themselves to give him money.

Hemingway asks Austin if Francis failing to overtly have sex with members of Militant Labour led her to suspect he might be a state agent.

‘That is ridiculous. The idea that I or anybody else in the leadership of Youth Against Racism in Europe and Militant knew about the sex lives and who was having sex with who is ridiculous. I mean we are a very, very working class organisation, full of ordinary people in trade unions and things like that.

I have seen reports about the “wearies” being promiscuous, and all of that. The undercovers have said that, and if you weren’t having lots of sex then your cover would be blown. That’s absolute and utter nonsense.

I would not have even known if he was having sex, or who he was or wasn’t having sex with, and it wouldn’t have interested me in the slightest. It does interest me if he was an undercover officer infiltrating our organisation and deceiving women into intimate sexual relationships. That’s abuse.’

Austin says Francis has done real public service by becoming a whistleblower, and for that she is grateful. But she says we cannot allow his claims that YRE were violent and looking for trouble to go unanswered.

That’s the last question for Austin. She will be back to answer questions about events on May Day 2001 where she was spied on by HN104 Carlo Soracchi and brought another civil claim against the Met. This will be dealt with in the Tranche 3 Phase 2 hearings scheduled to be held February-March 2026.

Tranche 3 Phase 1, Day 13
12 November 2025

INTRODUCTION

The testimony of ‘Lewis’ to the Undercover Policing Inquiry took place on Wednesday 12 November 2025.

It offered one of the clearest illustrations yet of political policing based on Metropolitan Police paranoia, faulty intelligence, and institutional suspicion producing years of unwarranted surveillance.

Lewis was a student organiser at Kingsway College, in the early 1990s. His leadership of the Kingsway College Anti-Fascist Group (KAFG) and involvement in Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE) led to him being secretly targeted in 1993 by Special Demonstration Squad officer HN43 Peter Francis ‘Peter Black’ / Peter Johnson’ / ‘Peter Daley’.

What emerged from Lewis’s account was the deeply ordinary, democratic nature of the anti-fascist organising he led, and the extraordinary levels of distortion in secret police reports that transformed a small, youthful, non-violent student group into a supposed ‘violent anti-fascist alliance’.

The story is less about genuine threat and more about police paranoia, misreads, bureaucratic exaggeration and the willingness of the Special Demonstration Squad to treat left-wing youth campaigning as subversion.

The Undercover Policing Inquiry (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.

Lewis values his privacy and has been granted a high level of anonymity at the Inquiry. His evidence was not video or audio recorded, and was only available to those in the room at the time, and from a transcript published later. A more detailed examination of the events he describes and the SDS reports on them can be found in our reports of the hearings for his contemporaries such as Lois Austin, Dan Gillman, Alex Owolade and Hannah Sell.

Lewis’s questioning was part of the Inquiry’s Tranche 3, examining the final 15 years of the Special Demonstration Squad, 1993-2008. Lewis has given the Inquiry a written witness statement.

He was questioned for the Inquiry by Don Ramble.

YOUTHFUL ANTI-FASCISTS MISCAST AS A MENACE

The Kingsway College Anti-Fascist Group was, at its core, a student-run contingent of teenagers and young adults determined to oppose the British National Party and racist violence in early-1990s London.

Members were mostly between 16 and 25. They travelled together to demonstrations, marched behind their own banner, and maintained internal discipline through their own stewards.

According to Lewis, KAFG’s ethos was unambiguous: they avoided violence, never masked up, and attempted to calm anyone who tried to behave aggressively within their section.

Their stewarding tactics at large mobilisations, including the huge high-profile 1993 Welling demonstration against the British National Party (BNP), involved firstly protecting their young members, and then linking arms to stop panic when police charged, in order to protect the demonstration. They believed in mass mobilisation, good stewarding, self-defence, but not initiating confrontation.

Yet early SDS documents, prepared before Francis even infiltrated the group, cast this modest college-based contingent as the spearhead of a new violent bloc inside YRE.

The SDS mistakenly identified Lewis as having led a ‘charge’ on BNP paper sellers at Brick Lane in East London, an event at which he stated categorically he attended but did not ‘lead the charge’ as reported. Yet that single error snowballed into a formal targeting decision, and undercover officer HN43 Peter Francis was deployed to spy on him.

YOUTH AGAINST RACISM IN EUROPE:
BROAD, DEMOCRATIC AND ORGANISED

Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE), another of Francis’s targets, appears in the Inquiry testimony as a broad, multi-racial, youth-led coalition active in Hackney, Tower Hamlets, and across the UK and Europe. It was not a clandestine outfit but a public, campaigning organisation that held meetings, organised demonstrations and stewarded marches in a disciplined manner, and had over 20,000 members.

While some in its leadership were members of Militant Labour (now called the Socialist Party), Lewis said that, contrary to what Francis and other spycops reported to their manager, YRE cannot meaningfully be described as a Militant ‘front’. Lewis himself was from a rival political tendency, yet became a leading organiser within local YRE branches simply by virtue of commitment and activity.

YRE and KAFG often collaborated. At the Unity Demonstration in Welling (organised jointly by YRE, Anti-Nazi League, and the Indian Workers Association), YRE stewards linked arms with students from Kingsway on the front lines of the march.

A later TV documentary would sensationalise claims about an ‘away team’ within YRE who were bent on provoking violence, but Lewis clarifies that the term only appeared around a single Brick Lane protest and did not represent YRE policy or culture.

The organisation neither planned nor advocated violence and, in Lewis’s words, ‘posed no real threat to the state whatsoever’.

Yet Francis, in his retrospective justifications, framed groups like YRE as potential subversives, assertions that Lewis flatly rejects.

BRICK LANE: PUBLIC ORGANISING, POLICE MISINTERPRETATION

The BNP held regular paper sales in the multicultural Brick Lane in East London. One particular protest there forms the crux of why Lewis believed he was targeted.

In 1993, alongside YRE and Militant Labour, Lewis co-organised a mass mobilisation designed simply to occupy the BNP’s pitch before they arrived. This was a standard and openly advertised tactic. Lewis’s mobile number was even printed on fly posters.

According to his evidence, this innocuous fact, being publicly identifiable as an organiser, appears to have been misread by Special Branch and SDS officers as evidence of militancy or leadership of a violent faction.

When undercover officer HN78 Trevor Morris falsely associated Lewis with a supposed ‘charge’ on BNP supporters, an entire mythology grew around him: he was inflated into a dangerous ringleader.

Lewis dismissed all these claims as fiction. There had been no casualties, no charges, no plots, just bad, invented intelligence, later laundered into a justification for intrusive surveillance.

WELLING: DISCIPLINE, NOT DISORDER

Lewis gave evidence on the Welling Unity Demonstration. The 16 October 1993 anti-fascist mobilisation was one of the largest in a generation.

Lewis describes KAFG’s contingent as disciplined and defensive: linking arms against police charges, wearing hard hats only to protect against baton strikes.

He completely rejected the idea that demonstrators wore masks or carried improvised weapons.

Lewis stated that Peter Francis’s reporting on Welling blends fragments of truth with exaggeration. He correctly notes a post-demonstration meeting held to review stewarding, but attributes to Lewis comments and intentions that Lewis contests or considers distorted.

The suggestion that KAFG or YRE intended to break through police lines or take control of far-right premises is, in Lewis’s view, wholly inaccurate.

TARGETING DECISION BUILT ON FICTION

In his evidence Lewis highlighted how he only discovered the truth about the level of surveillance years later, when a journalist sent him an article written by Peter Francis portraying him as the ‘most dangerous man in London’.

Lewis did not even recognise himself in the description. The SDS, he says, built its entire rationale for targeting him on false premises.

The impact on him was twofold:

1. Personal shock: that radical student activism could be misread as violent extremism.
2. Political concern: that police narratives were not rooted in reality but in stereotype, assumption, imagination and paranoia.

Peter Francis’ later claims that the groups intended to overthrow parliamentary democracy – the standard spycop justification for their infiltrations – are dismissed out of hand. Lewis argues that neither KAFG, YRE, nor related groups had anything like that intention or capability. The SDS, he suggests, simply projected its own fears onto radical youth activism.

THE SDS: PARANOIA AND FANTASY

As Lewis made clear, the evidence was not merely a personal narrative, but a case study in systemic failure:

• False intelligence transformed a student organiser into a supposed extremist.
• Political prejudice against left-wing youth activism blurred distinctions between peaceful protest and subversion.
• Undercover policing powers being deployed not to prevent crime but to monitor legitimate anti-racist organising.
• Official reports exaggerated, sensationalised, or outright invented threats.

Thirty years later these failings will strike a chord, particularly with student activist groups being targeted by the Prevent programme today.

The Kingsway Anti-Fascist Group and Youth Against Racism in Europe appear from Lewis’s testimony to have been lively, disciplined, democratic youth groups confronting racism and fascism in their communities. The dangers attributed to them existed not in reality but only in the imagination of the state.

And at the heart of it, as a young organiser, Lewis found himself monitored, infiltrated and categorised as a menace, all on the basis of a catalogue of mistakes and lies.

Tranche 3 Phase 1, Day 8
4 November 2025

INTRODUCTION

On the afternoon of Tuesday 4 November 2025, the Undercover Policing Inquiry heard evidence from an unexpected witness who was only recently added to the hearings schedule.

Known by the Inquiry only as ‘L3’, he was an active member of Croydon Hunt Saboteurs during the time when the group was infiltrated by undercover officer HN16 James Thomson ‘James Straven’ who was deployed 1997-2002.

Not until the opening statements of the current Inquiry hearings in October did L3 hear that in 2001 Thomson had accused him of attempting to traffic a firearm to the UK from France, as part of a supposed plot to murder a fox hunter.

L3 absolutely rejects the allegations and describes the supposed plot as:

‘the biggest event of my life that I am not aware of, up until about a fortnight ago.’

He was hastily added to the hearings schedule and also made a 24-page written statement [UCPI0000039400], which was only submitted the previous Tuesday (28 October).

The Undercover Policing Inquiry (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.

L3 was questioned by Don Ramble, Junior Counsel to the Inquiry. The Inquiry’s page for the day has audio and a transcript of the live session.

BACKGROUND – HUNT SABBING AND ANIMAL RIGHTS

L3 explained that he has been involved in low level animal rights campaigning since the early 1990s.

‘Very specifically it was targeted towards public outreach events. We did High Street stalls, we did leafleting. We did village fetes, this kind of thing. Anything in which we could get exposure. We did public meetings…

Some of the people I was conducting the outreach events with were also part of the local hunt sab group and I was introduced that way.’

In the mid 1990s he went abroad and worked for an animal rights organisation where he learned how to run a campaign and do media work.

Bizarrely, when the time came for Thomson’s lawyers to pose questions for L3, they appeared more interested in this media training than in L3’s account of the trip to France. The only reason we can see for this is that L3 was a very convincing and credible witness and they wished to try to undermine that by implying that he had been trained.

This is an odd approach, given that police officers could be expected to have training and experience in interview techniques and cross examination, yet the evidence given by ex-undercover officers has been consistently appalling and unconvincing. It seems far more likely that L3 is simply an intelligent, articulate man who was telling the truth.

At the end of 1997, L3 returned to the UK. He moved into a communal house where the person known as ‘L1’ in the Inquiry, and L3’s brother (known as ‘L2’), were living. Both L1 and L2 knew James Thomson from Croydon Hunt Sabs.

L3 first met Thomson in early 1998. Thomson would visit the house, but L3 thinks they first met out hunt sabbing.

‘He was already very much a part of that sab group and if anything I was the new boy. But I came with some credence, because L1 and L2 were already very much a part of it and would have introduced me. So that would have given me some kind of grandfather’s rights, as it were.’

L3 became part of what has been referred to as the core group of Croydon Hunt Sabs, alongside L1, L2, L4 and ‘Wendy’, who he describes as:

‘one of the finest humans I’ve ever met… She’s honest, trustworthy, dependable, wants to do the right thing. Wouldn’t cross you. She is just a very decent human being.’

James Thomson was also a part of the core group, in that he would go out sabbing very frequently, sometimes twice a week.

L3 was asked about equipment provided by Thomson, specifically some night vision equipment.

‘It was specifically given to those of us that were living at the house… rather than the group as a whole…

It was quite a sophisticated piece of equipment for the time. It certainly wasn’t something you would have been able to buy. It was a battery-operated device that illuminated the view in front of you to one degree. It wasn’t binocular is what I mean. You would see it in normal vision…

The garden at the back of L4’s house had a large badger sett running around the back of it, and he would take many of us to come and watch the badgers. And this piece of equipment was excellent for that purpose. That was how it was used initially.

And later, in order for us to gain our own information in what was an increasingly difficult environment to obtain information on the hunt, I used that equipment in my own intelligence gathering.’

L3 made clear that the device was not used for anything that broke the law, or to commit crime. However, he thought that might have been Thomson’s intention in giving it to them.

‘It was quite obvious that we didn’t have the capacity to obtain this level of equipment and so perhaps as a way to provide himself with some kudos, he provided us with the equipment. Or perhaps it was indeed meant for us to facilitate even further acts, that that might enable us to be able to do that we weren’t able to do so beforehand.’

Thomson told L3 he was from Scotland. He mentioned that he had an ex-wife and children, that he worked for a film company as a location finder, and lived in a small flat in the Oval area of London.

Thomson didn’t talk to L3 much about the film work he did, but others spoke to him about it often. It gave him a lot of flexibility.

‘And being in the film world I think we just assumed there was some money there that wouldn’t necessarily be aware to us, and that would explain the nice vehicle that he drove.’

Thomson had a Land Rover Discovery that he would often use to drive people around in. After going hunt sabbing the group would often go for a social in a local pub. Thomson would often drive them in his Land Rover. He also offered use of the vehicle to L3 and L2, and left it with them when he went travelling.

In addition to hunt sabbing, Thomson attended other animal rights demonstrations, like the ones against Shamrock Farm, a notorious breeder of primates for vivisection.

L3 says that he and Thomson also took an active role in destroying badger traps.

‘That campaign was generated by a Government initiative to eradicate badgers because of a concern of TB amongst cattle. The argument was highly contested… But nonetheless, the Government went ahead with their plan at that time and there was large-scale actions against it…

It was quite a sizeable, heavy steel constructed cage in which it was baited with foodstuff to attract the animal… it would release a spring-loaded trap which would close the door behind, trapping the animal inside…

We visited the area and essentially the desire was to release live badgers from traps, but actually we very seldom found badgers in the traps. But we found the traps themselves quite easily and, yes, they were destroyed by us when we found them. It took quite a bit of effort. They are quite solid, as I have just explained. You could squash them if you stood on them and bounced up and down.’

THE ATTEMPTED MURDER OF L4

As the 1990s drew on, the hunters became increasingly violent towards the sabs:

‘By the end of the 1990s it was at an unprecedented level and quite frankly we could expect the possibility of an attack on any given day that we were out with them… Saturdays were always more at risk of that than mid-week, because it attracted more people.

But at that time, every other week there may well have been something at some level, at some degree, somebody got hurt.’

There were rarely more than 20 or 30 sabs out at any one time. The hunt and its supporters would have numbered hundreds.

Q. You refer to being hit. With fists?

A. Yes, with fists, yes, but it was also whatever they had to hand. The members of what they call the field, which is the riders, they would use their crops, bone-handled crops, and the terrier men of course had any number of tools on their vehicles. Shovels, spades, spikes, you name it. All of which they used in an attempt to dig out and kill the fox, but it could also be employed to attack us with.

L3 says that sometimes the hunt sabs had to defend themselves from attack:

‘We never brought weapons with us. That would have been counter-productive. It would have been stupid of us to do so, even if we had wanted to. The vehicle was regularly searched by the police. Those would have been confiscated and doubtless us arrested. So, no, we did not bring weapons to our hunt sabs.

I will not deny that it is entirely possible that in our attempt to defend ourselves that we picked up whatever we found on the ground near us. I am not saying that we didn’t pick up a stick when we needed to. I am sure that we did… [Thomson] would have been very much a part of that.’

On 1 September 2000, the activist known as ‘L4’ was airlifted to intensive care after a supporter of the Surrey and Burstow Hunt ran him over in a Land Rover. We were shown an intelligence report filed by Thomson [MPS-0003867] that same day, which states:

‘Not surprisingly there is a great anger amongst the sabs at this incident as it was felt to be a deliberate act. There has been immediate talk of reprisals, but no definite plan has yet been formulated.’

L3 wasn’t present when the incident happened, but he went to visit L4 in hospital that evening. He rejects Thomson’s claim that there was any talk of reprisals.

L4 was on a life support machine and it was touch and go whether he would live. If he had succumbed to his injuries he would have been the third hunt sab to have died. The mood was not one of revenge.

‘My abiding memory of that event was just – I think it just simply washing over you just how serious it had become, that L4 was anything but out of the woods. I mean he wasn’t conscious at this point in the bed. He wasn’t aware of who we were. It was that serious for him.

And it’s just the prevailing mood that evening was just one of shock and horror at what had happened… But at that moment, absolutely no talk of reprisals at all. It was completely the opposite.

And in any case, L4’s partner was present. She was not a member of our sab group and it would have been wholly inappropriate for anybody to want to talk like that. But it just wasn’t what was on people’s minds. People were just completely deflated by what they saw.’

The day after the incident the sabs held a protest at the Burstow Hunt kennels. People of all ages and backgrounds came from far afield to express their support. L3 became very emotional as he explained to the Inquiry that they expected L4 to die at that point.

Thomson did not attend the demonstration and L3 says he was very surprised by that. It was very odd behaviour for a supposed friend and comrade.

During the protest at the kennels, a leading member of the hunt came out with his servant. They were carrying a riding crop and a spade, and they confronted the protestors.

L3 is clear that the protest at the kennels was not some sort of revenge attack. The trouble started when hunters attacked the protesters with weapons, and it ended as quickly as it had begun. Protestors were injured. A number of them were arrested in the days and weeks that followed. No hunters were ever arrested.

A further report, dated 6 September 2000 [MPS-0003897], four days after the protest, states:

‘Following the incident last week where L4 was run over and badly injured during a fracas between hunt saboteurs and hunt supporters, there is to be another demonstration this evening by members of the Hunt Saboteurs Association against members of the Surrey and Burstow Hunt.

The demonstrators will meet at East Grinstead BR station at 6 pm and from there make ‘home visits’ to a number of prominent members of the hunt.’

At that point L3 intervened to make a comment about ‘home visits’:

‘I understand that it can be taken as a controversial area, that protesters would turn up outside somebody’s own front door and make them aware in a very personal way that what we felt they were doing was objectionable…

I don’t think it’s been mentioned so far and it’s not in the interests of people like Thomson to have made this aware to you in his statement, but we really did consider what we were doing before it was done…

We knew who we were going to and we knew the risk that we were taking in so doing and how it may come across…

I can assure you that there were one or two people who we became aware of who were metaphorically crossed off the list for home visits, because others they lived with were considered too vulnerable and we wouldn’t wish to upset them. So these were considered actions is what I want you to understand.’

He points out that ‘home visits’ were demonstrations, there were no sinister overtones and they did not masquerade as an opportunity to cause damage.

Asked about Thomson’s reporting, L3 vehemently responded:

‘Again, it is florid writing. This is supposed to be a dispassionate document. If you are supplying information it should be very objective and not subjective, and the moment it starts adding opinion – and it is opinion that has been written there – it is steering the reader immediately to form an impression that is not their own. So, no, I refute it. We were not in a volatile mood at all.’

Appropriately, that damning critique of Thomson’s ‘florid writing’ brought us to the real matter L3 was called to give evidence about: Operation Lime.

OPERATION LIME

On 8 January 2001, L3 and Thomson travelled to France in his Land Rover Discovery. They were heading to Marseille, where L3 understood that Thomson had a meeting with someone about a business venture, importing golf carts into the UK. L3 went along for the ride.

Ramble began his questioning on Operation Lime by showing us a Special Branch note of 8 February 2001 [MPS-0005282]. This was written a month after the trip to France.

It claimed:

‘In the immediate aftermath of the incident [in which L4 was injured] and in the ensuing months there have been a number of revenge attacks against members/associates of the hunt. All members and supporters of the hunt concerned are now considered to be at risk, although the driver of the vehicle would be a particularly attractive target.’

L3 says that he is not aware of any such revenge attacks, only the protests that took place in the days immediately after the incident.

The report goes on to claim that those most angered by what happened are L4’s personal friends, and singles out L3’s brother, L2. The report claims L2 made a connection with a French national with a view to buying a quantity of black powder and a firearm, and says:

‘MT’s [Thomson’s code name, Magenta Triangle] credibility within the group was such that he was asked to use his vehicle to drive to France to collect the items.’

L3 was asked about his reaction to that.

‘My reaction to that is that I was utterly aghast when I first saw it. And I simply didn’t recognise what I was reading. This is fantasy, sir. It did not happen.’

Thomson’s account is that there was a ‘dry run’ to France in November 2000 to check out the route.

‘It was during this trip that MT became aware that the collection would take place in the Marseille area, although he was not told the identity of the French contact. The plan was to spend a few days in France, ostensibly as tourists, collect the weaponry, secrete it in his vehicle and return to the UK where L2 would take possession of it.’

L3 points out that this so-called ‘dry run’ was probably a day trip to Calais that Thomson, L1 and L1’s girlfriend took, on a ‘booze cruise’. L3 wasn’t on that trip, and he doesn’t know much about it.

Ramble points out that the reporting suggests there was a lot of discussion after the trip because they got searched by customs on the way home. L3 has no memory of such conversations:

‘They went across to Calais, they had a day out and brought back a load of cheap beer is what I understood happened.’

Ramble then showed a series of documents that demonstrated extensive involvement of Special Demonstration Squad management in Operation Lime. In a document from 13 November 2000 [MPS-0009484] Bernard Greaney and Noel Warr describe visiting Thomson the day after the supposed ‘dry run’:

‘He had just returned from an exhausting day in Calais with L1 and his girlfriend on 9/11 [2000]. They had gone out on the 1100 Eurotunnel train and been pulled by the internal security. No obvious reason for this – another car had also been singled out and subject to a search, including a sweep with some kind of machine which was look for explosives! (Presumably this is part of the Xmas anti-RIRA [Real Irish Republican Army] campaign).

Not surprisingly this rattled L1 somewhat, but MT managed to point out the random nature of this and will work on reassuring the group over the next few days.’

If this were true, there needs to be some examination of why Thomson would have wanted to ‘reassure the group’ and encourage them to go ahead with this supposed arms trafficking and murder plot rather than just be put off by a random customs search. Instead, inside the SDS, the absurdity continued.

ONE HOLIDAY AMONG MANY

We see another manager, HN58, supporting the proposal that Thomson take a week-long trip to Istanbul with L4 [MPS-0004441]. In this memo, HN58 also refers to the supposed murder plot:

‘At present there is a plan to obtain black powder and a gun from France through a French animal rights activist. While the target is unknown, it is very probable that the driver of the vehicle remains the most likely recipient. Magenta Triangle is well placed to report on this enterprise…

L4 is employed by [privacy] and had been working in Turkey earlier in the year… He was shortly after receiving his current injury scheduled to return to Istanbul to complete his contract.

Clearly he has not been able to fulfil his work commitments but he is now well enough to travel and intends to go to Istanbul to collect some belongs and ‘tie up’ some loose ends. Due to his condition he requires someone to accompany him. Magenta Triangle has been asked whether he can help.’

L3 describes this report as utterly staggering. He says it’s plausible that Thomson would have been asked to help L4, and he has a vague memory of the two of them making the trip to Istanbul. He emphasises that L4 had recently suffered extreme trauma.

‘This would have been him mining L4 for information… this is terrible really because L4 was in a very delicate position here. At this stage he was still in recuperation. He was not a well man. And vulnerable.

And who knows where his mind would have been at that point, and what he could have been engaged in, or get a couple of drinks in him as well, and who knows what he might have been saying at the time. He wasn’t in his right mind after what had happened to him.’

Yet another manager, HN53, filed a report on 13 November 2000 about the Istanbul trip [MPS-0527650]:

‘In the context of the Marseille operation, the importance of Magenta Triangle’s participation in the trip to Istanbul with L4 should not be understated. In the first instance, there is the probable intelligence dividend to be gained from L4 about the longer-term intentions of L1, L2 or L3.

More particularly, however, the cementing of the relationship between Magenta Triangle and the most high-profile animal rights “martyr” will greatly enhance his credibility and standing amongst those who are driving the procurement.’

L3 criticises the language used, and insists on how inappropriate it was to be getting close to L4:

‘It seems deliberately inflammatory. I mean, by very definition he wasn’t a martyr. But no. They are attempting to propel L4 to be something that he wasn’t. What he was, was a very vulnerable man who had nearly died and was desperately in need of friends to help him.’

The trip to Istanbul was authorised by Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Black. It seems most of SDS management were aware of what was happening, yet no one took any issue with the cynical targeting of the vulnerable victim of a serious assault who had suffered life-changing injuries.

On his return from Istanbul, Thomson filed a report [MPS-0004762] in which he claims a meeting took place with L3 on 30 November. It contained a detailed itinerary of the planned trip to France, travelling to Calais, on to Bordeaux, then to Marseille, and from there back to Calais.

L3 says that he doesn’t remember the trip being planned so far in advance. L3’s understanding was that Thomson was going to Marseille for a meeting about a business venture importing golf buggies.

‘I described it as having “fallen into my lap” and that suggests that it wasn’t planned sort of six weeks in advance, so I don’t think that’s correct…

It came to my attention that Thomson had a reason to be in the South of France relating to business, totally unconnected to our animal rights activity.

And it was mentioned to me, possibly even in just passing, and I saw an opportunity at a time where things were not great in a relationship I was having, and I thought, “I wonder if he would want somebody to help drive on a trip like that? It is a bit of a distance and there is an opportunity for me to get away and have a little break, effectively, without having planned it”.’

L3 went along for the ride, and his main motivation was the opportunity to visit Bordeaux and sample wines.

‘If the itinerary had been purely mine to create, we would have never gone anywhere near Provence, we would have gone straight to Bordeaux. I was not part of any planning to go to Marseille. That was something I had to accept on the grounds that this is where his business meeting was due to take place.’

L3 says the ‘business meeting’ in Marseille was always going to happen first, and that this business venture was plausible coming from Thomson.

‘To be perfectly honest, if anyone else in our sab group had mentioned this, I would have probably had 101 questions for them. But not so much with him, because he always displayed a degree of wealth that the rest of us did not have, and therefore I didn’t question it quite so much, because it wasn’t so implausible that he might have seen a little opportunity for a business venture.’

Thomson also reported that L3 had ‘sheepishly’ asked if his girlfriend could come along. L3 says this is nonsense.

‘The whole idea was to have a bit of time away so I wouldn’t have asked for her to accompany us…

At some point during the trip we were to liaise with “Sara” [who Thomson had deceived into a relationship], which I understood to still be a bit of a grey area as to whether they were still a couple or not… if anyone’s girlfriend was to accompany us, it was going to be his.’

In fact, Sara did meet up with them in Bordeaux and she gave evidence about the holiday to the Inquiry on 17 October 2025. Like L3, she had no inkling whatsoever that there was supposedly arms trafficking involved.

The fact that she met them in Bordeaux is significant because Thomson had told his managers that the itinerary was to travel to Bordeaux first, then Marseille, then back to Calais.

He claimed that the plan was only changed at the last minute, affording him no time to warn them that he would be in Marseille first. As a result, his handlers were in the wrong city when the supposed arms deal took place.

Yet Sara had booked a flight to be in Bordeaux at the correct time, suggesting Thomson had told her well in advance where he would be and when.

L3 and Thomson met up at Sara’s house before setting off to drive to France. It was just the two of them and they took the car ferry to Calais and drove south, staying in Lyon overnight.

‘So this is the beginning of what I now understand to be Operation Lime. And totally beyond my level of awareness, this has clearly been possibly the biggest event of my life that I am not aware of up until about a fortnight ago.

So I have put much thought to this and have a fairly well-constructed timeline of events, of what really took place as opposed to what you are going to ask me in terms of what Thomson believes took place. And the two could not be further apart…

I was to share the driving and the trip was to begin across the Dover-Calais ferry route and we were to drive down the eastern side of France towards Marseille, with a stop en route…

There was very much a holiday atmosphere to it. We were laughing and joking. It was very clear that we were away from life at home, and there was a fairly carefree feel to it.

And I remember where we stopped in the little rest area there was even a bit of winter sunlight. We were able to sit at a picnic table wearing just a jacket. It was all quite convivial.’

They shared a twin room and the only time L3 spent apart from Thomson before Marseille was when one of them went to the bathroom.

When they got to Marseille, Thomson went to have his meeting and L3 spent a couple of hours exploring the city and window-shopping before reconvening with Thomson to get food.

‘We arrived in the Marseille area around lunchtime. So it is early afternoon by the time we have checked into the hotel and parked up the car…

It had been established that his meeting was going to be at the bank… to be perfectly honest I wasn’t greatly interested. It sounded like a slightly far-fetched venture and I didn’t really see how the world of golf buggies was going to work. It was not really something I was very interested in.

If I am honest, I was just delighted to be somewhere else and was quite happy if he wanted to go off for two or three hours to his meeting, I was going to go off and explore…

He returned after his meeting. I don’t doubt for a moment I asked if it went well. There would have been some small talk over it. But nothing really sticks in my mind.’

L3 has provided a statement in which he recounts all the things he remembers about their time in Marseille. He recalls seeing ten uniformed French police patrolling together:

‘We turned a corner and coming down the street to meet us were ten members of the uniformed French police and, yes, we most certainly commented that, “Oh my God, where have we come to that they need to patrol in these numbers?”.’

He also provided detail about a cat behind a shop window:

‘It is ridiculous, I know, but the cat was engaging with us behind the glass. And I don’t know why I remember it. It just sticks in my memory. I tapped the glass and sort of engaged with the cat back and brought it to Thomson’s attention and, yes, it just sticks in my mind. I have no idea why I remember it.’

He says most of the rest of the evening wasn’t memorable. There was nothing odd about Thomson’s behaviour and they just went to get some food.

THE CAR DISAPPEARS

On the morning of 10 January, L3 woke to find that Thomson had already left.

‘I am either blessed or I suffer from the fact that I am a heavy sleeper. And I did not realise that at that point as I woke that I was alone in the room, and I woke to find that a handwritten note had been left for me… the basic detail of which was to let me know that he had discovered that the car had been stolen and that he was out effectively reporting that fact…

At some point I went out on to the street, probably with him, and I was shown the point at which we had left the car. I was aware that the car was parked very close to the entrance to the hotel. I could see that it wasn’t there.

There was shattered glass on the road, it was pointed out to me. And, well, I mean the vehicle is not there, and there seems to be evidence. What more could I do but accept the fact that the car had indeed been stolen, or so it appeared?…

I have always thought it a bit odd that it was stolen, but at the same time it is still believable.’

L3 explained that he had always felt something about the trip and the car theft wasn’t quite right:

‘No one was ever completely comfortable with the stories he gave. And it has been my thought across the last 25 years that the reason I was selected to help drive on this trip is so that I would be a captive audience for him for about a week and perhaps he would have all the time in the world to engage me in conversation and general intelligence gathering… that the car had in fact been wired for sound, if I can put it that way… and that possibly during the journey down, some of this equipment had malfunctioned and that he then needed a replacement vehicle in order to continue simply gathering evidence.

I have always wondered if I was being a bit paranoid about that, but I have been disabused of that in the last fortnight, haven’t I, because I didn’t even come close.’

L3 says there was some discussion about what to do with the rest of the trip now that they didn’t have a car.

Thomson said he was willing to hire a car, using L3’s driving licence. We are shown the rental agreement, which was attached to Thomson’s expenses claim for the trip [MPS-0527763].

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, interjected to confirm the spelling of L3’s name. As his name is restricted, it was impossible for L3 to answer, creating an awkward situation.

It is not the first time Mitting has asked anonymous witnesses to spell their names out from the witness box during live evidence. It turns out the reason for the question is that his name was spelt incorrectly on the form.

Once the vehicle had been hired, L3 and Thomson left Marseille and drove towards Bordeaux, stopping overnight in Cahors. As already noted, they picked Sara up at the airport in Bordeaux.

We were shown a photo of L3 taken by Thomson during that trip [UCPI0000039401].

‘We did a number of things using Bordeaux as a base. It was a complete holiday atmosphere…

We had a picnic out on the beach, along the peninsula. Again, I can remember the day, I can remember what we did. We visited the city itself and some of its more prominent architecture. And then closer to the end of the trip into Bordeaux itself we visited the historic town of Saint-Emilion.’

After returning Sara to the airport, L3 travelled north with Thomson in the hire car, staying in Dieppe overnight. They went to a memorable little restaurant (finding a vegetarian restaurant in a small town in France 25 years ago was pretty unusual, and they ate well that night). They then returned to Calais and back to the UK.

L3 says this was the only time he and Thomson travelled abroad together. There had been a political gathering in Amsterdam in April 1998 that they both attended, but on that occasion they travelled separately.

HN26 ‘CHRISTINE GREEN’

This led to a brief tangent in the questioning as he also saw a fellow animal rights activist we now know was Thomson’s colleague, undercover officer HN26 ‘Christine Green’, at that event. L3 only knew her by sight.

‘There are several occasions I can bring to mind where I have come into contact with other undercover officers, one of whom I now know to be “Christine Green”. She was associated with a fellow sab group at the time that operated out of the West London/ Reading area. They usually joined forces to sabotage hunts along the M4 corridor, and she was very embedded with them.’

L3 was asked about Green’s association with the hunt sab activist Thomas Frampton (known as Joe Tax or Joe Tex).

‘I can’t recall seeing them being intimate with one another, but there was no question in anybody’s mind that they were a couple.’

Green is understood to have confessed her true identity to Frampton, resigned from the police, left her husband and moved in with Frampton. They were known to be together for a long while after.

AFTER FRANCE

Ramble then returned to Operation Lime. Thomson was debriefed after the trip, on 16 January 2001 [MPS-0005257]. He describes L3 as having phoned a French contact on arrival in France, using a new SIM card.

L3 denies it completely:

‘That is not true. That did not happen. I knew no one in France. I had no contact to phone. I certainly didn’t have a separate sim card. It’s blatantly not true.’

In the report, Thomson goes on to explain the supposed last-minute change of plan, and the decision to drive direct to Marseille. He said it was because the contact was unable to make the meet later in the week, so it was arranged to rendezvous with him in Marseille the following afternoon.

‘I mean it just didn’t happen, so there is no further comment to make. It’s made up. It’s fictitious, there was no arranged rendezvous with anyone else in Marseille.’

We were then read Thomson’s lurid description of a meeting in a cafe next to Marseille station.

‘The contact is described as North African appearance (yellow skinned) spoke with very good English with little or no French accent he has possibly spent time in England. He introduced himself as [privacy]. They were shown the items and then drove with the contact a short way from Marseille to prove the items.’

Again, L3 is flabbergasted:

‘We met no one in Marseille other than in casual form – by which I mean a hotel receptionist or waiter – but under no circumstances did this event happen. I met no French North African. We did not sit in any cafe. This did not happen.’

The debrief goes on:

‘Initially the contact wanted his two mates to travel in the back of the vehicle with him. MT was not happy with this and insisted in sitting in the back seat with the contact, with L3 driving. The other two were left behind to catch a taxi.

MT directed where L3 should drive which was not the direction favoured by the contact. (MT feels he may have shown out a little as until this moment he had been the acquiescing of the two. However he felt decidedly uneasy about being in the vehicle with three strangers who were probably armed).

They stopped the vehicle a short distance away from Marseille and L3 checked the weapon.’

L3 says this is absolute nonsense:

‘I have absolutely no idea how you go about buying an illegal weapon, but if this is how you go about it, then I can’t believe you are going to walk away from this unscathed, it seems insanity.’

It is claimed he paid £700 for the gun. L3 says if he’d had £700 back then he’d have felt he’d won the lottery.

Thomson claimed the items were stashed in a hidden compartment in his Land Rover, and then he told his handlers where the vehicle was parked.

‘The vehicle was located at 1 am … the vehicle was recovered in such a manner as to simulate that it had been stolen. The following items were secreted in the vehicle: one Colt .45 automatic handgun. 18 rounds of ammunition, two small bags of black powder.’

We were shown photographs of the items found in the car [MPS-0004963, MPS-0004969, and MPS-0004959].

L3 was asked what his reaction to those photographs was:

‘I was utterly shocked… it began to dawn on me just how serious a situation I had unwittingly got myself into in offering to drive on a holiday. It had never occurred to me in my wildest dreams that this is what was really going on behind the scenes. And that my concocted little theory of a car being bugged was about as far away from what was really going on behind my back as could be the case.

I had never seen that weapon before. I had no idea it was stashed in the vehicle…

During the time that we were separated for a short while in Marseille, he obviously reacquired the weapon and stowed it in the vehicle along with the ammunition and black powder. All the while, I was doing nothing more than window-shopping my way around Marseille.’

While Thomson’s reporting is clear that the supposed intention for the gun was to seek revenge for the attack on L4, the intended purpose of the black powder is never specified.

We were shown another of Thomson’s reports, from about a year earlier, dated 23 March 1999 [MPS-0001925]. The report is very short and claims that animal rights activists, possibly in the north of England, had acquired some gunpowder.

L3 says he doesn’t know about that, and further wonders how Thomson would have known about it. This report doesn’t specify what the powder would be used for either.

A report filed by Thomson on 13 March 2001 [MPS-0005473] claims that one of the hunt sabs had found out the address of the driver who tried to kill L4.

L3 says this is untrue:

‘We didn’t attempt to locate him. And remember, at this point there is still some hope in that he’s been arrested and the case has been forwarded to the Crown Prosecution Service. So we are hopeful at this stage that he is going to face trial for attempting to murder L4. So we would not have wanted to interfere with that process.’

Five weeks later on 20 April, Thomson filed a further report, [MPS-0005752] confirming his earlier information was false, and no one had the address.

Another report by Thomson, dated 17 April 2001 [MPS-0748499], refers to a proposed trip to Amsterdam with L2, L3 and L4.

L3 says he has no memory of that trip ever being discussed, it certainly never happened, and he doubts that L4 would have been capable of it at the time.

By September 2001, L4 was working in Jakarta. We are shown a note on the authorisation for Thomson to travel there, from 13 September 2001 [MPS-0006714]. It claims that ‘following the failure of their attempt to bring a handgun to the UK, activists were content to allow the courts to deal with the matter,’ but that the collapse of the case against L4’s assailant had led to a ‘desire to kill’.

L3 says that obviously they were not happy with the failure to convict the hunter.

‘To be honest, I think everybody just simply felt depressed and deflated and cynically felt that the justice system was not there for us, and that it protected the powerful and the wealthy.’

He doesn’t believe Thomson was persuaded to go to Jakarta to visit L4, and he became emotional saying how much he regrets not making the trip himself.

‘It was known he was in a low mood at this point. His partner is the one who initiated these thoughts to us and was very worried about him, and wanted someone there with him basically. She was not able to go herself. She had too many commitments. So she looked to someone close to him to offer him that support so that he wasn’t going to be there alone…

It should not have been him [Thomson]. Because his intention was not there to support L4, quite the opposite.’

Asked his reaction to Thomson’s written statement to the Inquiry, L3 says it is all complete fabrication.

‘It’s difficult to separate where the truth is, there is so little of it. Everything that he has supposedly accounted for in what we know as Operation Lime is simply not true. It was made up.

I think there is a variety of reasons why he did this, and we mustn’t forget that in doing so he was equally deceiving his own people as well as us. In fact, everybody but himself was being deceived by this fake operation…

It seems to have been very financially lucrative to him to be in this deployment, that he wanted it to continue as long as possible. I mean, he was having a great time.

He was travelling the world, he was being paid overtime to essentially have a good time with his friends and be with his girlfriend. Why wouldn’t you want that to continue? So he came up with a scheme in order to maintain that deployment and a great lifestyle.’

L3 points out that if you look at the intelligence reports that Thomson was filing and then remove the gossip and tittle-tattle, what you’re left with is so thin that unless he embellished it, he would have been filing blank pieces of paper.

A later report of Thomson’s, dated 5 March 2002 [MPS-0008258] still talks about intentions to target ‘L5’, the hunt supporter who attempted to kill L4, claiming the Animal Liberation Front – the go-to bogeyman name the spycops used for animal rights scare stories – intended to cause him serious harm.

L3 says this is not real and rejects it entirely. It is notable that, despite having a reputation for violence and having attempted to murder a hunt sab more than a year previously, L5 is recorded in this report as having ‘N/T’ in Special Branch records – they had ‘no trace’ of him presumably because they felt he wasn’t worth watching. Given how much time the reports and the Undercover Policing Inquiry spend talking about Special Branch preventing violence and disorder, this is damning.

Ramble then turned to the authorisation document for Thomson’s trip to France [MPS-0526880]. L3 is asked about the way he is characterised in Thomson’s authorisation document. It refers to L3 as an intimidating figure, and implies he had carried out arson attacks.

L3 says it’s not true:

‘This is a deliberate picture being painted to make us appear far more extreme than we actually are. Because if a genuine report about what we were doing went in, there would have been no justification for the deployment.

So it was in his interests to make us appear like some crazed group of individuals hell bent on what he’s discussed here.

But nothing ever comes with detail. It’s just in the scantest, we are just expected to take his word for it. This is not true.’

We were shown other documents which single out L3 as being likely to be involved in ‘terrorism’ and describing him and his friends as a ‘cell’. However, as L3 had already pointed out, there are no specifics.

This is not the first, nor the only instance of vague, unsubstantiated intimations of serious criminality appearing in SDS reports, with seemingly no corresponding investigations or arrests ever taking place.

L3 points out that he and his friends were open and public: they went sabbing and were involved in public campaigns.

‘Virtually everything we were doing was available for scrutiny by local policing units, not some central spycop unit. It would not have necessary…

They didn’t need this. So in order for him to be in place, he would have to have embellished those reports in order to sustain his activity…

In his statements at points 2.18 and 2.34 it even mentions that his own boss described his last two and a half years as a sham and that his intelligence was not worthy, that he was not supplying them with details at all.’

IDENTITY THEFT

Thomson has defended his theft of the identity of a dead child, Kevin Crossland, in order to create an alternate identity for himself, claiming that:

‘Being a party to such ‘dodges’ to avoid police action with close members of the ungodly, whilst not technically necessary were [and are] to my mind essential in providing the depth of character essential for “James Straven” to be accepted through the core of this target group’s criminality.’

He specifically claims that activists, including L3, did the same. L3 says this is also not true:

‘This is just another outrageous attempt to deflect the fact that he took the identity of a dead child for his own benefit.’

L3 says he doesn’t believe he or other activists were ever aware that Thomson used the Kevin Crossland identity.

‘Had he spoken to me about such things I think it would have piqued our interest and we would have asked him a great deal more questions. I have no idea how you would go about doing that. We didn’t do it…

No one used that level of intrigue to develop a false identity. The only occasion in which I can remember using an alias, not a false identity, is when dealing with the media. And that was purely to protect myself.’

The Powerbase article on James Thomson (UCPI0000035222 on the Inquiry website) was then shown. It includes reference to an interview L3 gave to the Undercover Research Group, and we were taken through each of the points attributed to him. Most of it referred to things already discussed in evidence, but in less detail, because L3 was working from memory in 2018 without having seen the files disclosed by the Inquiry.

L3 was then asked why he only submitted a statement to the Inquiry last week, having provided evidence to the Undercover Research Group seven years previously. L3 said that, before he knew of being framed for the Operation Lime gun plot, he didn’t think he was especially relevant:

‘I was aware that this Inquiry had been established. Although I wasn’t quite aware of how far you had got. I wasn’t paying that much attention.

If I am perfectly honest, I really up until recently didn’t think I had very much to offer you, beyond what others would have already told you…

It was only as I began to hear testimony by people I actually once knew that it piqued my interest and I began to think, “Hang on, what? That’s not quite right”… I would have come forward much, much earlier had I had any idea of what I was about to read.’

It is put to L3 that Thomson would be giving evidence the following day, sat in the same seat L3 was sat in.

Q. I just want to ask you again… in terms of the timing that you provided your statements. If there was any suggestion that you didn’t come forward to the Inquiry years ago because you were involved to some extent in criminality, what would you say about that?

A. No. No, the complete opposite. I didn’t come forward because I really just didn’t think that what I was up to in terms of hunt sabotage and in terms of public engagement events would be of any interest to you.

I really just thought I was such a minnow that I would have nothing to offer you.
And it only became clear to me what had been going on behind the scenes, unwittingly to my knowledge, very much later and, in fact, at the eleventh hour.

He points out that the material contained in the secret files is very serious and, without him knowing anything about the causes, could have had a huge effect on his life.

‘I can’t imagine what could have potentially befallen me had they taken it to that level and wanted to make an arrest. What would have happened to me exactly? How has this affected me across the last 25 years of my life? Unbeknown to me?…

Would it have led to another massive miscarriage of justice had I been arrested for such crimes that I knew nothing of, and were the figment of a rather twisted imagination of James Thomson?…

I was his fall guy.’

That was the end of Ramble’s questioning.

CROSS-EXAMINATION CROSSED WIRES

There was some confusion at the end of the questioning about what would happen next. Richard Whittam KC, who represents 12 former undercover officers including Thomson, submitted a last-minute application to cross-examine L3 himself.

This would be a significant departure from the Inquiry’s usual process, where all questions are asked through Counsel to the Inquiry. It’s a key principle of a public inquiry being inquisitorial rather than adversarial.

The Inquiry has made clear that in exceptional circumstances, where witness accounts of very significant events are completely at odds, it might allow for this. Because of the seriousness of the allegations about Operation Lime, and the fact that Thomson and L3’s accounts are so fundamentally different, this could have be one of those exceptional occasions.

However, when asked what questions he wished to put to L3, Whittam inexplicably cited the media work L3 referred to right at the start of his evidence, what contact he has had with ‘Wendy’ prior to giving evidence, and the reasons for his late engagement with the Inquiry. Thomson’s counsel seemingly had no questions at all about the events in France.

The Chair, Sir John Mitting, seemingly as surprised and baffled as the rest of us, responded:

‘I had anticipated, wrongly as it now transpires, that you would have wished to question him about the critical issue in the evidence that he has given, Operation Lime. If that is not the case, I am not minded to accede to your application and would suggest that it is dealt with by the ordinary Rule 10 process.’

At the end of his evidence, L3 was therefore asked further questions by Ramble including the ones raised by Thomson’s counsel.

He explained that his media experience involved doing radio interviews for an environmental and animal welfare organisation abroad. As part of that he did some rudimentary media training.

Asked about his relationship with ‘Wendy’, L3 says they have had some communication over the years, although it’s been ten years since they met in person. He made clear that she had told him she had been asked to give a statement to the Inquiry, and that she thought he should contact them as well, but that she did not tell him what was in Thomson’s statement, nor that he was named as being involved in sourcing a firearm in France.

It was then pointed out to him that he sent an email to the Inquiry on 15 October offering to help the Inquiry. He says he would have heard of the firearm in the opening statements on 13 October, rather than in Sara’s evidence on 17 October as he had previously stated.

There was an absurd and petty feel to these questions which all seemed to seek to discredit him personally as a witness, rather than question his account of events.

L3 was then questioned by his own counsel, Hannah Webb, about his reflections on the way Thomson’s actions had affected him. L3 declared:

‘This is the most incredible event that has ever happened to me without me being aware of it.’

Mitting then thanked L3 and apologised for the length of time he is going to have to wait before the Inquiry publishes its determination and conclusions on this issue. Those are anticipated to be in the Inquiry’s interim report on the Special Demonstration Squad, expected in the second half of 2027.

Tranche 3 Phase 1, Day 6
23 October 2025

INTRODUCTION

‘Ellie’ (not her real name) was deceived into a one-year intimate, sexual relationship by undercover officer HN16 James Thomson, who she knew as ‘James Straven’. He was deployed 1997 to 2002. However, he remained in contact with Ellie for a further 16 years after his deployment ended, long after she had left London, and he continued to conceal his true identity from her.

She gave evidence to the Undercover Policing Inquiry remotely from Australia on Thursday 23 October and Monday 3 November 2025.

This hearing was part of the Undercover Policing Inquiry’s ‘Tranche 3 Phase 1’ which will run from October 2025 to July 2026 (with two breaks), examining the final 15 years of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad, 1993-2008.

The Undercover Policing Inquiry (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.

There are transcripts and videos of this hearing available on the Inquiry website’s pages for 23 October and 3 November.

Ellie has made a 38-page written statement [UCPI0000038206]. She was questioned by Sarah Hemingway, Second Junior Counsel to the Inquiry.

BACKGROUND

Ellie was not an animal rights activist. Thomson described her as an ‘animal welfare sympathiser but not an extremist or an activist’ and she agrees with this. She had an interest in animal welfare, and began volunteering at a local wildlife hospital when she was 18 years old.

She became friends with ‘Wendy’ (who gave evidence on the afternoon of 23 October) at the wildlife hospital. Wendy was a vegan and an activist. It was through her that Ellie met Thomson, when she was 20 years old, when Thomson went to help out at the wildlife hospital in 1999 or 2000.

Q. What was the extent of your interaction with James on that occasion?

A. Minimal. The wildlife hospital was quite busy. I had a lot of work on. I cannot imagine I would have said more than a few words.

Yet Thomson asked Wendy for Ellie’s number, and told her he wanted to date her.

Around that time, Wendy’s mother was dying. She was always back and forth to the hospital and Thomson was very supportive, driving her there and taking her to other places. Ellie assumed Thomson was interested in Wendy, but she didn’t see him that way, they were just very close friends.

Meanwhile, Ellie was having a bad time at the wildlife hospital because her boss was sexually harassing her. He put a lot of pressure on her, asking her out, firing her when she refused to go out with him, withholding staff pay and threatening to kill himself:

‘He gradually he got more and more control over everything and we ended up sort of living under his roof, eating his food, asking to be paid, and then there was just drama after drama. And just harassing and harassing and harassing and it just wears you down after a while…

He would sort of climb into my bed at night. And then if I got out there would be a big argument, which would go on for hours and I would end up sort of wedged in the corner and I put pillows behind me to kind of keep him away…

We’d asked him a few times for a contract. That didn’t go down well, so we never got the contract…

It just gradually got worse and worse and worse until he fired me again and when he went, “Okay, you can come back”, and I said, “No, I am done”.’

The harassment had gone on for 6-8 months. When she finally walked away Ellie lost her job and her home. Wendy helped Ellie out and let her move into Wendy’s mother’s house after she died.

At the time she started dating Thomson, Ellie explains she was:

‘An awkward, geeky, naive, possibly a bit sheltered, 21-year old. I’d moved out of home and moved into the wildlife hospital and that was my first step into the real world, and I had screwed that up quite spectacularly…

I just walked straight into a bad situation and then ended up homeless within a period of a year of moving out…

I would cry at the drop of a hat. A simple task that should have taken five minutes seemed to take half an hour. I was sleeping all the time, I didn’t have a lot of motivation. I was quite underweight.’

That was the situation Ellie was in when Thomson started dating her. It fits a pattern we have seen time and time again in this Inquiry of undercover police officers identifying vulnerable women much younger than themselves to target and groom into intimate, sexual relationships. Thomson’s manager HN10 Bob Lambert with ‘Jacqui’, HN2 Andy Coles with ‘Jessica’, and HN5 John Dines with Helen Steel. By any definition, the Special Demonstration Squad was a grooming gang.

ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP

Thomson told Ellie he was 33 years old. He seemed to be very conscious of the age gap. Ellie explained that when they first started dating, the 13-year difference concerned her somewhat too. It was actually even wider.

‘There was an incident when we were having dinner and he mentioned his children and I worked out that he would have been quite young when he’d had his first child. And that had made him a bit uncomfortable…

I got some random phone call from him saying that he had spoken to “Sara” and she had pointed out that he had his age wrong and he was actually 36 and not 33…

I thought he obviously always knew his age, he just had lied to me about his age because he was conscious of the age difference, but he was actually 36 years old.’

Sara gave evidence on 17 October where she made clear that the conversation never took place. She was certain that she would not have said what he claimed because she always believed he was two years younger than her, which would have made him 33 years old.

Hemingway asked Ellie about the age gap:

Q. Did his being older cause you any real concern at the time?

A. When I thought he was 33, that was sort of the upper limit. I know my sister had a concern about that. But I was okay with him being 33. When I found out he was 36, that was an issue, but at that point we were dating and I liked him and it wasn’t an issue enough to end it.

In fact, Thomson was 37 years old when he started dating Ellie, who was just 21.

They would meet up once a week, going out for meals, cinema dates and suchlike. That progressed to day trips on the back of Thomson’s motorbike, staying at B&Bs.

Hemingway then read out the now infamous section of the 1995 SDS Tradecraft Manual [MPS-0527597] that recommends undercover officers have:

‘fleeting disastrous relationships with individuals who are not important to your sources of information’.

Ellie agrees that her relationship with him did not fit this description. She was very close to Wendy, who was part of his target group, and she gave him unfettered access to her home.

FAKE IDENTITY

Thomson told Ellie that his background was Scottish, and his father was a Laird. He claimed to be the black sheep of a military family, and he said his sister was an actress. She notes that this seems to fit with him using the identity of James Christopher Swinton, brother of the actress Tilda Swinton. She asks the Inquiry to investigate this.

Thomson told her he had three children with a previous partner. He said the relationship had been unhappy, but every time they were going to split she became pregnant.

Ellie remembers finding Thomson’s home strange:

‘His cover accommodation was a shock when I first got there. It just – he was always quite well presented and well turned you out, his clothes were always quite neat. I know some of the hunt sabs, including “Wendy”, used to laugh at him for ironing his jeans.

So when I saw his accommodation, it wasn’t what I expected. It was very run down. I think there were two very thready towels in the bathroom. There was nothing personal in there at all. There was hardly any food in the fridge. It didn’t look lived in and it didn’t fit with him.’

He told her he worked as a locations manager, and that he had worked with the BBC before he set up his own company. He was away a lot with work, and she remembers his ‘James Straven’ name appearing on the credits of a TV show he’d worked on.

Ellie described her relationship with Thomson:

‘From my point of view, he was my first what I would call “proper” relationship. So anybody that I dated before hadn’t been – the feelings hadn’t been that intense, it hadn’t been there. This one I was very comfortable in quite quickly. I could see it going on for a long time…

It was easy, it was nice, there was no pressure, I could be myself. Apparently not, but he was my first love, basically. My first proper intense relationship…

I was having a conversation once, I do remember that, with “Wendy” and we were talking about people cheating on each other and I said, “Yes, I don’t think James would do that” and she went, “No, he’s not really the type. He doesn’t seem to be the type”. We got that incredibly wrong, but I was under the impression it was monogamous…

the fact that it was a nice low pace and we weren’t in each other’s pockets suited me very well. And then when we were together it was lovely. It was romantic, it was caring, it was sweet, it was easy, it was fun. It was great, and then I still had time for myself.’

She says Thomson was reluctant to have sex without contraception, but he didn’t use condoms.

‘So I went to maybe look at going on the pill. And talking with my doctor, we trialled the injection… once that was done we never used any other forms of contraception.’

On 17 October we heard painful evidence from Sara, Thomson’s partner prior to Ellie, about how Thomson told her in great detail that he had traumatic childhood experiences of sexual abuse.

Hemingway asked Ellie if he ever brought that up with her:

‘The rape? No, that was fairly horrific that he would say that. He did say that he had had a sexual relationship with a school nurse, but he seemed quite proud of that. That was only really mentioned once.’

Thomson never seemed to have any issues with having a sexual relationship with Ellie.

Ellie explained he was always very generous and paid for trips away and meals out.

‘I didn’t have a lot of money, especially because after the wildlife hospital I was finding my feet and trying to get sort of – by the time you’ve paid bills there’s not a lot left…

I did try and pay halves as much as I could, but… he paid for a lot of those things.’

He also paid for Ellie to do her motorbike training course, and they travelled together to Indonesia and Singapore in September/ October 2001.

INDONESIA AND SINGAPORE

The trip was Thomson’s suggestion. He asked her if she wanted to come and she jumped at the chance. She is sure that he paid for her to go and organised everything.

He told her he was going there to visit a friend, known at the Inquiry as ‘L4’, who had nearly died from being run over by a hunter in a Land Rover. Ellie had met L4 a couple of times.

‘What I found out later – which I didn’t know at the time – was that his partner had contacted James and she had said that she was exceptionally worried about L4, because of things that had happened, and she was worried that he was over there isolated and alone, and she paid for James to go over and be with him, because she knew they were friends and she just wanted him to be supportive and be a supportive friend over there.’

The trial of the hunter accused of nearly killing L4 had collapsed by that time.

Ellie is certain that Thomson paid for everything:

‘He organised everything, I literally just floated along…

He did all the tickets and the passports and everything, and he did all the checking in and all the sorting out and I just thought this is just something he does.’

Ellie never saw Thomson’s passport.

Hemingway then read a long extract from a police report into Thomson’s undercover activities written in 2002 at the end of his deployment [MPS-0719722]:

‘Indonesia. Matters began to come to a head in early September 2021 when Detective Sergeant Thomson sought authorisation to visit L4 in Indonesia. His operational grounds for doing so were based on a need to brief L4 on legal issues around the L5 trial.

His request was initially authorised, but events soon overtook that decision with the attack on 11 September.

It quickly became apparent, both from media sources as well as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, that there were too many risks attached to such a visit, particularly in view of the anti-American and British fervour being fomented in Indonesia. Detective Sergeant Thomson was therefore instructed not to travel to the Far East.

He was patently dismissive of the decision and its rationale, but advised the office that he would travel to France on annual leave instead (from 26 September to 5 October)…

By early November, enquiries had established that Detective Sergeant Thomson had indeed travelled to Singapore and Indonesia during his leave period using his covert identity.

As a result of this serious breach of operational security and discipline, he was interviewed by Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Black and informed that his operation would be concluded at the earliest opportunity – a final date being set of 27 January 2002.

Detective Sergeant Thomson continued to maintain that he held the moral high ground and justified his decision to override the veto on travel to Indonesia on the basis of operational necessity. There was, incidentally, no intelligence feedback from this trip.’

Ellie’s account is that she and Thomson didn’t actually spend much time with L4, only a few days before they went to Singapore, where he took her to the iconic luxury hotel Raffles to have a Singapore Sling cocktail:

‘He was quite keen on doing that. That seemed to be a bucket list thing…

I have found out since then that this was a bit of a place that all of the undercovers were quite keen on visiting. There’s a Raffles in London, where Ian Fleming wrote the James Bond stories, and that seems to be a thing for them, that they all like. I didn’t know that at the time.’

Ellie knew that Thomson had the nickname ‘James Blond’, and she knows he was aware of the name, because she called him that herself sometimes.

She believes it had come about because of suspicions about him when he first appeared at the hunt sabs. She says that his whole persona fitted the rogue character breaking the rules.

Ellie says that in retrospect, it fits with her experience of him that he was having sex on the job.

Thomson told Ellie to give him the roll of film from her camera when they got back from Indonesia and Singapore so that he could get it developed with his.

He gave her a collage of photos, plane tickets, a coaster from Raffles and other memorabilia, but there were no pictures of him in it. He told her all the photos taken by her ‘didn’t come out’.

She only has two of her photos from that trip which were the ones that remained in her camera. Everything else was gone.

THOMSON’S WITHDRAWAL

At the start of 2002, Thomson told Ellie that his ex-partner was emigrating to San Francisco and taking the children. He said he was going to move over there to be close to them.

‘From there things did progress quite quickly. I was round at his place, he went out, he said he had to go out for a meeting. When he came back he was a bit quiet and a bit, you know, in a little bit of a bad mood and he said things were progressing faster than he wanted, and he was probably going to be leaving quicker than he anticipated.’

He eventually left around March 2002. The SDS’s ‘extraction plan’ for Thomson’s deployment, codenamed ‘Magenta Triangle’ [MPS-0007389] shows that he had been instructed by Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Black to terminate his operation by 27 January 2002. That timeline was extended at Thomson’s request (as recorded in the later overview document MPS-0719722).

We were shown Thomson’s phone records [MPS-0719641]. They show 301 calls or texts to Ellie between April 2001 to April 2002, almost one a day, with the comment ‘no reporting’. In comparison, the records show 226 calls or texts to Thomson’s ex-wife and children and 627 to his real-life partner during the same period.

Before Thomson left, supposedly to live in America, he paid for Ellie to have a follow-up motorbike course. He sent her a card enclosing a voucher for the course in which he quoted poetry [UCPI0000038280]. It ends:

‘See you in the South of France! With love, James’.

She felt hollow at him moving away.

‘I wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do. Everything seemed a bit up in the air. He seemed to have a lot on his plate, so I did leave the ball in his court. So when he left I wasn’t sure if I would hear from him again.’

She says if he had just gone, and never contacted her again, she would have got on with her life. But that’s not what he did.

ONGOING CONTACT

After leaving and claiming he had gone to live in the USA, Thomson continued to contact Ellie. His deployment officially ended on 25 March 2002. His first email to Ellie after he left is dated 8 May 2002 [UCPI0000038289].

‘I could rarely get a genuine insight into how you felt about things when I was with you I’d definitely want to know now.

As there is no longer any possibility of my being able to look at you whilst you’re ‘talking’ I am hoping it’ll be easier for you. I do want to know that you’re happy after all. I also want to know that you’re grabbing the life that should be yours.

You are a hell of a lot smarter than either you let on, or allow yourself to believe. But when you get careless and distracted it leaks out, mostly through your sense of humour and wit (which I miss hugely, by the way) as you often don’t have the confidence to force an issue even when you know you’re right…

I don’t see you ever ducking an adventure, so it’s just a matter of being in the right places to let them happen to you. I really do want you to have as much fun in your life as I’ve had (and hopefully will continue to have) in mine. It’ll be fun meeting up when you’re old and grey, and I am a ghost, to swap war stories – all to be horribly exaggerated in the interests of a good yarn of course…

I also need you to do a spot of considering. I am likely to be heading for Europe in a while (the Cannes Film Festival, Daaaaarling) and will have to stop off in London either on the way there or on the way back.

So what I need know is how you feel about meeting up for a curry or pizza or some such. Is it too soon and how do you feel, et cetera, et cetera.

Have a serious think and let me know. I won’t take offence either way and will continue to bother you via email until much later when we can meet in the Pyrenees or Alps on motorcycles.

Oh, and can you not mention this to anyone else as I don’t want to be obliged to chase around seeing everyone – it’ll only be a short visit re that script thing.

Anyway, that’ll do for now. It’s far too hot to remain out here without a swim.

Take care my love. Yours aye. James X.’

This was the start of many years of email communication. He did the same with Wendy. Ellie is still baffled by his reasoning.

‘I don’t know why he kept in touch with us. I don’t know what he was playing at, at all.’

Thomson’s emails are deeply personal, flirtatious and flattering. Wendy knew Ellie was still in touch with Thomson. Other friends of hers knew they were still in contact as well. Ellie and Thomson would meet up every year or two:

‘It picked up where it left off, it was like going on a date again, yes, it just slipped straight back into that…

Always a goodbye kiss. Like an intimate kiss. I think sometimes holding hands. And then later on, sort of over the years, there were very intimate moments…

It was more than friendship, but it wasn’t a relationship. It was somewhere in the middle… I never really labelled it.’

DECEIT ACROSS THE WORLD

Ellie moved abroad in 2005, but the connection with Thomson continued.

‘Whenever I was going – and the same with “Wendy” – whenever we were going back to the UK to visit, we would email and say these are the dates we are going to be back, if you can make it back there and we can catch up, that would be great. And he would very often manage that… In fact he was one of the most consistent relationships I had.’

From Thomson’s emails to Ellie [UCPI0000038281], he seemed to be travelling the world. There were emails claiming to be from Tunisia, Malaysia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Malta and Kuala Lumpur (from where he asked Ellie to visit him).

We were shown one email where he said he was in Iraq:

‘I am up in the north this time in Kurdistan – so quite near the Iranian, Syrian and Turkish borders, which is good as I’ve not been here before.

Tomorrow the rough boys are taking me up to their ranges in the mountains to play with their big guns – although now I write that it sounds a bit dodgy! But it’s not as if any of them are hairdressers, what do you think? So I’ll try to get a photo of me being all manly, as I gather that’s how one impresses you antipodeans.’

This email was sent in 2008, six years after Thomson’s deployment ended. He told Ellie that he was making all those trips to dangerous war zones as part of a location manager job for American TV news. In fact, he was in the Metropolitan Police’s Specialist Operations Unit until 2012.

When the spycops scandal broke after EN12 Mark Kennedy was unmasked in 2010, Thomson was removed from operational duties to protect the Met and preserve his anonymity while they assessed the risk that might arise from the public disclosure in the media.

From then until his retirement in June 2014, he says he only fulfilled administrative duties in and around New Scotland Yard [UCPI0000035553].

The emails to Ellie were emotional. They were very special to her. She looked forward to receiving the next one. He asked her to send him a Google Earth link to where she was living after she moved house.

The emails often contained attempts to plan to meet up physically, something they managed to do on numerous occasions. We were shown one email which Thomson sent shortly after they met up for the day in England and gone out on motorbikes:

‘Whilst I hadn’t forgotten that I missed you, I hadn’t fully remembered why – a conscious effort on my part admittedly – and even seeing you so briefly brought it all back.

I had a truly wonderful time. I always did in your company. As for the attraction I so obviously still feel for you; suffice to say I’ve never felt as frustrated as I did knowing you were in a hotel near Heathrow without a chaperone while I was stuck in Scotland!

And all for the want of a little planning (or so I told myself). Actually I had made promises to myself to behave so I didn’t disconcert you, but I was perfectly happy to bin that idea even while on a motorbike.’

SEXUAL SUGGESTIONS

Thomson frequently asked Ellie to send him photographs, and he gives them explicitly sexual connotations:

‘I am expecting many paragraphs and photos – anything involving lingerie and you will no doubt help with the aforementioned aargh condition you left me in by being at Heathrow when I was in Scotland (note how it’s all your fault in my head at least).’

Thomson frequently referred to his own sexual frustration in emails with ‘aaargh’ as the subject line, and repeatedly asked Ellie to send photos of herself in lingerie.

On 23 October 2011, which is more than a year after spycop EN12 Mark Kennedy was uncovered and after eight women had filed claims against the police for deceitful relationships, Thomson emailed Ellie saying he was in Libya.

He told her he hadn’t moved on and was suffering from sexual frustration from not being able to have sex with her. Many of his emails were sexually suggestive and Ellie says it remained very common for Thomson to ask to meet up or request her to send him explicit photos. His manner is incredibly salacious, signing off emails with comments like:

‘sent with all my love as ever was, and still thinking of you far more than is good for me (and not always undressed)’

Ellie explained that she did not send him the photos he asked for and this sort of talk was pretty one sided. She didn’t deter him, but she just isn’t that sort of person.

We were shown a document dated 19 October 2001 [MPS-0719701], planning Thomson’s extraction from deployment. It specifically states that he should gradually be sending shorter and more rushed emails, displaying less interest in the members of his target group with more focus on himself and his own career in order to diminish his standing as a friend.

Yet ten years later he was doing nothing of the sort. On the contrary, he was still expressing a great deal of interest and desire to meet up and spend time with Ellie.

In his own witness statement, Thomson admits he stayed in contact with Ellie, claiming they met up once every three or four years. Ellie says there was more contact than that, they met up more like once a year. Ellie was aware that Thomson would also meet up with Wendy when she went back to the UK.

In an email dated 15 April 2012, Thomson refers to going to Afghanistan which he says he prefers to the office job. He sent her photos of himself with lots of people in uniform with guns.

By that time, he had been removed from working in close protection of prominent public figures, because the media had picked up on the existence of the SDS and he might be recognised.

Thomson retired from the Met in 2014 but his contact with Ellie continued. In fact, he stayed in contact for 16 years after his deployment ended, from 2002 until 2018.

It appears from emails in 2014 that Thomson was trying to work out exactly where Ellie was living. In June 2014 he asked her about the location of her current home. He tried to arrange meeting up with her, and makes very suggestive comments, but he also apologises for those, saying ‘it’s your body after all’. His emails also express contempt for what he calls ‘the powers that be’ – his management, the rules and regulations.

In retrospect Ellie sees all that in context of the fact that undercover officers were being uncovered, and it appears that he has contacts who could be quite threatening. She still feels vulnerable to him taking revenge on her, especially because he knows where she lives.

THE PUBLIC INQUIRY

Ellie has exhibited text messages between her and Thomson that show he chased her to meet up in June 2015 and visit her at her hotel, where they had sex. This was more than a year after the Undercover Policing Inquiry had been announced.

On 17 April 2018, Thomson told the Inquiry that he only had an old email address for Ellie. He did not admit he was still in contact with her by calls and texts.

At the same time, Thomson messaged Ellie on WhatsApp asking if they could talk, and the following day, 18 April 2018, they spoke on the phone.

Ellie recounts:

‘So he rang and I had gone into my room for some privacy, and there was a few seconds of just superficial, “Hi, how are you going, how are you doing”.

And then he’s just launched into saying that back when we were dating, he had actually been undercover – and it was about a half an hour conversation where he said, “Look, there’s a bit of an inquiry going on, they may try and contact you”. And then talked about it a little bit…

The conversation itself was a bit of a shock, and there is just this weird numbness that happened. Just like – just I have never felt anything like it. I can’t explain it. Just really – just a strange feeling, I didn’t quite know what to think, I didn’t quite know what to ask, I wasn’t quite making sense of it. I thought, the way he was talking, that maybe everything was real apart from his job. I thought maybe he wasn’t a locations manager.

And it was only as things progressed that he was sort of talking about Wendy and all the rest of it, and then he said, “the Inquiry will probably tell you my real name”, and that hit quite hard. Because I was like, “oh no, everything’s a lie”, and that hit home that little bit…

We were housemates again, Wendy and I, and she was in the lounge. And he’d said “maybe don’t tell Wendy, she’ll be angry”… I did not know what to do. So I went and had a shower.

I sat in the shower, had my sort of forehead against the tiles and I just thought for a bit and just thought “just don’t do anything for 24 hours and then tell Wendy and don’t plan anything beyond that”.’

Wendy had already heard about the Inquiry, so she pretty quickly cottoned on to what was going on. They both contacted the Inquiry. Thomson texted her again after that, saying he knew she had spoken to the Inquiry:

‘Hi Ellie.

Hope this finds you doing well. Heard from solicitors to say you had been in touch with the Inquiry in the UK. As I said when we spoke that’s absolutely your right and I will continue to respect whatever decisions you make.

So, really only wanted to say that if you do still want to discuss any of this at the personal level then that offer also stays open, and I will … be happy to speak to you and to explain, at least as far as I can, anything you want to ask.

Obviously, if you don’t want to speak, or have been advised against it, then please just ignore this.

Good luck for the future, whenever it might take you.’

She felt sick.

‘I was at work and clearly I do not have a poker face. I got the message and I stopped and one of my colleagues went, “oh my god, are you okay?” And I was like, fine”, and I thought I was going to vomit, I had to leave the room.’

THE IMPACT

The discovery of who he really was turned everything on its head. Ellie became very paranoid that she was being watched. She researched the spycops story, trying to work out what was going on, what was happening, who he was, who they were.

Her faith in men and relationships was absolutely shattered:

‘James had sort of restored my faith a little bit in men, being honest and upfront and decent and trustworthy and all of that kind of thing.’

In his witness statement, Thomson says he never considered the impact he would have on Ellie as he never considered she would ever find out. Ellie wonders how long would it have gone on for if the inquiry hadn’t happened.

She was asked to explain how it has impacted her life. She talked about her lack of trust, how she can’t make new friends, and she can’t drive her car without checking the boot and back seat. She became so emotional talking about this that she had to stop.

She asked if she could finish her answers about the impact at the next evidence session. It was clear this is a topic that deeply upsets her, and the Inquiry’s chair, Sir John Mitting, agreed:

‘You are speaking of events that none of us here, I suspect, have ever experienced personally anything even remotely like it. I entirely understand that it is not easy. I say now I am very grateful to you for taking the trouble to give oral evidence to me and you need to apologise for nothing.’

After taking a short break Ellie took a few more questions. She explained that the deceitful relationship Thomson had with her, which spanned 17 years of her life from the age of 21 to 38, disrupted any chance of her finding a suitable partner.

Because it was such a good relationship, she always felt ‘this is what you could have, so don’t settle for anything else’, and in all that time she hasn’t. She didn’t realise that ‘anything else’ would have meant something legitimate and real.

Hemingway then asked her how she feels about Thomson now:

Q. That sense of a James Bond character that we spoke about earlier, this lovable, affable rogue who is, you know, a charming person, doesn’t really do too much damage at the end of the day, what do you say about that? Is he really a James Bond character?

A. I am not going to swear, but no, I don’t think there is anything lovable or roguish about it…
I don’t for one second believe that any of it was legitimate… “Sara”, “Wendy” and myself are very different people, and all three of us thought highly of him…

“Sara” and I dated him and we are very different people. So for both of us to think that it was great suggests that he was a bit of a chameleon, which means none of it was genuine… whether he was doing it for his ego or because it was a bit of fun or because he just got off on it, I don’t know. But I know it wasn’t real.

She explained that she read the Undercover Research Group’s article ‘Was my friend a spycop?’, and she realised that Thomson met 12 of the 15 criteria. She sees that his relationship with her gave him legitimacy, and gave him access to Wendy’s home:

‘I woke up at night, he was staying over and he wasn’t in bed. And I was like “oh, maybe he’s gone to the loo or something”, and he didn’t come back for ages. And then I heard him come upstairs.
And the house was on three levels, so you had the kitchen downstairs and then you had the lounge room, a bathroom and my room on the middle level…

So he had been down in the kitchen that whole time and the kitchen was sort of at the heart of the home… And it’s where we kept things, certain things, certain paperwork, keys, all of that kind of stuff was all down in that kitchen.

So he had access to that all night, if he wanted it… I think also he had ample opportunity – and this is where I sound paranoid – to plant bugs in the house… so that he could hear us talking and he could hear Wendy talking if she had other friends come round, he could eavesdrop on their conversations.’

COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY

Ellie finished the day on 23 October with an emotional speech:

‘It was just so completely unnecessary. The people that he was going after, the people that they were spying on, that to me, they didn’t need to be spied on. And it was political stuff, it wasn’t even policing.

They weren’t breaking the law, it just seemed to be very politically motivated and very over the top, especially for the kind of information that they were getting, that they were looking for. You could get that by being very superficial, but he did this massive deep dive into everything, I think just for fun and just because he could.

The police – especially the Met – never had the best reputation, and they have been known to be… corrupt, racist, misogynistic, the whole lot. The general consensus is it’s not a case of one bad apple, it’s the whole orchard.

But for them to know that they did this, and to know that they did it to groups that were just speaking out about stuff they believed in, and even think the unions, justice campaigns for families… the level of intrusion was unbelievable… whoever thought that was necessary or relevant just needs their head read.’

RE-EXAMINATION BY CHARLOTTE KILROY KC – 3 NOVEMBER

Ellie returned a few days later on the morning of 3 November 2025 to answer questions put to her by her own barrister, Charlotte Kilroy KC.

Those questions went back over some of the topics touched on in her first day’s evidence, examining in more detail the relationship Ellie had with Thomson, before and after his deployment ended.

Kilroy began by asking Ellie whether she would have agreed to have a sexual relationship with Thomson if she had known that he was an undercover police officer. Ellie was categorical in her response:

‘Absolutely not. No. Not a chance.’

Ellie saw Thomson once or twice a week, and they were in contact via regular texts and calls. Kilroy asked what they would talk about:

‘How your day went, what have you been up to, planning on when we were next going to meet up, what we were doing next… caring, nice, relaxing, romantic, nothing too heavy. We didn’t have deep and meaningful conversations over text messages.’

Ellie explained that Thomson was her first proper relationship and her first love, and she saw it continuing long term, with a possibility of moving in together in the future.

But Thomson contacted her in early 2002 and asked her to go for a walk around the block. He told her that his ex-partner had a new partner and this new partner had a new job in San Francisco. They were taking his children, so Thomson was going to move too. This was a lie to cover up for the fact that his undercover deployment was ending and he needed an excuse to disappear from her life.

Kilroy pointed out that a move like the one he described should have taken a long time to organise. Ellie agreed. She said she was surprised how fast it progressed. He gave the impression it was the first he knew about it, and she imagined she’d have at least six months before he left. It went a lot quicker than that, and she wasn’t happy about it, but she didn’t want to make him feel bad.

When he left, buying her the motorcycle course and writing the note saying ‘see you in the south of France’, she took that as a positive sign they would keep in touch.

The email he sent six weeks later confirmed it:

‘It showed that he made an effort and he said some lovely things in it, so I printed it out and I kept it… it suggested that he still cared quite deeply and didn’t want to let the relationship go. And wanted to meet up and, like, there was no way I wasn’t going to meet up with him.’

CURATING SEXUAL INTEREST

Kilroy took us to that email [UCPI0000038289] to look in detail at how Thomson makes clear he is thinking about her body in a sexual way:

‘Actually unless I get my ass (that’s the local colloquialism for arse in these parts – oh, and that’s just reminded me of yours but moving swiftly on)’

He compliments her about her intelligence and wit, then refers to her insecurities and lack of confidence, and talks about still knowing each other when they are ‘old and grey’.

Ellie explained that the email made her feel differently about the end of the relationship. It suggested he still cared about her, it wasn’t really over and they would stay in contact. She felt something more might happen in the future.

In fact, they met up again within a few months, and it was like a date:

‘It would have been the two of us, we would have gone out, maybe dinner, maybe drinks, intimate conversation. Basically, whenever we met up it was like we’d picked up where we left off… Touching, handholding, kissing at the end… He would walk me to the train station, wait until my train was coming, we would have a kiss goodbye and then I would go to the platform and catch a train.’

They emailed every couple of months, and met up about once a year. She thought he was living in the USA and those were the only times they could see each other. She didn’t know at the time he was living in the UK as a serving police officer. Knowing that now makes her feel a bit of an idiot.

‘But I would never in my wildest dreams have thought that it was all a lie. That would never have occurred to me.’

Ellie moved to Australia in 2005, but the contact with Thomson continued. She would visit the UK every 18 months or so, and she would meet up with Thomson almost every time. There were hundreds of calls and texts over the years, which were always caring and romantic in tone.

Again, Kilroy took us through several of Thomson’s emails in detail, particularly Thomson’s expressions of sexual frustration [UCPI0000038281]:

‘I had a truly wonderful time. Even seeing you so briefly brought it all back. As for the attraction I so obviously still feel for you; suffice to say I’ve never felt as frustrated as I did knowing you were in a hotel near Heathrow without a chaperone whilst I was stuck in Scotland!’

Thomson makes multiple sexual allusions, describing how much he is still attracted to her. He refers to a time they had sex, and indicates that he is fantasising about her in uniform.

Knowing the truth about Thomson makes these emails extremely uncomfortable and unpleasant. He blames her for leaving him in sexual frustration, and asks over and over for photos of her naked or in lingerie in a self-confessed ‘tirade of sexual longing’ that went on for more than a decade.

He told Ellie that she was the only cure for his sexual frustration and complained that she was ‘half a world away’, and describes himself as ‘sordid’ talking about her ‘bare naked arse’.

Ellie says all his emails were like this and that made her keen for a sexual relationship with him again. She is clear the relationship was not platonic. It was only because they were a long way apart that it wasn’t sexual, and you wouldn’t talk like that to someone who was just a friend.

‘It stopped me moving on, because there was still that connection there. And it was still like a very strong reminder of the relationship and the sexual relationship that we had, and it was still suggesting that that could continue in some form or another.’

Ellie recalled a time that they met up and kissed on Box Hill:

‘We were sitting on the hill and I was in front of him and he had his arms around me and I sort of leant back and we had a kiss. And then there were these two men that walked past and they looked over at us – quite clearly at us – and laughed. And I thought it was odd. And I mentioned it at the time, I was, “did they see us or something?” And he said, “oh, they must have done”. In hindsight, I think they knew him.’

Kilroy points out that in an email from June 2014 Thomson refers to thinking of Ellie hanging around his office naked. Given where he had worked that is a deeply unpleasant thought.

When she visited the UK in 2015, Ellie met with Thomson at a hotel near Heathrow where they had sex. The initiative came from him. She now knows that this was after he had come forward to the Undercover Policing Inquiry.

The emails continued, but that was the last time she saw him before she spoke to him on the phone, in 2018, and he told her he was an undercover officer.

‘He sort of blurted it out quite early. He explained that there was an inquiry, that someone might be in touch. He asked me if I still had my old email address.

He told me that he couldn’t tell me a lot of information. He said he was willing to talking about it and tell me what he could. He said that they will probably tell me his real name, but his first name was James…

He said things were different today than they were back then. But he definitely did not think he’d done anything wrong.’

He did not apologise to Ellie for deceiving her for 18 years, instead telling her ‘my private life is my private life’.

Thompson told her someone might be in touch, specifically that ‘a sweaty English man in a raincoat talking about the Inquiry’ might visit her. She wasn’t sure if he was being light-hearted or resentful. She found the prospect disturbing. He told her not to let Wendy know the truth as she would be angry.

Ellie pointed out that when Thomson first appeared, many of the animal rights activists suspected him of being an undercover officer:

‘As time went on, I think they decided that he couldn’t be – he was just a little eccentric.’

Ellie’s first reaction to Thomson’s call was similar to that of many other people deceived by spycops into having close personal relationships. She didn’t want to betray him. She still felt their bond was genuine. It took her a while to accept the reality. It was a process, and she is annoyed with herself now that she realises it was all a lie.

When Thomson contacted Ellie again to say he knew she’d been in touch with the Inquiry she felt sick.

Q. Why did you feel sick?

A. Because he knew. And I hadn’t expected him to contact me and then I had this – it was quite confronting and just there’s a whole range of emotions that go on. I was still at that point, I think, feeling a certain aspect of guilt, I suppose. Although that wasn’t logical and I knew it wasn’t logical, I still felt quite intimidated by the text. There was no reason, there was nothing intimidating in it, but I felt quite intimidated by it… Because he knew and I didn’t know where that put me.

For a few months after I just went down rabbit holes. Like I can’t explain the need to know, where you need to find out.

One of the things I looked at is what kind of personality would be an undercover officer and from what I read it’s quite similar to con artists and they tend to have this sort of personality trait, which means they are able to lie, they don’t feel guilt lying and they don’t feel empathy.

So they tend to have quite strong straits of psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, all of that kind of stuff and the problem with that is people like that do not like being confronted, do not like being called out on their behaviour and it is very common for them to want revenge. So that’s something I am very aware of and he knows where I live.

She is convinced that he is still keeping an eye on her. She feels sure there are going to be repercussions for her giving this evidence. As a result, Ellie has closed off from people. She feels her home is bugged. She doesn’t keep a phone on her, and she takes different routes to work.

It is clear that talking about these impacts deeply upsets her and, as at her previous hearing, Sir John Mitting intervened to say:

‘I appreciate that this is not easy for you. But if you would like to continue to finish I am more than happy to do so, or to rise for a bit if you want to.’

Ellie simply said that she cannot imagine things will be any different in the future, and she had nothing else to add.

With that, her evidence ended. She was thanked by Mitting.

Tranche 3 Phase 1, Day 6
23 October 2025

INTRODUCTION

On Thursday 23 October 2025 the Undercover Policing Inquiry took evidence from ‘Wendy’. She was deceived into a long-term intimate friendship with Special Demonstration Squad officer HN16 James Thomson ‘James Straven’, which he continued long after his deployment ended in 2002.

We had previously heard evidence from ‘Ellie’, a friend of Wendy’s, who Thomson had deceived into a long-term sexual relationship.

The Undercover Policing Inquiry (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.

Wendy has provided the Inquiry with a 30-page written witness statement [UCPI0000038208]. The Inquiry’s page for the day has audio and a transcript of the live session.

Wendy was questioned by Don Ramble, Junior Counsel to the Inquiry, who began his questioning by asking her about her interest in animal rights and her involvement with Croydon Hunt Saboteurs.

ANIMAL LOVER

Wendy described growing up an animal lover, and being profoundly impacted by an animal rights stall when she was 14 years old. She discovered how she was inadvertently harming animals through her way of life, went vegetarian and started attending protests against a nearby vivisection lab.

She attended her first hunt at 16 years old and started going out regularly with the Croydon Hunt Saboteurs when she was 17.

Ramble asked her about membership of the group, and Wendy pointed out the voluntary nature of hunt sabs:

‘I think it’s important to note it’s not – even though there is the Hunt Saboteurs Association, it’s not like we sign up to a membership and have to, you know, commit to weekly meetings or anything like that.

So you might go out one week and there was four people and then you might go out the next week and there would be 20 people. I would say there was a core group of around ten people who would be there if they could.’

Wendy was the youngest person in that core group, most of whom were young men. She was usually the only woman from Croydon out in the field. They would socialise together:

‘After a hunt you really needed to decompress, so people would tend to go to the pub as a group, and just sit and have a chat and bring everything back down.’

Wendy would go out pretty much every weekend during the hunting season, and she described the experience of taking direct action that had an immediate and obvious effect: saving the life of an animal. In the off-season she would do a fundraising stall and attend protests.

FRIENDSHIP WITH THOMSON

James Thomson was deployed 1997-2002, using the name ‘James Straven’. He infiltrated hunt saboteurs and other animal rights campaigns in South London. Wendy was 17 years old when she first met him. She was still in school doing A Levels and living at home with her mother.

‘I do remember being in the back of a van and having a conversation with him quite early on when I was going out and realising that, for want of a better term, he was quite posh. And at the time, you wouldn’t believe it now, but at the time I was quite posh.

And I think we kind of went, oh, okay, we are both going to get a bit of ribbing for being the middle class sabs or, as he liked to refer to himself, “upper middle class”.’

Ramble asked if people were suspicious of Thomson, who quickly earned himself the nickname ‘James Blond’. Wendy explained that you had to be slightly suspicious of everyone:

‘We knew that there were phone taps at the time. Both because you would hear clicking when you picked up the line, but also because if you shared false information you would see the end result being that police would turn up at the false place instead of where you were actually going…

I do remember an experience where somebody who was actually an undercover journalist came out and next week there’s a story in the papers. So, again, it’s not so much that you treated everybody like a spy, but you treat everybody at arm’s length initially.’

She explained that there was something about Thomson that wasn’t quite right:

‘But then after a certain amount of time, when he starts being close friends and he starts dating, of course you go, “Well, he’s just a bit off, he’s just a bit of an oddball and that’s just him”.’

He claimed to come from a posh Scottish family, and would smirk when he spoke about himself, in a self-deprecating and ironic, but nonetheless boastful way. Wendy knew him to be a vegetarian, but others said they thought he was vegan.

He claimed to be a filming locations producer, and he was always willing to talk about his ‘work’. He would name drop people he said he was working with, such as Joanna Lumley, Peter O’Toole, Keira Knightley, Gillian Taylforth (who he supposedly got fired for mocking) and other celebrities.

There is a lot of truth to this as he actually gets on-screen credits in several productions, including the 1998 TV drama Coming Home, which starred Lumley, Knightley and O’Toole.

Ramble made clear that the Inquiry was concerned about how Thomson could have found the time to work in the film industry as a locations assistant while also being an undercover police officer.

Wendy explained that he would be away for work for about three weeks at a time every couple of months.

‘But also bear in mind, you know, we weren’t full-time animal activists. We were going out when the hunt went out. We might meet up during the week. But pretty much the week was his and then he was just with us on the weekends, maybe the odd evening.

So he had all the time in the world to do whatever he wanted to do, I suppose, and whatever he was getting extra money for.’

Thomson also told Wendy that he had three children with an ex, and seeing the kids was often a reason he gave for not coming to hunt meets.

WENDY’S FRIENDSHIP WITH THOMSON

Thomson became closer to Wendy in the second half of 2000. At that time, her relationship with her then-partner came to an end, and her mother found out her cancer had returned.

‘He made a lot more effort to see me on my own… I don’t have a lot of memories of James and I seeing each other on our own while I was in a relationship. But after that relationship ended, we spent time together alone…

He was one of the people that I spoke to after I found out [my mother] was terminally ill. And obviously I was very distressed about that.’

Thomson seemed to be very supportive at that difficult time. During her mother’s illness he made an effort to take her places. He met her mother, who really liked him.

‘She said to me after: “Why don’t you want to go out with him? He seems lovely. You wouldn’t want him because he’s a nice one.” And I said, “I just don’t see him like that mum”…

She’d never really kind of been vocal about me being with somebody or not being with somebody… and I said to her, why are you suddenly trying to make me date people? And she said, “Well, because I don’t want you to be alone after I am gone. I don’t like the idea of that. I’d really like to see you with someone”.

And obviously now I hate the fact that she thought he was a nice guy who I could potentially be with after she was dead’.’

Wendy goes on to describe Thomson taking her out for dinner with friends as her mother’s health declined:

He also took her sabbing:

‘Obviously around the time of my mother being severely ill and dying, things get very foggy… But one of my very clear memories was he actually took me out sabbing when she was in a coma in the last days…

I was told when they stopped life support that she would be gone in a couple of days, and she lasted ten days after that. So it was a very difficult time.

And I remember him saying: “I will come and pick you up. You don’t have to talk to anyone else while you’re out there, you don’t have to talk to me. We’ll go out, we’ll go sabbing and I will drop you back and let’s just – you know, you can’t just be at the hospital all the time”.’

Thomson was one of Wendy’s primary sources of support during her mother’s illness, and she was grateful to him at the time. Now she says:

‘I think he saw an opportunity when I was vulnerable and perhaps, you know I was single, I was vulnerable. I needed someone.’

She points out that he deliberately chose to intrude on her most personal moments, saying:

‘If you had any shred of human decency and empathy there are times when you could very easily use your children or your job as a locations producer to say, “I am so sorry, I can’t be there for that”, and let somebody who is genuinely close to that person step in and support them. And he instead took those times as an opportunity for himself.’

Wendy believes Thomson targeted her for a sexual relationship. She gave examples of incidents where he made sexualised comments when she was in her late teens and early 20s.

The Special Demonstration Squad officers have a history of homing in on vulnerable young women and grooming them into sexual relationships. Thomson’s boss, HN10 Bob Lambert, had done it himself when he was undercover in the 1980s with ‘Jacqui’. Thomson went on to do the same with Ellie. This was part of the spycops’ tradecraft. They were a state-sponsored grooming gang.

Ramble then read from what Thomson says about Wendy in his witness statement [UCPI0000035553] where he clearly seeks to minimise the relationship:

‘I would describe her as a close associate in that I came to know her well through [privacy] and her animal rights activities… I wouldn’t describe her as a close personal friend.’

We are told that Thomson repeats the phrase ‘close associate’ several times to describe his relationship with Wendy, to which she replied:

‘I was a pretty close associate for 21 years. That’s a long time to not be a personal close friend of somebody.’

Thomson’s phone call logs for 2001-2 [MPS-0719641] reveal a great many text messages and calls to Wendy’s personal mobile phone. He has sought to downplay this by claiming he was simply leaving messages for Ellie.

However, Wendy says that never happened. The vast majority of these were text messages for her; some were longer conversations with her. She pointed out that Ellie had her own phone (and his logs show multiple calls to that number as well).

‘It’s the most bizarre excuse he could have thought of, to be honest. If we were messaging regularly or speaking regularly on a certain day, it was probably because we had plans.

I can’t obviously tell you what those plans were, but we weren’t either of us the kind of person to just send a message going, “Hope you have a great day, buddy”, so if there was lots of back and forth we would be planning something. It would be a dinner or we would be catching up with other people, or, you know, whatever it may be.’

RELATIONSHIPS

Asked about Thomson’s relationships, Wendy explained:

‘I in no way want to suggest that when I felt James was trying to get with me and then instead went with “Ellie” it’s because “Ellie” was a second choice or he’d have rather been with me than “Sara”.

He didn’t care who he was with. He wasn’t interested in any of us as more than perhaps a momentary enjoyable moment while he was getting to have sex and get paid for it.’

Wendy pointed out that there were no single women in the Croydon Hunt Sab group until Sara joined, and he more or less immediately initiated a relationship with her. Then, when Wendy became single, he tried to start a relationship with her, and when that didn’t work out, he targeted her close friend Ellie (who was outside the group).

Wendy struggles with the fact that she encouraged both Sara and Ellie to have relationships with her friend ‘James Straven’.

Asked about the relationship with Sara, Wendy says Thomson never talked about Sara with her, which was odd. Thomson ended that relationship by giving Sara a letter claiming he couldn’t have a sexual relationship due to severe sexual abuse when he was a child.

Wendy didn’t know about the details of the letter Thomson gave to Sara. However, she remembers how Sara was after that conversation:

‘She seemed a little bit smaller, if you know what I mean. She just shrunk a little bit. Probably a little bit less bubbly. Yes, like she wouldn’t talk about it a great deal. I realise now [it was] out of respect for what he claimed had happened to him. But she just seemed a little bit smaller in person.’

Wendy met Ellie in 1999, when they were both working at the wildlife hospital. They ended up living in the same house, one owned by a relative of their boss, and working on a rota together.

In early 2001, Thomson asked Wendy how old Ellie was (21, the same age as Wendy herself) and asked her if she thought Ellie would be interested in a relationship with “an oldie like me”. Thomson told Ellie he was 33. He later said he’d got his age wrong and he was 36. He was in fact 37 when he first deceived Ellie into a relationship.

She recalls that he had probably only met Ellie once, and not even spoken to her, before this conversation. She says now:

‘Not only did I directly set her up with him, she wouldn’t have met him any other way. He wouldn’t have targeted her if she wasn’t my friend. And essentially I destroyed my friend’s trust in men and ability to date. So I struggle quite hard with that.’

ACTIVISM

Next, Wendy is asked about Thomson’s involvement in animal rights activism.

She says he regularly came along to hunt sabs, but didn’t do anything to stop the fox being killed. He didn’t even carry citronella with him (sabs would spray this essential oil on the ground once a fox had broken cover to mask the fox’s scent and enable it to escape the hounds).

Asked about the frequency of violence, Wendy explained that this depended on the hunt involved – some were known to be more violent than others.

The sabs would try to avoid such confrontations whenever they could, by running away. Their priority was to prevent the fox being killed, which they couldn’t do if they were arrested or stuck in a fight.

The Inquiry has spent a long time asking witnesses about violence at hunts. The police – far beyond the spycops – have portrayed sabs as keen instigators of violence, rather than its victims.

This comes despite many officers who infiltrated sabs, including Thomson, describing violence from the hunters, often with collusion of uniformed police.

Wendy has a clear memory of Thomson being present at two occasions when the sabs were violently attacked by hunters or supporters. On one of these, the hunters charged down a hill at them on horseback:

‘We turned around to exit the field and the police shut the gate. When we tried to climb over the gate, they pushed us back into the field at which point the men on horses started striking us with their whips. And I remember being hit on the head with a brass-ended whip which – excuse my French – bloody hurts.’

In another incident, two vehicle loads of hunt supporters, armed with golf clubs and bats, chased the sabs, then viciously attacked them:

‘I was struck with a golf club and I don’t know if I was momentarily knocked out, but I was on the ground and I was being kicked in the face by a man who was also on the ground and our legs were kind of tangled up and I was trying to kick at him, and he kicked me in the face and ended up leaving an imprint on my face.’

Thomson described this incident in his reporting. In his written witness statement he notes:

‘I have been referred to the file note at MPS-0001577, which refers to me sustaining bruising to my jaw, upper and lower back and legs during hunt saboteur activity on 21 November 1998. I remember this incident because I was attacked during a hunt sab and struck with a golf club.’

Wendy says the only times she saw Thomson involved in any physical altercation:

‘He was defending himself the same as we were. I believe the reason for that is that had he started violence out sabbing, it would have stood out like a sore thumb’.

REPORTING ABOUT WENDY

Wendy was then shown a number of reports by ‘Magenta Triangle’ (Thomson’s code name). One, from 20 July 1998 [MPS-0001211], is about the Annual General Meeting of the Hunt Saboteurs Association.

It mentions the Croydon sabs, saying that they will travel to Kent to support the sabs there in the coming season. Wendy explains that sometimes it was good to have ‘strength in numbers’ when a group was attacked by the Hunt.

Wendy is listed as attending this AGM. So is a sab known at the Inquiry as ‘L4’, who would later be almost killed by hunters and featured in Thomson’s spying. Wendy says that she and L4 were close friends.

She notes that Thomson seems to have deliberately inserted himself into L4’s life after he suffered serious injuries, similar to the way he inveigled himself more firmly into Wendy’s life when she was single and her mother was dying.

We hear about another report of Thomson’s, dated 24 August 1998, [MPS-0247867] which describes an Old Burstow Hunt cubbing meet that was attended by Wendy, L4, L1 & L2.

She confirms that L1 and L2 were also good friends of hers, as was L2’s brother, L3. Standing together, ‘back-to-back’, defending each other against hunt violence, made them all a close-knit group. However, she points out that she knew Thomson better than most of the other people in the group, having met him first.

Ramble reads a single-paragraph report from 29 March 1999 [MPS-0001923], in full. It claims that the Croydon sabs ‘are forging close ties’ with the animal sanctuary where she and Ellie worked. It specifically mentions plans to construct a duck pond. Wendy pointed out that, despite only being five lines long, the report has a number of inaccuracies, and went on to say:

‘I think it reflects fairly badly on any claims that they are making that they were there to intercept illegal activity or threats to the public or processes.

Because, you know, he was literally in his reports telling them that the activity we were undertaking was building a duck pond. It’s not really a threat to public security.’

A further report by Thomson, about a meeting of ‘Surrey Fighting for Animals’ on 5 August 1999, [MPS-0002323] talks about ‘activists’ and ‘fluffies’. Wendy points out how derogatory this report is, and how bitter Thomson sounds. She also notes that he invented division where none really existed.

She said Thomson himself would have attended ‘home visits’ against vivisectors, which were legal at the time. She explains that as the purpose was to make sure that people who ‘tortured animals for a living’ weren’t able to hide what they did from their neighbours, there would be some yelling, but no criminal damage or other criminal offences committed.

The report goes on to state:

‘Robin Webb then gave his speech, which was excellent but largely wasted on those present. Webb was then subjected to an hour of the most moronic questioning he may ever have had to face and it is unlikely he will darken the Surrey Fighting for Animals doorstep again.’

‘Everything he says is just creative theatre,’ Wendy says. It appears this was just a way for Thomson to make jokes at the activists’ expense, for his colleagues to laugh at.

She adds:

‘This isn’t reporting on criminal activity, proposed criminal activity, anything of value whatsoever.

It’s basically just trying to find ways to belittle, feel superior and make jokes. There doesn’t seem to be any relevance to it. That’s what confuses me the most, is all the money, time and effort that’s gone into these undercover officers’ deployments, there didn’t seem to be any reason for it.’

Thomson reported on 21 February 2000 [MPS-0003033] about who was living with Wendy and her boyfriend at this time. In another report, dated 26 April 2000, [MPS-0003413] he detailed that Wendy had now split up with her boyfriend.

She is scathing about the petty details of activists’ personal relationships being put into such reports, saying it’s:

‘obvious that they didn’t have anything of quality to report. What else did he have to talk about other than who was sleeping with who and who was living with who?’

She says the first report didn’t bother her so much – it just ‘highlighted what utter rubbish the whole thing was’ – but she felt more angry and hurt when she saw the second one:

‘I spoke to him quite a bit during the time that my relationship was breaking down and after it had broken down, and he was very supportive of me leaving the relationship. And yet it’s just another anecdote for him to put down, because he doesn’t have anything else to talk about.’

OPERATION LIME

L4 was deliberately run over by a hunt supporter in September 2000. Fortunately he was not killed, but he did sustain serious life-changing injuries. Wendy was not present, but heard about it the same day, as did Thomson.

Emotions were very high, especially as the driver of the vehicle, known in the Inquiry as ‘L5’, would turn up to hunts afterwards and taunt the sabs by making steering wheel motions with his hands. He was charged with grievous bodily harm with intent to kill. However, the trial collapsed.

Q. After that trial, was there any talk about ‘well, we will take the law into our own hands, we will get revenge or reprisals after that’, that you witnessed?

A. The only talk I heard and was part of after that trial collapsed was, “Oh my God, what’s going to happen with L4? This is going to kill him. How do we support him, what can we do?”

However, in his written statement, Thomson described a plot to obtain a gun and ammunition from France in order to seek revenge for what had happened to L4.

Thomson claimed to be part of this plot, stating that he had foiled it by arranging for the gun to be left in his vehicle, which was then ‘stolen’ by his SDS handler. This was ‘Operation Lime’.

Ramble asked Wendy what she thought when she read Thomson’s version of events. She responded:

‘I would say I was as close, if not closer, to L4 than James was and there was certainly never anything discussed or mentioned or even hinted with me, and the same from L1, L2 and L3. Never anything…

The second I read it, my jaw hit the floor. And I knew straight away it was utter crap…

I can remember thinking how ridiculous the entire thing was, that I couldn’t believe that at the time the rest of the police bought into it. Because, putting aside entirely my knowledge personally of the other individuals involved, and my 100 per cent knowledge in my heart that they would never have been part of something like that, it was the dumbest plot I could have conceived.

If you are an animal rights activist supposedly involved in such extremist activity that you are going to murder someone, why would you drive to France to buy a gun from a stranger to drive it back through customs to the UK?’

Wendy was not on the trip to France but she heard about it at the time. As far as she knew, the only things ‘Sara’, Thomson and L3 did on this trip were to drink wine and have a nice time.

L3 is also being questioned by the Inquiry about this. He is a late addition to the Inquiry, having gone years without realising what happened, and how close he’d come to being framed by Thomson for a fictional gun plot that could have ended in a long jail term and a ruined life.

POST DEPLOYMENT

When their deployment was ending spycops usually told the people they spied on that they were moving a long way away, often to another country. Thomson did this, saying his ex was moving to the USA with his children, and so he was going to move there too in order to be a good parent.

Wendy remembers Thomson’s departure as a sad occasion for them all, and recalls how upset Ellie was. She says he wasn’t happy either; he wanted to be near his kids, but didn’t want to leave his comrades or the UK.

He stayed in contact with Wendy long after his deployment ended. After she moved to Australia, he would normally meet up with her when she came back to the UK every 18 months or so, although she notes that he carefully avoided meeting other former targets.

He kept in touch by email and the odd phone call for many years, well after the spycops scandal was public and the Undercover Policing Inquiry was set up. Wendy has shared the emails with the Inquiry [UCPI0000038209].

The tone is one of lots of love, kisses and plans to meet up at various stages over the years. He even met her then partner. We’re shown an email from Thomson to Wendy, dated 24 November 2006, in which he asked her to send a photo – which she did. She hastens to make it clear that this was not a request for a sexual photo (which is something he did with Ellie).

He asked her for L4’s address, ostensibly so he could visit. She gave it to him, and now wonders what he did with it. She knows that he never contacted L4 at the time.

‘It haunts me. I cannot begin to imagine why he wanted that address. His deployment had ended, yet he was still working for the Metropolitan Police.

To me, it just reaffirms my belief that he was staying in touch with me because I remained useful on getting information. I do not accept that that information was not to be passed to the police. There is absolutely no reason why he would have required L4’s address, and in fact I confirmed, at the time, I remember confirming with L4 whether he had gone there, and he had not.’

Another email, sent to Wendy on 14 September 2009, asks her to tell Ellie that ‘she still owes’ him an email, adding ‘where are the photos?’.

She explains that at the time she just assumed that this was something Ellie had promised him in a conversation. Having heard Ellie’s evidence now, about the number of times Thomson harassed her for explicit photos, she now characterises this as:

‘sexual harassment by a dirty old man who wanted to get his jollies off with looking at photos of a younger woman he had tricked into a sexual relationship… I found it absolutely repulsive’.

INTERFERENCE WITH HER MOTHER’S WILL

After her mother died, Wendy started looking to buy a house with her inheritance.

‘I knew the contents of my mother’s will. I knew the executor of her will, which was her best friend, and obviously I knew the solicitor and the solicitor said: “Look, it’s an easy will, it’s not contested, it should just take a few weeks. So if you want to start looking at houses now, you should be able to do that.”

He said: “Technically, probate can take up to six months but that’s only for really complicated scenarios, usually where there’s multiple challenges, so you should be okay to start looking”. It took six months to the day.’

Wendy nearly lost out on buying the house she had set her heart on, back in 2001.

‘It felt like something positive could happen in regards to I had found a home that I actually wanted to be in, that was suitable, that was close to everything I needed to be close to. And I had made an offer and it was a new build from a small building firm…

As probate took longer and longer and we didn’t have any answers as to why, the builders started saying, “We can’t hold this property for you, we have multiple other buyers we could be selling this to”… I was going to lose the property.’

A highly detailed Special Demonstration Squad document on the plan for the ending of Thomson’s deployment [MPS-0719701] includes the following peculiar and disturbing comment:

‘Wendy recently moved into an address in [address redacted] which she has bought following the death of her mother, attempts to disrupt this purchase having failed. It is impossible to predict how long she might remain here.’

Wendy described her reaction on reading that report:

‘It was one of those heart-stopping moments… I started thinking back to that time and how odd it was, how long the process had taken for probate and how I kept going to the solicitor and asking what was happening, and he said he had no idea. There were no updates.

He was chasing my mother’s best friend, who was the executor of the will, who was also an estate agent, and had started showing me other properties and trying to persuade me to buy another property.

So I am thinking, was she in on it somehow? Was my solicitor in on it somehow? Did they contact the probate office and interfere with probate and just tell them to put it at the bottom of the pile? How deep did this go and how far up was it approved? Who approved this?’

In his written witness statement Thomson simply says he has no memory of the plan to disrupt Wendy buying a house. She does not believe him, nor does she believe management did not know.

DISCIPLINARY INVESTIGATION

Towards the end of Thomson’s deployment one of his managers, HN53, produced a report on various problems [MPS-0719722]. It describes how Thomson fabricated intelligence and was dishonest with his managers. Investigations revealed financial irregularities, identity theft and other possible criminal activity. This led to his deployment being terminated.

His security status was downgraded and had to re-apply for his firearm licence. However, he was not disciplined, let alone faced with criminal charges, and was allowed to remain in the police until 2014.

He was also given his firearm back and returned to active protection duties just two years after his deployment ended – highly unusual for an officer who had an unblemished history – let alone one as murky as James’.

Wendy says she is disgusted that despite his lies, sexual relationships and criminal activities being known, the police took no action against him.

‘They decided that the important thing was not to make the Metropolitan Police look bad. And they acknowledge in their internal documents that the risk of taking any other form of action, be it even just more formal discipline against James Thomson, might make them look bad. And that was what they based their decision to take no action upon.’

IMPACT

Finding out that Thomson was an undercover officer has affected Wendy’s memories of her mother, devastated the life of her best friend, and utterly ruined her trust in other people. Wendy was extremely forthright about her feelings about this:

‘This is not just the disgusting pathetic things that James has done while he’s playing spy. It is showing the absolute corruption of the entire system. Not even just the Metropolitan Police, but whoever had knowledge of these actions. It’s mind blowing.’

Asked if there are any other points she wishes to make, Wendy flagged several items.

Firstly, she dismissed Thomson’s ‘ridiculous claims’ about suffering from dissociation disorder, pointing out that this can be easily disproved. For example, he falsely claimed in reports that Sara was dating another activist (L1) in order to cover his own inappropriate relationship with her, showing he knew he was doing something wrong.

She also pointed out that despite the concerns raised by HN53, and the supposed policy that SDS undercovers were not supposed to take up protection duties within 10 years of their deployment ending, Thomson was given back his firearms licence, and put to work in close protection, after just two years.

New photographic evidence has now emerged of him engaged in close protection work with Tony Blair in 2010. She asks what would have happened if someone at that anti-war event had recognised Thomson.

She also referred to a letter that she’s seen, sent to Thomson in August 1996, before he joined the spycops unit. He is invited to take part in group therapy and advised to ‘keep taking the tablets’. She asked the Inquiry to investigate whether he was known to have mental health problems before he was deployed into her life.

‘The last thing I would like to say is just that I feel there is abundant evidence to show that at every stage, at every level, the Metropolitan Police has encouraged, facilitated and even covered up abuses of human rights.

And in my opinion they are continuing to do so and I sincerely hope, for those of us who have been impacted so severely, that the Inquiry holds both the undercover officers and all levels of management accountable for these actions.’

At the end of her evidence the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, thanked Wendy:

‘for the care and attention that you have given to your evidence and to your not-easy task of giving it orally and publicly. I am very grateful to you. I am very dependent upon those who participated in the events that I am looking into providing their own evidence about it, so that I can make a judgment about where the truth lies and about what really happened.’

Tranche 3, Phase 1, Day 2

14 October 2025

INTRODUCTION

On Tuesday 14 October 2025, the Undercover Policing Inquiry’s ‘Tranche 3 Phase 1’ hearings began taking Opening Statements from many of those who were spied upon by undercover police.

The hearings will run from October 2025 to July 2026 (with two breaks), examining the final 15 years of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad, 1993-2008.

The three days of opening statements at the start are an opportunity for those who are significantly involved to set out what they expect to see in the hearings.

The Undercover Policing Inquiry (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.

There is a full transcript and videos of this hearing available on that day’s page on the Inquiry website.

This is a long report, use the links to jump to a specific speaker:

• Maya Sikand KC, representing HN43 Peter Francis
• Fiona Murphy KC, representing ‘Category F core participants’ (families who discovered that the spycops had stolen their deceased relatives’ identities to create their cover names), including Liisa and Mark Crossland
• Charlotte Kilroy KC, representing ‘Category H core participants’ (women who were deceived into intimate relationships by these officers), in particular ‘Alison’, ‘Ellie’, ‘Maya’, ‘Sara’ and ‘Wendy’
• Angus McCullough KC, representing ‘S’, the ex-wife of spycop HN15 Mark Jenner
• Leslie Thomas KC, representing these clients of Bhatt Murphy solicitors: Bernard Renwick; Dr Graham Smith; Lee Lawrence; Mark Metcalf; Myrna Simpson; Stafford Scott; Winston Silcott
• Rajiv Menon KC, representing Duwayne Brooks OBE
• Ifeanyi Odogwu, representing Dr Neville Lawrence OBE
• Dave Morris, representing himself

Maya Sikand KC

Sikand represents whistleblower spycop HN43 Peter Francis ‘Peter Black/ Daley/ Johnson’. He has provided a written Opening Statement to the inquiry.

Sikand begins by pointing out that Francis and his legal team had to write and deliver this statement before being provided with all of the relevant disclosure from the Inquiry.

In particular, it was made before he was given the witness statement of HN86 who was the Chief Inspector in charge of the SDS and effectively Francis’ senior line manager when he was first recruited to the unit.

All opening statements had to be submitted in September. They were only disseminated to other Core Participants late on Friday afternoon before the hearings started on Monday, leaving little time to read and respond to their contents in the hearings.

Francis first supplied an opening statement to this Inquiry in 2020. Over a decade has passed since the Inquiry was officially announced by then-Home Secretary, Theresa May, in 2014.

‘NOBODY LIKES A WHISTLE-BLOWER’
(UNLESS WHAT HE SAYS SUITS THEM)

Sikand says Francis feels aggrieved that in all those years, he has not been thanked enough for his courage in speaking out, and that the Inquiry has not acknowledged his trauma. He complains that he hasn’t been treated as a hero, and has instead faced criticism from every corner.

In particular, Sikand highlights the criticisms of the Designated Lawyer group (other former officers, old colleagues of Francis) and the activists who were spied on between 1993 and 1997 by ‘Pete Johnson’ (his official cover name, although he also used the names ‘Pete Black’ and ‘Pete Daley’).

Later on, Sikand teaches Mitting the modern meaning of the term ‘throwing shade’, and provides some examples of the differing levels of contempt contained in their witness statements.

She quotes directly from the statement of ‘Lewis’, who certainly doesn’t pull any punches in his description of the man who went to the length of enrolling at Kingsway College in order to befriend him and spy on the very small group he was part of in those days:

‘A sad and lonely outsider who was a bit weird, boring and sometimes annoying.’

Francis says he understands why such groups would naturally feel anger upon discovering that somebody in their midst had been an undercover police officer, whose lies included emotional manipulation designed to elicit their sympathy.

For example, many of them sent him condolence cards after he lied to them that his mother had died. However, Francis complains of character assassination and says they should be blaming the Metropolitan Police, not him personally.

Sikand says that Francis ‘cannot apologise for telling the truth’ – however inconvenient his truth is. Nor can he apologise on behalf of his former employers, but he is sorry for any hurt and pain he may have caused; not just to those whose lives he infiltrated, but also the family of the real Peter David Johnson. She says he is especially remorseful about stealing the identity of a dead child.

Francis is pretty much unique among spycops in proactively divulging details that are detrimental to him personally. Others have only admitted disgraceful acts after others – usually the people they spied on – had exposed them.

ENDURANCE TEST

Sikand portrays Francis as someone who has been patient and loyal, who has stuck with this Inquiry, and unlike other officers, has always been willing to cooperate and participate.

She likens it to an endurance test, giving some examples of what her client has faced: the strange lies and bizarre allegations made by some of the more blatantly dishonest spycops. HN2 Andy Coles said Francis shot a wild boar with a firearm while undercover in Germany, and HN78 Trevor Morris suggested to a police internal investigation, Operation Herne, that Francis was twice admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

Only the previous day at the Inquiry, Oliver Sanders KC, representing the majority of spycops, had called Francis a liar and his claims preposterous. Sanders cited Francis’s mention of Commander Black and said there was no such officer.

Even by the standards of a professional defender of spycops, this is a ludicrous claim. Commander Colin Black is well known as one of the officers investigated by the Independent Police Complaint Commission over the spycops involvement with the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry in 1998. The Inquiry has published and cited an SDS document recording Black’s involvement with HN16 James Thomson in 2001.

Black is a key ficure, a manager who admitted at the time that they knew undercovers deceived women into relationships. After interviewing Thomson in September 2002, Black recorded in a document [MPS-0722289] that:

‘It is clear that he has entered into relationships during the course of his work which are inappropriate’.

Sikand points out that the Inquiry’s own official timeline shows that HN146 Colin Black was Operational Command Unit Commander Ops from April 1996. Black personally signed off the commendation given to Francis in 1998.

‘In accusing my client of fiction, Mr Sanders has in fact created his own.’

Francis also objects to redactions made to his witness statement, all the adverse criticism, and of course the very long wait to give his evidence.

‘Had I known that the public inquiry would take over ten years to hear my evidence, I would never have called for an inquiry in the first place’.

FIFTEEN YEARS AND COUNTING

He first spoke out about the SDS in March 2010, being referred to only as ‘Officer A’ in an account and accompanying article which both appeared in the Observer. Sikand notes that this was over six months before Mark Kennedy was exposed, catapulting spycops into the public consciousness.

Francis later spoke to the TV programme Dispatches, to the police’s own Operation Herne inquiry, and to the Stephen Lawrence Independent Review, which fed into the decision to set up the Undercover Policing Inquiry.

He says that the Inquiry has not bothered asking what he needs in order to give his evidence; they’ve just sent him what Sikand refers to as a ‘generic witness pack’. He finds it incredible that it took them until this year to create a Vulnerable Witness Policy, despite five years of the Tranche 1 and 2 hearings, and several years after Francis wrote his witness statement.

Francis says it is well-known that he suffers from severe mental health issues. These are caused by his undercover deployment and compounded by the lack of post-deployment support, the weight of being the lone whistleblower, and the stress of not knowing if he would be prosecuted for doing so.

After Francis took part in the landmark Dispatches documentary about spycops, senior police demanded that Channel 4 hand over the material with a view to charging Francis for breaching the Official Secrets Act.

This has all been exacerbated by the strain and uncertainty caused by this Inquiry’s many delays and glacial progress.

Like other core participants stuck in this limbo, Francis waited many years for disclosure and was then expected to respond within unreasonably tight deadlines. He has been excluded from the process of deciding just how much of the evidence, including his own, would be redacted and restricted, hidden from the public gaze.

Sikand asserts:

‘Peter Francis firmly believes that only when you come into the cold light of day unmasked can you be truly accountable.’

PROTECTING THE GUILTY

Francis is highly critical of the fact that the majority of his SDS colleagues sought, and were granted, anonymity in the Inquiry. Both of his line managers (HN86, and HN67 ‘Alan Bond’) have been given full anonymity, as have two other senior Special Branch officers (HN58 and HN53) who he blames for failing to properly support him after his deployment ended.

He believes that such senior and significant individuals, no longer even active in policing, should not be permitted to hide behind a cloak of secrecy in an inquiry which should be underpinned by ‘the key tenets of accountability, openness and transparency’.

Sikand speaks more about the ‘duty of candour’, and about the new statutory standards which will soon be introduced via legislation (the Public Office Accountability Bill, known as the Hillsborough Law). This will require all public servants – including police – to act honestly, with frankness and transparency in testimony and in disclosing documents, especially in court cases and official investigations like this one.

Francis asks why exactly the Inquiry has decided that HN81 ‘Dave Hagan’ no longer needs to appear. He is a crucial witness, at the heart of many of the important issues this Inquiry was set up to examine, such as the infiltration of the campaign for justice by the family of murdered Black teenager Stephen Lawrence.

We are now told that Hagan is too ill due to PTSD from his deployment. Francis understands that some officers are genuinely ill and unable to participate as a result, but notes that HN81 seems to have been well enough to produce and send in a 77 page, very detailed, self-serving witness statement fairly recently.

Francis points out that Hagan is someone who has repeatedly impugned his credibility, yet there will be no opportunity for these allegations to be questioned and his version of events tested.

To learn at the last minute that he won’t be turning up isn’t just of concern to Peter Francis, says Sikand. It’s bound to be a huge disappointment to the Lawrence family and other core participants, and erode public confidence in this Inquiry’s ability to get to the truth.

Francis believes that such untested evidence should be afforded less weight than his own. He says he’s willing to answer the questions put to him, go ‘through the wringer’, and have his evidence robustly examined.

He expects to come under attack from all sides. He’s aware that he might offend people with his unvarnished truths, but says this shouldn’t be ‘some sort of expensive tax-funded popularity contest’. He says his evidence will not be sanitised; he plans to account for himself candidly, using ‘unflinching and unfiltered language’.

THE MANY ACHIEVEMENTS OF PETER FRANCIS

Francis claims that he did a good job, successfully gaining his targets’ trust and infiltrating their ‘inner circle’. According to him, he was a highly effective undercover officer who excelled at gathering high grade intelligence for his paymasters, and asserts that this is borne out by his annual appraisals.

He says that the Security Service appreciated the quality of his unrivalled reporting on Militant Labour activists, and he was later awarded an official Commendation for his SDS work.

He notes that many of his core disclosures about the secrets of the SDS, made over a decade ago, have now been proven to be true.

Everything from the operational details of the spycops’ tradecraft through to specific forms of what is now considered unacceptable and unjustifiable misconduct on their part (e.g. sexual relationships while undercover, and the theft of deceased children’s identities).

Despite the shade that has been flung, many other SDS officers have now given evidence which corroborates what Francis has always said about the way the unit operated.

He claims that there is now considerable collateral evidence that SDS officers were tasked with spying on and undermining Black family justice campaigns.

He notes that those who were targeted in this way, who have plenty of experience of the police’s institutional racism and misconduct, have not been hugely surprised by these revelations. Francis believes that they have welcomed his blowing the whistle on these highly intrusive and inappropriate undercover policing operations.

YOU WOULDN’T MAKE IT UP

Sikand reiterates that he should be considered a whistleblower:

‘Mr Francis has stuck his head significantly above the parapet, without any whistle-blower protection and without any psychological support associated with his whistle-blowing.

To this day, the Metropolitan Police Service still do not recognise him as a whistle-blower, despite the misconduct he has uncovered. He has suffered a significant detriment for the greater good.’

She notes there is no legal protection or support available to police officers who make such disclosures in the interests of the public. In his submissions Francis suggests that legal reform is needed and that this is something that the Inquiry should include in its official recommendations.

Sikand points out that Francis has nothing to gain from telling the truth. It hasn’t won him any friends, nor financial gain, but instead come at considerable personal expense to him and his partner. He hasn’t been thanked by anyone.

Francis says that people forget that the undercovers themselves are also victims of the SDS. Sikand explains:

‘Many officers who were approached to join the SDS were already in some ways vulnerable, being attracted by such an extreme and isolating role in order to escape from personal problems.’

She quotes Francis’ more blunt description:

‘We referred to the SDS as mushroom undercover policing, because we were kept in the dark and fed bullshit.’

Francis says he is not the only one of the spycops to be left with complex PTSD, having been ‘hung out to dry’ by the Metropolitan Police.

He goes into more detail about the ways in which he was badly failed by his employers, before, during and after his deployment.

He complains that he did not receive enough information about what would be involved, or the likely psychological impact on him. Training and ethical, legal, or practical guidance were practically non-existent. He believes that the undercovers were deliberately and negligently left to their own devices, so that they might ‘swim deeper’.

According to Francis, these failings were ‘abject, inexcusable and unforgivable’. He says that when his time in the field ended, he really struggled to reintegrate, both into Special Branch and into his real identity.

The indifference and lack of support with this rehabilitation led to him suffering a mental breakdown, and going off work sick. He ended up suing the police for psychiatric damage, and receiving a settlement in 2006.

Fiona Murphy KC

Murphy represents the Crosslands and other bereaved families whose deceased relatives’ identities were stolen to create undercovers’ identities.

They are known as Category F core participants in this Inquiry, and you can download their written Opening Statement.

The Category F families say that there is no good reason, justification or necessity for the SDS’s ghoulish practice of stealing identities from dead children.

Murphy refers to the unit as a lawless clique, and points out that:

‘The choice of senior and junior officers alike to ignore the obvious legal, moral and ethical abhorrence of the practice in preference to the vain hope that the families would never find out, reflected the morality of the kindergarten.’

SMUG INHUMANE DISDAIN

The SDS’s 1995 version of its Tradecraft Manual, written by HN2 Andy Coles shortly after his deployment ended, drips with smug, inhumane disdain for anyone outside the SDS.

His instructions for stealing an identity say:

‘On finding a suitable ex person, usually a deceased child or young person with a fairly anonymous name, the circumstances of his or her untimely demise was investigated.

If the death was natural or otherwise unspectacular and therefore unlikely to be findable in newspapers or other public records, the SDS officer would apply for a copy of the dead person’s birth certificate.

Further research would follow to establish the respiratory status of the dead person’s family, if any. And, if they were still breathing, where they were living.

If all was suitably obscure and there was little chance of the SDS officer or more important one of the wearies running into the dead person’s parents/siblings et cetera the SDS officer would assume squatters’ rights over the unfortunate’s identity for the next four years.’

The families note that this tradecraft was known about by very senior officers, right up to the rank of Deputy Assistant Commissioner.

This includes HN587 Peter Phelan, who was due to give evidence on Monday 20 October but excused at the last minute. Most of the officers who have been asked admit that they did not give the morality of the practice much thought.

WE WERE NEVER MEANT TO FIND OUT

There is plenty of evidence to show that the police never considered how the bereaved families would feel about the theft of their loved ones’ identity. The Met didn’t really think about the possibility of reputational harm if the public knew, because they confidently assumed that it would never ever become public knowledge.

One spycop after another has defended the practice at the Inquiry by saying nobody was ever meant to find out. This is also true of anyone else who commits identity theft. The crime doesn’t become legal or justified just because a police officer does it.

It is clear that concerns were raised many years before the spycops tactic of identity theft was finally formally ended in 1994.

It has been said that this change was prompted by practical considerations, such as the computerisation of birth and death records, and the risk of someone finding a death certificate in the cover name, rather than any consideration at all for the bereaved families.

The families want to know why it took so long. The issues likely to be caused by computerisation were mentioned in the unit’s Annual Report of 1990-91. The now-infamous Tradecraft Manual, with its flippant and degrading references to bereaved families, refers to ‘many earlier fears’ as well as the problem of computerisation.

The Category F families’ written statement includes a list of questions they would like the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, to investigate.

According to the SDS Annual Report of 1994-95, SDS management conducted a thorough review before a new, more secure procedure of creating an entirely fictitious cover identity was introduced. However, this review has never been disclosed to the families, so they are left wondering if it has been lost, destroyed, or withheld.

The families disagree with the Metropolitan Police’s assertion made in the opening statement delivered by Peter Skelton KC the previous day: that HN26 ‘Christine Green’, deployed in 1994, was the very first SDS field officer to use a wholly fictitious cover name. They remind Mitting that this was common practice in the earliest years of the unit’s existence (1968-1974) and that it was done by HN56 ‘Alan Nicholson’ in 1990-91.

LIFE IMITATING ART

When the SDS was formed in 1968 officers simply made up names. It was only after the theft of a dead child’s identity was featured in the 1973 spy film The Day of the Jackal that it became standard practice for SDS officers. They even referred to finding an identity as ‘the Jackal run’.

As well as being illegal and immoral, it carried an obvious tactical vulnerability – ssuspicious comrades might find the death certificate. While there are several reasons why a birth certificate can’t be found, there is no excuse for having a death certificate if you’re alive.

And sure enough the fifth known officer to do it, HN297 Richard Clark ‘Rick Gibson’, had members of Big Flame confront him with ‘his’ death certificate. He had to end his deployment immediately. Despite this, the practice continued for more than 20 years.

The families have heard from Peter Francis that it was standard practice for SDS officers to not merely use the birth certificate but also research the family and background of the child whose identity they were planning to use, and would go as far as to visit places in person.

Some managers have denied that this kind of investigation took place, but the Category F families remain firmly unconvinced by these denials. They want to know exactly what research was carried out, what was recorded, and what consideration, if any, was given to the ethics of doing this.

QUESTIONS FOR HN16 JAMES THOMSON

Kevin Crossland was killed in 1966 aged five, along with his sister and mother. The family’s only survivor of the plane crash was David Crossland, Kevin’s father, who remarried (to Liisa) and they had another son, Mark, afterwards.

David sadly died in 2001. It was only much later that Liisa and Mark discovered that Kevin’s name and identity had been stolen by a police officer, Detective Sergeant James Thomson.

It appears that Thomson had, around the time of David’s death, been procuring false documents in the name of Kevin, giving the name ‘Kevin Crossland’ when he was arrested in his undercover persona, and possibly even hiring private detectives to research the real Kevin’s family.

Liisa has said that she felt shocked, confused and disgusted by these revelations. Understandably, she and Mark seek answers, and hope that Thomson will provide some when he appears at the Inquiry.

However, they note that to date, his evidence has been ‘contradictory, inconsistent and wholly unreliable’, and that he has a reputation for lying to everyone. Not just the activists he spied on and the women he deceived for several decades, but also his SDS managers, other police officers, this Inquiry and its risk assessors. Even by the standards of the spycops, he is unlikely to be truthful.

The ‘Kevin Crossland’ persona was apparently an entirely unauthorised, additional false identity that he created for himself. He had already been issued with false documentation in his official, agreed, cover name, ‘James Straven’, before being deployed undercover by the SDS in early 1997. He registered both false identities on the electoral roll at the flat he lived in while undercover.

The Crosslands want to know why his managers didn’t make any effort to properly discipline him for doing so.

When asked about this matter in 2002, Thomson made a series of conflicting claims to SDS management, which included saying that he wanted a name he could use if he was ever arrested, and saying he wanted a name he could use to travel to the United States, as part of his eventual exfiltration.

They found out that neither explanation could be true. He had in fact applied for a certified copy of the birth certificate as far back as 1991, more than five years before he even joined the SDS.

We now know, from Thomson’s own statement, that he added Kevin Crossland’s name to the electoral register in 2000, used it to set up electricity and bank accounts in 2001 and even applied for a ‘Kevin Crossland’ provisional driving licence in 2002.

Another excuse provided by Thomson was that he suffered a head injury early in his deployment, and it was a mental illness (dissociative identity disorder) which caused him to start making irrational decisions.

MULTIPLE OFFICERS WITH MULTIPLE IDENTITIES

The Crossland family do not believe him. They know that bad practice was commonplace within the SDS, and shared informally from one officer to another. Also, Thomson was not the only spycop to acquire and make use of additional false names and identities.

For example, we heard in Tranche 2 that HN5 John Dines had cover documents in at least two extra names as well as his official cover name, ‘John Barker’. He even had a driving license as ‘Wayne Cadogan’. Also, that HN2 Andy Coles used other false names, not just ‘Andy Davey’ (e.g. he was arrested as Christopher Andrew Jones while hunt sabbing in November 1994).

Thomson has been criticised by others for his shoddy tradecraft. He is known to have travelled on a dodgy passport that he’d tampered with by removing pages, and indeed to have multiple passports.

Unlike the other spycops, who tended to do a complete vanishing job from their targets’ lives when their deployments ended, ‘James Straven’ took the extraordinary risk of staying in contact with a number of women friends for up to sixteen years after his supposed departure.

QUESTIONS FOR THE MET

Thomson claims to have been arrested and given the name ‘Kevin Crossland’ to the police on two occasions. He must have known that there was a risk of his managers finding out about these. The Crosslands believe that this indicates that he was confident that they wouldn’t mind.

They want the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, to study the chronology closely and find out the truth, if he can.

It is clear Thomson was only able to act like this because of a complete lack of effective management, supervision or oversight.

This is further illustrated by his apparent lack of ‘product’, the reports that were meant to be the point of his deployment. Between January 2000 and March 2002, he submitted just 21 intelligence reports; fewer than one per month.

There is a seeming reference to the Thomson affair in the Met’s 2008 internal SDS Closing Report and ‘alarm bells being missed’.

Supposedly SDS managers carried out a detailed investigation into Thomson’s activities. A Detective Inspector, known to us only as HN53, recalls compiling a list of criminal offences committed by Thomson. Detective Sergeant HN9 told Operation Herne, the police’s internal spycops inquiry, that he had fully expected Thomson to be arrested for his wrongdoing.

NO CONSEQUENCES

However, Thomson was never arrested and charged, nor even formally disciplined. Murphy submits that he was shielded from prosecution because the SDS preferred to do things informally, protecting the entire operation from scrutiny or exposure.

She notes that all that happened was a temporary reduction in his vetting status, a temporary removal of his firearms licence, and a temporary move to administrative duties. He was allowed to continue working as a Metropolitan Police officer until 2014.

An officer who left the SDS before Thomson joined, HN56 ‘Alan “Nick” Nicholson’, has given evidence about James Thomson trying to get hold of a cover driving licence, after his undercover deployment had ended, ‘for nefarious purposes’. He did not remember what name this licence was in.

Incredibly, Thomson was recommended for promotion after his criminal activities had come to light, by none other than the now-disgraced SDS boss, HN10 Bob Lambert, someone who was quite partial to criminality and fraudulent expenses claims himself.

This is just one of many issues which the Crosslands want the Inquiry to thoroughly investigate. They heard, and acknowledge, what the police had to say the previous day about supporting their campaign for answers.

However, it is clear that the Crosslands need to gain a greater understanding of the institutional knowledge around many of these issues in order to make sense of what happened, and what they term ‘the institutional malaise’ that led to such a lack of effective scrutiny and oversight on the part of senior police officers. These answers can only come from the Met itself.

Murphy ends with these words:

‘It is increasingly apparent, as this Inquiry commences its third tranche, that cloaking the SDS in secrecy and depriving it of any form of public scrutiny or accountability facilitated the SDS to descend into yet further depths.’

Charlotte Kilroy KC

Kilroy represents the Category H core participants. In this tranche, this means women who were deceived into sexual relationships by undercover officers, as well as ‘Wendy’, who was groomed by SDS officer James Thomson and deceived into a long-term close friendship.

You can download their written Opening Statement. As it says, by 1993 the practice of deceiving women in this way was a fully entrenched part of the SDS’s operations.

SUSTAINED SYSTEMIC ABUSE

Kilroy points out that this Inquiry has already heard evidence of dozens of such sexually abusive relationships spanning the previous 25 years. Many involved women who were young, and/or vulnerable in some way. For some of them, the undercover officer was their first serious boyfriend. For many, he seemed a potential life partner, a soul mate.

The undercovers made up all kinds of false stories to entrap and manipulate the women they targeted in this way, to downplay suspicions and deepen their emotional involvement. They inflicted an emotional whirlwind on their victims. They used remarkably similar strategies to exit from their lives, convincingly feigning breakdowns over a sustained period before disappearing, leaving the women shaken to the core, worried for their partner’s lives.

All of this was done with the full knowledge and approval of SDS managers and, as is now clear, the knowledge and approval, or at least indifference, of more senior officers.

Kilroy reminds Mitting that:

‘Woman after woman has told this Inquiry about the havoc these men wreaked with their lives, the confusion, paranoia and heartbreak. The lost life chances, houses not bought, jobs not taken, children not had.’

They have told us about the worry caused by their loved ones suddenly disappearing without trace, the fruitless searches they embarked on. Then came the devastation that accompanied the appalling discovery, usually many years later, that these men had been paid to lie and spy. This has understandably caused huge trust issues, and for many, paranoia and paralysis.

‘Many women have told you that they feel they have been raped.’

As this Inquiry goes on, we hear yet more of these stories, with disturbing new twists and features, all ending in irrevocable damage.

In these new hearings, Tranche 3 Phase 1, we will hear from four of these women: ‘Alison’, ‘Ellie’, ‘Sara’ and ‘Wendy’.

In Phase 2, which starts in February 2026, we’ll hear about seven more.

A CHANGE IN THE LAW IS LONG OVERDUE

Before going further, Kilroy addresses a common misconception: that these deceptions were basically equivalent to any con man or lothario who tells lies in order to trick women. Immoral but normal, in short.

She says that these cases are fundamentally different, because the misconduct is much more serious, and the damage caused by it far more severe and far-reaching. This is abuse being carried out by paid agents of the state, acting with the active or tacit approval of some part of the state apparatus and then deliberately concealed, by the state, for many years.

These men were trained and guided to be the opposite of their real selves, overseen by an unknown group of managerial staff, and paid by the state for every second they spent with the women they lied to. They planned their profoundly distressing departures long ahead of time. They were only ever in these women’s lives to undermine the values the women held most dear; to betray them, their friends, and their principles.

Kilroy describes the impact on the victim and explains how this experience ruptures our trust in the entire world:

‘This is not just one act of sex or one act of deception, but thousands of memories of intimate moments in hundreds of days trashed. The photograph albums we have in the mind are polluted by an intruder and that intruder is the state, who we have always been told to trust. The painstaking work of reconstructing our memories to represent truth will take a lifetime…

The particular evil of the acts perpetrated by each of these undercover officers and their managers and superiors must also be properly acknowledged. I will be asking you to do that in your report on the SDS. I will also be asking you to recommend that in future this conduct is accepted to be a serious sexual offence…

It cannot be right that an ordinary person who impersonates a person’s husband or pretends to be a different gender is committing rape, but undercover officers who trick their way into women’s bodies, and their managers who conspire with them to do so, are not committing any sexual offence at all.’

VIOLATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS

The officers who have behaved in this way and have been questioned at the Inquiry have all accepted that they did so in the clear knowledge that consent would never have been given if their true identities were known.

Kilroy points out that this violation has been found by a court to be a breach of article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the right to freedom from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment – saying it is shameful that domestic UK law does not yet fully recognise the special breach of trust and the severe consequences for the victim.

She proposes that a new statutory offence is created, to deal with this form of ‘aggravated rape’, and promises to address this in more detail in her closing submissions at the end of Tranche 3.

She also mentioned the case brought by ‘Monica’ who was deceived into a relationship by HN14 Jim Boyling ‘Jim Sutton’.

She brought a case to challenge the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision not to prosecute him for sexual offences and misconduct in public office. Her case failed. Kilroy asks Mitting to include a recommendation in his report that the decision of the Appeal Court be revisited.

She says that society owes this to the women as recompense for the failings that led to their abuse, and owes it to future generations to ensure nothing like this ever happens again.

MORE APOLOGIES FROM THE POLICE

Kilroy notes that in his opening statement, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police has made yet another apology for the way these women were treated, and the SDS managers’ failure to prevent this mistreatment.

It repeats what the police have said before about these relationships being ‘abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong’, the result of an institutional culture of sexism and misogyny within the police force.

He has also condemned the attitudes of the SDS managers, who he says demonstrated a:

‘complete disregard for the sexual autonomy of the individuals who were being deceived into sexual relationships and the emotional and psychological consequences of that deception on them’

He also rejected the impression given by the unit’s Tradecraft Manual, that such relationships fell into a ‘grey area’, rather than being wrong.

Kilroy highlights three more admissions that have now been made by the police.

1. It is thanks to the efforts of many of the women who are ‘Category H’ core participants at the Inquiry (i.e. women deceived into relationships) that many senior police officers have begun to recognise sexual misconduct as an abuse of power.
2. There is said to be ‘deep regret’ that this wasn’t recognised or understood earlier.
3. The police want to apologise for the way they have treated these women in the past. Specifically, the way they responded to their civil claims, their insistence that they could ‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny’ what had happened, and their failure to prioritise candour and openness over continuing secrecy. They additionally now apologise for taking so long to recognise the abuse of power inherent in this serious sexual misconduct.

Welcoming these developments, the women agree that this has taken the police far too long. Taking part in this Inquiry has at times been an ordeal. The women have attended many of the hearings. As well as giving their own evidence, they have listened to that of former officers, who have often been deeply duplicitous and contemptuous.

SPYCOPS DISAGREE WITH THE POLICE

Kilroy explains that some officers have pointedly refused to align themselves with the police’s apology, and their evidence has been:

‘marred by repeated failure to show remorse for their sexual misconduct and by attempts to justify it.’

She goes on to speak about the power of the women’s contributions to the Inquiry:

‘All of us who have heard the women speak for themselves, describing what it means to be deceived and ill-treated in this way, the thousands of degradations, large and small which it involves, will have been struck by how impossible it is for anyone else to properly describe what has happened to them or to imagine it.

Their evidence, the damage that has been done to them, and the dignity of their suffering leaves an indelible impression. There is, in short, no substitute for hearing from the women themselves.’

She then extends an invitation to the Commissioner to meet with the women as a group and hear from them directly, with the aim of working to ensure that these abuses are never repeated.

Kilroy moves on to give a little more detail about each of the four women who will be a witness in this first set of Tranche 3 hearings running up to Christmas 2025.

TRANCHE 3 PHASE 1 WITNESSES:
‘ALISON’ (MONDAY 8 DECEMBER)

‘Alison’ was deceived into a five-year relationship by HN15 Mark Jenner ‘Mark Cassidy’ between 1995-2000. She was 30 when it began, and thought they would have children and a life-long relationship. She will be exhibiting video footage she filmed, showing their life together.

‘Mark Cassidy’ (as she knew him) moved into her flat, but refused to have children with her. As a result they attended couples counselling for 18 months. She says now that this was extremely cruel of him. She had no idea that he already had a wife and children.

Kilroy goes further, pointing out that:

‘It requires a cold, calculating mindset to sustain a deception this pervasive. His behaviour could be described as “sociopathic”.’

Jenner disappeared very suddenly from her life, turning it upside down. Alison spent years looking for him, and says that at times she questioned her own sanity. Eventually she met Helen Steel, who had been similarly abused by HN5 John Dines.

Alison pieced together her suspicions and worked out what Jenner was. However, even after she brought a civil claim against the police, they refused to confirm whether or not he was ever a police officer, citing their supposed cast iron policy of ‘neither confirm nor deny’. The impact of this, and Jenner’s deception, has been huge.

Kilroy highlights the fact that, rather than showing any remorse or empathy in his statement, Jenner has sought to portray himself as the true victim, showing scant regard for either Alison or his former wife, ‘S’.

‘S’ will also be appearing, on Tuesday 9 December, and telling the Inquiry how her ex-husband’s deceit and sexual infidelity has impacted her.

Four days have been allocated to hearing what Mark Jenner himself has to say, 15-18 December.

‘SARA’ (FRIDAY 17 OCTOBER)

‘Sara’ met HN16 James Thomson ‘James Straven’ while hunt sabbing in 1998, and this developed into a sexual relationship soon after. She has described it as serious and intense; she loved him, and thought it was mutual.

He told her all sorts of lies, and used similar manipulative tactics to other SDS undercovers to end their sexual relationship after a year or so, telling her that he had been sexually abused as a child.

However, he didn’t do this in order to exfiltrate himself from the field. Instead they continued as emotionally intimate but platonic friends until she moved abroad in 2001. At this point he started a new relationship with someone she knew, ‘Ellie’.

‘Sara’ wrote to him afterwards but he never replied. She was left feeling profoundly unsettled.

It wasn’t until August 2018 that she learnt (from the Inquiry) that ‘Straven’ had in fact been James Thomson, an undercover police officer.

This shocking news has affected her in many ways. She’s been left feeling angry, paranoid and betrayed. As time has gone on the stress has been exhausting, and she’s realised more about the ways in which she was used and violated. She feels disgusted, distressed and drained.

‘ELLIE’ (TUESDAY 23 OCTOBER AND MONDAY 3 NOVEMBER)

‘Ellie’ was also deceived by HN16 James Thomson ‘James Straven’, and had her first serious relationship with him. When it began she was just 21. He was 38 at the time, but told her he was 33.

She had first met him over a year earlier, while volunteering at a wildlife hospital with a mutual friend, ‘Wendy’.

She and her sister moved in with Wendy, and Thomson then asked Wendy to set them up as a couple. Their relationship developed quickly; she describes him being romantic and sending her postcards. After a year or so, he told her that he had to move to the United States as his children were now living there, and he left.

However, he didn’t disappear entirely. He stayed in touch and continued to string her along. They would sometimes meet up in person for dates and continued kissing when they did. They stayed in contact with regular emails to each other.

Even after she moved to Australia in 2005, Thomson continued being romantic and sexually suggestive in his communication. They had sex again in 2015, and several years after this he asked for her Australian address.

This was well after the Inquiry had been set up. He must have known the truth would come out.

Despite knowing Ellie’s home address, and her email, Thomson lied to the Inquiry when they asked him if he could help to locate her.

A year later, in 2018, he contacted Ellie himself. He confessed to being a police officer, telling her not to tell Wendy. He did not apologise to her.

She still hasn’t fully processed this. She feels anxious and unsafe. She is now single and says that she can never trust another man again.

‘WENDY’ (TUESDAY 23 OCTOBER)

‘Wendy’ found out the truth about ‘James Straven’ from her friend Ellie in 2018.

She had known him for over 20 years by this point. She first met him in 1997, when she was a hunt sab, just 17 years old. She suspected that he had a romantic interest in her, but for many years, they were just friends.

Her mother was terminally ill, and died in 2001. ‘Straven’ met her mother during this period, and inveigled himself into Wendy’s support circle, driving her to hospital and taking other support roles.

Wendy bought a house with her inheritance, and was shocked to find out recently that the police tried to prevent this purchase.

She moved to Australia in 2005 but ‘Straven’ remained in contact with her, always asking her for news of mutual friends and acquaintances in the animal rights scene.

Since she found out that he was in fact a police officer named James Thomson, she has made huge changes in her life, and stepped back from involvement in animal rights and some of the work she used to do. She doesn’t feel safe, and doesn’t trust people.

She feels guilty about introducing him to people like Ellie, and for the part she may have inadvertently played in him gathering information. Both her mental and physical health have suffered.

CONCLUSION

Kilroy says the deeds of James Thomson seems quite extraordinary, and declares them scandalous even by SDS standards.

She highlights that he has been the subject of numerous critical internal police reports over the years, which record a catalogue of misconduct, lies and potential criminal offences. The failure to discipline him was representative of just how lawless the SDS had become.

However, these reports contain little sign of concern or care for the women he deceived. Such relationships are not even mentioned in the Met’s 2009 internal SDS Closing Report.

This omission makes it clear that other forms of undercover misconduct such as misleading courts were taken much more seriously than the abuse of women’s human rights and bodily autonomy. As recently as 2009 these abuses were viewed as incidental, inevitable and an intrinsic part of the job. They still are by many serving senior officers.

Kilroy suggests:

‘Sexual relationships were synonymous with and necessary to the “deep swimming” approach to undercover deployments that was so celebrated by Bob Lambert and the SDS.’

Officers of all ranks remain blinded by institutionalised misogyny, and far too many still seek to make excuses for the spycops’ sexual misconduct. However, the general public have been horrified to learn about these deceitful relationships. It is clear to them that the culture of the police needs to change.

Kilroy ends her submissions by drawing Mitting’s attention to one more point, which is raised in the written opening: that the Inquiry should explore why the legislative changes made in the Tranche 3 era (1993-2008), for example the introduction of the Human Rights Act 1998 and Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, did not effect any real change in the way the SDS operated.

This is another argument for the introduction of a new criminal offence, rather than relying on failed police regulations and codes of conduct to prevent sexual relationships from taking place.

Mitting responds, thanking Kilroy’s clients for their witness statements and their willingness to give oral evidence about these matters.

He follows this by saying he thinks that recommending changes to the laws around rape are beyond this Inquiry’s Terms of Reference, and would require more input from ‘fields well outside undercover policing’. He tells Kilroy that they should both reflect on this.

This avoidance of the issue underlines one of the Inquiry’s major failings. It is common practice for a public inquiry to appoint a panel with relevant life experience to advise it.

Since the beginning, we have said that Sir John Mitting’s immensely privileged white male life cannot have given him the understanding required to address systemic racism and sexism. To achieve its aims, the Inquiry needs a diverse panel of advisors, as has proved so vital in other inquiries. Mitting has steadfastly rebuffed the suggestion.

Four days have been allocated to hearing what James Thomson has to say for himself: 5, 6, 10 & 11 November.

Angus McCullough KC

Angus McCullough KC speaks on behalf of ‘S’.

She is the ex-wife of HN15 Mark Jenner ‘Mark Cassidy’. Along with two other former wives of undercover officers, she was designated as a Category M core participant in this Inquiry (families of police officers).

They contributed a joint Opening Statement at the start of Tranche 1, back in November 2020, and we reported on McCullough’s powerful opening statement then.

Since that time, the other two women (‘KTC’ and Jennifer Francis) have decided to end their involvement in the Inquiry.

McCullough says that much of what has been heard in evidence since 2020 has borne out what was said in that statement, while some of it has gone beyond even their very worst fears.

THE BACKGROUND OF ‘S’

He starts by providing some more information about ‘S’, who has submitted a new Opening Statement for Tranche 3 Phase 1. She says that she was in a happy marriage with Jenner, and they had two young children. He was already a Special Branch officer and confided that he had been asked to take on undercover work.

His manager, HN10 Bob Lambert, came to the house to meet her. She knew that Lambert had received a Commendation for his own undercover work, and erroneously believed him to be a trustworthy, family-oriented man. She was given the impression that her husband’s new role would be dangerous but very important for the safety of society.

She made many personal sacrifices in order to support Jenner’s career choices, and took care to keep his new work secret from friends and family members. He told her that it would mean him being away most evenings and weekends, so she took on the bulk of the work of caring for their two children at these times.

LOYALTY AND PERSONAL COST

This unwavering support extended to agreeing, following an incident when one of his targets walked past the house, to uproot her young family and move out of London.

Jenner and Lambert both told her that Jenner would be at risk of serious violence if they stayed in their original home.

The move entailed enormous upheaval (though the financial costs were covered by the SDS). Now that she’s discovered the true nature of his target groups – antifascists and trade unions – she questions the whole basis of the move.

She stuck with her husband throughout his deployment and for many years afterwards, but they eventually separated. Even after the spycops scandal broke in 2011, he did not tell her the truth.

She only learnt about his sexual infidelity, and the long-term sexual relationship he had entered into while undercover, from reports which began appearing in the media in 2013, in which the other woman was referred to as ‘Alison’.

This news blind-sided her and her family. She has described how the devastating impact of this discovery was exacerbated by the police’s policy to ‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny’ any information about these undercovers. She couldn’t trust what Jenner told her. Much of the truth has only been revealed due to what she credites as the ‘hard work and tenacity’ of Alison and the other women who had been deceived by spycops.

‘S’ has had to re-examine every aspect of her marriage and work things out for herself. She has realised that when Jenner took trips abroad without her and the children, something he did multiple times during his deployment, using his holiday time and their family money to do so, he was accompanied by Alison. The couple went on trips to Vietnam, Greece, Israel, Thailand, the Netherlands, Scotland and Northern Ireland together.

‘S’ says it is inconceivable that the SDS managers did not know the truth about these trips, and about the relationship with Alison. He and Alison lived together from February 1996 to March 2000.

‘S’ considers it her duty to take part in this Inquiry, and she hopes that her unique perspective will help it uncover the truth.

AN INTIMATE VIEW OF THE SPYCOPS

Some of the explanations and excuses she’s heard in the spycops’ evidence so far do not ring true to her, based on her knowledge of the unit. She is in a position to counter the narrative that has been spun by these officers, by relating her own experiences and memories.

She says that it is not the case that SDS officers had to spend long periods away from their real families, isolated and stuck in their undercover identities, a claim made by HN2 Andy Coles, HN43 Peter Francis, and HN78 Trevor Morris.

She remembers things differently. Jenner returned to her and their children almost every single weekday morning (when Alison and his other targets thought he had gone to work) and stayed with them until as late as 5pm on the days when there was no SDS meeting.

Similarly, many of the spycops have said that they were left to their own devices, unsupervised for the most part, and had very little contact with the unit’s managers.

‘S’ recalls that Jenner spoke with his boss, Bob Lambert, on the phone every day. The entire SDS met in person twice a week, and Jenner had a circle of friends in the unit. ‘S’ met many of his colleagues, and their wives and partners, at events such as the SDS Christmas parties.

Finally, she remembers well the culture of secrecy that surrounded the unit, and how important it seemed. She describes feeling so brainwashed that even when Jenner’s misdeeds were being exposed in Parliament and in the media, she felt unable to talk freely or seek support from anyone.

THE LACK OF WELFARE SUPPORT

It is obvious that nobody at all, either within the SDS or the wider Metropolitan Police, ever considered the impact of these deployments on the officers’ partners or children, or ways of mitigating this. The only thing offered to ‘S’, after Jenner had been exposed, was a panic button.

Many of the former spycops have spoken about the way that this work affected their mental health. She notes that those who are giving evidence in this tranche say their personalities changed during their deployments – they became more short tempered and aggressive, suffered from paranoia and anger or developed conditions such as PTSD and dissociative identity disorder.

Yet the SDS managers ignored these problems, or failed to prevent them. And they did nothing to support the families who bore the brunt of the behaviour of these damaged men.

THE RISK OF RELATIONSHIPS

Of most concern to ‘S’ was the revelation that the risk of spycops engaging in sexual relationships was common knowledge within the unit by 1994, yet nobody thought to let her know about this when Mark was being recruited.

Jenner was advised by HN2 Andy Coles that such relationships were ‘inevitable’ but claims he didn’t believe that he would engage in one himself. It is noteable that he began his deceitful relationship with ‘Alison’ in the early months of his deployment.

‘S’ provides a list, in her written statement, of evidence relating to this sexual misconduct and its prevalence.

As McCullough notes:

‘Peter Francis says that he would be very surprised if the whole of the SDS did not know that nearly every SDS officer was having sex whilst undercover.’

Far from the shallow, ‘fleeting and disastrous’ relationships recommended by Coles in the unit’s infamous 1995 Tradecraft Manual, it appears that during this era, these relationships were often long-term ones, considered serious and committed by the deceived women.

The spycops moved in with them, went on holiday with them, celebrated Christmas, New Year and Valentines Day with them, proposed marriage to them, and in some cases, maintained these fictional relationships in some way long after their deployment had ended.

QUESTIONS RAISED SO FAR

‘S’ hopes that she will learn more about her husband’s recruitment and his deployment. She says she has been shocked by some of the evidence that has now come to light, leaving her with more questions, such as:

• If one of the reasons for the SDS’s policy of only recruiting married men was to minimise the risk of them indulging in sexual relationships while undercover, but found it ‘clearly ineffective’, why wasn’t it scrapped?
• If the purpose of SDS managers visiting officers and their wives at home during the recruitment process was to carry out some kind of assessment of their suitability, but nobody was ever assessed as unsuitable, what was the point?

In addition, she has included a long list of questions in paragraph 25 of her written Opening Statement, most of which are queries first raised by her and the other Category M women in 2020. As of 2025, they still have no answers.

WHAT ‘S’ HOPES FOR FROM THIS INQUIRY

‘S’ says that she appreciates the Met Commissioner’s apology to her and other ex-wives, reiterated the previous day.

Disappointed by some of the tight-lipped witnesses who have already appeared, she hopes that the SDS officers – undercover officers and managers – who give evidence in Tranche 3 do so with more candour, and the same sense of commitment that they had to their SDS work.

She has observed that many of the other witnesses (i.e. those who were spied on) have been remarkably candid in their evidence, and she wishes the spycops would do the same. She believes it is disrespectful of them not to.

She has chosen to be anonymous in order to protect the privacy of her children. She hopes that this Inquiry results in more recognition of the impact of the SDS on them and women in her position.

‘S’ now seeks openness, transparency and answers. She would like to feel assured that lessons will be learnt and laws introduced to ensure:

• that nobody will be subjected to sexual deceit in the name of policing again
• that undercover officers’ partners will not be exploited in the way that she was
• that there is a cultural and systemic change in police attitudes towards women, to expunge misogyny and sexual misconduct from policing

‘S’ is due to give her evidence in person on Tuesday 9 December.

Leslie Thomas KC

Leslie Thomas KC speaks on behalf of six clients of Bhatt Murphy solicitors.

They have given a written Opening Statement.

INTRODUCTION

The first three were all spied on by the SDS because of their involvement in campaigning for justice after the deaths of close family members, all of whom were killed in contact with the police.

They are:

• Myrna Simpson (the mother of Joy Gardner)
• Bernard Renwick (the brother of Roger Sylvester)
• Lee Lawrence (the son of Cherry Groce)

The other three are:

• Winston Silcott, a victim of a miscarriage of justice. He was falsely convicted of the murder of PC Keith Blakelock and later had the conviction quashed.
• Dr Graham Smith, who founded the Hackney Community Defence Association (HCDA), which supported people who had suffered as a result of police misconduct.
• Mark Metcalf, who was involved in the Colin Roach Centre in Hackney, where HCDA was based.

Bhatt Murphy, their solicitors, also represent other people whose experiences of the spycops have been very similar. We’ve heard from some of them in previous tranches, including Sharon Grant OBE and Celia Stubbs. Stafford Scott will supply a written witness statement to be published as part of Tranche 3 Phase 1, but he is not being called to give oral evidence.

The police have never liked being criticised. They didn’t like the many groups who campaigned for police accountability and protested about police harassment, racism and brutality, even when that behaviour had inflicted serious injuries and death.

Thomas starts by reminding us about the founder of the police, Sir Robert Peel, and his seventh principle of policing, quoting it in full. He says that the SDS:

‘forgot that they were citizens in uniform, and instead treated fellow citizens as enemies.’

Those he represents were citizens who sought justice, and found themselves under surveillance and covert scrutiny as a result. He reminds us that these were often traumatised and grieving people whose lawful campaigns were treated as threats.

He says the evidence clearly shows:

‘a pattern of fabrication, inter-generational targeting, trauma and mission creep.’

His clients were not accused of criminality or public order breaches. What they had in common was taking legal action against the Metropolitan Police in an effort to simply hold the police to account for what they had done.

THE SDS: PAID TO LIE

In their reporting, the SDS frequently lied about these campaign groups. There are many examples of them fabricating information, from making up names of non-existent groups, to misrepresenting their politics, to false accusations of all kinds.

It is noticeable that most of the people Thomas speaks about are Black. The SDS’s bias and prejudice against both those on the left and against Black people obviously informed the way they reported on these groups. Thomas explains that this tended to mean portraying them as dangerous or at least hopelessly open to exploitation.

Whether it was to justify their infiltration and ongoing surveillance of a particular group, or to justify their own existence, it is clear that the SDS often deliberately exaggerated their reports.

Thomas notes that the Met’s internal SDS Closing Report, compiled in 2009 after the unit had been closed down, refers to them ‘padding out an otherwise redundant operational deployment’.

ONCE TARGETED, ALWAYS TARGETED

Some of this surveillance went on for decades and often across multiple generations of the same families.

Lee Lawrence was just 11 when his mother was shot. Joy Gardner’s son was five years old when his mother was suffocated to death. Winston Silcott was a young man when he was wrongly convicted of murder and sent to prison.

Just like Celia Stubbs, who we know was the subject of surveillance for decades after the police killed her partner Blair Peach, all of them were targeted by the police for many years, compounding the trauma they had already lived through.

The spycops’ intrusion knew no bounds. They often attended, and reported on, funerals and memorial services, events that should have been private. Thomas asks the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting:

‘What kind of police force spies on grieving families?’

CREEPY AND CHILLING

Many of the spycops’ reports had very little to do with public order, the supposed reason for their undercover operations, and did not even pretend to be.

In what Thomas terms a clear sign of mission creep, these reports included details of civil legal claims and defence strategies, meetings with lawyers. They prove that, contrary to earlier claims, the unit definitely was monitoring members of Parliament and elected officials.

By targeting groups and individuals who were involved in or supporting those involved in litigation, the SDS undermined the rule of law.

There are accounts of peculiar burglaries and break-ins, where the only thing taken seems to have been information. There are suspicions of SDS involvement in these incidents.

The unit’s managers were complicit in the wrongdoing of the undercover officers. They sanctioned and approved their actions, signed off on their reports and failed to raise concerns about the inclusion of racist language or legally privileged material. There is a strong sense that this rot ran up the chain of command.

The surveillance of police accountability groups, and other entirely lawful and peaceful justice campaigns, is widely understood to have a ‘chilling effect’ on democratic participation.

Back in 1984, the Home Office clearly told Special Branch (in response to their 1983 report Political Extremism and the Campaign for Police Accountability within the Metropolitan Police District) that they should not spy on people just because they were ‘highly critical of the police’, yet it is obvious that the SDS merrily ignored these instructions. Because they could.

For more about police spying on police accountability groups, see this excellent article by Donal O’Driscoll of the Undercover Research Group.

MISINFORMATION AND MISSING EVIDENCE

Winston Silcott, like many of those maltreated or killed by the police, was demonised and smeared in the media.

It has long been suspected that the SDS gathered all sorts of information about bereaved families, their friends and supporters, so the police could pass misinformation on to the media and undermine their campaigns. It is crucial that this Inquiry investigate this matter.

Both HN78 Trevor Morris and HN15 Mark Jenner have told the Inquiry that they submitted many more reports than have been disclosed here. In the absence of so many of the SDS’s reports, it will not be as easy to fully understand why (or when) groups were targeted.

This is made more difficult by the fact that so many of the former spycops are not being expected to give evidence. For example, HN81 ‘Dave Hagan’, whose absence is particularly frustrating for the family justice groups he spied on.

MYRNA SIMPSON

Thomas then gives more information about each individual he represents, starting with Myrna Simpson.

He asks for an image of Joy Gardner to be displayed, but the Inquiry doesn’t bother to show it to those of us watching on YouTube.

Joy was born in Jamaica, and later moved to the UK where her mother, a British citizen, was already living. At the time of her death, she was a mature student, living in North London with her five year old son who had been born there.

Thomas describes in detail exactly how, in July 1993, Gardner was killed in the presence of her young son by police officers from the Met’s Aliens Deportation Group.

Having been denied any contact with her solicitor, she was forced to the floor, bound, handcuffed and gagged with 13 feet of surgical tape wrapped round her head, preventing her from breathing. She was taken to hospital in a coma, and died there of asphyxiation caused by the tape and restraints.

‘JUSTICE FOR JOY’ CAMPAIGN

Joy’s mother, Myrna Simpson, campaigned for truth and accountability for many years following this tragedy, and continues to do so.

The police officers responsible for Joy’s death were acquitted of manslaughter at a trial in 1995, having told the jury that Joy was ‘the most violent woman they had ever dealt with’. There has never been an inquest or a public inquiry.

Thomas tells us that this acquittal raised concerns within the highest levels of the Met at the time. They were terrified that riots would break out.

At least four different SDS officers are known to have filed reports about Myrna Simpson and her campaigning. One of them, HN78 Trevor Morris, fabricated a false story about the involvement of the Socialist Workers Party, and also claims to have spoken at one of the public meetings held by the campaign in Tottenham Town Hall.

Simpson doesn’t believe this happened, and doesn’t wish to give it the dignity of a response, but has no memory of the meeting.

It’s unlikely the truth will ever be known, as Counsel to this Inquiry failed to test the claims made by Morris when he gave his oral evidence last year.

At no point do the SDS managers seem to have considered the propriety of spycops involving themselves in such campaigns or speaking at such public meetings.

Simpson was horrified by the derogatory and untrue reporting that appeared in the media following her daughter’s death, and has provided the Inquiry with an academic report of these smears.

She does not accept that there was any justification at all for the spycops’ intrusion into her life, saying:

‘Our aim was not to make trouble. It was just to get a voice as we needed justice for Joy, for the way she was killed. We still need that justice.’

BERNARD RENWICK

Renwick is taking part in the Inquiry on behalf of his family, including his parents, Sheila and Rupert, who came to London from Grenada over 60 years ago and had five children.

Bernard Renwick’s brother, Roger Sylvester, was killed by police in January 1999. We are shown a picture of him. 30 years old at the time, his death resulted from prolonged restraint by eight police officers. They have never faced criminal charges. The inquest jurt took just two

ROGER SYLVESTER JUSTICE CAMPAIGN

The family waited for almost five years for an inquest, which finally took place in 2003. The jury took just two hours to return a unanimous verdict of unlawful killing, but that was later quashed in the High Court.

The family have continued campaigning for justice for Roger, but were disappointed by the decision of the Crown Prosecution Service earlier this year not to prosecute the officers who killed him.

The campaign was set up and led by members of Sylvester’s family, and the very first march and vigil took place in Tottenham just one week after his death.

Renwick strongly disputes what HN81 ‘Dave Hagan’ put in the report he filed about this event, which included the claim that it was ‘predominantly’ Black youth to make it sound scarier. Renwick points out that it was led by his parents and their pastors, widely publicised, and attended by local people of all ages.

He is adamant that there has never been a group with the name ‘Friends of Roger Sylvester’, yet this name appears in SDS reports authored by Hagan.

There are many other falsehoods and inconsistencies in these reports, including complicated, entirely concocted stories about Sylvester’s family and their relationship with other family justice campaigns and groups such as the Movement for Justice.

Renwick says that the police did not view his brother as the vulnerable young man he was, someone struggling with mental illness. Due to their racism, they saw him as a Black man who posed a threat. This racial prejudice can also be seen in the intelligence reports of the SDS, which led to riot police turning up at the inquest.

Bernard Renwick is due to give evidence in person on Thursday 27 November.

LEE LAWRENCE

Thomas introduces Lee Lawrence as ‘an award-winning writer’. His book, The Louder I Will Sing: story of racism, riots and redemption, is about growing up as a young Black man in the UK, including the way that the shooting of his mother, Cherry Groce, has influenced every aspect of his life. He founded an initiative to tackle youth violence, the Cherry Groce Foundation.

Lawrence’s mother, Cherry Groce, was shot by the police in September 1985, during a surprise raid of the family’s home. Lawrence was just 11 years old at the time. He and his sisters were in the house when the raid happened.

Their mother was left paralysed, and had to use a wheelchair for the rest of her life. He and his siblings became her main carers, and he continued living with her until he was 27.

In his statement Lawrence describes an incident which took place in October 1999. Having intervened to prevent a racist attack, Lawrence was charged with assault.

One of the SDS undercovers, HN81 ‘Dave Hagan’, began filing inaccurate reports about Lawrence and this case, in which he made sure to refer to him as ‘Lee Groce’, and ‘the son of Cherry Groce’.

Cherry Groce died in 2011, as a result of the injuries she’d suffered in 1985. Lawrence fought for an inquest, which eventually took place in 2014. He and the other surviving members of the family were finally allowed to see the police’s own report into the botched raid, which had been deliberately withheld for 29 years.

The inquest found that Groce’s death was the result of ‘serious and multiple police failures’, after which the Met Commissioner issued an apology to the family. Cherry Groce never received an apology when she was alive.

THE ‘GROCE FAMILY SUPPORT CAMPAIGN’ (SIC)

We now know that the name ‘Cherry Groce’ appeared in an SDS report just six weeks after she was shot.

The 1985 SDS Annual Report contains the bizarre claim that the ‘GROCE Family Support Campaign’ is an organisation that has ‘been effectively penetrated by SDS officers’.

Earlier in 2025, the Inquiry heard evidence from HN115 Tony Wait that the term ‘penetrated’ usually meant that a spycop had infiltrated a group and repeatedly attended/ reported on its activity.

Lawrence disputes this. Friends and members of the local community did meet to discuss what had happened, but he says there was never a definable campaign as such, so he is at a loss to understand what this might have referred to.

He has now seen around a dozen reports about his 1999 arrest and subsequent trial, at which he was acquitted. They contain false allegations, details of his solicitors and his defence case, and the possibility of him taking civil action against the police. They all appear to have been written by HN81 ‘Dave Hagan’.

Although Hagan has provided a written statement to the Inquiry, he has not even tried to explain this reporting. He has been excused by the Inquiry from giving evidence in person to answer any questions.

Lee Lawrence’s second book, The Colour of Injustice, described as ‘a history of the overpolicing and under-protection of Britain’s Black community’, was published in October 2025, and he was interviewed by the Guardian in September.

Thomas ends by asking Mitting to consider whether the Met’s ‘damage limitation perspective’ was a driving factor in its persistent interest in campaigns for justice and police accountability.

WINSTON SILCOTT

PC Keith Blakelock was killed in October 1985 during disturbances on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham. These disturbances followed the death of Cynthia Jarrett after four police officers had entered her home.

Winston Silcott and two other men were convicted of Blakelock’s murder in March 1987, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. However, all three convictions were quashed in 1991 after it became clear that the case rested on a police-fabricated ‘confession’, and there was no other evidence to link them with the crime.

THE ‘TOTTENHAM THREE’ CAMPAIGN

Many people campaigned tirelessly for these convictions to be overturned. Amongst them was Winston’s brother, George Silcott, and a good friend of his, Delroy Lindo. There was also Stafford Scott, of the Broadwater Farm Defence Committee, who gave written evidence to the Undercover Policing Inquiry in Tranche 2.

Even though none of them had links to left wing politics or groups, or to any public order concerns, and they were campaigning against a clear miscarriage of justice, they became the subjects of SDS reporting, ‘with alarming regularity’, according to Thomas.

These reports included all sorts of personal information about family members, details of phone calls made from prison, legal matters and George Silcott’s election campaign.

Even after the convictions were overturned, the SDS spying continued. Winston was the subject of SDS reports until at least 2001. He ended up spending longer in prison than the other two because of a second conviction relating to an incident where he acted in self-defence, but he is now out.

Six different SDS officers reported on the Silcott family. In addition, HN5 John Dines deceived Helen Steel into a relationship while undercover. Like other spycops who abused women, he manipulated her into feeling she’d found her soulmate.

Six months into the intense relationship, Dines found a flat that backed on to the Silcott family home and moved in there with Steel. This was during the campaign for Winston’s release.

The Silcotts have long held suspicions about some strange incidents involving items in their house being moved or disturbed, and wonder if there is a connection.

Winston’s conviction was quashed in November 1991. Around the same time, Dines and Steel moved out of their flat. Dines’s undercover deployment ended soon after.

The officers in charge of the investigation into the murder of Keith Blakelock were later prosecuted for fabricating the evidence that was used against the Tottenham Three, but were acquitted.

Despite being found completely innocent of Blakelock’s murder in 1991, Silcott has been the subject of unfair treatment by the police, both from individual officers and as an institution, ever since. He says he feels that he has a ‘target on his back’ because of his association with a crime the Court of Appeal agrees he did not commit, and that none of the SDS’s continued surveillance of him can be justified.

DR GRAHAM SMITH

Dr Graham Smith is a recently-retired university lecturer, and an expert in police complaints. He was involved in founding the Hackney Community Defence Association (HCDA) in 1988, and was active in it throughout its seven year life-span.

DEFENDANTS’ INFORMATION SERVICE

Separately, Dr Smith and others set up a project called the Defendants’ Information Service (DIS) in 1994. This was a very useful database of police officers who had been, in his words:

‘found to have lacked credibility and whose evidence was either not relied on by prosecutors or rejected by the courts.’

They had to register with the Data Protection Registrar so that this information could be shared with criminal defence and police litigation solicitors. The Association of Chief Police Officers and several police forces complained about the existence of the DIS, and tried to prevent this registration, or stop the service from operating, but failed.

The DIS database, its reports written for solicitors, and correspondence with them, were considered subject to ‘legal professional privilege’, i.e. they were confidential and sacrosanct from partisan spying by police. Despite this, HN15 Mark Jenner filed reports containing details of DIS.

The Colin Roach Centre, which hosted the DIS project, was broken into overnight on 22-23 December 1994, and it is thought that this may be why.

‘HACKNEY COMMUNITY DEFENCE ASSOCIATION’ (HCDA)

HCDA was first reported on within a month of its launch, by HN10 Bob Lambert ‘Bob Robinson’, who described it as ‘a front organisation for local anarchist activists’.

Smith says that this is simply not true. It was set up as a self-help group for victims of police injustice – Trevor Monerville’s family were involved – who thought it might be worth taking their cases to civil courts instead of trying to get justice from the police complaints procedure.

HCDA gained a reputation for the good work it did campaigning for police accountability, and supporting many local people with their cases in both the criminal and civil courts. A lot of these cases involved police brutality and false accusations, including the planting of drugs.

HCDA investigated cases and published reports into corrupt policing. They were instrumental in overturning many miscarriages of justice and highlighting the ongoing racism that had led to them. They were also very successful at helping people to claim damages and win settlements from the Met for the mistreatment they had suffered.

HN78 Trevor Morris ‘Anthony ‘Bobby’ Lewis’, one of the very few Black officers in SDS history, was asked to report on the group’s activities in 1991.

HN15 Mark Jenner was deployed in February 1995. He was specifically tasked with infiltrating HCDA, which is described in SDS documents at the time as being:

‘involved in the coordination and opposition to local police allegations of harassment, racism and wrongful arrest.’

Unfortunately for Jenner, this was the year when HCDA disbanded, and Dr Smith says he withdrew from community activities.

Undeterred, Jenner recorded this development in June 1995 in a report which Smith says is littered with inaccuracies, then filed at least ten more reports about Smith over the following three years.

Thomas points out that the SDS’s reporting on the HCDA, DIS and Dr Smith flew in the face of the Home Office directives that police accountability groups were strictly off-limits, and this reporting was entirely unjustified and improper.

There are lots of questions that will need to be put to Jenner when he appears during the week 15-18 December.

Dr Graham Smith is due to give evidence in person just before that, on Thursday 11 December.

MARK METCALF

Mark Metcalf has provided a personal witness statement, as well as one on behalf of the Colin Roach Centre.

Metcalf has been involved in political, community and trade union organising all his adult life. His name appears in many SDS reports, from 1986 onwards. He’s learnt that Special Branch opened a Registry File on him in 1987, marking him out as someone they were actively watching and recording.

The SDS prepared a ‘tasking strategy’ for HN15 Mark Jenner when his deployment began. According to this, his main target was supposed to be anarchists in Hackney. This document mentions Metcalf and the HCDA by name.

Metcalf says he has never been an anarchist. Despite this, Jenner admits in his statement that he set out to get close to Metcalf as a way of gaining access to a wide range of groups. Jenner then reported on every aspect of Metcalf’s life, from job applications to bank accounts.

THE COLIN ROACH CENTRE (CRC)

The Colin Roach Centre in Hackney hosted many community organisations including, as previously mentioned, the Hackney Community Defence Association and the Defendants’ Information Service.

It was named after Colin Roach, a 21 year old Black man who died of a shotgun wound inside Stoke Newington Police station on 12 January 1983.

The police claimed it was suicide, but evidence showed that he had not entered the police station with the gun, the position of the gun was inconsistent with self-use, and the police surgeon found his injuries were inconsistent with self-inflicted shotgun wounds.

In 2013, Metcalf wrote one of the earliest articles about Jenner, in which he also described HCDA’s work.

Metcalf says that the SDS’s reports suggest that the CRC and the HCDA were one and the same. Metcalf disputes this. He points out that the Centre was used as a base by many local groups – including a gay and lesbian group, support for refugees and asylum seekers, trade union work, as well as HCDA – and it provided advice of all kinds to the community.

Metcalf also disputes Jenner’s claim that his infiltration of the Colin Roach Centre had nothing to do with the work to counter police misconduct that took place there, but was for the purpose of gathering information about demonstrations for public order reasons.

Any such demonstrations that took place were well-publicised and there was no need to infiltrate the CRC to find out about them. It’s noteworthy that the police undermine their own claim: Jenner is described as having ‘unique access to a range of anti-police campaigns’ in the SDS Annual Report of 1995-96.

Jenner says he intended to use Metcalf and the CRC as ‘stepping stones’ from which to target other groups, and was particularly interested in Irish Republicans and Red Action. These weren’t groups that Metcalf got on well with, so it’s unclear why associating with him would have helped Jenner gain their trust.

Mark Metcalf is due to give evidence in person on Wednesday 10 December.

CONCLUSION

Thomas summarises the point:

‘Any decent observer knows that grieving families are not legitimate targets of covert policing. There was no disorder to quell, there was no hidden criminality to expose, only people exercising their right to demand justice.’

He ends his submissions by saying that until all the families and individual campaigners he’s talked about receive proper, meaningful, personal apologies from the Met, ‘the stain on the reputation of the Metropolitan police will endure’.

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, says he was ‘delighted’ to hear Thomas quoting Sir Robert Peel, adding that Peel ‘should be in our hearts’. It is telling that he is so effusive about Peel and is not moved to say that those who have died at the hands of the police should be in our hearts and minds.

Rajiv Menon KC

Rajiv Menon KC represents Duwayne Brooks OBE. His oral submissions closely follow the content of Brooks’ written Opening Statement.

As a teenager, Duwayne Brooks grew up in South East London. He was a close friend of Stephen Lawrence, and was with him on 22 April 1993. While waiting at a bus stop that evening they were the victims of a violent racist attack, which resulted in Stephen’s murder.

Duwayne survived, traumatised by the original attack but also by the hostility and racism of the police. Rather than dealing with him sympathetically, as the vulnerable young victim of a serious crime, they treated him like a criminal suspect.

During this period, racist attacks were horrifically common in that part of London. Stephen Lawrence was not the only one to be killed. In many ways, what happened to Brooks mirrored the experiences of another young Black man whose story has been heard in this Inquiry, Nathan Adams.

Nathan’s older brother, Rolan Adams, was killed in similar circumstances to Stephen Lawrnce, while Nathan, like Duwayne, escaped and survived.

Both Adams and Brooks suffered from severe trauma, compounded by the way the police treated them immediately after these murderous attacks. They were key eye-witnesses, as well as victims in their own right, but never received any support from the police. No charges were ever brought for the attacks against them. They were both utterly failed by the police.

Institutional racism was, and appears to still be, endemic in the Metropolitan Police, as recognised by the 1999 Macpherson inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence case and more recently by Baroness Casey’s report in 2023.

It is clear that both young men were victims of police racism. They were the victims of racial stereotyping at the time, and the victims of police harassment, and covert surveillance, for years afterwards.

SPIED ON FOR SERVING SOCIETY

Duwayne Brooks has spent much of his life dealing with the aftermath of that night in April 1993. He was arrested six times in the following six years. He was repeatedly prosecuted on trumped-up charges that fell apart as soon as a court examined them. He has sought police accountability for his treatment, and finally received damages after seven years of civil proceedings.

As well as assisting the police with their murder investigation, and appearing as a witness in the 2011 murder trial, Brooks provided evidence for the private prosecution of three of the murderers brought by the Lawrences in 1996, and of course took part in Macpherson’s inquiry into the case.

Menon tells us that alongside this, Brooks has worked to expose racism and corruption in the police. He reels off a long account of Brooks’ public service, and his efforts to improve policing and race relations over the past 25 years.

Brooks knows that he, like many other campaigners for police accountability and for justice for the victims of racism, was the subject of various forms of covert surveillance, including undercover policing.

He is disturbed that the police chose to use resources for spying on people like him, rather than well-known racist criminal gangs who were committing serious violent crimes.

Menon notes that just this week, the Met have finally changed tack, and accepted that:

1. undercover officers indefensibly reported on people like Brooks, who presented no risk of criminality or public disorder
2. it would have been a better use of police resources to prevent and investigate racist violence – an issue that this Inquiry should now examine the extent of, Menon suggests

Menon moves on to address the topic of police spying on Duwayne Brooks in more depth.

He notes that not all of this spying was carried out by the SDS. For example, there is an instance of Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Grieve, who was in charge of the Stephen Lawrence murder investigation at the time, secretly recording at least one of the meetings he’d arranged to have with Brooks and his lawyers. This raises many questions, not least if this was common practice by senior police officers.

Brooks has also learnt that one of the officers employed within the Racial Incidents unit at Plumstead police station was used as a plain-clothes police ‘spotter’ during the large anti-racist demonstration in Welling in May 1993, identifying Black people he recognised for police records.

SPYING ON THE BEREAVED

Mark Ellison KC published the findings of his Stephen Lawrence Independent Review in 2014, having carried out an investigation into the possible impact of police corruption and collusion on the original murder investigation.

Some of his findings related to the role of undercover policing. He found he was unable to make definitive findings about some of the claims made by HN43 Peter Francis due to the destruction of many SDS documents. It is hoped that this Inquiry may be able to get to the truth.

Ellison discovered that in August 1998 a meeting was brokered by SDS boss HN10 Bob Lambert, bringing together one of his undercover officers who’d been spying on the Lawrence family, HN81 ‘David Hagan’, with former Special Branch Detective Inspector Richard Walton.

Walton was working with the Met’s legal team on their response to the Macpherson inquiry. Ellison said there was no justification for this meeting; it was ‘wrong headed, inappropriate and highly questionable’.

The revelation of this fact triggered Walton’s 2016 resignation from the police in order to avoid disciplinary proceedings, and Lambert’s resignation from his university posts.

Ellison’s report contained some other findings that related to Brooks personally: his arrest in May 1993 and subsequent charging; the SDS tasking Peter Francis to identify him in footage to try to discredit him; the SDS’s reporting in the years 1999-2001; and their gathering of personal information about him and his civil claim.

As Menon says, the Ellison review raised a lot of questions (these are listed in full in the written statement).

EXCUSING THE SPY

Another section of that statement addresses the evidence that has been disclosed to Brooks by this Inquiry. Much of it relates to the two undercover officers who spied on him – HN43 Peter Francis and HN81 ‘Dave Hagan’ – and their manger, known only as ‘HN86’, who has been accused of being ‘thoroughly and overtly racist’.

Duwayne Brooks has spent years waiting for this Inquiry to investigate some of these issues. Like everyone else who was spied on by HN81 ‘Dave Hagan’, he is furious that the officer has been excused from attending and answering questions. He says it’s ‘a slap in the face’ that this man will not be asked to account for his actions or explain his reporting.

HN86 has refused to give evidence too, and threatened legal action against the Chair if there is an attempt to force him to do so.

Brooks campaigned for this Inquiry to take place, but is disappointed at how it’s gone. The way that ‘Non-State’ core participants (i.e. people who were spied on) have been treated, excluded from the process and secretive ‘closed’ hearings, and denied full disclosure.

This not only defies justice and transparency. On a practical level, it impedes their ability to give best evidence and ultimately destroys any chance of the Inquiry meeting its Terms of Reference and uncovering the truth about the spycops’ operations.

Brooks says that those who were wrongly spied on deserve to be treated with respect and humanity rather than as inconvenient witnesses. He remains willing to provide oral evidence and assist the Inquiry – but not until he has received full disclosure of relevant documents with enough time to digest them before responding.

Menon notes that many of the Black core participants in this Inquiry share similar experiences of racist policing, and ends by suggesting that they were spied on:

‘precisely because they were challenging the injustice of racist policing, not because they posed any public order threat.’

DO WHAT YOU’RE TOLD

After Menon finishes, Mitting responds to say that if Brooks is unwilling to take the slot allocated to him in this Tranche, then it may not be possible to hear his oral evidence at all.

It was shocking to hear such an insensitive threat from Mitting, willing to actively exclude such an essential witness rather than simply provide him with the relevant documents in a way that should be standard for all witnesses.

Given his earlier comments about Robert Peel, it wasn’t even the first time that afternoon that Mitting had shown a gleeful bias toward police. He seems unwilling or unable to properly see the perpetrator-victim nature of his subject, and instead adds another instance of showing contempt for those who have been wronged if they dare to say anything that challenges his position.

Ifeanyi Odogwu

Ifeanyi Odogwu represents Dr Neville Lawrence OBE, father of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence. Dr Lawrence has also supplied a written Opening Statement.

Stephen Lawrence was murdered on 22 April 1993. His parents, Neville and Doreen, immediately became the subjects of invasive police surveillance. It started with the ‘Family Liaison Officers’ (FLOs) who visited their home that evening. These officers have admitted that they recorded the names of people who visited the family after Stephen’s death.

HN43 Peter Francis says that he was handed a copy of the list compiled by these FLOs, and tasked with investigating the people on it, and their political persuasions. He says that he was also asked to gather information that could be used to alter the perception of the public about the family and its campaign, and that this intelligence-gathering was the SDS’s number one priority.

Lawrence heard what the spycops’ lawyer Oliver Sanders KC had said the previous day. Sanders attacked the credibility of Francis and his evidence about what he was tasked to do, mainly on the basis that there are no written records that back it up.

Odogwu points out that the absence of records does not prove that this didn’t happen. As the Ellison Review into spying on the Lawrences found, many instructions were oral and went unrecorded at the time. In addition, many of the records no longer exist, having been lost or deliberately destroyed.

HN78 Trevor Morris gave evidence to the Inquiry in 2024 about his part in the intrusive surveillance of the Lawrences and the volume of his reporting, admitting that the SDS reports may well have contained material capable of smearing the Lawrences. Nothing he said contradicted the evidence of Peter Francis.

TARGETING THE GRIEVING, NOT THE KILLERS

Odogwu brings up the issue of proportionality. It is clear that at this extremely sensitive time, the police’s time and resources should have been devoted to investigating Stephen’s murder and finding the killers, not putting his family under surveillance.

Neville Lawrence remains deeply troubled about this matter:

‘The implication that we were somehow the ones to watch was as perverse as it was offensive. It was as though our grief was treated as a threat, and our home as a site of suspicion, something I will never accept or forgive.’

The reports which have survived contain a great deal of subjective gossip, along with intimate details of the Lawrences’ personal lives, finances and political opinions. They also contain information about the meetings they attended and spoke at, and about their long, arduous and entirely lawful campaigning efforts.

It is clear that by December 2000, SDS reports contained legally privileged information about the family’s civil claim. There is precious little that relates to the supposed point of the SDS operation: imminent disorder, subversion or crime.

One of the results of their campaign was a public inquiry into matters arising from the death of Stephen Lawrence, announced in 1997. This was an inquiry that set out to examine the ways in which the family had been failed, so that lessons could be learnt for the future.

It concluded that there were multiple failings on the part of the Metropolitan Police and that institutional racism was at the heart of these. These findings were published in the Macpherson report in 1999.

A SPY IN THE LAWRENCE FAMILY CAMP

It is shocking to think that while the public inquiry was going on, the SDS sent another undercover officer to spy on the family and their supporters. This was HN81 ‘Dave Hagan’. The Ellison Report characterised Hagan as ‘an MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] spy in the Lawrence family camp’ (a description disputed by Hagan himself).

There is evidence that the information gathered by Hagan was sent to the legal team that represented the Met in the Macpherson Inquiry, and that a secret ‘back channel’ was set up to enable direct communication between this legal team and the SDS.

Detective Inspector Richard Walton, a former Special Branch officer, acted as a conduit for this flow of ‘valuable’ intelligence. He is said to have received ad-hoc off-the-record briefings from the undercover unit.

This collusion was not disclosed to the Macpherson inquiry at the time. Neither was the fact that the police had used undercover officers to spy on the Lawrences after Stephen’s death. Peter Francis says he saw that inquiry as the time for the Met to come clean. He advocated for telling it about the SDS, but he was overruled by managers.

These things are coming to light now, with plenty of details due to be disclosed in the upcoming hearings. Odogwu refers to what we can expect to hear more evidence of: the kind of in-depth discussion that regularly took place between Walton and SDS manager HN10 Bob Lambert, and about the great interest that Commissioner Paul Condon took in Hagan’s ‘invaluable reporting’.

He notes that Hagan was congratulated by Condon, and subsequently received a Commendation for his work. Condon has since denied all knowledge of the SDS.

NO QUESTIONING THE SPY

Having waited so long for this Inquiry to get going, so he could discover the truth of the SDS spying on his family, Dr Lawrence is extremely disappointed that Hagan has been excused from giving evidence in person.

This means that he cannot be asked to account for his actions, explain anything or answer questions. His written evidence will not be ‘tested’ and like many other core participants, Dr Lawrence believes that this is a serious problem.

It’s worth noting that HN86, the SDS manager who was responsible for Peter Francis’ tasking, will probably not be appearing either. He is refusing to travel to the UK to give evidence, or to do so online.

The Lawrence family were campaigning for legal justice following the racist murder of their son. They did not cause public disorder, or work with any groups who caused disorder, and Odogwu submits that there was no possible justification for the intrusion they suffered.

Even the Met have now accepted that the SDS reporting on Dr Lawrence was wholly indefensible and would have rightly prompted public outrage if the public had actually known about it.

EXPOSING THE RACISM

One of the most important issues which this Inquiry must investigate and get to the truth of is the part played by race, and racial discrimination, in the undercover policing operations suffered by the Lawrences and other families.

Were they treated worse than a white family would have been? Were they the victims of unconscious (and conscious) bias?

Black-led campaign groups and anti-racist organisers were almost always treated with suspicion. They were the subjects of systematic police infiltration, reporting and harassment.

During this Inquiry we have heard about a long list of campaigns and groups who fought against racism and in support of those who were victims of it, who were deemed ‘subversive’ and therefore deserving of surveillance.

In contrast, racist white gangs did not attract the same levels of intrusion. There is no evidence of the SDS targeting the many violent, far-right, racist organisations that were active during its existence with anything other than a few very short undercover deployments.

These groups caused huge harm to communities, and often presented public order problems for the police, but were not subject to the kind of intrusion aimed at the Lawrences over the course of many years.

The Inquiry has already heard contradictory excuses for this from spycops. HN298 ‘Mike Scott’ said:

‘There weren’t any right-wing groups who were demonstrating, or causing any problems as far as I can recall.’

But HN56 ‘Alan Nicholson’ said that, on the contrary, the far-right was such a big problem that it would have been too dangerous for him to infiltrate a particular group.

The police knew about the problems caused by right-wing groups but didn’t do anything, instead pouring resources into countering those who would simply illuminate the police’s endemic racism.

We have heard far too many examples of overt racism on the part of individual police officers during this time. The fact that racist language and attitudes went unchallenged and undisciplined is further evidence of discrimination within the force. Race influenced every aspect of the SDS’s work; their targeting, tasking and reporting. Their reports include many examples of racial profiling and categorisation.

In 1999, Sir William Macpherson’s inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder found that the Met suffered from ‘institutional racism’. Baroness Casey reached the same conclusion in the 2023 Casey Review.

Odogwu submits that this problem is ‘rooted in culture and systems’.

Dr Lawrence’s opening statement ended with an invitation to the Inquiry to examine these issues carefully, with the prospect of a finding of race discrimination.

Dave Morris

The day’s final Opening Statement comes courtesy of Dave Morris, one of the two McLibel case defendants. He has also submitted a written version.

The other defendant in the McLibel case was Helen Steel, and she is preparing her own witness statement on wider issues, including the shocking extent of the SDS’s impact on her life.

Morris was the subject of SDS reporting for decades and so has already appeared as a witness in this Inquiry:

• Opening Statement, Tranche 1 Phase 2, 23 April 2021
• Opening Statement, Tranche 1 Phase 3, 11 May 2022
• Live evidence, Tranche 2 Phase 1, 8 July 2024
• Live evidence, Tranche 2 Phase 2, 5 & 7 November 2024

He has not been invited to give oral evidence in these Tranche 3 Phase 1 hearings, but is allowed to make an Opening Statement so seized his chance to have a say!

Before getting underway, Morris makes some remarks of solidarity with the other ‘Non-State’ core participants (the people significantly spied upon).

The Interim Report published by this Inquiry in 2023 concluded that the SDS should have been closed down decades earlier than it was, and Morris points out that if only this had happened, the human toll, and the impact on all of those whose stories of being spied upon we have heard, would have been far less. He notes that even the Metropolitan Police now admit that this was ‘a dysfunctional unit’.

THE MCLIBEL TRIAL

Morris explains the McLibel case. Activists in London Greenpeace had distributed a leaflet highlighting McDonald’s many harmful practices. The burger corporation threatened to sue for libel, presumably expecting the skint activists to back down. But they didn’t.

The two of them spent 15 years embroiled in this legal battle, the longest trial in English history, followed by lengthy appeals, and then by a ground-breaking victory in the European Court of Human Rights. They did not receive legal aid, and relied on the support of volunteers, including a young and seemingly principled Keir Starmer.

Morris says this Inquiry has begun to shine a light on a dark and highly significant secret, referring to the two-way collusion that went on between the Metropolitan Police and the McDonald’s corporation.

In his written statement, he has provided more detail about some of the facts that have already come to light. Prime among these is the fact that both the Head of McDonald’s security team, Sid Nicholson, and his deputy, Terry Carroll, had previously been senior police officers, based in Brixton. Nicholson boasted that McDonald’s security were all ex-police, and this meant they had plenty of contacts who were still serving officers, and could supply them with information.

POLICE IN THE CASE

London Greenpeace was infiltrated and reported on by several undercover officers, including HN10 Bob Lambert ‘Bob Robinson’, who actually helped to write the ‘What’s wrong with McDonald’s?’ leaflet that sparked the libel action.

Lambert returned to run the SDS as its Inspector in 1993, by which time the McLibel trial was underway, but his part in making this ‘libel’ was never disclosed during the trial.

In order to find out the names of the activists who were campaigning against them, and allegedly libelling them, McDonald’s hired private spies to infiltrate London Greenpeace. Their libel writ was then served on five named individuals.

Although HN5 John Dines ‘John Barker’ was very active in campaigning and distributing leaflets, his name was omitted from the writs because McDonald’s knew about the SDS and that he was an undercover police officer, not a genuine activist. Dines was concerned that this omission might raise his targets’ suspicions.

Dines knew about the private spies. So did the Security Service, who asked the SDS to provide a report. And so did another SDS officer, HN67 ‘Alan Bond’, who told Dines that he had known about the McDonald’s spying operation from the outset.

Dines received information about the company’s plans. He knew in advance about the writs, even the date they were due to be served. Carroll spoke of receiving assessments from Special Branch. It is evident that information flowed in both directions.

As well as infiltrating London Greenpeace’s activities and attending its open meetings, Dines engineered a long-term intimate relationship with Steel. This meant that he was privy to the strategy discussions that took place amongst the five people who originally received writs. He had the opportunity to steer their thinking.

He reported on a ‘closed meeting’ held early in this phase of the campaign, and many subsequent legal meetings, and has admitted that he was relaying the legal advice to his bosses in the SDS.

This is a clear violation of the principle of legal privilege, that a lawyer and client’s communications should be confidential and sacrosanct. Once again, rather than upholding the law, police officers are violating the law in order to maximise corporate power and profit.

STYMIE THE SEARCH, HIDE THE TRUTH

Helen Steel spent years looking for Dines after he disappeared from her life. Lambert and the SDS management were so worried that she might locate him that they launched a major operation to stop her.

In 2002, Steel tracked Dines down to his new life in New Zealand. The Met had been following her moves and spent a large amount of taxpayers’ money relocating their ex-employee to a different country so Steel wouldn’t find him.

As the unit’s boss by this time, Lambert was concerned about the possibility of Dines (or the Met’s Commissioner) being forced to give evidence in the McLibel case, and the risk of the unit’s existence being revealed.

We haven’t seen all the SDS reporting; much of it has been ‘lost’ or destroyed. However, during this set of hearings, the Inquiry will have the opportunity to question two former senior officers who had oversight of the unit, and may well be able to answer some of the many questions Morris has.

The main questions are:

• Who knew about these matters?
• How long did it go on for?
• How was the collusion conducted?
• How high up was the authorisation given?
• Who liaised with McDonald’s?
• What was the role of Bob Lambert?
• What was the role of the Security Service?
• Why was it allowed to happen?

Various former SDS managers told the Inquiry last year that any collusion between the SDS and McDonald’s would have had to be authorised by officers who were more senior than them.

Morris notes that one of these men, HN143 Commander Dennis ‘Ben’ Gunn, is due to give evidence on Monday 20 October. He also notes that Gunn produced a ‘position paper’ regarding the Special Branch having established excellent links with commercial and industrial organisations including through delivering presentations and briefings, and offering what he termed a ‘consultancy service’.

WHO WILL TAKE RESPONSIBILITY?

Morris keeps his biggest question for the end:

’Who is now going to take the responsibility and apologise unreservedly for this scandal?’

He acknowledges that various apologies have now been made by the Met for the serious wrong-doing of the SDS.

But he notes that the Home Office still haven’t provided this Inquiry with a full witness statement, and that no Home Secretary – of the nine politicians who have occupied that position since this Inquiry was first announced – has ever issued an apology.

These secret political policing deployments were ultimately signed off at the very highest level, by successive Governments from the start of the SDS in 1968 onwards, and that needs to be apologised for too.

Tranche 3, Phase 1, Day 3

15 October 2025

INTRODUCTION

On Wednesday 15 October 2025, the Undercover Policing Inquiry concluded the opening statements for its latest round of hearings.

Evidence hearings will run from October 2025 to July 2026 (with two breaks), examining the final 15 years of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad, 1993-2008. The Inquiry has limited the focus of these Opening Statement to the six deployments about which we will hear evidence in this first phase of hearings (October – December 2025). Nevertheless, they offer an opportunity for those who are significantly involved in those events to set out what they expect to see in the hearings.

The Undercover Policing Inquiry (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.

The Inquiry website’s page for the day has a transcript.

This is quite a long report, use the links to jump to a specific speaker:

Imran Khan KC
Representing anti-racist campaigners, family justice campaigns, blacklisted workers and a fellow lawyer.

James Wood KC
Representing anti-racist campaigners and bereaved families whose justice campaigns were spied on

James Scobie KC
Representing socialist anti-racist campaigners who were spied on

Kirsten Heaven
Representing the ‘non-police non-state core participant group’ (lots of people who were spied on)

Imran Khan KC

First of all, we heard from Imran Khan KC, representing people spied on for their anti-racist campaigning and blacklisted workers, namely:

• Baroness Doreen Lawrence OBE
• Dan Gillman
• Dave Smith
• Frank Smith
• Lisa Teuscher
• Steve Acheson
• Steve Hedley
• Suresh Grover

Khan starts with a powerful, first-person explanation of why people in London have had to campaign for police accountability, and support the victims of police racism:

‘We are led to believe that the policing of citizens in the UK rests on a profound principle, that police serve by consent. It is a principle at the very heart of a mature democracy. The UK’s Black communities have never been afforded this right.

‘When it comes to alleged crimes by us, we are over policed, suffering actions that lead to criminalisation and brutal violence. Crimes against us are under policed and under-resourced, lacking a professional and robust approach.’

SURESH GROVER & THE MONITORING GROUP

Suresh Grover has been involved in this kind of work in Southall, and across the city, since 1976. He set up the Southall Monitoring Group, now called The Monitoring Group (TMG).

‘By uncovering injustice and scrutinising public bodies Mr Grover and The Monitoring Group have shone a light where the police prefer darkness.’

Grover worked closely with Doreen and Neville Lawrence after the murder of their son Stephen, supporting them with their private prosecution, the inquest and then the public inquiry. The police chose to subject Grover to intrusive surveillance, and chose not to monitor far-right extremism, even though the racists caused much more violence and harm to communities.

Khan points out that only now, and far too late, are the police acknowledging that they could have done better. People like Grover are still waiting for an actual apology from them.

Grover has now received some disclosure from this Inquiry, but the reports only begin in
1998, even though it is obvious that he has been spied on for much longer. Some of the reports about him refer to earlier intelligence that we’re not being shown.

Khan says it’s vital that the Inquiry recognises the structural nature of the institutional racism that still exists in the Metropolitan Police. Though the Met admitted in their opening statement that the SDS was ‘a dysfunctional unit’, Khan says it was just one unit within a dysfunctional force.

He asserts that institutional racism was entrenched in every aspect of these undercover police operations – the management, authorisation and oversight of the spycops– and that this Inquiry’s
final report must adopt the definition of institutional racism given in 1999 by the Macpherson inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder.

TMG and Grover believe that they continued to be under police surveillance, long after the demise of the SDS in 2008.

At this point the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, interjected to recite the Macpherson definition of institutional racism:

‘The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin.’

He then demonstrated a shocking lack of understanding of institutional racism, expressing his belief that the term cannot apply to the SDS because they were not directly interacting with the public to provide a service.

Khan patiently explained that it’s about recognising the disproportionate impact on Black individuals and family campaigns. However the exchange raises significant doubts about Mitting’s suitability to investigate racism in undercover policing. Core Participants have been calling for him to be assisted by a panel of experts in matters like institutional racism for years, however he has consistently refused.

BLACKLISTED WORKERS

For decades, most major construction firms were involved in illegal blacklisting of politically active workers. They fed information to The Consulting Association, which maintained an illegal central database. Workers applying for jobs would be checked to see if they had a Consulting Association file and, if they did, they weren’t given a job.

When the Information Commissioners Office raided the Consulting Association in 2009, they found the names of more than 3,200 people who had been blacklisted. Some people were on the list for complaining about unsafe workplaces or unpaid wages. Others, who had never worked in the industry, were on it for anti-fascist campaigning.

In 2012 David Clancy, the Information Commissioners Office investigations manager, said:

‘There is information on the Consulting Association files that I believe could only be supplied by the police or the security services.’

The Independent Police Complaints Commission later confirmed that every constabulary’s Special Branch routinely passed information to the blacklist. In 2018, the Met admitted that their Special Branch had done so, and that it was a crime that could have led to officers being prosecuted (although none have been). This wasn’t police officers upholding the law, this was police officers breaking the law to maximise corporate profit.

It went far beyond blacklisting. Spycops infiltrated and spied on a wide range of trade unions, reporting on their meetings and campaigns, on individual trade union activists and industrial disputes. This issue affects many hundreds of thousands of people, not just the small number granted core participant status in the UCPI.

We know that intelligence gathered by Special Branch and its spycops was sent to MI5 and government departments. Whistleblower officer HN43 Peter Francis ‘Peter Daley/ Johnson/ Black’ has said intelligence he supplied was put in the Consulting Association files.

However to date this Inquiry’s investigation of this matter has been ‘superficial at best’. There is no mention of it at all in the Inquiry’s 2023 interim report. Only a couple of the former spycops have even been asked about it.

Khan is blunt about this failure:

‘Any conclusions based on extrapolating from fragmentary documentary evidence and the failing memories of a small number of police officers would be entirely insufficient.

Sir, the failure to fully investigate blacklisting is either a remarkable lack of curiosity or an intentional self-imposed restriction.’

It is in the public interest to get to the truth of this issue, and crucial if this Inquiry is to fulfil its purpose.

In the coming weeks, the Inquiry will hear from undercover officers HN43 Peter Francis, HN15 Mark Jenner  ‘Mark Cassidy’ and HN104 Carlo Soracchi ‘Carlo Neri’, all of who reported on lawful trade union activity.

These three officers alone compiled reports on members of, among others:
• Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians (UCATT)
• Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU)
• Communication Workers’ Union (CWU)
• National Union of Journalists (NUJ)
• National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT)
• Fire Brigades’ Union (FBU)
• National Union of Teachers (NUT)
• UNISON
• Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS)

They reported on internal union elections and internal union factions. They reported on specific issues such as the Building Workers Group, the Brian Higgins Defence Campaign and the Building Workers Safety Campaign. These were everyday examples of industrial action to save jobs or recover unpaid wages. They could never be equated with attempts at sabotaging the economy or overthrowing parliamentary democracy.

This spying wasn’t just the SDS officers being overzealous, either. Regarding unions as subversive was standard across Special Branch and ongoing spying on union activists was normal. Peter Francis said:

‘In any political grouping, I would expect the members of trade unions to have a political file’

There is no doubt that blacklisted worker Dave Smith is the pre-eminent authority on the subject. He literally wrote the book about it. He was granted core participant status at the Inquiry, solely because of his blacklisting. Yet the Inquiry says it does not intend to call him to give evidence.

Outraged, Smith has initiated legal proceedings to challenge Mitting’s decision to exclude him.

DOREEN LAWRENCE

Baroness Casey’s 2023 report into the internal culture of the Met found it to be institutionally racist, misogynist, and homophobic. This came two years after the independent inquiry into the murder of Daniel Morgan found the Met was institutionally corrupt.

Khan notes that current Met chief Mark Rowley has refused to accept Casey’s conclusions.

Since Casey’s findings, the BBC has broadcast shocking footage of current officers exhibiting extreme racism and misogyny; and literally the day after the Inquiry heard Khan’s opening statement, news broke of an independent consultancy’s report finding the Met had racism ‘baked in’ to its recruitment, promotion and grievance processes, affecting Black staff specifically – and that senior officers had suppressed the report, refusing to make it public or even share it with the National Black Police Association.

This all shows nothing has significantly changed since the 1999 Macpherson report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence found that the Met was institutionally racist.

It was a result of a wider racism that is woven into British culture, as Khan elaborated:

‘The history of the UK is clear. Black people have been subjected to centuries of slavery, decades of second-class citizenship, widespread legal discrimination, economic persecution, educational deprivation and cultural stigmatisation.

Black people have been bought, sold, killed, beaten, raped, excluded, exploited, shamed and scorned for a very long time. The word ‘racism’ is hardly an adequate description of that experience. And that experience continues to this day. It was no different in 1993 when Stephen was killed.’

Khan cited the Met’s hostility to those who would hold them to account for their racism, something documented at the very highest levels. He quoted a memo to Commissioner Paul Condon in September 1993 from Deputy Assistant Commissioner David Osland:

‘Our patience is wearing thin on 3 Area [south-east London], not only with the Lawrence family and their representatives, but also with self-appointed public and media commentators.’

Baroness Lawrence asked a lot of questions of this Inquiry at its outset and now, as she prepares to give evidence in person many years later, she is bitterly disappointed at the lack of answers.

Khan notes that far too many officers have been allowed to hide behind the anonymity:

‘Many – indeed, key – police officers such as HN81 Hagan and HN86 who should face the full glare of public scrutiny and who [Baroness Lawrence] wants to confront as she did officers at the Macpherson Inquiry – will be able to hide – in cowardly fashion – behind anonymity, not appear at all or, most shameful of all, take the Inquiry to court for trying to force them to give evidence. This is in her view utterly disgraceful’

Khan has since made submissions challenging the decision to excuse HN81 from giving evidence, and the Inquiry will hold a hearing on 3 November.

The impact of Stephen Lawrence’s murder on his mother has been massive, on her entire family, her marriage and her life ever since.

She now knows that the police were spying on her instead of doing what they should have done.

APPROVED AT THE TOP

The spying suffered by Baroness Lawrence was sanctioned by those at the very top of the Met, and beyond in the Home Office. Shortly after the Undercover Policing Inquiry was announced in 2014, Lawrence was contacted by a former Home Secretary who wanted to emphatically assure her that they had nothing to do with the any of the alleged activities. It was a highly suspicious thing to do.

We have already seen how the Home Office, which set up the SDS, directly funded it for decades and received its annual reports, managed to ensure it did not retain a single document about any of it. She is considering whether to name the ex-Home Secretary in question.

Lawrence recently discovered from the phone tapping scandal that she has also been a victim of unlawful spying by the media as well, specifically the Daily Mail, which may well have been perpetrated with the connivance of police officers.

She wants to know why nobody from the Met bothered to contact her personally to let her know about the spying, or to apologise to her. She says that the ‘apology’ made on behalf of the Commissioner during Monday’s hearing was insensitive and impersonal.

In recent weeks, Lawrence and Khan attended the Parole Board hearing of one of Stephen’s killers. What she heard from him has echoes of what she’s heard from the Met; that they’re no longer racist, everything they inflicted was an accident – and she doesn’t believe them. She says Stephens’s killer and the Met are cowardly racist liars.

Lawrence also found the opening statement of whistleblower spycop HN43 Peter Francis jarring. He talked about the impacts on himself, he lacked empathy and understanding of the impact his actions had on others.

Indeed, throughout this inquiry there has been a pattern of the spycops seemingly considering themselves to be the real victims.

Khan concluded his representations for Lawrence with a potent and horrifying litany of loss and injustice:

‘She lost her son. She lost her husband. She lost her privacy. She lost the future she should have had and only last week she was having to hear more lies and fantasy from one of her son’s murderers.

She has been failed repeatedly by the Metropolitan Police Service, when they failed to deliver justice for the murder of Stephen, then when they spied on her and then when they were involved with the press in doing the same.

She has been failed by the press, who have outwardly supported her by publishing sensational headlines, at the same time as spying on her.

She has been failed by the Independent Office for Police Conduct and the Crown Prosecution Service in not taking action against officers, who should have been charged and/or disciplined.
She’s fed up with these failures.

During all of this she has had to fight – fight the police and fight sections of the press. She is tired of doing so. For once in her life, she wants to believe that she need not fight and that justice will be delivered.’

Imran Khan’s written Opening Statement

MICHAEL MANSFIELD

Khan moves on to speak on behalf of Michael Mansfield KC. It is clear that Khan has a great deal of respect for Mansfield, as a legendary lawyer who has inspired him personally and professionally.

Mansfield has been at the heart of many important, high-profile legal cases, including miscarriages of justice and other cases of state misfeasance or negligence.

Described by spycops as ‘the devil incarnate’, Mansfield was the subject of surveillance for many years. Unsurprisingly, he is quite cynical about the likely outcomes of this Inquiry!

Khan delivers a heartfelt speech on the importance of protecting lawyers and their role in any democracy, which includes challenging the draconian powers of the State.

‘It is beyond perverse for the police to label a lawyer engaged in his professional duties in challenging their unlawful acts as subversive and for them to then go on to unlawfully spy on him. It would be laughable if it were not so serious.’

There was fierce criticism of the Inquiry for not compelling HN81 ‘David Hagan’ to give evidence.

‘It is said that HN81 suffers from mental health. Well, so do many of the core participants in all these other inquiries and indeed at this Inquiry, including many non-state core participants, but also Peter Francis.

In refusing HN81, the Inquiry has failed to consider that an inquiry is almost invariably set up as a result of tragedy, with countless victims having suffered unimaginable loss, and yet in these circumstances the victims do and will give evidence and are and will be deeply affected by reliving their trauma.

HN81 should have been required to give evidence in person. His absence is inexcusable.’

Expecting traumatised victims to testify while excusing a perpetrator is an obscene stain on the Inquiry.

Khan concludes by observing how we look in horror at the new authoritarianism in the USA, but protest here is increasingly criminalised, and spycops are given immunity from prosecution. The legal profession itself is being targeted. Lawyers should never suffer adverse consequences for representing clients. But it’s been happening here for decades.

 

James Wood KC

Next we heard from James Wood KC, representing Alex Owolade, Karen Doyle, Sukhdev and Tish Reel, and two members of Michael Menson’s family, MSS and MWS.

Wood echoes Khan’s comments about institutional racism within the Met:

‘It permeated the force and all its activities.’

Racism was therefore entrenched in the SDS and its targeting of people like his clients.

Wood says the SDS was a:

‘racist, undemocratic, political policing unit that was wasteful of public resources and should never have existed.’

He moves on to give summaries of each of his clients.

MICHAEL MENSON

Michael Tachie-Menson died in horrific circumstances in January 1997, the victim of an extremely violent racist attack which included him being set on fire. The police repeatedly suggested he must have done it to himself.

Michael’s family faced police indifference, and a refusal to investigate his death properly. The media were fed with misinformation, including smears about Michael’s mental health, by officers.

Eventually, an inquest reached a verdict of ‘unlawful killing’. Despite this, senior police officers continued to insist that Michael’s injuries were self-inflicted and that the coroner was wrong.

Menson is described as a gentle, caring man with strong faith and high values. He was a talented and successful musician with Double Trouble who released their own music and produced hits for others such as Rebel MC’s Street Tuff.

Menson had some mental health problems in his late 20s, and received treatment. He was 30 when he was attacked and killed. He told four family members about the attack. The police repeatedly insisted that his injuries were self-inflicted and refused to take evidence from Menson before he died.

The family began a campaign for justice, contacting MPs and the media. They kept finding that the police had contacted the journalists first and spun their false narrative of self-harm and suicide.

As with so many justice campaigns, police resources that should have been spent catching killers were diverted to discrediting bereaved people who only wanted the truth.

At the inquest in September 1998, the Met aggressively asserted that it was suicide. Investigating officers behind the scene passed information to the coroner with this narrative, and said that this was a family of troublemakers.

Nevertheless, the jury ruled it to be an Unlawful Killing. The Met hurriedly issued a statement, saying that they regretted that they had treated his death as self-inflicted in the first 12 hours, but making no mention of their racist failure to investigate and their wilful misleading afterwards.

We were shown a clip from that evening’s Channel 4 News with a Police Federation representative who hadn’t been at the inquest or heard the evidence still insisting that it was suicide and claiming that the family’s supporters had ‘crowded out’ the courtroom and intimidated the jury into delivering a wrong verdict.

It is just one of many instances of the Met doubling down on a narrative to serve their reputational aims at the expense of truth and justice, letting killers walk free rather than admit they got anything wrong.

As the family always knew, it was murder. Three men were later arrested and convicted, two for murder and one for manslaughter.

The family made a formal complaint which was investigated by the Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire. In 2002 it published its findings. The Met investigation was found to be unprofessional, uncoordinated, in part negligent, at best inept. Evidence of racism was abundant, with one officer referring to Menson as ‘a fucking black schizophrenic’.

By coincidence, the investigating Chief Constable, HN143 Dennis ‘Ben’ Gunn, had previously been a Met Special Branch commander. He gave evidence to the Inquiry on 17 October.

RICKY REEL

Ricky Reel was Sukhdev and Balwant Reel’s second child. He grew up in a happy family with three siblings.

It is now 28 years since Ricky Reel went missing, after a night out, on 14 October 1997. When his parents filed a missing persons report, the officer suggested that he must’ve run away because he was either avoiding an arranged marriage and/or was gay.

His body was found in the Thames a week later. Sukhdev visited her son at the mortuary and was handed his clothing.

When she got home, she noticed a significant tear in the brand new shirt that he had been wearing on the night of his disappearance. She raised this with the police who said that she had done it herself. The family later worked out that the tear corresponded to the location of marks on Ricky’s body, identified at his post-mortem.

He had been the victim of a racist attack. The police spoke to his friends who confirmed it, yet the police failed to investigate this, maintaining that his death must have been accidental. The Met were hostile to the family and secured an open verdict at the inquest.

Wood moves on to talk about the Reel family, and what they went through in the aftermath of Ricky’s death.

They were forced to start campaigning for justice for Ricky, after it became clear that the police were not bothering to look for his killers. Instead, as with the Menson family, the Met put their resources into subjecting the Reels to intrusive surveillance, while telling the family that cost restrictions limited their capacity to investigate Ricky’s death further.

One of the spycops who targeted them was HN81 ‘David Hagan’ who also spied on the Lawrence family. He reported on candlelit vigils, and on Reel family members attending the Lawrence inquiry.

HN81 told investigators in 2014 that he once gave Sukhdev Reel a lift home, after a Movement for Justice meeting, presumably seeking information to discredit family. Yet he did not mention this in his reports. This raises the question: what other inexcusable things did he do that went undocumented?

Wood then went on to speak about missing evidence. We know that many of the spycops’ reports and records have been deliberately destroyed over the years. This continued even after the UCPI was announced and all records should have been retained. This destruction of evidence, coupled with the use of verbal briefings to avoid paper trails, means we will never get the full truth about the SDS.

The Reel family see the Met’s new apology as a merely pragmatic decision in face of new unassailable evidence, and they do not accept it. They are still seeking answers.

MOVEMENT FOR JUSTICE

The Movement for Justice (MFJ) began in the 1995, stemming from the Kingsway College anti-fascist group set up following a vicious racist attack against Kingsway student Shah Alam.

They met every week and campaigned tirelessly about issues from immigration and asylum through to countering police racism. MFJ was not a ‘subversive’ organisation, and the spycops’ intrusion cannot be justified, says Wood. He suggests that this was a ‘convenient’ place to plant spycops to monitor feelings about the police in the wider community.

MFJ was spied on by HN43 Peter Francis and HN81 ‘David Hagan’. The officers’ reports were extremely detailed, and the level of intrusion into Alex Olowade’s personal life particularly striking. Francis actually enrolled at Kingsway College as part of his strategy to befriend members and infiltrate the group.

MFJ was a straightforward anti-racist campaign that used marches, campaigned for legislative changes that were harmful to asylum seekers, by marching, petitions and contacting MPs as its tactics. It did not by any measure threaten violence and disorder, nor was it ‘subversive’ and seeking to overthrow parliamentary democracy. But by opposing racism and highlighting police failings, the Met saw it as somehow equivalent to those things.

Wood notes that a spycops report wrongly describes the MFJ as ‘exclusively black’, as if this makes it more of a threat. Peter Francis reports that the n-word was frequently used in the SDS, including by senior managers.

Wood’s clients have been horrified to learn about the spycops’ infiltration of their campaigns, and just how much was spent on these operations, while they were being told that the police lacked the resources to respond to or adequately investigate serious racist attacks, including those that caused the deaths of their relatives.

POLITICAL POLICING

It is clear that the Met used spycops to surveil, undermine and attack those who criticised police actions, most of whom were engaged in using legal channels such as vigils, civil claims, and inquests to campaign for justice, with no suggestion of any criminality or public order issues.

There’s been no suggestion that any criminality or public disorder was being carried out by people like Sukhdev Reel or the Lawrences. As is well established, HN81 ‘David Hagan’ infiltrated their campaigns with the intention of gleaning info that the police could use against them.

The 2014 Ellison Report, which triggered the setting up of the UCPI, found:

‘N81 was, at the time, an MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] spy in the Lawrence family camp during the course of judicial proceedings in which the family was the primary party in opposition to the MPS.’

There are many parallels between the experiences of these different families, all of whom were the victims of police racism and police failings, while grieving the loss of their loved ones at the hands of racist killers.

The Menson campaign’s police complaints investigation found that the police had carried out Special Branch checks on them. It indicates a belief that anyone who questions the police, even about demonstrable failings, is motivated by a subversive ideology.

HN81 reports referred to the Reel family’s activity as a ‘campaign against the police’. They were specifically monitoring the Reel family in case they began to get huge support like the Lawrences. This was not, as they’ve tried to claim, ‘collateral intrusion’, it was direct spying because they feared that the truth might be exposed.

Wood cited a report [MPS-0738094] which records a meeting on 18 August 2014 between HN81 ‘David Hagan’, Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt (who was leading the Met’s response to the Undercover Policing Inquiry) and Detective Superintendent Craddock, a senior investigating officer with the police’s own self-investigation into spycops, Operation Herne. This was five months after the Undercover Policing Inquiry had been announced.

At this meeting, they discussed how HN81 had told Herne that he had met Sukhdev Reel and given her a lift home. They realised this was inconsistent with their public denials. They agreed on a line that:

‘no documentation has been identified detailing any targeting or infiltration by the SDS into any family member or any justice campaign or those justice campaigns themselves.’

The senior officers decided not to look any further or change what they told the public. When faced with evidence that cast them in a bad light, they decided, as usual, not to come clean but to ignore the evidence and spin the facts to cast them in the best light, a light they plainly did not deserve.

There is an institutional failing to admit wrongdoing even when they proof is in front of them. This is yet another high-level cover-up, lying until outside investigations force them to admit the truth.

Wood accuses the Met of institutional racism, institutional sexism, and institutional homophobia, and also of denial and defensiveness. It does not tend to accept criticism or own its failures, instead looking for and latching onto small flaws in any criticism as a way to dismiss the whole complaint.

He says this toxic culture has endured, right up to the present day. In comparison, the non-state core participants at the Inquiry (those who were spied upon) have participated fully even though this has meant reliving all sorts of trauma. They deserve the truth.

James Wood’s written opening statement

James Scobie KC

Next we heard from James Scobie KC, representing Lois Austin and Hannah Sell, who were part of Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE), a campaign that stemmed from Militant Labour (now called the Socialist Party), and Militant Labour member Dave Nellist who was Labour MP for Coventry South East from 1983 to 1992.

They were primarily spied on by HN43 Peter Francis ‘Peter Daley/ Johnson/ Black’. Francis’ whistleblowing on the SDS was one of the key moments in the exposure of the spycops scandal. He gave an interview to the Observer in 2010 and then after the scandal drew huge public interest in 2011 he gave a huge amount of information to the Guardian.

After an avalanche of revelations from many sources, it was Francis’s revelation of spying on the Lawrence family that finally caused the Home Secretary to order the Ellison Review and follow that with the full scale public inquiry we now have.

However, Scobie contrasted all this seemingly public-spirited action with a description of a very different Peter Francis: self-serving, troubled, and deeply attached to his identity as a Special Branch spycop.

Scobie says Francis has given differing accounts of his career, some of which must not be true, and we must only accept what can be corroborated.

Francis’s own accounts show he wanted to be respected as among the best ever SDS officers. He wanted to emulate his manager Bob Lambert’s undercover activity, which he had said was:

‘hands down regarded as the best tour of duty ever.’

He had to be, in the unit’s parlance, a ‘deep swimmer’. Scobie explained that depth was judged by risk. The officer must be close to public disorder, violence and/or crime. They must have very close relationships with those they spy on: the greater the deception of their target, the greater their status in the unit.

They should take positions of responsibility in their organisations, the more central the better. And of course, they had to avoid ‘compromise’, never being suspected and ensuring the existence of spycops remained unknown.

Management judged undercover officers on these things, rather than the value of the intelligence that was the supposed purpose of the deployment.

There was one more key aspect – the length of the deployment. Francis failed here. He was withdrawn against his will in September 1993, much earlier than he wanted. A usual deployment was five years, Francis wanted to do seven, yet his job was terminated after only three years.

He was furious. He was signed off sick in October 1999, medically retired in April 2001, and then sued for psychiatric damages in 2003.

He didn’t just want compensation and support, but also respect and a commendation. His statement in 2003 sought to demonstrate that he had fulfilled all the criteria, and done all that was asked of him. He signed that document for court proceedings yet it contains numerous provable falsehoods. He ignored this statement completely in his opening statement to the Inquiry this week. Such unreliability puts all his other evidence into doubt.

Nevertheless, many of his allegations about tradecraft have been proved. The police wanted to cover up tasking and tradecraft, and the Met settled with him in 2006. Francis admitted misconduct including deceiving women into relationships relationships, yet he got the apology and commendation he sought.

Guests at his presentation included some of the most deplorable spycops such as HN10 Bob Lambert ‘Bob Robinson’ and HN78 Trevor Morris ‘Anthony Lewis’. He said he had protected the unit. He was told he’d be invited to its fortieth anniversary party following year.

But there had been comeback. His 2003 statement meant those at the top of the SDS could no longer deny what the unit really did. Francis was told he was seen as disloyal for having filed the civil claim, and so he wasn’t invited.

He contacted journalist Tony Thompson the very next day, beginning a swathe of bold revelations to the public that exposed the SDS. However, Scobie said, for 11 years after his deployment his whole motivation was to be re-included in the unit and seen as the best spycop.

He had been withdrawn because, although he was dedicated and obedient, he had nothing of value to report. Even by SDS standards, his deployment was pointless. If his targets were – as he still maintains is true – very violent and causing public order problems, he wouldn’t have been withdrawn.

Exaggerating risk is a key feature of SDS reporting, describing a false sense of jeopardy. It not only justifies the unit’s existence, it’s also an effective disguise to cover up deployments that exist for other reasons, such as spying on Stephen Lawrence’s family.

Pretending spycops were doing dangerous things made the undercover officers and their mangers look good, and gave them an excuse for the excessive fear of exposure. That last factor really came from a fear of having their inexcusable targeting and tradecraft exposed (as described in some detail in the Met’s 2009 internal closing report when shutting the unit down).

So when Francis now exaggerates his danger, his managers won’t contradict him, because they need to perpetuate that image too.

Francis was told Youth Against Racism in Europe was a new and violent group. The illusion of risk was central to his deployment and his self image. He has toned it down over the years, though, as a number of his claims are simply not true:

1. He spoke of how HN297 Richard Clark ‘Rick Gibson’ had been confronted by the people he spied on who’d found that he had stolen the identity of a dead child. Francis’s claim that Clark had to jump from a second floor window to escape, and thus being exposed might bring instant violent retribution and possibly death, is untrue. Clark simply walked away.
2. His claim that he was the first SDS officer to go abroad is untrue – a number had done it before. HN326 ‘Doug Edwards’ and HN340 ‘Andy Bailey’ / ‘Alan Nixon’ had done so in 1970, soon after the SDS was founded. Francis claimed he’d lain awake at the camp in Germany in fear at a camp guarded by people with AK47s, yet we also see that he had time for a sexual relationship and a disco.
3. The dawn raids on Nazis that he describes simply did not happen.

His reporting at the time doesn’t support his subsequent claims on violence. He now claims his groups were instigating violence with the British National Party (BNP), but then in the same statement says they were only violent in self-defence. That is lawful, and did happen: Combat 18 and BNP supporters did attack and they fought back.

Yet Francis only actually recalled two instances of violence involving activists, of which he only reported on one at the time. As for the second, the 1993 anti-BNP protest at Welling, he says the only harm he saw was two women injured by police.

Francis wrote reports on people saying they were violent, but gave no evidence. Meanwhile, the SDS desire for risk created actual risk; Lois Austin from YRE was one of a group subjected to a premeditated attacked by uniformed officers at Earls Court.

As at Welling, the police were excessively violent because they were acting on intelligence provided by Francis and others. After Earls Court, Austin and others successfully sued the police for the assault.

In the period 1994-98 there was a decline in fascist violence, correlating with a decline in anti-fascist activity: if they’re not attacking, there is no need for us to defend. Anti-fascist community protection prevents fascist violence and crime.

Many of Francis’ reports concern Militant Labour. Dave Nellist served as an MP for South East Coventry, and despite their claims not to spy on elected officials, we know that Special Branch opened a file on Nellist in 1983, the same year he became an MP. His constituency office was also spied on.

The Security Service continued to take a great deal of interest in Militant and trade unionists even after they decided that many other target groups were no longer considered ‘subversive’ enough to monitor to the same degree.

Many of Francis’ reports would have been of interest to other ‘customers’, i.e. government and private companies. The spycops were anti-democratic rather than ‘counter-subversive’.

Francis has sought to portray his undercover persona ‘Pete Black’ as someone who had casual sexual encounters, and seems to have started a rumour that one of these was with Judy Beishon. In 2013 this came to the attention of Operation Herne, the police’s internal investigation into the spycops scandal. From there, the rumour spread through the Met.

However, Herne made what Scobie terms an ‘appalling decision’ not to bother contacting Beishon to find out if it was true. She only learnt about this false allegation in 2024, and utterly rebuts it.

Peter Francis claimed to have done successful work infiltrating Black family justice campaigns. However it is evident that he only reported on a few such groups, and didn’t actually manage to get that close to them.

He had treated the MFJ group at Kingsway college as a ‘gateway’ to YRE/ Militant. When Special Branch decided that they needed more information about Black justice campaigns, he had moved on from MFJ and was no longer involved. HN81 ‘David Hagan’ was tasked with infiltrating the MFJ instead.

Scobie ends by saying:

‘Far from being the best as he sought portray himself, Francis was emblematic of the worst aspects of the SDS, self-aggrandising and exaggerating his own risk and the intelligence he provided.

Instead of providing meaningful intelligence about the activities of the Youth Against Racism in Europe or Militant Labour, his accounts were so poor and meaningless that they undermined the confidence in the SDS and the unlawful edifice of political policing as a whole.’

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, responds to say that Beishon has provided a written statement to the Inquiry utterly denying any sexual contact with Peter Francis. He has not invited her to give evidence in person because he has no doubt that she is telling the truth.

James Scobie’s written opening statement

Kirsten Heaven KC

Kirsten Heaven represents the entire ‘co-operating group’ of Non State, Non Police core participants, the people involved because they were significantly spied on. They have collated a joint Opening Statement.

She opened with some key questions:

• Has the Met gone far enough in this inquiry?
• Who exactly, at the highest levels of the police, was directing the spycops operations?
• How much of the spycops activity was led or directed by the Home Office?
• Why are there no admissions or apologies from former or current Met Commissioners?

Sir Paul Condon, Commissioner 1993-2000, has pretended not to know about the existence of the SDS. However we now know that he personally paid a visit to the spycops’ safe house after the 1993 anti-fascist protest in Welling to individually thank them for their work. HN81 ‘David Hagan’ testifies that his manager told him that his reports went to Condon’s desk, and that the Commissioner was grateful for the information.

We also know that senior figures within the Met were ‘customers’ of the intelligence supplied by the spycops. This is confirmed in spycops’ Annual Performance Reviews.

HN72 told the police’s internal spycops inquiry Operation Herne that it was Deputy Commissioner John Stevens who would have given the go-ahead to HN81 being tasked to report on the Stephen Lawrence campaign.

In addition, Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Grieve is known to have covertly recorded meetings between him and the legal team of Duwayne Brooks, the prime witeness to Stephen Lawrence’s murder.

The Home Secretary has chosen to remain silent on the role of the Home Office in the spycops scandal. It has confirmed that the Inquiry has not asked it for a witness statement. Surely departments of State should now be asked to provide corporate statements?

We have also learnt that the Cabinet Office was interested in the reports being filed by HN104 Carlo Soracchi ‘Carlo Neri’, who was deployed 2000-2006. Will the Inquiry explore this further?

HN26 ‘Christine Green’, who infiltrated animal rights groups 1995-2000, is not giving evidence to the Inquiry as she is ‘out of the jurisdiction’ (the Inquiry is said to have no power to compel witnesses who are outside the United Kingdom, something that’s currently the subject of legal argument).

She is not the only one of the former spycops who appear to have left the country until this Inquiry no longer has an interest in them.

We are concerned about the non-appearance of HN81 ‘David Hagan’ especially in light of his central role in spying on the Stephen Lawrence campaign amongst others.

HN86, who was head of the SDS 1993-1996, is now refusing to give oral evidence. He was the manager who directed spycops to report on justice campaigns, and serious allegations of racism have been made against him by Francis.

NEW RULES TO IGNORE

Two major pieces of relevant legislation were introduced in the Tranche 3 period (1993-2008): the Human Rights Act (HRA) and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA).

However the SDS continued to operate much as it had before, a secret unit:

‘marred by a culture of exceptionalism and impunity’.

It simply ignored both RIPA and the idea of human rights, and breached them both.

A second major spycops unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), was established in 1999 and did the same. This inquiry should examine how much SDS tradecraft was exported around the country by NPOIU officers. The NPOIU will be the subject of Tranche 4, with hearings expected to start in late 2027 and/or early 2028.

Many SDS managers were former undercover officers, who were probably responsible for the spycops unit’s continuing culture of criminality, institutional racism, misogyny, abuse of women, etc.

New and abhorrent tradecraft was developed by the SDS during this time. There was more use of cover vehicles, including minibuses, and more international travel. The spycops went to new lengths to create their cover identities, e.g. enrolling in college, and there was an expansion of the use of deceitful sexual relationships

We’ve learnt that the spycops were allocated somewhat disturbing codenames at this time for each of their deployments:
• HN104 Carlo Soracchi ‘Carlo Neri’: Craggy Island
• HN81 ‘David Hagan’: Windmill Tilter
• HN5 John Dines ‘John Barker’: Hawke’s Bay
• HN3 ‘Jason Bishop’: Red Herring and Quill Feather
• HN14 Jim Boyling ‘Jim Sutton’: Psycho Dream
• HN15 Mark Jenner ‘Mark Cassidy’: Touchy Subject
• HN16 James Thomson ‘James Straven’/ ‘Kevin Crossland’: Magenta Triangle

Individual officers like HN16 James Thomson ‘James Straven’ / ‘Kevin Crossland’ seem to have taken full advantage of the slack attitudes of the spycops managers, and the complete lack of effective supervision or scrutiny.

Thomson has a track record of lying to this Inquiry (during the anonymity process) and has now admitted to deceiving two women into sexual relationships. He also lied to his managers and frequently acted without their authorisation.

He made fraudulent expenses claims and got away with doing very little work, producing very little intelligence. It’s impossible to see how his deployment could have been justified in any way, even by the internal standards of the unit.

He managed to extend his time in the field by supplying his managers with false information – claiming that his targets were involved in deals with firearms in France – and they weren’t paying enough attention to notice that this was all a complete fabrication on his part.

HN26 ‘Christine Green’ who infiltrated the animal rights movement. In 1998, she took part in an action at Crow Hill mink farm in Hampshire which released 6,000 mink into the wild. Like Thomson, she failed to gain proper authorisation for her participation in crime. The Met didn’t tell Hampshire police, who investigated but never brought any charges.

The Met only informed Hampshire police in 2014. The Met have now admitted that this was a failure of management, and that they should have informed Hampshire police of her involvement.

By the Tranche 3 period, the infiltration of family justice campaigns was standard SDS practice, and this is obvious from reading the unit’s Annual Reports. The Inquiry should not accept that there was any public order reason for spycops officers like HN15 Mark Jenner ‘Mark Cassidy’ to report on such campaigns. These groups were specifically targeted because they were critical of police failures.

At this time, the SDS was desperately fighting for its survival. There was no way they could keep justifying deployments into the far left. The Inquiry must explore the strategies adopted by the managers at this time. They seem to have been eager to expand their ‘customer’ base and increase their ‘marketability’ at this time. Just who were they promoting SDS intelligence-gathering services to?

The SDS was eventually closed down, between October 2007 and February 2008. The Closing Report, published by the Inquiry this week, was scathing to the point of vitriolic. It described how there was precious little oversight of the SDS, and it sought to insulate itself from any external review. Its budget had become less transparent than ever before, even though the spycops’ expenses grew ever more extravagant.

In addition to Christmas parties, the SDS often took officers on jollies. These included repeated trips to Amsterdam, paint-balling in Birmingham, and ‘team bonding’ in Las Vegas. It appear that ‘overtime’ payments were made automatically whether the officer worked extra hours or not. The police’s Covert Finance Unit’s review in 2007 identified 23 areas of concern when it came to SDS finances.

There were a number of occasions when the SDS was reviewed. Superintendent Peter Finnemore visited as part of a HM Inspectorate of Constabulary inspection in 1999. He was allowed to meet a few specially selected, pre-briefed undercovers.

There was also an ‘internal audit’ and review carried out by DS Crane in 2004. This made a long list of recommendations for the unit. One of them was that the Code of Conduct be updated to meet the new legal requirements of RIPA. However the SDS disregarded Crane’s suggestions, calling his work ‘shoddy’, and stubbornly refused to reform itself.

It is inconceivable that senior Met officers would have been unaware of the outcome of a review that they themselves had commissioned. Why did it take them another three years to close down the unit?

The SDS managers tended to react to problems; they were not proactive about introducing improvements or managing the field officers more effectively.

The scenarios created for the unit’s recruitment process illustrate that their thinking hadn’t changed much from what we heard in Tranche 2 (covering the SDS 1983-1992). The SDS didn’t see any need to conform with legal frameworks or change how they operated.

Undercover officers appear to have had little respect for ‘shallow paddlers’, and managers who hadn’t been deployed themselves. HN52 told Operation Herne that the field officers never let him into their ‘inner circle’. HN67 ‘Alan Bond’ described similar problems with the ‘cliques’ within the SDS.

In comparison, HN10 Bob Lambert ‘Bob Robinson’, the deepest of deep swimmers who personally committed all of the unit’s catalogue of outrages as though it were a bingo card, is described as ‘the lynchpin’ of the SDS.

The unit was always run informally. There was very little ‘discipline’, and serious misconduct went unpunished. The undercovers’ lavish expenses, paid without question, took their salaries up to the same level as Inspectors, making it unsurprising that they had an insubordinate attitude towards their managers and handlers.

The Closing Report criticised inappropriate reporting on justice campaigns. But the Met, ever keen to avoid scrutiny and criticism, did not tell any of the people affected.

Lambert and others have nonetheless insisted that the unit did good work. We reject this.

The SDS was always run by white men, and there was an obvious culture of racism and misogyny – as acknowledged even by James Thomson.

Vulnerable individuals (including minors) were often targeted and interfered with by spycops, and their vulnerability was given very little consideration by anyone in the SDS.

The SDS seemingly had no concerns about the ethics of spycops committing crimes while they were undercover. When speaking to Operation Herne, Chief Superintendent HN84 Ray Parker referred to an SDS document from 1991, which left him with the impression that it provided ‘rules of engagement’ for agent provocateur, activity that was expressly forbidden. He was said to have been ‘amazed’ by this. This document has not come to light. We ask the Inquiry to investigate its disappearance.

In his evidence, HN81 ‘David Hagan’ recalls that when he was being recruited he was asked what he would do in a scenario where his targets began racially abusing an inter-racial couple. He told them that he would join in with the abuse, in order to maintain his cover. It is telling that the result of this interview was that he was recruited to the unit and sent to target groups of racial justice campaigns, despite having said that he would commit a hate crime in the hypothetical scenario.

We heard about spycops breaching the rules around ‘legal professional privilege’ in previous tranches, and it is clear that this continued in T3. They routinely spied on lawyers and clients (including Imran Khan KC and Michael Mansfield KC as we heard earlier in the day) and on elected Members of Parliament.

Trade unionists and their activities were reported on as a matter of course, with the spycops continuing to join union branches as part of their ‘cover’. It seems that the gathering and passing on intelligence for vetting and blacklisting purposes may actually have increased during this period.

The impact of this blacklisting cannot be underestimated. This unlawful practice destroyed people’s relationships, families, employment prospects, careers and lives.

The Inquiry must be mindful of the authorities’ ‘duty of candour’. It is hoped that the Metropolitan Police Service, Home Office, Security Service and every other arm of the State involved will fully and candidly account for what happened in the period under examination.

Non State, Non Police core participants’ written opening statement

Tranche 3, Phase 1, Day 1

13 October 2025

INTRODUCTION

The Undercover Policing Inquiry kicked off ‘Tranche 3’, examining the final 15 years of the Special Demonstration Squad 1993-2008, on Monday 13 October 2025.

This is quite a long report, use the links to jumpt to specific speakers:
• David Barr KC – Counsel to the Inquiry (the Inquiry’s main lawyer who’ll question witnesses)
• Peter Skelton KC – Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis (the Metropolitan Police as an institution)
• Neil Sheldon KC – Home Office (government ministry in charge of police and the Inquiry)
• Oliver Sanders KC – Designated Officers (the majority of undercover officers invovled)

Additionally there was a dramatic end to the day:

• HN86 refusing to testify

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, opened the hearing, saying that T3 will continue until the end of July next year.

Tranche 3 has been divided into 3 ‘phases’. Phases 1 and 2 will consist of evidence from undercover officers (UCOs) and civilian witnesses.

Phase 3 (currently scheduled to take place in June-July 2026) will examine evidence of the unit’s management – hearing not just from the SDS (Special Demonstration Squad, later called the Special Duties Squad) managers, but from those higher up the senior chain of command, those with oversight of the spycops’ operations. We hope to finally hear from the Home Office, who despite setting up the SDS and directly funding it, have been notably silent in this Inquiry to date.

The dates are:

• Tranche 3 Phase 1 hearings, SDS officers and relevant civilians 1993-2008 part 1: 13 October 2025 – approx 18 December 2025
• Tranche 3 Phase 2 hearings, SDS officers and relevant civilians 1993-2008 part 2: 2 February 2026 – approx 26 March 2026
• Tranche 3 Phase 3 hearings, SDS managers: 15 June 2026 – approx 30 July 2026
We believe there will also be ‘closed’ (secret – not open to the public, or to those spied upon) hearings taking place in 2026. Everyone involved in Tranche 3 will then be invited to make Closing Statements in early 2027.

Mitting is due to produce a report, detailing his findings about the SDS, before he retires later in 2027. A new Chair will then be found to oversee the remainder of the Inquiry.

It is important to note that this week’s Opening Statements refer only to what is being called ‘Tranche 3, Phase 1’ (T3P1). Despite having delayed the start of the tranche by eight months, supposedly in order to ensure everyone would have a chance to review the evidence before it began, the Inquiry has yet again failed to get the Hearing Bundle of documents ready on time.

Around 300 people and organisations heavily involved in the spycops scandal have been designated as Core Participants by the Inquiry (mostly people who were spied on). They have so far only received the witness statements and evidence in relation to the six officers that will be examined in this first set of hearings.

Of those six, only HN16 James Thomson ‘James Straven’ / Kevin Crossland’, HN15 Mark Jenner ‘Mark Cassidy’, and HN43 Peter Francis ‘Peter Black/ Daley/ Johnson’ will give evidence in person.

In relation to the others, Barr told us that HN81 ‘David Hagan’:

‘cannot give oral evidence for health reasons, but he has provided the Inquiry with a detailed witness statement.’

HN26 ‘Christine Green’ is understood to be:

‘outside the jurisdiction. She is legally represented but has declined to provide a witness statement’.

This is understood to mean that the Inquiry does not have the power to compel witnesses to give evidence if they live outside England and Wales.

HN123:

‘is unrepresented and ceased responding to the Inquiry’s correspondence some time ago. Despite significant efforts by the Inquiry to find him since then, we have been unable to do so. He has not provided the Inquiry with a witness statement but he did make a witness statement for the purposes of civil litigation against the Commissioner in 2003’.

We note that HN123 is not the only T3 officer to have gone AWOL in this way and we will be questioning the Inquiry’s apparent intention to continue giving those officers anonymity, despite their obvious bad faith.

Evidence relating to the remaining 19 officers from T3 is yet to be released to Core Participants. ‘Phase 2’ (T3P2) hearings are expected to start in February 2026 and continue until at least the end of March.

In his statement, Barr gave a relatively long rundown of the legal, political and administrative changes that affected the SDS during the T3 period (which runs from 1993 until the SDS was disbanded in early 2008) and of the evidence the Inquiry will be hearing.

In the afternoon we heard from lawyers representing the Home Office, Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and some of the officers (undercovers and their managers). They each gave fairly short statements, effectively blaming each other for the scandal of what they are now calling ‘a dysfunctional unit’.

Before reading the reports of their statements below, we encourage you to remember that throughout the history of the SDS they were all saying how brilliant it was, and commendations were being handed down from on high to SDS officers like confetti.

The Inquiry’s page for the day has video of the hearing, a transcript, and many of the documents referred to.

Live evidence (questioning witnesses in person) starts on Friday 17 October.

David Barr KC (Counsel to the Inquiry)

Barr’s written Opening Statement has been published on the Inquiry’s website.

There are over 100 pages of Annexes, including a list of all 15 ‘open’ undercover officers (UCOs), and 10 ‘closed’ UCOs (whose real and cover names are being kept anonymous).

Barr began by highlighting some important changes that took place during the T3 era, 1993-2008, and key themes of these T3P1 hearings.

With the end of the Cold War, there was a diminishing interest in ‘subversion’ on the part of the Security Service (aka MI5).

It decided to stop identifying rank and file members of groups considered ‘subversive’ in October 1992.

However, Barr noted an increased threat of terrorism in the UK during the T3 period, citing a number of major terrorist attacks:

‘9 September 2001, or “9/11”, when Al-Qaeda terrorists attacked the United States occasioning very serious loss of life, including 67 British citizens’; and ‘the appalling “7/7” attacks, in 2005, which claimed the lives of 52 innocent people as well as those of the suicide bombers’.

It is hard to comprehend the relevance of these attacks to the work of the SDS.

On Barr’s account, it came when:

‘in a case of mistaken identity, police shot dead Jean Charles De Menezes, at Stockwell underground station, wrongly believing an innocent man to be another suicide bomber’

The SDS proceeded to spy on the family of this innocent victim, and their Justice4Jean campaign.

Barr also mentioned spying on campaigns against the Second Gulf War (including ‘what is generally accepted to have been the largest political demonstration in Britain of all time’ in February 2003). Barr explained that the Inquiry will be examining whether reporting on the Stop the War Coalition, Disarm DSEI and other anti-war, or anti-arms trade campaigners, was justified.

Barr also mentioned the 2006 Lebanon War and ‘long-running problems in the Levant’, as background to spycop HN18 Rob Hastings ‘Rob Harrison’ spying on the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian solidarity group. We note that this is the first time this officer’s real identity has been mentioned in public.

Other movements spied on in this period included the climate movement, especially Camp for Climate Action. This will be examined in detail in Tranche 4, which will examine the second spycop unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, which deployed EN12 Mark Kennedy ‘Mark Stone’.

But we now know that these events were also attended and reported on by SDS officers. We were told that HN66/EN327 ‘Dave Jones’ was targeted against the 2006 Camp for Climate Action held close to the Drax power station in North Yorkshire.

Both HN118 ‘Simon Wellings’ and HN18 Rob Hastings ‘Rob Harrison’ appear to have attended the 2007 Camp for Climate Action at Heathrow Airport.

Barr described extensive reporting on other environmental groups, and non-violent direct action against genetically modified crops, road building and the proliferation of motor vehicles generally, with groups such as Earth First! and Reclaim the Streets being specifically targeted by the SDS.

However, none of these deployments will be looked at in detail until ‘Phase 2’ hearings beginning in February 2026, and the bundle of documents and evidence about these officers has not yet been disclosed to us.

Animal rights activism continued to be targeted by the SDS throughout the T3 era. A footnote to Barr’s statement notes that spycops HN26 ‘Christine Green’, HN14 Jim Boyling ‘Jim Sutton’, HN16 James Thomson ‘James Straven’ / ‘Kevin Crossland’, and HN60 ‘Dave Evans’ were all targeted in the animal rights field, Green and Thomson exclusively so.

Barr explained that ‘a wide range of animal rights activism was infiltrated’ including hunt sabs.

He notes that a:

‘landmark event was the Hunting Act 2004 which, subject to certain exemptions, rendered unlawful hunting wild mammals with dogs. It came into force on February 2005.’

IRELAND

Barr’s list of key events in the period included the 1992

‘transfer of lead responsibility for Irish Republican terrorism on the mainland from the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, or MPSB, to the Security Service’

He also cited the radical changes to ‘both the political and policing landscape’ brought about by the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998.

Nevertheless, he went on to describe SDS activity in the 1990s (notably that of HN15 Mark Jenner – see below) which suggests the unit still considered this part of its remit.

RACIST POLICING

This will be a primary focus of the evidence we are going to hear in these ‘Phase 1’ hearings. Barr noted that there was considerable racist violence within the Metropolitan Police District in the early 1990s, particularly in South East London, which prompted large anti-racist protests, for example the two that took place in Welling in 1993.

He highlighted the fact that:

‘Racism within the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] was also an issue. Numerous racial justice campaigns arose often from deaths in custody, miscarriages of justice or failures to bring the perpetrators of racist attacks to justice.’

After the murder of Black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993 and the racist police investigation, a public inquiry was announced in July 1997 and reported in February 1999. It famously found that:

‘the Metropolitan Police Service was institutionally racist.’

Barr continued:

‘We have been investigating SDS reporting on Black justice campaigns and attitudes to race within the unit from the outset of the Inquiry. There have been many examples in Tranches 1 and 2 of racist content within SDS reporting. We have found much reporting on those campaigning for racial justice.

There were deployments into far-left wing groups campaigning for racial justice, such as that of HN106 “Barry Tompkins” in Tranche 1… HN88 [‘Timothy Spence’], in Tranche 2, [deployed to Stoke Newington and Hackney], where he reported on racial justice campaigners and those seeking to hold the police to account.’

We have already heard a great deal of harrowing evidence about the racism at the core of the police, and how it related to the SDS operation, from a host of witnesses: John Burke-Monerville, Sharon Grant OBE, Diane Abbott MP, Richard Adams, and Stafford Scott. (Scott has provided an additional witness statement for this Tranche, which will be published in due course).

This provides important contextual background about the attitudes and practices found within the SDS and amongst the ‘consumers’ of the intelligence it gathered.

Barr made it clear that the issue of race will be particularly prominent in T3P1:

‘There is a great deal of SDS reporting on a large number of racial justice campaigns during this era’.

Much of it came from the deployments of HN43 Peter Francis, HN81 ‘David Hagan’, and HN15 Mark Jenner.

A large number of civilians affected by SDS reporting on racial justice campaigns or race related issues have provided witness statements, including:

• Baroness Doreen Lawrence OBE
• Dr Neville Lawrence OBE
• Duwayne Brooks OBE
• Bernard Renwick
• Lee Lawrence
• ‘MSS’ (family of Michael Menson)
• ‘MWS’(family of Michael Menson)
• Myrna Simpson
• Patricia Armani Da Silva
• Sukhdev Reel
• Tish Reel
• Winston Silcott

Barr noted:

‘The traumas experienced by each of these people are clearly set out in their deeply moving, at times harrowing, evidence. So too are their complaints about the police, many of which have already been held to be justified.’

Others who advised or closely supported those at the heart of such campaigns and were themselves reported on or directly targeted have also made statements, including:

• Michael Mansfield KC
• Suresh Grover of The Monitoring Group;
• Asad Rehman of Newham Monitoring Project
• Marc Wadsworth of the Anti-Racist Alliance
• Mark Metcalf and ‘Alison’ of the Colin Roach Centre
• Dr Graham Smith of the Hackney Community Defence Association
• Hannah Sell and Lois Austin of Youth Against Racism in Europe
• Alex Owolade, Karen Doyle, Antonia Bright and ‘Lewis’ of the Movement for Justice

The Inquiry intends to look for evidence of conscious and subconscious racism in the SDS deployments, and examine the way that Black justice campaigns were reported on. Was this a case of what is termed ‘collateral intrusion’ when mainly spying on someone else, or were they deliberately targeted by Special Branch? What was this reporting used for?

BLACKLISTING

It is well established by police and their satellite bodies that Special Branch officers routinely, illegally, supplied personal details of people to an illegal employment blacklisting organisation, The Consulting Association. Thousands of people were denied work merely for entirely lawful trade union and workplace activity.

Barr informed us that:

‘The Consulting Association continued to be involved in blacklisting throughout the Tranche 3 era. We will continue, as we have to date, to look for evidence of any links between SDS intelligence and those blacklisted’.

However we note that blacklisted union activist, COPS campaigner and Secretary of the Blacklist Support Group, Dave Smith, has not been called to give oral evidence, despite his expertise and unique understanding of the blacklisting scandal.

Smith has applied for a Judicial Review of the unreasonable and irrational decision by Sir John Mitting not to call him at these hearings, saying:

‘The inquiry’s intention to restrict the evidence of blacklisted workers, means they are relying only on police accounts. It is against natural justice and the public interest and it makes the inquiry look like an establishment cover-up’.

KEY LEGAL DEVELOPMENTS

T3 saw some very significant legal changes, most notably the enactment of the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) on 2 October 2000. From then onwards, unjustified interference with private life through undercover policing, and inhuman or degrading treatment at the hands of undercover officers, both constituted Human Rights breaches enforceable in the UK domestic courts.

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (referred to as ‘RIPA’) introduced a statutory regime with specific regulations for all deployments of undercover police officers, supposedly to ensure that these complied with the requirements of the HRA.

It introduced new systems for the authorisation, review, record keeping and oversight of undercover deployments which Barr noted:

‘should have focused minds on the justification for deploying SDS UCOs, including proportionality, as well as the need to manage and limit collateral intrusion.’

Barr made it clear that this Inquiry is prohibited from ruling on civil or criminal liability, but
that its terms of reference allow it to establish the extent to which managers considered and followed the laws which were designed to prevent problems of precisely the kind which beset the SDS.

In addition to the HRA and RIPA, other relevant legal changes that took place in the T3 period included the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996, the Police (Conduct) Regulations 1997/30, the Data Protection Act 1998, the Greater London Authority Act 1999, the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 and the Police (Conduct) Regulations 2004/645, the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, and the Police (Health and Safety) Regulations 1999.

Barr pointed out that these last two are relevant to:

‘the extent to which the MPS sought to protect its officers, and those affected by their actions, from avoidable psychiatric harm’.

He also observed that the Inquiry will examine:

‘a great deal of evidence in this tranche about the harm done not only to members of the public but also undercover officers as a result of SDS operations’.

ORGANISATION OF THE SPECIAL DEMONSTRATION SQUAD

The Inquiry has now published a timeline and explanatory note for Tranche 3. This sets out the dates different officers served in the unit and some of the organisational changes that took place.

Barr described how in 1992, Special Branch’s ‘C’ and ‘E’ Squads merged into ‘CE Squad’ which commanded the SDS until approximately January 1995. Command was then transferred to ‘S’ Squad.

He also mentioned the 2006 merger of the Met’s Special Branch (‘SO12’) and Anti-Terrorist Branch (‘SO13’) into Counter Terrorism Command (‘SO15’).

In 1997 or 1998, the meaning of the SDS acronym also changed, from ‘Special Demonstration Squad’ to ‘Special Duties Section’.

The SDS itself was headed by a Detective Chief Inspector (DCI), supported by a Detective Inspector (DI) and two or three Sergeants.

A civilian administrator was added in 1995, and a Detective Constable joined the back office team in 2003. Nominally, the SDS was supposed to have 12 undercover officers deployed at any one time, but in practice there were often fewer than that.

Many aspects of the SDS operation appear to have remained largely the same in the T3 era. They continued to recruit officers exclusively from within Special Branch. Training continued to be informal, in the back office and on the job.

The deeply problematic SDS Tradecraft Manual appears to have been in use throughout this period. The unit continued to conduct twice weekly meetings at safe houses, and undercover officers continued to use cover accommodation, cover employment, cover documents and cover vehicles.

Other practices changed. The back office was moved to covert premises in 1997 or 1998 and
undercover officers were given (frankly ludicrous and disturbing) code names.

The SDS computerised its administration in 1995 and the Inquiry has worked from electronic documents in this Tranche. (Full details of their methodology and sources can be found in the Tranche 3 Disclosure Note).

In Tranche 2, examining the SDS 1983-1992, we heard how the selection process was changed after the ‘Scutt affair’. T3 saw further changes, with the introduction of psychometric testing (according to the SDS Annual Report of 1993-94).

The practice of peer mentoring continued, but was not without its problems. There is evidence that when HN86 was in charge of the unit, he sought to improve the support available for UCOs, with psychological support apparently on offer from around 2001 onwards. However, the extent to which his reforms were actually put into practice and maintained is in doubt.

By 2005, the unit’s recruitment process seems to have included:

‘an informal meeting, an interview, psychometric testing, a psychological interview, a structured interview, a home visit and then final selection.’

The selection process, according to Barr:

‘sought, amongst other things, to assess moral and ethical boundaries… Dilemmas on themes of “racial violence”, “racial issues” and “sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll”, amongst others, appear to have been used’…

The titles alone seem to confirm that these were areas which either were, or should have been, of concern for management’.

However, despite all the legal and organisational changes, much of the behaviour of the SDS remained the same. There is considerable evidence that sexual relationships were still known about and talked about within the unit during T3.

Keeping the unit’s existence and methods secret continued to be a ‘paramount consideration’, and this influenced the way that misconduct of all kinds was dealt with, or not, and the unit’s attitude to the civil and criminal justice systems.

Barr outlined key questions for the Inquiry, a list which bears quoting in full:

‘who took targeting decisions, what decisions were made, why, how, whether they were justified, whether they were kept under review and, if they were justified initially, whether they remained so?’

He went on to say:

‘We will be taking a particular interest in how targeting was dealt with once the provisions of RIPA came into force. What difference did formal statutory processes make? To what extent did they achieve the aims which the legislation intended and, where they fell short, why?

It is self-evident that the introduction of RIPA did not act as a panacea for problems of the kind that we have been investigating. But understanding why that was the case may be very important to recommendations for the future of undercover policing. Especially if the answer is cultural, involving ingrained attitudes, behaviours and practices’.

DECEASED CHILDREN’S IDENTITIES

The SDS officially stopped stealing the identities of dead children early in T3, and HN43 Peter Francis was the last of the ‘open’ UCOs to base his cover identity on a dead child.

However, the Inquiry has learnt that HN16 James Thomson made supposedly unauthorised use of the identity ‘Kevin Crossland’. Barr explained:

‘Kevin Crossland lost his life, aged 5, in an aeroplane crash in the early hours of 1 September 1966. His mother and sister also perished in the crash but his father, David, survived albeit with serious injuries.’

The Inquiry will consider evidence of family members and will hear oral evidence from Liisa Crossland, about the impact of Thomson’s conduct and concerns about the management of the SDS.

Thomson will be questioned about how and why he used Kevin’s identity, seemingly for his own ends. Barr noted:

‘By the time the issue came to the attention of SDS managers, DS Thomson had registered Kevin to vote, obtained a mobile phone in his name and obtained a driving licence in this name.’

SDS ANNUAL REPORTS

The SDS produced annual reports until at least 1996-97. These reports were published in T2. Three further documents have now been published, including what appears to have been some discarded text from the 1995-96 report, a signed copy of the 1996-97 report with associated minute sheet, and either an incomplete draft, or part of a report, for 1997-98.

Barr noted that no complete report for 1997-98 nor any subsequent SDS annual reports have been found amongst surviving SDS records.

We can see from the minute sheet accompanying the 1996-97 report that it was definitely seen by a number of senior officers, including the then Commissioner, Sir Paul Condon, and the then Assistant Commissioner (Special Operations), Sir David Veness.

Dated 14 October 1997 is a comment from Condon:

‘Please convey my appreciation to all concerned for another year of outstanding courage and professionalism’.

This fact should be coupled with spycops describing Condon visiting their safe house to personally congratulate them. It shows that when, in the early days of the spycops scandal and the Met were in denial mode, Condon was lying when he said he’d never even heard of the SDS.

The incomplete 1997-98 report evidences a wish, on behalf of SDS management, to trumpet to their superiors about the work of HN81 ‘David Hagan’, his infiltration of the Movement for Justice and reporting on the group’s alleged actions in relation to the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry.

Questions need to be asked about the senior chain of Met command’s knowledge and involvement with the SDS, and the Inquiry will be investigating this at hearings in summer 2026.

THE DEMISE OF THE SDS

The SDS was shut down at the very start of 2008. The Inquiry will examine the events around the unit’s demise in detail at the T3P3 hearings in summer 2026.

According to Barr, in these T3P1 hearings, they will start exploring the apparent ‘clash of cultures’ that occurred towards the end:

‘It manifested itself in considerable tensions between managers with backgrounds outside Special Branch and UCOs recruited from within Special Branch. The former sought to effect significant changes to the way in which the SDS was run. They were met with considerable resistance to their efforts.’

The Inquiry has just published an explosive report for the SDS [MPS-0722622] which was written by Detective Sergeant HN273 in 2009, following the closure of the unit, at the behest of DCI Flood.

Barr describes it as:

‘a significant early critique of the SDS operation. Amongst other things it recognised the considerable legacy of risk which the unit was leaving behind. For example, because of the way in which courts had not been properly informed of SDS activity.

An important question is why more was not done at that time to act upon the recognition that there were likely to have been miscarriages of justice and deceitful sexual relationships’.

HOW EVIDENCE WILL BE ‘ADDUCED’

Barr addressed the Inquiry’s evidence process for this Tranche. He made a point of insisting that the Inquiry’s approach ‘will remain the same as it was in Tranche 2’, claiming that the vast majority of evidence was only ‘adduced’ in writing, rather than being heard orally.

This was something of a dog whistle on Barr’s part, as there is significant controversy over the fact that the Inquiry does not intend to call many non-police non-State witnesses in this Tranche, even where there are significant disagreements.

He specifically defended those decisions, telling the Chair:

‘Not every dispute of fact arising on the face of the written evidence will need to be resolved in order for you, Sir, to discharge the terms of reference. For this reason, it is not necessary to call some witnesses even though their evidence conflicts with that of other witnesses. Nor is it necessary to question every witness who is giving oral evidence about every dispute.’

He also explained that non-police non-State witnesses would continue to give evidence first, before the officers that spied on them.

This means that a large number of these witnesses will be expected to give evidence in ‘Phase 1’, about officers whose witness statements have not been disclosed and whose oral evidence will not be heard until next year.

(A full list of the non-State witnesses can be found at Annex E to the written version of Barr’s Opening Statement and the Inquiry has uploaded a provisional schedule of the T3P1 hearings).

Barr then made a very important point, reminding the Chair that:

‘the boundaries between our tranches and the phases within them are entirely administrative boundaries used by the Inquiry to organise the conduct of our necessarily complex and lengthy investigation. The ground truth was a continuum and there is considerable overlap between tranches and phases in places.

For example, some members of the public were reported on by both SDS and NPOIU UCOs during the period that both units co-existed. Some were affected by both Tranche 3 Phase 1 and Tranche 3 Phase 2 UCOs.’

One such example is that of the civilian witnesses who will be called to appear in these hearings but can also provide important evidence about HN104 Carlo Soracchi ‘Carlo Neri’, who won’t appear until ‘Phase 2’.

This understated comment was a significant moment: the Inquiry has behaved quite ridiculously when it comes to Soracchi, and although his real name has been public knowledge for years, this was the first time anyone from the Inquiry has publicly said it.

Finally, Barr summarised the police witnesses who will be giving evidence in ‘Phase 1’, and about whom others will give evidence, in the coming weeks:

1. HN143 Dennis ‘Ben’ Gunn
Gunn is actually a senior manager from T2 who is giving evidence out of turn, early next week because ‘it is expedient to do so now rather than wait until next summer’s senior management
hearing.’ Gunn served as Commander (Operations) in the Met’s Special Branch (MPSB) between approximately February 1988 and November 1991.

2. HN587 Peter Phelan
Barr noted that the Inquiry plans to call another senior manager ‘at some point during the Phase 1 hearing’. Peter Phelan was supposed to give evidence on Thursday 16 October but he cancelled unexpectedly. He served as Commander (Operations) in MPSB from the late summer of 1983 until December 1987 and thereafter as Deputy Assistant Commissioner (Security) from January 1988 until December 1991.

3. HN16 James Thomson, ‘James Straven’/ ‘Kevin Crossland’
Detective Sergeant James Thomson was deployed from February 1997 until March 2002 under the fictional cover name ‘James Straven’. He infiltrated the animal rights movement, specifically targeting the Brixton Hunt Saboteurs and the Croydon Hunt Saboteurs, and Barr added that:

‘He also appears to have mixed with at least some people who were believed to be committing offences under the banner of the ALF.’

Barr noted that Thomson’s deployment into Brixton Hunt Sabs was short lived. The reason he cites: ‘it was felt they were too unpredictable to be a source of reliable advance intelligence.’

It is worth noting that this seems improbable. It is far more likely that Thomson just failed to win the trust of the group, one which evidence from T2 suggests the SDS were extremely interested in.

Barr notes that Thomson claims to have ‘assessed the Croydon Hunt Saboteurs to be more organised and consistently led’.

Thomson’s reporting for the first three years of his deployment is described as: ‘a mixture of intrusive personal reporting of the kind with which we are now familiar but also reports about activities which, on their face, appear to have some policing value’. Thomson’s managers
were seemingly pleased with his performance.

However, Barr states:

‘In fact, all was not well. There are very many troubling aspects of DS Thomson’s deployment and conduct. Despite investigation by his immediate managers towards the end of his deployment, investigation by [police internal spycops investigation] Operation Herne and our work to date it is still not entirely clear where the truth lies…

One thing is certain: Mr Thomson has, on his own admission, told many lies to date. He has lied not only to those he mixed with whilst deployed but also to his managers and to the Inquiry. His credibility is very much an issue.’

HN16 JAMES THOMSON ABUSING WOMEN

Thomson’s misdeeds include deceiving several women into sexual relationships (something which he no longer denies).

‘Sara’ joined the Croydon Hunt Saboteurs, soon after meeting the man she knew as ‘James Straven’, in the autumn of 1998. She liked him. A relationship developed and became sexual. He told her that he loved her at the Glastonbury festival in 1999.

She felt a strong connection to him and would have married him had he asked. Over Christmas 1999 she could not contact him. She challenged him and he came to see her with a letter in which he claimed to have experienced sexual abuse when at school, asking her not to tell anyone about this. She is now very angry with the way in which she was manipulated.

Barr stated:

‘I shall not attempt, in this brief opening, to do justice to “Sara’s” evidence about the impact of DS Thomson’s deceit. But her counsel, Ms Kilroy KC, will be speaking on her behalf tomorrow.’

Sara will be the first T3P1 witness to give evidence, doing so on Friday 17 October.

‘Ellie’ was not an activist but was and is an animal lover. She volunteered and later worked at a local animal hospital. Her relationship with the man she knew as ‘James Straven’ began in early 2001.

He had asked her close friend, who we are calling ‘Wendy’, to set them up. Ellie was 21 years old at the time and vulnerable. He said he was 33. He was in fact 37. ‘James Straven’ was Ellie’s first real love and first serious boyfriend.

They went on holiday together to Indonesia and Singapore. Around the start of 2002, Ellie recalls ‘Straven’ telling her that he was going to move to the United States because his ex-wife and children were moving there. About a month later he told her he would be moving sooner than he thought. This was all part of Thomson’s exfiltration plan from his deployment.

For an extraordinary sixteen years after Thomson’s deployment ended, he kept in touch with ‘Ellie’ and met up with her periodically. ‘Ellie’ has provided exhibits to the Inquiry, including some of the loving and emotional communications that passed between them over the years. In one, Thomson asked for photographs of her in lingerie.

In June 2015, thirteen years after his deployment ended, after this Inquiry was announced and just a month before its formal opening, ‘Ellie’ had sex with the man she still knew as ‘James Straven’.

Eventually, in April 2018, after Thomson knew that he was going to lose his anonymity in the Inquiry, he told Ellie he had been an undercover police officer. By this stage, Barr noted:

‘We may need to explore in more detail what was said in this conversation. Amongst other things, “Ellie” states that Mr Thomson told her that a lot of former UCOs were leaving the country until the Inquiry had blown over.’

Such prolonged contact, over so many years, had a significant impact on ‘Ellie’. She was never able to move on and get over him, and the discovery that ‘Straven’ was an undercover police officer has had a profound impact upon her.

Ellie will be giving evidence on 23 October and 3 November.

‘Wendy’ was deceived into a long-term friendship by ‘Straven’ which lasted for over twenty years. from 1997 until she discovered the truth about who he was in 2018.

She volunteered and then worked at the same animal hospital as ‘Ellie’. She was an animal rights activist, who became a hunt saboteur in 1997, aged 17.

‘Straven’ supported her in 2000 and 2001 when her mother was dying, at a time when her mental health was very poor. She recounts how Thomson encouraged her to continue hunt sabbing at this time and facilitated her doing so.

‘Sara’ and ‘Ellie’ were close friends and Wendy is now troubled by the role she played in encouraging Thomson’s sexual relationships with them both. Thomson’s deception has had a significant impact upon her which she articulates in her witness statement.

One particularly disturbing aspect of his interference in her life is a passage in an internal SDS document about her which reads:

‘Recently moved into an address… which she has bought since the death of her mother, attempts to disrupt this purchase having failed. It is impossible to predict how long she will remain here’.

Why on earth did the spycops want to stymie her buying a house? Barr agreed in his statement that ‘this passage calls for an explanation.’

SDS managers first developed serious concerns about Thomson in 2001, when he told them he would travel to France on annual leave (from 26 September to 5 October 2001). They discovered he had in fact deliberately disobeyed instructions and gone to Indonesia with ‘Ellie’.

Barr explained that from then on, more and more problems with Thomson’s conduct emerged.

He had multiple credit cards and bank accounts in his ‘James Straven’ identity, and more than one passport, some with pages removed, apparently to conceal unauthorised travel.

He had multiple driving licences at various addresses, and managers believed he must have broken the law to obtain some of them.

‘Perhaps most troubling of all, DS Thomson was found to be developing another false and unauthorised persona. It was based on a deceased child’s identity: that of Kevin Crossland…

There was, and is, considerable suspicion about the financial propriety of DS Thomson’s conduct during his deployment.’

Barr then recounted an especially serious incident in Thomson’s deployment which will be examined in detail by the Inquiry.

As part of his supposed infiltration of the Animal Liberation Front, Thomson reported on a plot to travel to France to obtain a firearm and black powder from an animal rights activist. This supposed plot was allowed to go ahead in order to be disrupted by the police.

Barr explained:

‘DS Thomson appears to have driven to Marseille in his cover Land Rover Discovery with an activist known as ‘L3’. He seems to have left the vehicle where it could be, and was, recovered by [SDS manager] HN58 who made it appear like a theft.

A semi-automatic large calibre handgun was found in the vehicle, together with ammunition and black powder. DS Thomson hired a car and drove to Bordeaux where “Sara” recalls meeting him.’

However, SDS managers became suspicious that the plot might in fact have been a self-
aggrandising tale designed to prolong Thomson’s deployment. There has been no independent corroboration of the plot, and it appears that another UCO – who has full anonymity in this Inquiry – told his manager HN36 Michael Dell that Thomson was in possession of a firearm, given to him as a gift while on protective duties.

Thomson allegedly sought permission to keep the gun as a gratuity, and when that was refused, did not return it but instead took it to France and stored it in a ‘deposit box’.

Barr bluntly asks:

‘Was there a genuine plot which DS Thomson’s intelligence and actions thwarted, or was it all a deception on his part?’

SDS managers noted that the volume of Thomson’s reporting was much lower than might have been expected, and on analysis it proved to be of little value, so what was he doing? During his deployment, he was spending time with ‘Ellie’ and ‘Wendy’ and found the time to study for numerous qualifications from the Open University.

Barr told us that the SDS managers suspected that Thomson was overly ‘engrossed’ in his unusual cover employment. HN36 Michael Dell even commented in a File Note that Thomson’s activities in the film industry were almost the only topic of conversation at field officers’ meetings.

Barr displayed a screenshot from the British Film Institute’s website for the 1998 television drama, ‘Coming Home’, noting:

‘It is certainly an extraordinary feature of this deployment that the cover name of an SDS UCO features in the credits for a wartime period drama.’

The evidence is that managers knew about Thomson’s relationships. His phone records revealed a suspiciously large number of calls to ‘Sara’, ‘Ellie’ and ‘Wendy’.

In his witness statement, Thomson claims that when he was interviewed by Detective Chief Superintendent Black, he admitted to having a relationship with ‘Sara’.

Barr noted that:

‘it appears that an opportunity might have been missed to prevent, or reduce, the protracted deceptions of both “Ellie” and “Wendy” which continued until 2018. In the result, “Sara”, “Ellie”, “Wendy” and the Crosslands did not find out what DS Thomson had done until this inquiry’s processes brought his conduct to light.’

Barr made it clear that the Inquiry has a lot of questions about how the case of Thomson was handled by SDS management. According to him:

‘Both SDS and more senior MPSB managers faced a by now familiar quandary. Should they discipline Thomson or might that risk leading to a chain of events that would compromise the operational security of the SDS?’

Thomson doesn’t seem to have faced any formal disciplinary process, just some ‘stern words from DCS Colin Black’. His undercover deployment was ended, his security vetting reduced and his firearms authorisation revoked, but these last two were reinstated a few years later, and Thomson continued working as a police officer until his retirement in June 2014, upon completion of 30 years’ service.

It is striking to see that managers being interviewed in 2012 (i.e. after concerns about the SDS had become public) are recorded as saying that they have ‘every faith in JT who has shown unquestionable integrity over the last decade’, thanking him ‘for his dedication, commitment and value over the last 11 years through some extremely stressful operations that have been performed in an exemplary way throughout’ and adding that they do not wish DS Thomson to finish his career ‘thinking he is under a cloud’.

Barr concluded his account with the comment:

‘As to why DS Thomson behaved as he did, we understand him to be conveying in his witness statement that he lost his sense of identity and effectively became James Straven. He suggests that he was suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder.

You may need to decide, Sir, whether Mr Thomson lost his grip on who he really was or whether his conduct, over the course of many years, has in fact been motivated throughout by amoral self-interest.’

HN43 PETER FRANCIS ‘PETER JOHNSON / BLACK / DALEY’

Peter Francis joined the SDS in January 1993 and was deployed between September 1993 and September 1997. He stole the identity of a dead child, Peter David Johnson. Barr noted that there are some questions about how this was done.

He also used other names,‘Pete Black’ and ‘Pete Daley’, but without any false documentation to support them. He secured cover employment at a special needs school in West London, which allowed him to have school holidays with his real family.

Of his early deployment Barr notes that:

‘whilst in the back office, preparing to deploy, he regularly drove the then head of the SDS, HN86, to and from work. Doing so enabled him to get to know HN86 well and led to conversations about the unit.’

Francis’ evidence says HN86 was thoroughly and overtly racist. In particular, Francis says he was instructed by HN86 to seek out intelligence that could be used to undermine, discredit and destroy
Black family justice campaigns, particularly that of Stephen Lawrence.

HN86 denies these allegations, and the Inquiry intends to look at them very closely indeed.

Barr notes:

‘On the one hand there is evidence of overt racism, in the chain of command, relating to HN593 Detective Chief Supt. Robert Potter and HN86.

There is also evidence of racist content in SDS reporting, considerable emphasis on Black justice campaigns, evidence of critical police comments to the media in other cases, following the deaths of Black people as a result of the use of force by police, and broader findings about racism within the MPS, not least the findings of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry itself…

On the other hand, none of Mr Francis’ SDS contemporaries corroborate his account of a tasking to undermine the Lawrences. Nor is there any written SDS record of any such tasking.’

Barr also noted that several other witnesses question Francis’ credibility.

Francis’ account states that when he was working in the SDS back office, HN86 gave him a list of names of people visiting the Lawrence family home in the wake of Stephen’s murder, and asked him to find out if any of them had particular political affiliations and were known to the SDS.

Family Liaison Officers (FLOs) who visited the Lawrences’ home in the aftermath of the murder did make a list of visitors to the house, and the FLOs are being asked to provide further evidence.

Barr insists that:

‘Our exploration of the evidence in Tranche 3 will not be narrowly confined to whether or not events occurred precisely as described by Mr Francis. The Inquiry is seeking to establish the full truth about what happened in relation not only to the Lawrence family and Stephen Lawrence Campaign, but also Duwayne Brooks and other family justice campaigns.

We will be exploring whether relevant SDS deployments were tainted by either conscious or subconscious racism, taking into account all relevant contextual evidence.’

Francis’ first targets included the Kingsway Anti-Fascist Group (KAFG) and ‘Lewis’, a member of that group who is due to give evidence on 12 November. Barr notes that: ‘There are significant disputes of fact between members of KAFG and Mr Francis’ for the Inquiry to investigate.

Very early in his deployment, Francis attended a demonstration at the British National Party’s headquarters in Welling, held on 16 October 1993.Through his infiltration of KAFG, he made contacts within both Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE) and Militant Labour (ML, called the Socialist Party since December 1996).

Francis held a number of official roles within YRE and Militant, some of which he discussed with managers. However, yet again, Barr notes that:

‘There are considerable differences between Mr Francis’ accounts and the accounts of those he mixed with from YRE and ML. There are also conflicts between Mr Francis’ evidence and that of his managers and fellow UCOs’.

Francis was also involved in anti-racist activism, reporting widely on a number of single issue and racial justice campaigns, including the Winston Silcott Defence Campaign, the Brian Douglas Campaign and the Wayne Douglas Campaign.

Francis reported on trade unionists, whom he believed fell into the ‘subversives’ category. Examples include:

• Frank Smith (trade unionist and member of the Militant Away Team)
• Alex Owolade (member of UNISON, as well as the Revolutionary Internationalist League, and then Movement for Justice (MFJ)
• Tony Gard (member of the National Union of Teachers as well as the MFJ)
• Matt Wrack (member of the Fire Brigades Union)

Francis claims that his intelligence was of interest both to Special Branch and to the Security Service, and was likely disseminated to the Branch’s building trade contacts, and potentially used for ‘blacklisting’ purposes.

Similarly, he reported on Militant members getting involved in unions and associated campaigns, such as the National Union for Teachers’ Campaign Against Vouchers in Education.

By November 1996, the Security Service was no longer required information on such ‘subversive groups’. In any event, it was decided to end Francis’ deployment in 1997. An exfiltration strategy was put in motion in December 1996, and became a long and convoluted process.

Francis finally withdrew from the field in September 1997, using the pretence of a sick mother, who then died. This prompted sympathy cards and offers of support from his targets.

He asserts that his deployment in fact ended due to the actions of his then wife who raised concerns about his mental health with his manager, HN10 Bob Lambert.

Francis says he argued forcefully for the Macpherson Inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder to be informed of his involvement, but his superiors were against this.

He feels he was failed by SDS management. He was medically retired from the Met in 2001 and then brought a civil claim for damages against them, which was settled out of court.

Francis says managers Lambert and HN67 ‘Alan Bond’ advised him always to use condoms when having sex undercover. He describes two occasions when the Squad travelled to Amsterdam where many of the officers, he implies, enjoyed all the city had to offer.

He says he had a number of sexual encounters during his deployment (some of which he referred to in the civil claim he brought in 2003, which management would have seen). Barr elaborates:

‘He portrays a unit in which such conduct was well known and accepted as part of the job. He states that managers HN86 and HN67 told him that the SDS went “where MI5 feared to go”, the inference being that MI5 agents could not engage in sexual activity but SDS officers could’.

Barr also noted:

‘All three of the open former UCOs being called to give oral evidence in Phase 1 sexually deceived women. Three of the five who we will be hearing from in Phase 2 are also known to have done so.’

Despite raising doubts about Francis’ credibility as a witness, Barr acknowledged that he is a whistleblower:

‘He made a very significant contribution to the series of events which led to the establishment of this inquiry.’

HN81 ‘DAVID HAGAN’

HN81 ‘David Hagan’ joined the SDS in January 1996 and was deployed on undercover operations in June of that year. He used the cover name ‘David Steven Hagan’ and was assigned the codename ‘Windmill Tilter’.

He infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Hammersmith and later Fulham. He has provided the Inquiry with a lengthy witness statement but is not attending to give oral evidence due to complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

Barr describes his operation as:

‘a relatively fruitless exercise as far as public order intelligence was concerned. The SWP was not engaging in what is euphemistically described in police documents as “street activity”.’

HN81 sought redirection, which took him South of the Thames to Brixton. There he refocused his attention on Class War, an anarchist political organisation that had been involved in the Poll Tax riots of 1990.

His involvement with this group led him to Movement Against the Monarchy (or ‘MA’M’). He was not specifically tasked to infiltrate Class War or ‘MA’M’. His managers had directed him to go to Brixton, outlining his general targeting strategy as a “roving public order brief” with a broad discretion as to direction.’

Barr questions why he was sent with such a wide brief to ‘a racially diverse part of London’ and notes that ‘he found little by way of serious public order to report on’.

Within a year of his deployment starting, HN81 sought to infiltrate the Movement for Justice (MFJ), a group involved in a number of campaigns focussed on issues of racism and immigration. These included the police’s use of stop and search powers, CS spray, and deaths in custody (all of which disproportionately affected young Black men), often supporting family justice campaigns.

Issues of race became a feature of HN81’s reporting, and he remained a member of MFJ until his deployment ended in the summer of 2021.

Barr explained:

‘The extent to which members of MFJ, including ‘David Hagan’, were, or were not, involved in the Stephen Lawrence Campaign, the Stephen Lawrence Public Support Group (or with the Lawrence family or other supportive groups) is a matter that will need our close attention. A significant number of the documents relating to HN81’s deployment refer to the Stephen Lawrence Campaign and, indeed, the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry.

HN81 was present at Hannibal House, above the Elephant and Castle shopping centre, on a number of occasions when that inquiry was sitting there. Not least on the day that the five murder suspects attended. He accepts being involved in the public disorder surrounding that event.’

The Stephen Lawrence family campaign always advocated for order and calm. Yet on that day, 29 June 1998, Hagan describes shouting and aggressive posturing, and admits to joining in with the pushing and shoving that began when the suspects emerged from the building.

We were shown a long and compelling extract from ‘The Murder that Changed a Nation’, a BBC documentary showing scenes of the community’s protests as well as the police’s behaviour that day.

Barr cited the feelings of Stephen’s father, Dr Neville Lawrence, who finds it:

‘particularly troubling that an officer who sought to justify surveillance on the grounds of public disorder actively contributed to it’.

He also noted the observation of Baroness Doreen Lawrence, Stephen’s mother:

‘HN81’s presence at campaign meetings and events was purposeful and his involvement suggests more than incidental involvement; the effects of his actions amounted to surveillance and intrusion into their family and the campaign for justice.’

Barr revealed that:

‘There is written evidence that the SDS, through HN81 and his manager DI Robert Lambert, fed directly into the MPS Stephen Lawrence Review Team (or SLRT). They provided oral briefings to A/DI Richard Walton around August 1998 at a time when the Commissioner’s legal team were preparing his submission to the Macpherson Inquiry. There was a meeting at which A/DI Walton, DI Lambert and HN86 were present which was held in DI Lambert’s back garden.

It is our understanding that [Chair of the Lawrence inquiry] Sir William Macpherson was not made aware of such channels of intelligence…

Who knew what about HN81’s operation must also be established. There is evidence suggesting that it went to the top of the MPS, eliciting praise from Commissioner Sir Paul Condon at the height of the Macpherson Inquiry…

In a summary of HN81’s withdrawal strategy, HN129 DS Noel Warr notes (I quote), “[Windmill Tilter] is quite candid in admitting that he was largely responsible for their adoption of the Stephen Lawrence case, and the rest, as they say, is history”.’

It is important to note that that this kind of interference in legal processes is by no means an isolated incident, and Barr specifically stated that:

‘The legal and ethical basis for the MPS resorting to undercover intelligence in the context of legal affairs is a wider topic that this inquiry will investigate’.

Through MFJ, Hagan also came into contact with the family of Lakhvinder ‘Ricky’ Reel, who died after a racist attack in Kingston-Upon-Thames. The police insisted it was an accident and the family started a campaign for justice:

‘His mother, Sukhdev Reel, has stated that she was horrified to learn that HN81 had been reporting on their personal lives, and had driven her home following a meeting one evening.’

HN81’s deployment ended in 2001. He believes that his service as an undercover officer has had an enduring effect on his mental health and that of his family.

HN15 MARK JENNER ‘MARK CASSIDY’

Mark Jenner was deployed between February 1995 and April 2000. He first infiltrated the Colin Roach Centre (CRC) and the Hackney Community Defence Association (HCDA). He then targeted Anti-Fascist Action and Red Action.

From late 1995 onwards, Jenner was reporting on Republican Forum and Republican Sinn Féin, and SDS records from 1997 show that he was ordered to focus on London-based Irish Republican activists. His targeting specifically included two named individuals, Mark Metcalf of the CRC and Norman Blair. The former he got very close to, but not the latter.

Barr explained that the Inquiry will investigate whether there was any justification for spying on the CRC and HCDA:

‘There are serious differences between the portrayal of the CRC and HCDA by the SDS and the descriptions provided by these witnesses.’

However it is agreed that the CRC campaigned against racism and the HCDA was involved in police accountability work, including cases with a racial dimension.

Barr further noted:

‘There is also an issue as to how DC Jenner conducted himself, including whether he was violent in his undercover identity and, if so, whether his use of violence was appropriate or authorised?’

Witnesses Mark Metcalf, ‘Alison’, Steve Hedley, Dr Graham Smith, and Jenner’s now ex-wife (known as ‘S’) will all give evidence about his deployment.

Barr noted that Jenner was arrested on suspicion of obstruction of the highway at a counter demonstration against the National Front in Dover on 28 February 1998. He showed news footage of that event, commenting that it:

‘gives a flavour of the kind of public disorder in which DC Jenner found himself during the course of his deployment. He is wearing a black bomber jacket, black woollen hat and gloves and can be seen prominently at the end of the piece, apparently mouthing “come on” to opposing demonstrators.’

Barr also noted that Jenner assumed a number of positions of responsibility during his deployment and that a cause of considerable concern is

‘the extremely prolonged sexual and emotional deception that DC Jenner practised on “Alison”.’

Jenner began a sexual relationship with ‘Alison’ very early in his deployment, and soon moved into her flat. The relationship lasted almost five years and they cohabitated for more than four years.

Jenner became very deeply involved in her life, attending family weddings, birthdays and religious celebrations and holidays in the United Kingdom, Greece, Israel, Vietnam and the Netherlands.

Barr noted:

‘A particularly cruel feature of DC Jenner’s deception of “Alison” is that she wanted to start a family. The man she knew as “Mark Cassidy” told her he wanted to have children with her, but “just not yet”. Her written evidence explains that she persuaded him to go to couples counselling for between 12 to 18 months in an attempt to resolve that impasse.’

Jenner implemented his exfiltration plan after Christmas 1999, by feigning depression and paranoia.

On 15 March 2000, he abruptly moved out of the flat, returning for two periods over the following weeks, before finally disappearing for good on 11 April 2000, leaving a note explaining he had left to travel to Germany. ‘Alison’ was utterly devastated by his sudden departure.

She made extensive efforts to locate him, but these yielded nothing.

She learned through an unofficial search that Mark Cassidy’s passport was recorded as stored in ‘CE’. Further enquiries with a private detective led her to believe that Mark had been living under a false identity.

Eventually, a meeting with Helen Steel and a discussion surrounding her own experience with HN5 John Dines ‘John Barker’ convinced Alison that Mark Cassidy had been a Special Branch officer.

She didn’t receive any confirmation of this until 2011 (and the Met continued to ‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny’ his identity for years after that).

Barr said:

‘An extraordinary and valuable element of the evidence that we have is video footage
of DC Jenner during the course of the relationship. It was filmed by “Alison”…. It vividly depicts the deception in ways that words cannot.’

We will also hear from ‘S’, Jenner’s wife at that time, who Barr recognises as a ‘female victim of his deployment’.

Her evidence describes the sacrifices made by her family during and after the deployment, including being forced to move house, and the other impacts of Jenner’s behaviour. She is critical of SDS management, asserting that there was a lack of oversight, information, and support.

Barr lists a number of issues the Inquiry will wish to investigate in relation to Jenner’s deployment, including management knowledge of the sexual relationship and the extent to which the chain of command was aware of the nature of his target groups.

He cites a memo written by HN127 Tiddy dated 10 October 2000, which was circulated at the time to all of the unit’s managers (i.e. DCI HN53, DI HN58, DS HN52 Greaney and DS Warr):

‘Partnerships in the left-wing field are by and large confined to the parties that they are members of. For example, there are a large number of cohabiting partners/relationships within the SWP and SP and anyone who enjoys single status over a certain period may invite unwanted suspicion.

The most difficult of this type of enquiry is generally instigated from an attached female who may be taking soundings on behalf of one of her friends. The female antennae is a difficult creature to subdue and whereas, as a rule, they applaud monogamy they do possess the ability to unearth doubts about perceived relationships.

There have been recent operations e.g. Touchy Subject [Jenner] and Psycho Dream [Boyling] where, due to the lifestyle employed by the operatives their bona fides were considered unimpeachable.

This is patently not the case in every operation and consideration should now be given to providing additional operational support to field officers.’

This strongly suggests managers knew about the long-term intimate relationships these officers were having and knew exactly how they were spending their time. Beyond that, it indicates that managers saw such long-term relationships positively as a way to reinforce a deployment.

HN26 ‘CHRISTINE GREEN’

HN26 ‘Christine Green’ spied on animal rights activists from November 1994 to November 1999. She was based in South and West London, but also operated outside the city. She reported principally on London Animal Action, South London Animal Action, Brixton Hunt Sabs and what Barr describes as ‘persons involved in actions which fell under the ALF [Animal Liberation Front] banner’.

He commented that:

‘Her reporting covers a great variety of activism in the cause of animal rights, some of it lawful and some of it decidedly unlawful’.

However, it wasn’t clear whether he meant the activism or the reporting was unlawful, because he went on to say that:

‘Amongst reporting on individuals of a kind that was usual for the SDS is a report on a planned meeting to discuss making civil claims against the Commissioner. It is yet another example of reporting on civil litigation, or the potential for it’.

Barr made reference to a watershed in her reporting, around the spring of 1998. Following complaints from managers that she wasn’t producing good enough intelligence, there seems to have been a sudden increase in reporting on Animal Liberation Front (ALF) type activity, focussed on a man named Thomas Frampton, who was widely known as ‘Joe Tex’ or ‘Joe Tax’. An SDS File Note described him as ‘the leader of a London based ALF cell’.

In fact, Green became intimately involved with Mr Frampton and eventually resigned from the police to be his permanent partner.

There is some dispute about when that intimate relationship began, but in Tranche 2 hearings, Paul Gravett and ‘Walter’ gave evidence to the effect that it began during her deployment, and this might explain the sudden change in her intelligence product.

Barr commented:

‘Far fewer women than men served as undercover police officers in the SDS. But HN26’s case illustrates clearly that the risk of undercover police officers becoming involved in sexual relationships with those they mix with undercover is not confined to men.’

It is, however, striking that, far from the cruel and degrading ways in which male officers behaved towards the women they deceived, Green seemingly told Frampton the truth about her identity, and ultimately left her husband for him. They were understood to still be together when the facts became public in 2018.

Barr highlighted a key question of particular concern to the Inquiry: Green’s involvement in the high-profile animal liberation action which resulted in up to 6000 mink being released into the wild from Crow Hill Farm in Ringwood, Hampshire on the night of 8 August 1998:

‘She was authorised by her SDS managers to participate. The focus of our investigation, when managers are questioned next summer, will concern the circumstances in which she was so authorised, the level of that authority, and why local police were not informed either before or afterwards when the crime was being investigated.’

HN123

Barr told us HN123 infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Anti-Nazi League in the mid-1990s, adding the cryptic comment ‘He later targeted another group which was involved in violence.’

Barr highlighted three aspects of HN123’s written evidence that are of particular significance:

1. He has stated that he reported on the Stephen Lawrence Campaign whilst he was infiltrating the Anti-Nazi League.

2. His partner wrote a letter of complaint to Assistant Commissioner David Veness in August 2002, in which she referred to officers boasting about undercover activity, including their sexual relationships and the extra-marital affairs. She recalled AC Veness himself referring to the SDS as a ‘cowboy outfit’. Her main concern was the failure of the SDS to protect the welfare of its officers and the stable family relationships they relied on.

This was an attempt to bring the issue of sexual misconduct to the attention of a very senior officer: ACSO Veness was second only to Lord Stevens in the SDS’ chain of command at that time. Mr Veness will have an opportunity to respond next summer when the Inquiry’s attention turns to the unit’s management.

3. HN123 joined in with Peter Francis in bringing a claim for damages for personal injury to his mental health against the Met’s Commissioner. This was settled out of court.

CONCLUSION

Barr ended by saying that the Inquiry ‘continues to be a Herculean task’, and thanked all the people who have worked to prepare for these hearings, often to tight deadlines. He also said how ‘daunting and stressful’ the prospect of giving evidence will be for many, and advertised the fact that the Inquiry now has a Vulnerable Witness Policy, encouraging people to read it and seek the support it offers.

 

Peter Skelton KC (on behalf of the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis)

Skelton spoke for only thirty minutes, representing the Metropolitan Police as an institution.

His statement was basically a long list of the mistakes the police had made, peppered with negative superlatives and apologies, suggesting that the MPS no longer have the will to defend the indefensible.

He acknowledged from the outset that there was serious wrongdoing by ‘some UCOs’, and specified that it was ‘not only in hindsight but by the standards at the time.’

He then listed seven specific failings:

1. Managers should not have allowed reporting on family justice and police accountability campaigns

He stressed that these groups presented no risk of crime and no risk of disorder, and families like the Lawrences tended to actively discourage such behaviour.

He referred to senior officers having ‘legitimate concerns’ about a lack of trust in the police and some public disorder resulting from this, but accepted that the use of undercovers was not justified. The police’s time and resources would have been better spent on community engagement and relationship repair, and responding more effectively to racist violence.

He denied that the SDS gathered information about the Lawrences with a view to smearing the family, as alleged by whistleblower officer Peter Francis.

He expects managers and more senior officers to be questioned about exactly what they knew about such reporting, and what they authorised, or failed to question, acknowledging that there was a ‘collective failure to exercise ethical judgement’, and also a failure on the part of the most senior officers to get rid of an unhealthy ‘us against them’ culture within the Met.

APOLOGY 1

He delivered an apology at this point to ‘the family of Stephen Lawrence, Duwayne Brookes OBE the family of Ricky Reel and the other individuals, families and family members who were the subject of this improper reporting during the T3 period’.

2. Sexual relationships were wrong

APOLOGY 2

Skelton began by citing the Met’s apology made in 2015, describing these relationships as ‘a gross violation of privacy and human rights. They were abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong’, adding that they were a serious failing ‘by the standards of any time.’

He stressed that who knew what about these sexual relationships will be a matter for Phase 3, but admitted that they were ‘facilitated by poor management’ and that there is considerable evidence that managers within the SDS and Special Branch either knew, or should have known, of at least some of them.

He pointed out that the attitude of managers towards sexual relationships was exemplified by the ‘inadequate, misguided, sexist and offensive’ guidance in the SDS’s Tradecraft manual.

He described its focus as ‘self-serving’, and ’predicated on the false premise’ that rather than the undercovers, it would be their civilian targets and ‘associates’ who would want and initiate these relationships. UCOs were allowed and encouraged ‘to abrogate responsibility for their own predatory actions’.

He went on to say:

‘senior police officers in the MPS and other police services would now be expected to recognise sexual misconduct as an abuse of power and to understand the significant effects that it has on the people who are manipulated and deceived.’

This is not due to some sudden developoemnt of conscience within the Met, but the reaction to the investigative and campaigning efforts of women who were deceived into sexual relationships by officers from both spycops units.

Skelton ended by saying:

‘It is a matter of deep regret that such recognition and understanding was not part of the prevailing culture within the MPS during the 1990s and 2000s. Therefore, no consideration was given at that time – as it would now be today – to contacting the individual women to inform them that they had been deceived’.

We note that if that is the case, it was a very long time coming, as women deceived into relationships in the 1990s and 2000s were still finding out about it as late as 2017 for ‘Jessica’, 2018 for ‘Ellie’, and 2019 for ‘Maya’.

3. Participation in Crime

Managers failed to ensure that any participation of SDS officers in criminal activities was fully compliant with Home Office guidelines (Home Office Circular No. 35/1986 ‘Consolidated Circular to the Police on Crime and Kindred Matters’), specifically citing the Crow Hill mink farm incident and multiple examples of officers misleading the courts.

The Home Office had already issued unequivocal instructions in 1969, a year after the SDS was founded, saying that if the use of any kind of informant might lead to a court being misled, they should be exposed or withdrawn. No spycops should ever have gone to court without the court’s full knowledge.

4. Failure to discipline UCOs for misconduct

He referred to a ‘general failure on the part of the SDS’s management to impose discipline on UCOs’:

‘Officers who behaved unprofessionally or dishonestly were not subject to misconduct proceedings and there was no proper recognition that their lack of professionalism and integrity created security risks which made them unsuitable for further sensitive work within Special Branch or elsewhere in the MPS.

This led to a culture in which misconduct was tolerated wrongly in order to protect the continuation of the secret work of the unit… the handling of Detective Sergeant Thomson’s misconduct exemplifies this failure.’

5. Deceased Children

Skelton described the move from using dead children to fictional identities as ‘prompted by computerisation not ethical concerns’ and repeated the apologies made in T2, extending them to the Crossland family and other families affected in T3:

APOLOGY 3

‘The MPS accepts that the managers of the SDS failed to recognise the hurt, distress, and anger that the use of deceased children’s identities would cause the families of the children, and the public concern that would result if the practice had been revealed.

It apologises unreservedly to the families for this. It also wishes to acknowledge that their distress will have been compounded by the revelation that some SDS officers behaved indefensibly while using their children’s names’.

He went on to say that there was ‘no justification whatsoever’ for DS Thomson’s misuse of Kevin Crossland’s identity.

6. Welfare of UCOs

Skelton described how the T3 period saw an increasing awareness, both within Special Branch and in the wider intelligence community, of the unique stresses and risks to mental health that could be caused by undercover work.

He noted that the ‘operational security of the unit’ was too often prioritised over the welfare of the UCOs, with professional psychological support not being made compulsory until 2001.

The ‘psychological effects of living in a false identity and, for some, the direct experience of physical violence or the chronic fear of being exposed and physically attacked’ went unrecognised. The Met now acknowledges that some SDS officers suffered ‘significant psychological harm as a result of their work’.

One of those officers, Peter Francis, was mentioned by name at this point, in a way that seemed a rather nasty back-handed attack on his credibility and mental health.

7. Spouses, partners and families of UCOs

Finally, the MPS added to the long list of grovelling apologies they have been forced to issue in the course of this Inquiry, this time to the UCOs’ partners and families.

Skelton noted that SDS deployments led to particular stresses on the undercovers. They spent a lot of time living in their false identities, for years on end, most of them only intermittently returning home to their families and their ‘real’ lives. Security risks and fear of exposure meant that some UCOs and their families had to undergo the upheaval of relocating their homes and lives.

The failure of the unit’s managers to ‘provide sufficient support and psychological welfare’, and their failure to prevent sexual misconduct (and therefore sexual infidelity) from taking place contributed to the harm done to UCOs’ families.

Skelton noted that ‘S’, the former wife of Mark Jenner, will be giving evidence and stated:

APOLOGY 4

‘The MPS wishes to apologise unreservedly to them, and to all the partners and former partners of SDS UCOs, for its failure to better protect them from the effects of the SDS’s work and the misconduct of its officers’

Conclusions

After all of that, Skelton added the police’s standard mitigating point:

‘Undercover policing is an extremely valuable means of gathering intelligence for the purposes of protecting national security, preventing serious crime, preserving public order, and other important policing purposes.’

He acknowledged that it is ‘exceptionally invasive’, and there was a risk of officers abusing their power, saying that ‘high standards of conduct, ethics and governance’ were needed for any undercover operations.
He insisted that ‘some of the SDS’s targeting was justifiable’ and some of the intelligence they gathered was ‘valuable’, but offered no examples, and admitted that some of those they spied on should never have been the subject of undercover reporting.

His closing comments were damning:

‘In short, the SDS became a dysfunctional undercover unit. The human toll of the SDS’s dysfunction has been severe and wide-ranging: misuse of deceased people’s identities, wrongful intrusion into individuals’ private and political lives, grievous sexual exploitation, damaged relationships, broken families, and widespread anger, distress and psychological harm – including to some of the officers themselves.

The MPS recognises how important it is to understand the damage that the SDS has caused, to hear directly from the people who have been affected, and for the Inquiry to hold those responsible to account.’

 

Neil Sheldon KC (Home Office)

The Home Office has submitted a written Opening Statement.

Neil Sheldon KC spoke on behalf of the Secretary of State of the Home Department (the Home Secretary), in her capacity as a Core Participant (rather than as the sponsor and funder of the Inquiry).

These are the first submissions to be made by the current Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood – the ninth person to hold the office since the Inquiry began – so he took the opportunity to say on her behalf that she is appalled by these ‘historical allegations’, and that it is vital that this Inquiry uncovers the truth and lessons are learnt for the future.

However, Sheldon then defended the use of undercover operations as a tool for tackling crime. He did stress that there ‘never can be any excuse or justification for the type of conduct at the heart of the Inquiry’, noting that it irreparably damaged lives, and that it must be subjected to ‘unsparing public scrutiny’. Nevertheless there was an obvious attempt to distance the SDS from any other policing operations.

NOTHING TO DO WITH US, HONEST

The rest of the statement was an exercise in distancing the Home Office from any responsibility for what happened.

Sheldon said ‘direct involvement of the Home Office in this T3P1 is limited’, pointing out that the Inquiry has not yet requested any witness evidence from the Home Office in any Tranche, as though this were somehow evidence of their innocence, rather than a serious oversight on the part of the Inquiry.

Core Participants have pressed for the Home Office to be required to provide a witness statement and respond candidly to questions about their role.

We would also remind the Home Secretary that her Government has just introduced a Bill to Parliament (the ‘Hillsborough Law’) which would make attempts by the Home Office to cover up their role in the spycops scandal a criminal offence.

Sheldon admitted that the Home Office was ‘a recipient of indirect SDS intelligence’, but repeatedly claimed that there was no ‘cogent evidence’ that they had anything to do with the SDS’s tasking.

He said that only one State witness claimed otherwise in either of the earlier Tranches, and cast doubt upon the credibility of that particular former officer (HN78 Trevor Morris ‘Anthony Lewis’ gave evidence to the effect that the Home Secretary deemed the SWP to be a ‘subversive organisation’).

He made a plea that the Inquiry should ‘rigorously’ test any such allegations in this Tranche, and that people should take care not to lump all branches of ‘the Government’ together, or refer to ‘the Home Office’ when they actually mean another branch of the State or the Security Service.

He went on to assert that the Home Office have not seen any evidence to suggest that anyone there had any knowledge of UCO misconduct, specifically their involvement in criminality, theft of dead children’s identities, sexual misconduct, or actions which may have led to miscarriages of justice.

He stressed that:

‘it is important that everyone keeps in mind what the evidence does, and perhaps more importantly, does not demonstrate in this regard.’

This is very reminiscent of the police defence in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal proceedings Wilson v MPS, where the MPS insisted on admitting only to what could be demonstrated by the written evidence, and declined to ask any of their employees who were present at the time what they did or did not know.

The Home Office set up the SDS, and documents at the time show that they were terrified of the embarrassment it would cause the Home Secretary if its existence were ever made public. The Home Office directly funded the SDS for 20 years, renewing funding annually after reviewing its activity over the year.

After the spycops scandal broke, a search of all Home Office archives failed to find a single document about the SDS. The Undercover Plolicing Inquiry is exactly the kind of thing the Home Office must have had in mind when they ensured there was no paper trail leading to them.

REGULATORY REFORMS

Sheldon then moved on to mention the ‘radical reform’ that took place in the T3period, a reference to the fundamental change in the way that undercover policing operations were supposed to be authorised and regulated, with new statutory standards and requirements being introduced.

For example, according to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), deployments could only be authorised if three requirements were met: necessity, proportionality and oversight.

There was also the Police Act 1997, and new Police (Conduct) Regulations which came into force in 1999. These brought in new regulations that the police were supposed to follow, and an improved complaints procedure.

Included was a new Code of Conduct for all police officers to follow at all times

‘It is of paramount importance that the public has faith in the honesty and integrity of police officers. Officers should therefore be open and truthful in their dealings; avoid being improperly beholden to any person or institution; and discharge their duties with integrity…

Whether on or off duty, police officers should not behave in a way which is likely to bring discredit upon the police service’.

The ‘CHIS Code’ (or to give it its full name, the ‘Covert Human Intelligence Sources: Code of Practice 2002’) provided guidance on all aspects of undercover operations. It aimed to ensure that such policing was done in a way that complied with RIPA, other relevant legislation and human rights. It outlined the procedures that should be followed by authorising officers, and those handling intelligence from undercover sources, including a duty to consider the risk of collateral intrusion.

Finally, he quoted at length from the 2004 ‘Home Office Guidelines on the Work of a Special Branch in Great Britain’. In short, Special Branch staff were expected to comply with all of the new legislation that had been introduced, including the Human Rights Act 1998 (which came into force in October 2000). They were reminded that, just like every other branch of the police service, they were also: ‘subject to the provisions contained within the Data Protection Act 1998 and, more recently, the Freedom of Information Act 2000’.

At no point did Sheldon acknowledge that the SDS simply ignored all of this ‘radical reform’ and didn’t bother to comply with the new legislative ‘landscape’.

The other spycops unit, the NPOIU, was established during the T3 period, and it is clear from what we already know about their operations that the same forms of malpractice continued in it. Both units saw themselves as beyond the law.

Sheldon went to some pains to state that none of these reforms were the result of legislators or anyone at the Home Office becoming aware of misconduct or malpractice on the part of any police officers.

IN CONCLUSION

Sheldon finished by saying that the Home Secretary supports the Inquiry’s aims and is committed to her department ‘continuing to cooperate fully with its investigations’. She awaits its findings and recommendations with interest, including the ‘interim report’ which Mitting has promised to deliver in 2027, before he finally retires. Sheldon then took the opportunity to acknowledge, on behalf of Mahmood, Mitting’s ‘many years of hard work’ as Chair of this Inquiry.

Mitting thanked him for his ‘kind words’.

Oliver Sanders KC (Designated Officers)

Sanders represents the ‘designated lawyer officers’, 114 mostly ex- (though some current) spycops.

They are predominantly from the Special Demonstration Squad, but some from the later National Public Order Intelligence Unit, and they include both undercover and back room staff. Some of them became managers later. In total, it’s around 60% of all SDS staff (around 70% of those still alive).

None of his clients are due to give evidence in this Phase of hearings (Jenner, Francis and Thomson have all chosen to be represented by other lawyers).

HN81 is a client of Sanders, but he will not give oral evidence. Neither does he represent managers Gunn and Phelan (who are T2 witnesses giving evidence out of turn),

Sanders therefore only wanted to raise a few ‘short matters’ today; his written Opening Statement goes into more detail.

THE SUCCESSES OF THE SDS

He pointed out that there are more ‘closed’ officers (who won’t be known to the public), and therefore more ‘closed’ (secret) hearings in Tranche 3 than any of the previous tranches. He claimed that during this era, the SDS ‘did some of its most challenging and valuable work’, basically suggesting that although we will hear lots of damning evidence, we won’t hear about a lot of the background and how successful the SDS really was.

He alluded to the unit’s managers having a lot ‘on their plate’, which we (the public, who are excluded from the ‘closed’ hearings) can never fully understand, and claimed that they made lots of improvements to the way the unit was run and started to ‘modernise’ it before RIPA was enacted, with a whole list of innovations being introduced at this time.

These included:

‘psychometric testing for new recruits; psychiatric or psychological support for undercover officers and former undercover officers; the introduction of a mentoring scheme; the introduction of performance indicators and customer feedback surveys; the introduction of designated cover officers for specific undercover officers; and changes to the way in which undercover identities were made.’

Like Sheldon, he glossed over the fact that none of these ‘reforms’ prevented officer misconduct or mismanagement or had any discernable impact on the toxic culture of the SDS.

THE PROBLEMS OF HN43 PETER FRANCIS

Sanders dedicated a significant chunk of time to discussing, or rather, seeking to undermine, the evidence of Peter Francis, whilst claiming to make ‘no comment on his sincerity or motivations’.

He advised Mitting to be ‘cautious’ about accepting the claims made by Francis, saying that many of them are uncorroborated, and at one point referring to his evidence as ‘a mixture of fact, fiction and fantasy’.

In particular, he highlighted Francis’ claim that there were ‘high-level concerns’ within the SDS and Special Branch, about the ‘risk of “race riots”’, and/or of public disorder connected in some way to Black family justice groups, including the Lawrence family.

Sanders claimed that this could not possibly have been the case, because there’s no written evidence of these concerns in any of the surviving reports and records that the Inquiry has been able to unearth.

As he well knows, the SDS avoided written records on some sensitive subject, as well as destroying a lot of its paper archives when it was closed down, and the wider Met is known to have deliberately shredded many more shortly after this Inquiry was announced.

Similarly, Sanders dismissed three other claims made by Francis.

The first: that the SDS was keen to find out who visited the Lawrences’ home in the immediate aftermath of Stephen’s murder, again pointing to a lack of any proof of this. Yet in his statement earlier in the day, Counsel to the Inquiry David Barr KC pointed out the existence of evidence that police ‘Family Liaison Officers’ did in fact make lists of such visitors.

Secondly: Francis has also claimed that there was an attempt to ‘smear’ the Lawrences and their campaign. Sanders attempted to suggest that this would have been ‘an extraordinary and unprecedented tasking’, completely inconsistent with what the SDS did. He claimed that this would entailed ‘an extraordinary degree of bad faith’.

It is doubtful that any of the Non-State core participants had any difficulty in believing that this was indeed something that the SDS were capable of doing, and not ‘extraordinary’ at all. Sanders is underestimating the documented extent of the bad faith with which the institutionally racist and institutionally corrupt Met approached Black families like the Lawrences at the time.

Stephen Lawrence’s friend Duwayne Brooks, the main witness to the murder, was persecuted by the Met for years. He was prosecuted on charges so trumped up that the judge threw it out without Brooks saying a word, designating it an abuise of process.

Then the Met did it again. There is no other person known to have ever had two cases thrown out as abuse of process. So yes, the Met undoubtedly did have an extraordinary degree of bad faith towards those invovled in the Lawrence campaign.

Francis has also stated that he believes that intelligence gathered by the SDS around the time of Stephen’s murder was retained and passed on to other officers (specifically Richard Walton) years later, at the time of the 1998 Macpherson Inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder. Sanders flatly states that this is ‘not true’ but offers no reasons for this opinion, and claims there are inconsistencies in what Francis has said about this over the years.

It is well established that SDS manager HN10 Bob Lambert brokered a meeting between his officer HN81 ‘Dave Hagan’ and Richard Walton, a senior officer crafting the Met’s defensive response to the Macpherson inquiry. Lambert would not have done that unless HN81 ‘Dave Hagan’ was the best officer to report on the Lawrences.

HN81 ‘DAVID HAGAN’

He finished his submissions with a rebuttal on behalf of one of his clients, HN81 ‘David Hagan’.

Since the Ellison Review of the Stephen Lawrence case came out in 2014, he has been referred to as ‘a spy in the Lawrence family camp’ and, according to Sanders, this has had ‘a devastating and unfair impact on him’.

Hagan denies ever meeting or speaking to the Lawrences, and says the organisation he infiltrated – the Revolutionary Internationalist League, and what he called its ‘front’ Movement For Justice – was not close to the Lawrence family, who shunned most political parties.

We note that this unrepentant and self-pitying statement completely ignores the fact that Hagan admitted that he did meet, speak to and even drive Sukhdev Reel, the mother of murdered Asian teenager Ricky Reel, to her home, a fact that has caused that family significant distress.

The Inquiry’s decision to delay seeking evidence from Hagan for over 10 years, by which time he was apparently too ‘ill’ to provide it, is one that will not be easily forgiven by many core participants.

HN86 refusing to testify

After Sanders had reached the end of what he wanted to say, the Chair, Sir John Mitting, intervened with an unexpected bit of drama.

He explained that he had made a Restriction Order in July 2018 granting anonymity over both the real and cover names of HN86.

He read at length from the anonymity application received from the ‘Designated Lawyers’ at the time, which stressed that it was in the public interest to grant HN86’s request, as this would enable him to participate as fully as possible in the Inquiry, by mitigating any risks to his health and welfare. The inference was that he was willing to co-operate and give evidence, provided his identity was protected.

Mitting stressed that the Inquiry is willing to take whatever measures are needed for HN86 to give his evidence, for example he could do so remotely. He is keen to find out what HN86 has to say, especially about some of the evidence provided by Peter Francis.

HN86 was deployed undercover as well as serving as an SDS manager. However it seems that he has now declared that he has no intention of giving any oral evidence. There are no medical grounds for this refusal. He just doesn’t want to.

Mitting then dropped the news that he had decided to serve notice under Section 21 of the 2005 Inquiries Act, to compel HN86 to give evidence, and notified him of this via his lawyers. HN86’s lawyers are now seeking to challenge that decision with a Judicial Review.

Mitting pointed out that HN86’s decision to bring legal proceedings will mean three different groups will need to reflect on the situation, and what happens next:

1. The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime will have to consider whether they should allow public money to be used to fund these proceedings, which are not designed to enable the Inquiry to continue its purpose but on the contrary, will make it more difficult.

2. If HN86 cannot be persuaded to provide oral evidence, then Mitting and his team will have to reconsider his anonymity, and maybe revoke the Restriction Order on his name that was granted in 2018.

3. The ‘Designated Lawyers’ themselves may have to reflect on whether it would be proper of them to bring proceedings ‘that aim to frustrate the purpose indicated in their application’ for that Restriction Order.

Sanders responded to the Chair’s unusually public airing of this kind of grievance by pointing out that this is actually the third such judicial review the firm has brought against the Inquiry’s decisions on the public dime, and he sees no reason why the taxpayer shouldn’t pay him to do this one too.

The unfairness of this is particularly stark, as Non-State core participant) Dave Smith, the country’s leading expert on employment blacklisting, is also currently seeking to bring a judicial review. In contrast to HN86, Smith is going to court in order to be able to give – rather than withhold – vital evidence to the Inquiry, and is having to pay for this out of his own pocket.

Sanders noted that HN86 is getting older (unlklike the rest of us?) and ‘doesn’t feel able to give evidence’.

According to him, the judicial review questions whether or not this Inquiry actually has any legal power to compel someone like HN86, who lives overseas, to return to the UK and give oral evidence, or even just to give it remotely.

Sanders described this question as ‘a live issue’ and ‘arguable’, adding that he ‘appreciates it is a disappointment for you and the Inquiry and others’, and almost shrugging his shoulders as he says ‘all I can do is advise him and take his instructions and represent him’.

He continues:

‘It is our position that the Inquiry has no power to compel overseas witnesses, and there is no point us trying to litigate it now’.

We can agree that the issue is an important one, as it raises questions about why this power was not used to compel HN5 John Dines to give evidence in T2 and whether it could be used to compel HN26 ‘Christine Green’ to give evidence in T3. The Inquiry had started the day by saying that Green will simply be left alone because she is ‘outside the jurisdiction’.

It was also striking that Mitting chose to air this conversation in public, and although he was very polite about it and couched it all in careful legalese, the overall impression we got was that he really is quite cross.

Peter Skelton KC was invited to comment about this development on behalf of the Commissioner, but he protested that he could not say anything at the stage about the Met’s position as he had not had time to take any instructions from them. Mitting asked that Skelton let the Inquiry know when he has received such instructions.