Blair Peach protest, 1979

This summary covers the final week of the four-week 2021 hearings of the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI), examining the activities of the Metropolitan Police’s secret political unit, the Special Demonstration Squad, from 1973-82.

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

THE DECEIVED AND THE DECEIVER

The UCPI hearings on 10 May and 11 May were notable for the consecutive appearances of an activist who had been deceived into a sexual relationship with an undercover officer, and the actual spycop who had deceived her.

‘Madeleine’ was the only activist we heard from this week. State core participants giving evidence were spycops ‘Vince Miller’ (HN354, 1976-1979), ‘Paul Gray’ (HN126, 1977-82), and ‘Michael James‘ (HN96, 1978-83). Summaries of evidence were given for three other spycops, and documents introduced for a fourth, who is now dead.

Owing to the refusal of the Inquiry to release names or photographs of officers, there are many people who may never know if they were spied on. The Inquiry has also refused to call as many spycops as possible to give evidence, so we are unlikely to ever have an accurate picture of their activities.

CONFLICTING ACCOUNTS

Once again, everything we heard this week supported the emerging picture that we do have. People who were spied on gave clear, consistent, and detailed accounts of their actions, including the moral and ethical standpoints that led them to join the groups that were infiltrated.

Spycops gave conflicting accounts of what they did; whether they had intimate relationships with activists, what went on in safe-houses, what their managers were or were not aware of, and even whether or not their work was useful. They contradict each other, and sometimes contradict themselves, whether in different reports or even within the same session of giving evidence.

This was very clearly shown this week when comparing the evidence of undercover ‘Vince Miller’ (HN354, 1976-1979) who infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and ‘Madeleine’, an SWP member who he deceived into a relationship. Madeleine gave evidence on 10 May, Miller on 11 May. Both took a whole day.

Miller was the first unmarried officer to be deployed by the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS). He was in a relationship, however, and this was one of the first things his superiors asked him about.

He believes this was because being married was preferred, as having a wife meant some form of support whilst enduring the stress of an undercover deployment. All the other evidence from spycops this week (and beyond) echoes this statement: family ties would prevent them ‘going rogue’.

‘Paul Gray’ (HN126, 1977-1980), giving evidence on May 13, said he thought ‘you had to be married’ to join the squad, as:

‘It led to a secure background, a secure home… I suppose it was good to have somebody at home when you came back after a long weekend or a long day’

It appears that, despite this being a deliberate choice by the SDS, no thought was given to the impact it had on the officers’ wives. Contact phone numbers for their husbands were not given until 1978, when one wife asked for this.

Wives were expected to do everything to help their husbands, up to and including moving house at short notice if their cover was blown. Many of them were left acting as single parents for weeks at a time. They believed their husbands were doing work crucial to the security of the nation.

UNMENTIONED ONE-NIGHT STANDS

Madeleine is one of four women who Miller has admitted to having intimate sexual contact with. Two of the others were not activists, nor were they connected with his target group. He says he simply met them in the pub – whilst undercover and claiming expenses – and had what he describes as ‘one-night stands’ with them. This was very early on in his deployment, when he was still exploring the area he had to infiltrate.

Madeleine’s relationship with Miller described in a friend’s diary, January 1980

Since they were nothing to do with his deployment, Miller chose not to mention them in his ‘impact statement’ to the Inquiry. Even when his solicitor was sent a letter by the Inquiry specifically asking for details of all sexual relationships, Miller remained silent. It was not until a year later – in his witness statement – that he admitted to them.

This alone is enough to bring his overall credibility into question. Everything he says must now be examined through a lens of ‘is this the whole story?’ What would it serve Miller to omit from his evidence?

David Barr QC, Counsel to the Inquiry, seemed to be aware of this as he questioned Miller. Barr kept the pressure on to an extent that made Miller literally sweat, as he contradicted himself repeatedly about matters of procedure and events in the SDS safe house. When questioned about his deception of Madeleine, Miller flushed red and was visibly deeply uncomfortable for the duration of that topic.

On the previous day, Madeleine herself was open and quietly compelling. Miller claims that he only had sex with her once, but she gave the Inquiry a detailed account of their months-long relationship. This is backed up by near-contemporaneous diaries detailing conversations about Miller’s refusal to stay the night after he’d had sex with her.

MANIPULATING PEOPLE BY LYING

Miller told Madeleine his refusal to stay over was psychological, that he didn’t feel safe unless he woke up in his own bed. He also told her he had grown up in a children’s home, and recently had a bad breakup from a toxic relationship. Giving evidence, Miller said it hadn’t occurred to him that his cover story of past pain and not wanting to be hurt again might evoke feelings of sympathy, intimacy and protectiveness.

This is astonishing, given that his entire job consisted of manipulating people by lying to them. Like all the spycops we’ve heard from so far, he says he received little training. However, the ability to gauge people’s reactions to what you tell them is surely a prerequisite for working undercover. For example, Miller was once asked what he was doing for Christmas. To end the topic, he replied that both his parents were dead.

His cynical tale of woe is another piece of spycop tradecraft, one that other women deceived by spycops will recognise all too readily.

‘REALLY, REALLY SINISTER’

Barricade on Cable Street, 4 October 1936 [Pic: Bishopsgate Institute]

Madeleine was about 15 when she joined the International Socialists (IS), which later became the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). In 1970, when she was 16, a Special Branch Registry File on her was opened.

Parts of that file are redacted by the Inquiry, which she finds ‘really, really sinister’; what 50-year-old information about her does the Inquiry not want her to see?

AUTOMATIC TARGETS

Miller explained that it was not unusual for 15- and 16-year-olds to be spied on and have files, if they were ‘sufficiently active’. Additionally, it streamlined the paperwork to open a file on someone if they were ‘constantly being referred to in all sorts of practices’.

The inference is that if children were often mentioned in reports on their parents, it was easier for the SDS administration to open a file on them. This is backed up by the evidence of ‘Michael James‘ (HN96, 1978-83).

In a self-fulfilling manoeuvre, children and adults became automatic targets for the State simply because they had a file.

Madeleine had split up with her abusive husband in the autumn of 1978. By this time, she had known Miller as a member of the SWP for over a year. A flatmate’s diaries show he visited their flat in summer 1977. After the breakup, she increasingly regarded him as a friend.

This was the period during which Miller was infiltrating the Walthamstow branch of the SWP. He became treasurer, then district treasurer and social committee organiser for the Outer East London District Branch. Miller organised fund-raising gigs and other social events. As people dedicated to the same ideals, the SWP members’ lives were very enmeshed.

PUBLIC DISORDER PICNIC

The Queen’s Silver Jubilee in June 1977 saw one such social event. It had been declared a one-off bank holiday; in a gentle push-back against the imperial overtones of the occasion, Walthamstow SWP organised an anti-Jubilee family picnic in Epping Forest.

The Inquiry asked if the picnic was likely to involve any public disorder:

‘Absolutely not, no. It was just a picnic. With children, I might add.’

Given some of the things we are expected to believe from other State witness statements this week, the Inquiry not knowing what a picnic involves is the very least of it.

The direct actions of the Walthamstow SWP were not geared towards public disorder either. A report mentions them ‘occupying’ a Sainsbury’s supermarket, but this is untrue:

‘what they probably did was stand outside with banners, handing out leaflets and talking to shoppers… We felt supermarket prices were kept artificially high to extract profit for shareholders.’

It is hard to see why campaigning for lower prices at Sainsbury’s would be a threat to democracy. This explains why the spycops exaggerated in their report, something that happened throughout this period.

There is a paradox here. On the one hand, the undercovers talk about ‘hoovering up’ information indiscriminately for superiors to make use of, never filtering or questioning the value of the intelligence. On the other, the threat factor of small, peaceful groups is repeatedly made out to be far greater than it was.

On the third – because you need three hands to keep track of their contradictions – they describe the groups as harmless, then circle back round to the justification of information possibly being useful in the future. Or being ‘filed and never used again’, according to ‘Michael James‘ (HN96, 1978-83).

STEALING THE IDENTITY OF A DEAD CHILD…

James infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party and Troops Out Movement, occupying a senior role in the latter by the early 1980s. Like most of the spycops from this period, he was given precise instructions to steal the identity of a dead child and had no qualms about this:

‘I had no moral reservations about this at all… And I couldn’t see why it was a moral issue, because it didn’t involve anybody.’

Pressed on why he thought this:

‘No family were injured or caused any distress because of this practice.’

Later, when queried by the Inquiry Chair, Sir John Mitting, he added:

‘I dismiss what I see in the press about what they say about the stress given to families whose children have been used in the way. I don’t accept that. From my own knowledge that didn’t happen.’

‘Paul Gray’ (HN126, 1977-82) said in his written statement that it was the founder of the SDS, Conrad Dixon, who had instigated the use of dead children’s identities. Giving evidence on 13 May, he changed this to say that the practice was inspired by the film The Day of the Jackal.

When pressed by the Inquiry as to which it was, Gray decided on the latter as he had:

‘checked Wikipedia and the film had just come out when we started doing it.’

He was not alone among the spycops in having a cavalier attitude to the truth, but he was particularly blatant about how much being asked about it annoyed him. He often gave obtuse answers to straight-forward questions, and at times refused to answer them outright, despite having sworn to tell ‘the whole truth’ before giving evidence.

Interestingly enough, he took offence at what was said in what is presented as his own written witness statement:

‘I have not written that, not at all, this is not my kind of English. This was written for me.’

His words and attitude confirm something previously suspected – that the statements were worded for the spycops, not by them.

…TO SPY ON LIVING CHILDREN

Returning to Michael James, a May 1979 report he wrote [UCPI0000021293] gives personal details about a member of Clapton SWP and Hackney Women’s Voice. It describes her as divorced, with a six-year-old child. Why report on her marital state, the age of the child or even that she had a child?

‘All I can conclude is that I was trying to paint a picture of an individual that may have been used in the future.’

Would you have been concerned at all about reporting information on children?

‘Well, all I said was she had a daughter of six years. I mean, I’ve not gone into any more detail.’

In August 1979 he reported [UCPI0000013300] on an under-18-year-old SWP member, including the school they went to. He said he wasn’t concerned about having done this.

James gave evidence on 13 May, a long and somewhat torturous process that saw him evading giving answers and instead suggesting questions he thought should be asked. This left Inquiry counsel Steven Gray QC persistently cutting through James’ repeated shambling around answers, for which he is to be applauded.

The Inquiry discussed other examples of intrusive reporting. When pressed to justify various egregious sections in his files, James fell back on the defence that it didn’t really matter. It was just information that mostly went nowhere, kept on the off-chance it might actually be useful one day; but since that was in the future, who knew, so you reported everything.

INTRUSIVE REPORTING

Despite James’ claims that the information would, in his experience, ‘never see the light of day’, many of his reports were passed to the Security Service (MI5). All the files published by the Inquiry with a reference number beginning ‘UCPI000…’ are taken from the Security Service’s existing records.

As Steven Gray QC pointed out:

‘the fact that it wasn’t going to see the light of day again in your experience is not borne out by the fact that we’re looking at it now, is it?’

The theory that the reports would not be looked at until some time in the future could also explain the fictional tendencies of the spycops who wrote them. A practice familiar from SDS reports seen earlier in the hearings was to take the most extreme statement anyone made at a meeting and portray it as the whole group’s real basis. Realistically, most meetings, from business to Brownies, would suffer under that parameter.

A January 1979 report [UCPI0000013063] from Miller also mentions children. School Kids Against the Nazis (SKAN) had been formed when the National Front held a demo outside a school in multicultural East London. About 200 pupils had opposed it, with 15 arrests – all but one of them Black kids.

SCHOOL KIDS AGAINST NAZIS

‘Paul Gray’ (HN126, 1977-1980) also reported on SKAN, and seemed preoccupied with one Black boy in particular. Gray reported on his family life, that he spoke at a SKAN meeting, and leafletted schools in a campaign against education cuts, among other things.

Gray claimed this reporting was justifiable from a public order point of view, but then denied that the reports were his [UCPI0000011997], [UCPI0000011380].

Shown a report detailing minor criminal offending of a minor schoolboy, [UCPI0000011994], he was asked if this was the sort of information he would have reported on SKAN?

‘Although SKAN’s members were young, they were just as violent as any other anti-fascist group.’

The Inquiry then showed a short video of SKAN Hackney – an endearing bit of footage with schoolkids, black and white, explaining they were friends and colour did not play a role, and that they were against the NF stirring up tension.

Gray agreed that this was the impression that he had of SKAN at the time, but claimed:

‘the characters that I was aware of were a lot more violent.’

Asked specifically about the child prominently featured in his reports, Gray conceded he had never seen him committing violence at demonstrations, but ‘he was always the first out of the bus at Brick Lane’. It is also notable that he described the boy as having an ‘effeminate manner’. He says he never thought about whether this was appropriate or not.

SUGGESTIONS OF INSURRECTION

Gray said that in fact, the legitimacy of reporting on SKAN at all was never discussed with him by superiors. It was not talked about at the weekly meetings. Nor was the reporting on girls protesting because they were not allowed to wear trousers to school [UCPI0000021267].

Returning to the 1979 report from Miller, this said SKAN:

‘can, with short notice, get large numbers of school students on to the streets, should the need arise.’

The Inquiry asked Madeleine if SKAN were indeed able to suddenly create a mob ready for street violence. Yet again, she had to deflate suggestions of insurrection. SKAN was a self-organising group of kids responding to the upsurge of racism around them:

‘The idea that we would have somehow had to have planted these ideas in their heads is a bit ludicrous really. It was their own experience.’

Madeleine notes other reports are deliberately facetious, and often selectively quote a few individuals’ opinions rather than the general view, even just picking up on comments made by members of the public. She elegantly described it:

‘There’s a little bit of embroidery going on in many of the reports. There would have been people there who would have expressed opinions that we wouldn’t necessarily agree with, but we would discuss and debate and argue with them.’

MADELEINE BELIEVED HERSELF SAFE

In the summer of 1979, Madeleine was 25 and slowly coming out of her shell after years of her husband’s possessive behaviour and abuse. At a house party in Ilford, mainly attended by SWP members, she was happy when her SWP comrade of three years, Vince Miller, pulled her into his lap, and when he later put his arms around her. She was not looking for a relationship, but believed herself safe with him:

‘I thought he was lovely. A really nice guy. I thought he was a genuine, lovely, easy going person, I thought he was sensitive, he had this story of heartbreak and all the rest of it. I felt he was looking for genuine relationships with people.’

After the party, he took her back to her flat and they began a sexual relationship. It was the only time that he stayed the entire night with her, leaving in the morning.

ABSOLUTE BETRAYAL

Asked how she would have felt to discover Miller’s true identity at the time, she said it would have been devastating. She was young and naïve, and would have been profoundly shocked and distraught:

‘I’d made myself very vulnerable to him and I trusted him, and to me it would have been an absolute betrayal… I would have regarded it, as I do regard it now, as rape.’

Miller claims Madeleine invited him up to her room. Questioning Miller, David Barr QC bluntly asked if he went because he wanted sex – despite the fact that he was a serving police officer on duty?

‘I think I’d have to say yes.’

Asked if he thought Madeleine would have had sex with him if she knew who he really was, Miller admitted:

‘if she knew that I was a police officer then almost certainly not… But I’m both a police officer and a person, so she might have seen the person, not the police officer.’

Had she seen the person, she would have also seen that he was in a committed relationship. What she saw instead was a single comrade she’d known for years, who had become a trusted friend, and then lover.

The Inquiry attempted to downplay the impact the relationship would have had if Madeleine hadn’t latterly found out the truth about spycops. This gives no consideration to the reality of the situation as she experienced it at the time.

THE FOCUS OF HER AFFECTIONS

Madeleine hoped that they would become a couple. She didn’t see anyone else, and her feelings for him grew. They met about once a week; always at her house, never his. She was very keen for the relationship to continue, as she was ‘never looking for a one-night stand or casual sex with anyone’, and ‘he seemed very keen on me’.

Their regular dates continued for a couple of months. He was, she says, the focus of her affections. However, towards the end, things changed:

‘He became increasingly distant, and I began to become disappointed that it didn’t seem to be going the way I wanted it to go. And, yeah, I kind of became a bit upset about it.’

Madeleine found herself wondering if it was her fault that Miller was withdrawing his affection. The last time she saw him was at a friend’s house. She hadn’t seen him for about a week. He was sitting on the other side of the room with a woman, and she sensed from their body language that there was something between the two of them. Madeleine now thinks this is the other SWP member that he has admitted deceiving into a relationship.

FEIGNING EMOTIONAL DISTRESS

Miller ignored Madeleine. When he left, she followed him to ask why he was being so distant. He said that he’d already told her that he couldn’t get too involved and that he didn’t want to get hurt again.

She remembers his departure damaging her self-esteem, leaving her feeling upset, disappointed and rejected. She saw it as part of a pattern with her marriage and thought:

‘God, have I made another mistake?’

He said he was going to go to California to ‘find himself’. This is yet another early example of what became standard practice – spycops would cover the end of their deployment by feigning emotional distress and say they were going abroad to sort themselves out.

The emotional turmoil created by some of the later officers had huge impacts on those who loved them. More than one desperate woman deceived into a relationship went searching in the country where her partner was supposedly living, not knowing he was actually back at a desk job in Scotland Yard.

FURTHER TALES OF VINCE

This was not a relationship that had ‘very little impact’, and it was caused by the spycops whether Madeleine knew of them or not. The revelation that the man she knew never really existed has caused more recent impact, undoing the peace that Madeleine eventually made with the end of the relationship.

‘To discover that I didn’t know him at all and that he was a fiction, that’s been quite difficult to get my head around. He doesn’t actually exist, it was all an act, wearing a mask… it’s really chilling and sinister… I just don’t know how people can behave like that.’

It is indeed abhorrent that Miller chose to have sex with a young woman who had no idea of his true identity, and who he knew was emotionally vulnerable. Perhaps even more so that he claims it didn’t cross his mind that she might feel pressured, after being in a relationship with a controlling man.

When asked by the Inquiry about pregnancy concerns, Miller put all the responsibility on Madeleine:

Q. Did you use contraception?
A. Not that I recall.
Q. Did you give any thought to the consequences of fathering a child when you were in fact an undercover police officer?
A. No, I didn’t. I think my perception was that as a full feminist socialist supporter, then if there was any need for protection, then she would have mentioned it. I didn’t see her as some kind of shrinking violet, or something like that. This was a member of the women’s movement, and women had the same right to ask for things and to insist on things as a man. And I would have supported that then. I incidentally still do. So she would have had the right – absolute right to insist, if it was necessary.
Q. But in the absence of any insistence?
A. Then I assumed everything was safe. In contraceptive terms.

Miller’s account of their relationship differs so wildly from Madeleine’s that even the Inquiry Chair, Sir John Mitting, butted in to question him on it.

AN ESSENTIALLY TRUTHFUL PERSON

Miller repeatedly stated that he had little or no memory of many events during this time. Madeleine has clear recollections of the last time she saw him. Miller said he has no memory of saying goodbye to her before he ended his deployment. However, he maintains that he only had sex with her once, which he now describes as:

‘inappropriate and unprofessional.’

Mitting stressed that Madeleine had impressed him when giving evidence:

‘As a sincere and essentially truthful person, trying to tell me, as best as she could remember, what happened between you and her.’

Their relationship was not the only topic where Miller delivered a different version of the truth.

August 1977 saw a key moment in the fight against fascism in Britain. The National Front (NF) were organising a march in Lewisham, and there was a huge counter-demonstration. The collision of the two became known as the ‘Battle of Lewisham‘.

Miller says Walthamstow SWP members checked out the route the night before, and deposited piles of bricks that could be used as weapons the next day. He also claimed they were armed during the march.

Madeleine utterly denies all of this. There is no evidence that anybody ever planted any bricks at all.

BATTLE OF LEWISHAM

This confrontation is now commemorated with a plaque in Lewisham. It was the turning point in the rise of the right wing, and the beginning of the end of the NF.

Miller remembers that everyone who opposed the NF agreed that the far-right had to be stopped from marching through New Cross, a very multicultural area, and that they all organised and planned to stop it.

Miller was an SWP steward for the march. He described the NF as ‘deliberately confrontational’, adding:

‘I don’t think these situations would be allowed to take place now.’

Despite the Met deploying 4,000 uniformed officers, Miller explained that ‘following the march’ was impossible; ‘it was chaos’. The police had no protective gear in those days. In his words:

‘the mounted branch took a complete hammering.’

There were running confrontations all over the area for the rest of the day. Miller described how, after the march was over, members of the far-right were poised to attack the protestors.

Battle of Lewisham plaque, erected on the corner of New Cross Road & Clifton Rise in 2017

Miller said he was ‘too close for my own comfort’ to the confrontations, but that he avoided getting involved in any ‘direct physical violence’ himself.

He remembers phoning up other spycops after the event, to check they had got home safely. A number of them were present that day, because they were infiltrating many of the other groups who attended, not just the SWP. They definitely discussed the event in the safe-house, he confirmed.

We learned from a report dated 23 August 1977 [MPS-0733369] that Special Branch held a debriefing for eighteen of its officers who were present. Miller says he was not one of them, and explained that other Special Branch plain clothes officers would have gone to the march, and that it’s likely that the SDS’s views would have been represented at the meeting by one or two officers, ‘at a high level’.

He notes the SDS undercovers were disappointed that their pre-intelligence had been ignored, resulting in severe violence. Despite that, in the SDS Annual Report for 1977, the Lewisham event is described as a triumph for the unit.

THE DEATH OF BLAIR PEACH

Blair Peach

By way of contrast, we have been told that only one spycop was present at the April 1979 anti-fascist demonstration in Southall where police killed Blair Peach, and he left early because it had turned violent.

The anti-fascist protest was a reaction to a General Election rally held by the National Front in a very multi-cultural area of London. This deliberate baiting by fascists was exactly the kind of event that the SDS should have been reporting on.

Gray said his branch made arrangements for the demo, [UCPI0000021193], but he did not attend, saying he probably had an SDS office meeting if it was on a Monday (which it was not) or had to go to work in his cover deployment (despite stating earlier that he never did any work there).

OBVIOUS LIES

Celia Stubbs, 2021

Gray claimed that he did not hear about what had happened to Blair Peach, apart from what was on the news. Like many of his colleagues, he claims there was never any discussion about it at meetings of the SDS.

This is an obvious lie, not just because it was a fairly significant public order event, but because it was, naturally, discussed at his SWP branch [UCPI0000021218].

Gray also denied knowing Blair Peach’s partner Celia Stubbs (who gave evidence on 6 May 2021), despite having reported on her activities and referring to her as ‘Celia’ during the hearing.

He states he could not remember going to pickets outside Harlesden Court where the inquest into Peach’s death was held, although he reported on it:

‘If there is a report, then I must have gone.’

There were two reports, [UCPI0000013435] and [UCPI0000013498] that show Gray was organising the selling of Socialist Working papers at the event.

Despite a general call-out from the SWP to attend to Blair Peach’s funeral, Gray says he didn’t go. However, photos were taken at the funeral by a separate Special Branch unit. These were collected in an album brought to the office meetings of the SDS for the spycops to identify the people present. It was then used by Gray in standard reporting [UCPI0000013539]. He still says the killing was not discussed.

THE KILLING WAS NOT DISCUSSED

Vince Miller said that demonstrations were discussed during meetings at the safe houses, and there was:

‘informal exchange of information, but also a release so that you could actually talk about things somewhere.’

He too claims that Peach’s death was never talked about.

There are multiple reports from spycops about the 1977 Lewisham and Wood Green demonstrations, both of which featured clashes between fascists, anti-fascists, and the police. There are hardly any about Southall. Every spycop asked about this demonstration has clammed up, even ones who have been quite forthcoming about their other activities.

It is insulting to be expected to believe that neither reports, which were written on the minutiae of people’s lives, nor memories of an event where a member of the public was killed by police, remain within the SDS.

OFFICERS HOLDING OFFICE

There is some contention as to whether spycops were supposed to hold office of any kind, or take influential roles, within the organisations they infiltrated. What is certain is that most of them did.

One of the officers in this era was Richard Clark (‘Rick Gibson’ HN297, 1974-76). He set up a branch of the Troops Out Movement as part of a long-term climb through the ranks to the very top of the organisation, where he then sabotaged it – as we reported earlier.

In the period under examination, from Clark onwards, every single undercover officer took a role in the organisations they infiltrated, except for ‘Graham Coates’ (HN304, 1976-79) who was infiltrating anarchists without hierarchy or official roles.

In some case officers took national leading roles. What resulted from this was not just information, but also the opportunity to have a say in the direction of the organisation, and ultimately the ability to derail that organisation.

This week alone we’ve heard from:

‘Vince Miller’ (HN354, 1976-79)
Treasurer, SWP Walthamstow branch
Treasurer, SWP Outer East London District
Social Committee, SWP Outer East London District

‘Colin Clark’ (HN80, 1977-82)
Treasurer, SWP Seven Sisters & Haringey branch
Treasurer, SWP Lea Valley District
National Treasurer, Right to Work Campaign
Offered a place on SWP Central Committee; turned it down, but did do admin at HQ.

‘Bill Biggs‘ (HN356/124, 1977-82)
Treasurer, SWP Plumstead branch
Newspaper Organiser, SWP Plumstead branch
Treasurer, Briston SWP branch

‘Paul Gray‘ (HN126, 1977-82)
Newspaper organiser, SWP Cricklewood branch
Newspaper organiser, SWP North West London District
Acting Chairman, Coordinating Committee, Anti-Nazi League West Hampstead branch (later Camden Against Racism/Anti-Nazi League -West Hampstead & Hampstead Group)

‘Michael James‘ (HN96, 1978-83)
Newspaper organiser, SWP Clapton branch
SWP Hackney District Committee
Membership & Affiliation Secretary, Troops Out Movement
Chair of Steering Committee, Troops Out Movement

‘Phil Cooper’ (HN155, 1979-83)
Treasurer, Waltham Forest Anti-Nuclear Campaign
National Treasurer, Right to Work Campaign

In 1982 and 1983, Cooper was trusted enough to gather the entrance money for the SWP’s annual national delegate conference in Skegness. This provided him with a list of 1,983 attendees, which he included in his report that was passed to MI5 [UCPI0000018180].

It was noted by MI5 that ‘the SDS office [was] still groaning under the weight of Cooper’s report’, which was subsequently considered to be of significant value to the Special Branch and MI5 alike [UCPI0000028728, MPS-0730009, MPS-0735901].

UNRELIABLE WITNESS

Cooper is not being called to give oral evidence due to his current state of health. However, he has previously provided an updated and amended written statement.

A big question is whether Cooper told the Undercover Policing Inquiry’s risk assessors that he engaged in sexual activity whilst he was deployed.

The assessors were employed by the Metropolitan Police to determine the risk to former undercover officers if any aspect of their identity was revealed. Their report from late 2017 recorded Cooper accepting that he had had two or three encounters with women, and the circumstances in which they took place [MPS-0746710].

Both the author, David Reid, and the second risk assessor, Brian Lockie, were left with the impression that Cooper was describing his own experiences whilst deployed [UCPI0000034397].

In contrast, Cooper suggests both misinterpreted his comments, saying that he:

‘was not as clear as I should have been about the dividing line between the specific, factual details of my particular deployment and more hypothetical comments about such deployments more generally.’

Cooper now denies engaging in any sexual relationships while undercover.

The psychological assessors who spoke to Cooper ahead of the Inquiry say that he is not a reliable witness due to being both highly suggestible, and wanting to avoid subjects that would mean revisiting traumatic experiences [UCPI0000034361], [UCPI0000034360].

CHANGING PARAMETERS

The last witnesses to appear at the Tranche 1 Phase 2 hearings of the Inquiry were the two risk assessors in question, David Reid [MPS-0746378] and Brian Lockie [MPS-0747533]. They were called by lawyers representing a number of undercover officers, including Cooper.

Both were asked to explain some alleged factual errors in their risk assessments for other officers. This line of questioning seemed to aim at undermining the accuracy of their recollections of Cooper’s testimony about his sexual encounters.

Both Reid and Lockie reaffirmed that what they recorded Cooper saying was correct, although they conceded that they were ‘not infallible’.

We also learned that the risk assessment process had been an evolving one. The assessors have been learning as they went, and changing their protocols and procedures accordingly.

It is unclear what this means for the earlier risk assessments, which were used to justify secrecy around the names of SDS undercovers.

WHAT NEXT?

May 13 concluded this round of hearings. The next hearings – ‘Tranche 1 Phase 3’, examining SDS managers 1968-82 – are scheduled for some time in the first half of 2022, but there will be no certainty of the dates for some time.

Though the Inquiry admitted in 2017 that more than 1000 groups were targeted by spycops , it refused to publish the list and for a long time only named fewer than 100. Activist researchers have produced a more complete list of those targeted.

Kate Wilson: Verdict expected

During the first set of hearings in November 2020, the Inquiry disclosed another 126 names of groups that were spied on in 1969-1975. An updated list, with groups named during the current set of hearings, is being put together by the Undercover Research Group (URG) at the moment.

We also hope to receive the verdict in the case of Kate Wilson before the end of this year. Kate was deceived into a relationship by undercover officer Mark Kennedy. Her ten-year legal battle for answers recently culminated in a hearing at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, at which police admitted their spying breached a number of her human rights, including her fundamental right to freedom from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Regardless of the verdict, however, this landmark case and the disclosure resulting from it is bound to have consequences for the Undercover Policing Inquiry, as it reveals details that the police have been trying hard to keep concealed. Watch this space.

<<Previous UCPI Weekly Report (4-7 May 2021)<<

This summary covers the third week of the four-week 2021 hearings of the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI), examining the Metropolitan Police’s secret undercover political policing unit, the Special Demonstration Squad, from 1973-82.

Witnesses from the police and the ‘non-State core participants’ gave evidence, and some witness statements from police who were unable, unwilling, or not called upon to appear personally were summarised. This follows the format of last week’s hearings, and many of the same topics were covered.

Rather than unfolding like a fictional courtroom drama, with revelations that suddenly turn the course of the narrative, the hearings of the UCPI are turning the wheel on a microscope to reveal more details about the events it is examining. We already have the big picture: the abusive activities of spycops in England and Wales 1973-–82. This week gave us many more details of those activities.

POLICE ARE ABOVE THE LAW

‘Mike Scott’ (HN298, deployed 1971-1976) gave one of the clearest statements yet that Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) undercovers considered themselves exempt from the laws they were supposed to uphold. In 1972, Scott was accused of being a police officer by Géry Lawless, an activist in several organisations focused on Northern Ireland issues which Scott had infiltrated.

Scott laughingly related how later that day, while driving around randomly, he somehow chanced upon Lawless when the latter was alone in a phone box. He cornered him there and after an exchange of words punched him so hard in the face that Scott chipped a bone in his hand.

When asked to justify his violent crime against a member of the public, Scott replied:

‘It was acceptable to me and I was the one that made the decision. I was the one that was there, and the person that was the so-called victim was Géry Lawless’.

The implication of ‘you deserve what you get because I say so’ is more text than subtext here.

POLITICIANS ARE NOT ABOVE THE LAW

Scott attended the Young Liberals’ 1972 annual conference in his capacity of Membership Secretary for their Putney branch. He reported on the presence of MP David Steel, directly contravening the ‘Wilson Doctrine’, which said that MPs should be told if they are subject to state surveillance.

According to Scott, ‘MPs are not above the law’. Spycops are apparently another matter, especially when punching people in the face.

Although Scott didn’t pick up a criminal record for his assault on Géry Lawless, he did for his actions during the Stop The Seventy Tour anti-apartheid campaign. He was convicted of obstructing a public highway under his fake identity, which was stolen from a living person.

SPYCOPS AUTHORISED TO LIE UNDER OATH

Scott’s lying under oath was authorised by his superiors, and he never gave a thought to whether the real Michael Scott now has a criminal record. In fact, he doesn’t even consider it in those terms:

‘What happened to me was not exactly a criminal record, it was really of no consequence, actually.’

In fact, he said, the identity theft, used to set up a bank account, might have been beneficial to the real Michael Scott because ‘my credit record was good.’

The unshakable conviction that whatever he chose to do was the best course of action simply because he chose to do it wass astonishingly clear. The Inquiry is now investigating whether the real Michael Peter Scott has a criminal record for this conviction.

Scott was not alone in being arrested, charged and convicted under a false identity. ‘Barry / Desmond Loader‘ (HN13, 1975-78) infiltrated the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) and was arrested twice while undercover. The first occasion, in late 1977, was for ‘insulting or threatening behaviour’ following a clash with the fascist National Front (NF) outside Barking police station.

Just three days after his court appearance for that, Loader was arrested a second time, again for clashing with the NF. Police records [MPS-0526784] reveal that Superintendent Ken Pryde established contact with a court official during the proceedings, giving them Loader’s cover name and his status as:

‘a valuable informant in the public order field whom we would wish to safeguard from a prison sentence should the occasion arise.’

Loader was found guilty, fined, and given a one-year bind-over of £100. It is noted in an SDS ‘Minute Sheet’ that this sentence was considered ‘very useful’ as it would allow Loader to keep a low profile for the remainder of his deployment [MPS-0526784].

LAWYER-CLIENT PRIVILEGE DIDN’T APPLY TO SPYCOPS

Naturally, the arrests and trials of spycops meant that the undercovers took part in meetings between the genuine activists and their lawyers. ‘Mike Scott’ was one of 14 people arrested in May 1972 for blockading a coach carrying the British Lions rugby team as they were leaving to play in apartheid South Africa.

Scott’s reports include comments from the activists’ lawyers. These have been redacted by the Inquiry as even now, 50 years later, they are subject to legal privilege. And yet, they were put in a report to the prosecution side from a spy among the defendants!

‘Geoff Wallace’ (HN296, 1975-78) infiltrated the International Socialists (IS). In April 1976, during their Right to Work Campaign, the IS newspaper Socialist Worker hired solicitors to represent those arrested while campaigning. Wallace reported [UCPI0000012323] on their meetings, likewise ignoring lawyer-client privilege.

This right, long protected in common law, is recognised by the European Convention on Human Rights, and can only be waived by the client. It is also recognised as absolute, in the sense that once privilege is established, it may not be weighed against any other countervailing public interest.

THE SDS MUST BE KEPT SECRET

Apparently, it’s a right that can be easily overridden by secret and secretive police units eager to avoid exposure and embarrassment. Discussion in the above mentioned Special Branch Minute Sheets reveals that Loader’s senior officers prioritised keeping his identity secret over any other consideration. Scott’s superiors did the same thing.

In 1979, spycop ‘Graham Coates’ (HN304, 1975-79) made ‘an error of judgement’ when, during a traffic stop, he gave a uniformed officer his real name but showed the driving license in his cover identity.

SDS boss Mike Ferguson (a former undercover himself) was ‘incandescent’, not just at Coates’ own indiscretion but at the potential revelation of the unit and its methods. Coates was withdrawn from the field on the spot.

In previous years, senior officers attempted to pass off incidents of criminal activity by spycops as ‘a few bad apples’ or used the ever-popular ‘rogue officer’ defence. Now, however, evidence continues to mount up of complete awareness by very senior officers. There was clearly a two-way flow of information between the SDS and MI5 – not only of requests to spy on people and the resulting reports, but also the criminal activity of the officers themselves.

THE MET COMMISSIONER KNEW

Sir Robert Mark, March 1977

Graham Coates, ‘Bob Stubbs’ (HN301, 1971-76), ‘Roger Harris’ (HN200, 1974-77), and other spycops described visits to the SDS ‘safe house’ from various Metropolitan Police Commissioners (the highest officer), Assistant Commissioners, Deputy Assistant Commissioners, and the Commander of Special Branch.

Coates recalls managers demanding ‘maximum attendance’ from all deployed spycops for a visit from then-Commissioner Sir Robert Mark – ironically renowned for his drives against police corruption.

This tallies with similar reports by spycops from the 1960s and 1990s. These visits seem an established part of the Met Commissioner’s role; at the very least, they show full awareness of the unit.

Coates also remembered a remark suggesting spycops’ expenses accounts were thoroughly examined by the Commissioner (even if reports might not have been). This shows an astonishing level of attention to detail for individual officers’ activities. Generally though, the purpose of these visits was to praise the undercovers and occasionally present them with bottles of whisky.

NOTHING WAS EVER DISCUSSED

When not entertaining senior police officials, the safe houses were used for meetings between spycops and their managers once or twice weekly. Two very different pictures of activities there emerged this week.

One is of a ‘social’ environment that somehow fails to include any discussion of what the people there spent most of their time doing. According to Scott, the twelve or so spycops never talked about their undercover work, the groups they infiltrated (even between spycops in the same group!), the activists they spied on, or the tactics used to get close to them.

This is the period during which the practice of stealing dead children’s identities as the basis for undercover personae begins and solidifies as required practice. There was some reluctance from a handful of spycops, but the idea, seemingly initially used by Scott, became management policy and was effectively enforced.

Other tradecraft also took shape in this era. Enough spycops have reported a lack of formal training, hands-off management, and the absence of a manual or even guidelines, making it unclear how tradecraft was developed and passed on if the undercovers themselves did not talk about it either.

In this picture presented by amnesiac officers, there were no spycops with (memorable) reputations as womanisers. Likewise, there was supposedly no way that management could have been aware of spycops having intimate relationships with female activists because this was never mentioned. In the hundreds of meetings that Scott attended, he has no memory of these things ever being spoken of. (He does remember chatting about toy soldiers though.)

SAFE HOUSE ‘BANTER’

The alternative picture is of a group of men letting off steam, comparing notes and exchanging ‘banter’. Coates and Harris both described officers who spoke so frequently and crudely about the women they had calculatedly deceived that managers would have been in no doubt about the nature of those relationships. Rather than being unaware of what was being discussed, managers participated in the ‘low-level communal humour’ that characterised the conversations.

Coates states that Richard Clark (‘Rick Gibson’ HN297, 1974-76) had a reputation for having sexual relationships. He also recalls that ‘Jim Pickford‘ (HN300, 1974-76) was widely known as a philanderer. This matches what’s known of these officers’ activities. A third officer, whose details he did not recall, also behaved in this way.

Asked about the kind of things being said, Coates reluctantly shared one example:

‘he’ll have made her bite the blankets again last night.’

The Inquiry also asked him an anecdote about a female activist who could lactate on demand. Although Coates has no recollection of this, the fact the Inquiry raised it also shows the type of conversation known to have taken place.

WHY THE LEFT BUT NOT THE RIGHT?

The spycops did not choose targets randomly. In the period under examination in the current Inquiry hearings, 1973-82, all groups spied on were left-wing. Officers were allowed to switch groups if they wanted to (Coates left the International Socialists because he was getting bored and thought the anarchist movement might bring more spark to his life). So why didn’t they do so when it became obvious the groups were mostly harmless?

This week’s evidence only consolidates the emerging picture of spycops infiltrating small groups with either completely peaceful and democratic methods and aims, or no capacity to carry out any really disruptive or violent action – even if it was suggested.

Again and again, the spycops demonstrate the ability to believe they reported nothing of real use from spying on groups that were harmless, whilst simultaneously also believing they contributed significantly to preserving the safety of the realm, that the money enabling them to do so well-spent and their actions were completely justified. It’s a positive symphony of cognitive dissonance.

As mentioned in our previous weekly report, during this period the right wing were on the rise. Openly fascist and racist groups were using tactics such as firebombing, burning down businesses owned by Black and Asian people, and holding meetings in diverse areas to deliberately bait the residents. Yet these groups were never – with one exception – infiltrated.

That exception came about by accident. The Workers Revolutionary Party was so concerned about the National Front that they asked one of their members to infiltrate it. Ironically, that member was SDS undercover ‘Peter Collins’ (HN303, 1973-77).

Had the NF realised that they had been deceived, it is likely that they would have responded with violence; the question of whether being exposed as a spycop or being exposed as an activist would be more dangerous is an interesting one.

UNDERMINING GROUPS WORKING FOR EQUALITY

Although the left-wing were very aware of the problems caused by the right-wing, which was a genuine threat to public order with subversive intentions, the police were apparently oblivious.

Scott claims that:

‘There weren’t any right-wing groups who were demonstrating, or causing any problems as far as I can recall, at the time.’

He and almost all of his colleagues infiltrated anti-fascist groups – why were these so prolific if right-wing groups were not a problem?

They clearly were, and the spycops unquestionably had the freedom and the remit – preserving public order – to infiltrate them, if they chose to. The fact that they didn’t indicates that the SDS was a unit dedicated to undermining and spying on groups working for a more, rather than less, equal society.

We know there was systemic sexism permeating the SDS, which, according to Coates, viewed the women’s liberation movement as:

‘a bunch of angry women that could be ignored.’

It is not much of a stretch to speculate that systemic racism went along with it. It is very disturbing that these attitudes are still present today.

Worryingly, an isolated incident of International Socialists reported as attacking people at the NF offices with stones and bricks was seized upon by the Inquiry:

‘We note that, if the report is accurate, this was an occasion on which the violence was started by left-wing activists from the infiltrated group.’

This is not the first time that the Inquiry has used reports of ‘violent’ anti-fascist protests as a justification for many of the deployments.

In contrast, an SDS report dated 7 March 1977 [UCPI0000017776] describes a single coach of members of the Socialist Workers Party (as the International Socialists had become) being attacked by five coaches of National Front supporters at Watford Gap Service station.

For some reason, the Inquiry glosses this incident in neutral terms:

‘The SWP contingent from NW London and West Middlesex districts appears to have been involved in an encounter with the National Front in a service station en route to Birmingham’

This gives a misleading impression of this serious and unprovoked attack by the NF on SWP members.

UNWILLINGNESS TO ACCEPT CULPABILITY

Blair Peach

A deeply upsetting example of State unwillingness to accept culpability for its role on the wrong side of history came directly from the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting.

During the Undercover Policing Inquiry’s hearing on 23 April 2021, which was the 42nd anniversary of Blair Peach’s death at the hands of police as established by the Met’s own report, a minute’s silence was held for the murdered teacher. In his introductory remarks for the Mitting referred merely to Peach being killed by ‘a blow to the head’. He did not mention the police at all.

Celia Stubbs, who was Blair Peach’s partner at the time of his death, spelled out how the rise of the right wing was a growing problem during the years covered by this phase of the Inquiry. She and Peach were members of the Anti-Nazi League from its formation in 1977. Two years later, when a call went out from the multicultural community of Southall for support against the NF, they responded.

The NF were ‘campaigning’ in Southall in April 1979 in the run-up to the general election, despite their candidate not living there. Holding rallies in areas with large Black and Asian populations was a common NF tactic. They were met with counter-demonstrations by exactly the kind of groups – including undercovers – that the SDS had been focused on infiltrating for the last decade.

For example, at one such event in 1977, which became known as the Battle of Lewisham, at least 18 spycops were present and over 50 pages of reports were produced. Nobody died at the Battle of Lewisham. In contrast, the 1979 counter-demonstration that Blair Peach was killed at in Southall was supposedly only attended by one spycop.

A BLENDED, ‘GISTED’ DOCUMENT

Celia Stubbs knows that one of the spycops attended the demo in Southall that day. The Inquiry has taken evidence in secret from officers who it does not want to identify. It has then blended their testimony into a single ‘gisted’ document. In it, an officer says they were at the demonstration in Southall, saw violence and being horrified left before Peach was killed.

Celia Stubbs, 2021

Stubbs is offended by all of this. Firstly, the total secrecy around the officer – we aren’t given their name, cover name, or any other details at all. Secondly, the idea that there was only one spycop at the demo is ridiculous.

There was a large presence from the Socialist Workers Party, the most infiltrated group in the history of the SDS. Following the call-out from Southall residents, it is unthinkable that spycops eager to maintain their cover would not have been there in large numbers.

Not only that, but the demonstration was a left-wing response to obvious baiting by the right-wing NF. It was blatantly going to turn into a public order issue. This was finally something that legitimately fell within the remit of the SDS. Yet they maintain that only one officer was present, and he left early – precisely because there was public disorder!

The killing of Blair Peach is heart-breaking, and also terrifying in that it could happen to anyone, on any demonstration, not just against fascism. His final hours, the cover-up of the cause of death, and the subsequent fight for justice, are covered in more detail elsewhere.

Celia Stubbs talked calmly, but with obvious strong emotion, about Blair’s death and the events that followed, including the banding-together of groups campaigning for justice for those killed by police.

Simultaneously, it was the beginning of spying on those groups. The solidarity of grieving families was considered a subversive act.

Stubbs said:

‘It’s obvious that when someone is killed, the police don’t want to be associated with it. This looks like yet another cover-up. It makes us feel like we’re not being heard…

‘I mean, Blair was killed by police officers and our feelings and campaigns were criminalised. The police, I think, wanted to keep ahead of our campaign so that Blair’s killers… we were never able to hold them to account.’

Stubbs said that, despite having seen so many secret police reports, she is left with as many questions as she had before. One of these reports [MPS-0001219] was from decades later. It was written in the summer of 1998, regarding plans to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Blair Peach’s killing.

Stubbs told the Inquiry that an officer referred to in the report was Mark Jenner (‘Mark Cassidy’ HN15, 1995-2000) who infiltrated the Hackney Community Defence Association and the Colin Roach Centre (also in Hackney). Whilst undercover he deceived an activist, ‘Alison‘, into a long-term relationship.

Cassidy reported that:

‘local trade unions are organising a large rally and demonstration, which will be presented with a strong anti-racist/anti-police flavour… the event will inevitably attract a large left wing presence with particular accent on anti-police type groups and the potential for disorder will be significant.’

Stubbs was indignant at this:

‘we’d had remembrance demonstrations after five years, after ten years, and this was twenty years. There’d never been any disorder. I don’t know why he put that. I think it’s pretty unpleasant.’

This continues a long-running tradition of spycops exaggerating the potential for disorder when making reports on groups and why they had to be reported on.

NO THREAT TOO SMALL, NO GROUP TOO HARMLESS

The spycops were trusted to use their intelligence to discern threat levels, yet were apparently unable to tell the difference between fanciful ideas (e.g. the Workers Revolutionary Party finding enough people to infiltrate and subvert every single branch of the Labour Party Young Socialists) and genuinely executable plans (like having a skip delivered to a hotel).

An SDS report dated 26 May 1977 [UCPI0000017437] describes a member of the SWP announcing that he was mobilising local trades union branches to support an anti-Jubilee demonstration during the visit of Princess Anne to Kensington Town Hall on 31 May, and of 1,500 expected demonstrators, 1,000 of whom were likely to be trade unionists ‘violently opposed’ to Jubilee celebrations. This seems wildly and obviously far-fetched.

Additionally, the small groups most often spied on usually didn’t manage to carry off their most outrageous genuine plans, such as painting lines on small roads to show the path of a new motorway.

Some groups, such as the Workers Revolutionary Party and the Socialist Workers Party, regarded by the SDS as ‘subversive’ – that is, wanting to overthrow parliamentary democracy – entered candidates in elections. If they were seeking to overturn Parliament, then legitimately being elected to it is surely the least subversive way of doing so.

Many of the groups had democratic internal processes, something that the spycops were blatantly aware of given how many of them were democratically elected to positions of influence within those groups.

ACCESS TO PERSONAL DETAILS

The spycops’ stories vary as to whether or not they were given guidance on whether or not to take formal posts in organisations they infiltrated. Enough of them did so, with full knowledge of their managers, that it was obviously accepted.

Positions such as treasurer and recruitment officer gave them access to personal details of all group members. Often, they were part of the vetting process and point of first contact for people interested in joining. This gave them influence over the actual makeup and structure of the groups, and to some degree taking on these tasks would have also compensated for their lack of genuine activism.

As is notable from the accusation that caused Mike Scott to assault Géry Lawless, some groups were suspicious that newcomers might be undercover cops.

After Rick Gibson’s exposure by Big Flame, some members talked about how he had badly messed up his turn to give a talk on activism. Lack of background, political awareness, and genuine interest in activism were sufficient red flags that some spycops compensated for by deceiving activists into sexual relationships. To form a relationship with an established, trusted member of a group encourages members to extend their trust to the spycop.

This would almost certainly have been seen as easier than researching the philosophies of the groups and differences from other groups on the left. Coates had to give a 20-minute talk on the history of the Labour Party to the IS group he was infiltrating, so this was not unique to Big Flame. The spycops were trained to ‘mirror’ their targets, but it’s impossible to do so if you’re the only one talking.

NOT JUST INFLUENCING, BUT CREATING GROUPS

Richard Clark (‘Rick Gibson’ HN297, 1974-76) was the spycop responsible for the formation of the South East London branch of the Troops Out Movement. His rise through the ranks to the top of the organisation, and eventual bid to join Big Flame, was achieved by deceiving four women activists into sexual relationships, and manipulating and betraying the members of both groups.

More details can be found in last week’s reports, and in the opening statement on behalf of ‘Mary’, one of the women, and Richard Chessum – who provided his own written witness statement as well.

Chessum knew about Gibson’s sexual relationships, and says it was general knowledge at the time. Did Gibson accidentally tell different women different things, and they then compared notes and spotted the discrepancies in his cover story? ‘Mary’ said he didn’t share any contact details with her, was often very hard to reach, and she knew very little about his background.

Having thoroughly investigated Gibson, Big Flame took action. They invited him to meet them in a pub and then spread out all the evidence they had gathered. ‘He looked as though he was going to cry’, said Chessum, who was told about it at the time.

Gibson came up with one last story and gave them a phone number of the office where his brother was supposed to work. It was another lie. When they went to check his flat, they found it empty, Gibson having had done a midnight flit.

After this, Chessum met with Mary and her flatmate, and told them what he had seen. He says they were shocked but not surprised. They had already discussed the possibility of Gibson being some kind of police officer. They had noticed his habit of never staying overnight, and wondered if this was because he had a wife to go back to.

BREAKING APART FAMILIES

Because, of course, the spycops did have wives to go back to. ‘Graham Coates’ (HN304, 1975-79), who spoke for all of the 7 May hearing of the Inquiry, said that on joining the SDS he was specifically asked if he was married or in a stable relationship:

‘It was explained… in very general terms that they felt that an officer in a stable relationship or a stable married relationship would be a more stable character, given the likely exposure to stresses and strains of the likely work involved.’

There appears to have been no thought whatsoever given to the stresses and strains on the families themselves. Once again, women were exploited for the benefit of the SDS.

‘Jimmy Pickford‘ (HN300, 1974-77) infiltrated a number of groups, including anarchist ones, like the South London branches of the Anarchist Workers Association and the Federation of London Anarchist Groups.

His widow provided a statement describing how she was given no support during his absences, and had to take great pains to protect his cover whilst trying to raise their two small children, effectively as a single parent. There was no going to joint social gatherings or having friends round to their home. This left her extremely isolated, as she had no family in the UK and so was reliant for support on close friends.

In fact, the majority of the marriages relied upon by management to keep the spycops stable disintegrated soon after their deployment ended. Despite there having been ample opportunity since the unit was set up, there was no kind of post-undercover care in place for the families and the spycops themselves.

The spycops seem to have been as oblivious to the damage they were doing to the people and causes they spied on as they were to the damage they were doing to their own families.

This is the second of our weekly reports on the current round of Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings examining the actions of the Metropolitan Police’s undercover political unit, the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), from 1973-82.

These hearings are scheduled to run for four weeks before taking a break for about a year. Subsequent hearings will look at the unit’s later years.

This report summarises the main points of the second week of this set of hearings. For more details, see our daily reports linked from our Inquiry page. For background information on the Inquiry, see our UCPI FAQ.

WHAT’S NEW THIS WEEK

Following last week’s opening statements, the focus this week was on witnesses from both the undercover unit the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) and the ‘non-state core participants’ (ie the people spied on) in the era in question.

Many of the same themes emerged as during the first round of hearings in November 2020, which looked at the SDS from its foundation in 1968 until 1972. Further evidence has done nothing to contradict the impression of the SDS as a secret and secretive unit with a remit to report every detail of the lives of the people they spied on.

‘BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY’

Spycops picked their own targets, or were assigned them by the Security Service (aka MI5). Miscarriages of justice would be authorised in order to prevent the unit being exposed. The foundations laid in the early days of the SDS were rapidly built upon during 1973–82, eventually resulting in the credo revealed by whistle-blower officer Peter Francis – ‘by any means necessary’.

And yet, the information obtained by those means was characterised by some spycops this week as being of little use; the groups they went to such lengths to infiltrate as basically harmless. Other undercovers fell back on the refrain that they reported everything and left it to their superiors to filter out what was useful. Both spycops were simply pulled out without strategy.

This doesn’t explain why some reports contained passing remarks made by individual activists that had been deliberately exaggerated, or even invented, so that the groups would seem dangerous or in favour of violence.

In this report we highlight some of the week’s events as examples of recurring themes, and look at the infiltration of various anti-apartheid campaigns. Full coverage can be found in our daily reports.

LITTLE TO NO TRAINING

‘Dave Robertson‘ (HN45, 1970-73) and ‘Alex Sloan‘ (HN347, 1971) – who both gave evidence on 27 April – spoke of having little to no training for their roles, and being expected to pick it up – or just make it up – as they went along.

It seems that the higher-ups were doing the same thing. A statement from spycop ‘David Hughes’ (HN299/342, 1971-76) details how SDS management did not really know what to do when another officer was suspected of, or in the case of Robertson, identified as being undercover by the people they were spying on.

Alex Sloan explained that he was not given any guidance about what to do if his cover was blown. He was never instructed on what to do if offered a responsible position like treasurer or secretary in a target group (but thought he should accept it). He was not told about ‘legal professional privilege’, a long-established legal convention prohibiting his presence at discussions between lawyers and their clients. This last point came up more than once this week.

In most cases, the spycops themselves chose which people to spy on and which groups to infiltrate. David Hughes attended public meetings advertised in then-radical magazine Time Out. As we saw last week, none of these groups (bar one) was right-wing.

Special Branch’s remit, and by extension the remit of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), was to deal with ‘subversion’ (opposition to the UK’s parliamentary democracy), and threats to public order. From the evidence this week, the spycops were not given clear criteria on how to assess what was subversive.

Robertson could not recall guidance about what might constitute ‘extremism’ or ‘subversion’. He said vaguely ‘it was just part and parcel of the whole’. Alex Sloan, when asked if he knew what was subversive, replied that it wasn’t for him to judge – another recurring standpoint of the spycops.

Rajiv Menon QC, representing Piers Corbyn, defined it as activity that:

‘threatened the safety or well-being of the State and was intended to undermine or overthrow parliament by political or industrial means’.

Two justifications for spying on non-subversive, non-violent, law-abiding groups emerged: a) they might lead to violent groups b) it was useful to confirm that they were indeed what they seemed to be. Neither of these justifications seem to have been borne out by the results of decades of spying.

It is now clear that both Special Branch and the SDS spycops have always had a broader remit, which extended to threats to police credibility, corporate profit, and the convenience of the government of the day.

The campaigns infiltrated were all what we would now describe as social justice groups. The one exception – as mentioned before – was when a spycop was asked to infiltrate a right-wing group by the left-wing group he was spying on.

LITTLE TO NO USE

Once the spycops were embedded in these groups, their initiative appears to have deserted them.

Another repeating theme is the spycops themselves reporting that the groups were no real threat, and / or giving evidence now that the intelligence they gathered was basically useless. Descriptions given in evidence included:

• ‘Mickey Mouse’, ‘never scary at all’, not causing ‘aggravation to anyone’, (Alex Sloan on the Irish National Liberation Solidarity Front);
• ‘The majority of people I encountered during my deployment were not that extreme’ (David Hughes)
• ‘I do not think my work really yielded any good intelligence’ (Sandra Davies)

And yet, rather than withdrawing and trying to find a group that was bent on public disorder (such as Column 88, Nazis who were using firebombs), they continued to report on the peaceful groups working for positive social change.

UNFILTERED ‘INTELLIGENCE’

Nor were they directed to filter what ‘intelligence’ they gathered – every detail went into the reports, from activists’ body types to cigarette brands. Robertson said that ‘everything was fair game for reporting’, including details of flowers given to speakers. It was someone else’s job to decide what to do with the intelligence he collected.

The spycops reported highly personal information, such as the condition of Ernest Rodker’s health and the birth of his child. Some would give their own slant to their reports. Hughes stated:

‘Sometimes my personal views crept into my reporting. The SDS office never told me this was inappropriate or not permitted.’

They reported ideas from activists that were what executives now would define as ‘blue-skying’, involving fireworks, ticker-tape, and weather balloons, as though they were serious plans – despite the groups having no history of such actions.

Christabel Gurney

They reported on Christmas parties. One held as a fundraiser for the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the home of Christabel Gurney was 75p a ticket, 12p for drinks, and attended by a spycop. Sandra Davies seems to think that festive cakes and sweets made by the Women’s Liberation Front at the request of the Black Unity and Freedom Party were a ruse to ‘get their philosophy across’ to children.

Many of the reports went to MI5. Some fifty years later, MI5 still has them. Dave Robertson talked about not typing up his own reports after writing them, but knowing they were routinely copied to MI5. He said it was ‘obviously pretty routine’ that MI5 would request details about someone and the SDS would supply them.

This week Piers Corbyn, Diane Langford, and Ernest Rodker all specifically asked that their files be withdrawn and handed over to them. They are by no means the only activists who want this. It has always been one of the core demands of COPS.

A CULTURE OF DUBIOUS PRACTICES

We heard from various spycops this week, some in person and some via written statement. Despite – or because of – some convenient bouts of amnesia, their reports are consistently similar, and not just for this period (1973 – 82). They clearly indicate a culture of dubious practices that began with the very start of the undercover units and intensified, fostered by a climate of complicity, as the years passed.

All of their statements uphold the fact that knowledge of SDS activity went all the way to the top of the command chain. Hughes recalled the then-Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Robert Mark, visiting the unit:

‘It was obvious to me that he had concerns about the SDS. I remember words to the effect that “you realise that you could cause me tremendous problems under certain circumstances”.’

The motivation for the miscarriages of justice resulting from spycops violating lawyer-client privilege and standing trial under cover names, as demonstrated this week by ‘Michael Scott’ (HN298, 1971-76), was clear from the very beginning.

Scott was arrested as part of an anti-apartheid action. To avoid revealing the existence of the SDS, he was instructed to stand trial under his cover identity, including deliberately lying from the moment he took the witness stand. He was to attend meetings with genuine activists and their lawyer – violating lawyer-client privilege; and to withhold evidence that would have exonerated the activists (the protest took place on private land – a pub car park – and did not, as claimed, block a public highway).

Scott received a conviction – or rather, as he had chosen to steal the identity of a living person, the real Michael Scott did. The police reports show no concern at all about deceiving the court and orchestrating a miscarriage of justice, purely to avoid any ‘potential embarrassment to police’ if it became known that a spycop was involved.

Rodker sees this as part of a repeating pattern:

‘The failure to view activists as individuals with their own legitimate rights and interests, and the decision to place those second to the unfettered gathering of information on them may be a precursor to some of the more gross abuses of activists that, I note, happened in later periods of undercover policing of campaigners.’

Judge Mitting has said he will turn this matter over to the Inquiry’s panel that is due to review likely miscarriages of justice. The Inquiry has known about these miscarriages for years now, and in light of the age and health of the activists whose convictions may now need overturned, it is shocking that this Panel has still not been set up by Mitting.

IN CONTEXT

During the first week of the hearings, the police lawyers stressed the importance of looking at the activities of spycops in context, rather than through a modern lens. It was a different time with different values. A time when it was apparently fine to include in reports that: an activist couple had ‘a Mongol child’; ‘large Jewish nose[s]’, or the fact that a woman activist didn’t wear a bra, as merely objective descriptions.

It is true that the activism under discussion should be fully understood in the context of what it was trying to achieve. To properly assess the impact on the groups they infiltrated, one must know what causes the spycops were undermining.

WOMEN’S RIGHTS

Diane Langford co-founded the Women’s Liberation Front in 1970. At this time women could not get a mortgage, credit card or loan without a male co-guarantor. They did not have the right to equal pay or maternity leave, and could be fired for becoming pregnant. They had no legal recourse against discrimination in employment, education, and training. Contraception was not available on the NHS; there were no rape crisis centres. It is indefensible to say that this is a status quo that should have been maintained.

However, as spycop ‘Sandra Davies’ (HN348) told the Inquiry in November:

‘Women’s liberation was viewed as a worrying trend at the time.’.

The aims of the WLF – equal rights for women and a society free from all forms of discrimination – were clearly and publicly stated in the application for membership, which Sandra Davis would have signed when she infiltrated the group in 1971. Their methods were also clear and public: demonstrations, open meetings, street theatre, film screenings, boycotts, and other collaborative actions. Diane Langford stressed the importance placed on collective action over individuals ‘indulg[ing] in macho posturing’.

Diane Langford, New York City, 1996

‘Dave Robertson‘ (HN45, 1970-73) reported on the WLF, and several other groups that Langford belonged to, including the Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist League (RMLL) which she formed with her late husband and fellow activist Abhimanyu Manchanda. A small group focused on studying deep political theory, the RMLL aimed to guide and advise the WLF and other groups campaigning against oppression.

When the RMLL eventually suspended Manchanda, splitting that group and destabilising two others, Robertson would play a part or even had a vote in that decision. When the WLF ousted Langford, leading it to change its name and then fall apart, Sandra Davis voted against her (and was elected treasurer shortly after).

As with Richard Clark (‘Rick Gibson’ HN297, 1974-76) last week, we see spycops deliberately taking positions of influence within the groups they infiltrated and then using this to weaken them – and bring about their demise.

There is a deeply unfunny irony in that Sandra Davis was working to delay equal rights for women on 10% less pay than her male colleagues. It is also worth noting that despite police lawyer David Perry QC (in Kate Wilson’s case) attempting to deny a culture of sexism in the SDS, this is the era in which the unit developed and consolidated the methods and practices that it would use for the next thirty years.

ANTI-APARTHEID CAMPAIGNS

Not content with preserving sexism, the SDS was also deeply suspicious of any group that sought to end racism. Again, to look at their operations in the context of the times is to see violent right-wing and fascist groups on the rise in the UK, and a government cheerfully doing business with South Africa’s apartheid regime.

Apartheid was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 until the early 1990s. It categorised people into a hierarchy of racial groups, with whites at the top.

‘Beach and sea whites only’ sign, apartheid South Africa

The laws segregated all areas of life, reserving the best for whites. It affected everything from education, employment and housing to which bench people could sit on or which beach they could visit. Most of the population was denied the right to vote. Sexual relationships and marriages between people of different racial groups were illegal.

Groups fighting against apartheid in the UK were infiltrated by Mike Ferguson (HN135), ‘Michael Scott’ (HN298, 1971-76), HN332, Jill Mosdell (HN346, 1970-73), and Douglas Edwards (HN326, 1968-70).

THE ANTI-APARTHEID MOVEMENT

The Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) was set up to unite as many people as possible with the same goal: bringing equality and democracy to South Africa. As a UK group, they focused on the UK institutions and companies that were trading with and supporting the South African government, and attempted to stop these practices.

Anti-Apartheid Movement demonstration, London, 15 July 1973

Central to the AAM’s approach was to try and avoid doing anything that would distract the press from the real issue – the violence of the South African apartheid regime. As such it eschewed violence or heated confrontation. Rather, it concerned itself which included common campaign tactics such as organising petitions, public meetings, pickets, vigils, cultural events, and mass rallies.

In 1970, the AAM President was the Rt Rev Ambrose Reeves, an Anglican bishop. Vice presidents were Sir Dingle Foot QC MP; Rt Rev Trevor Huddleston, another Anglican bishop and Rt Hon Jeremy Thorpe MP. Also on the board was the then-leader of the Liberal Party Basil Davidson, an historian who had worked for MI6 behind enemy lines in the Second World War and been awarded the Military Cross.

This is hardly a group of radical subversives; far from overthrowing parliamentary democracy, the AAM’s sole aim was to extend it to southern African nations that were subjected to racist rule of colonial white minorities.

Despite this, the AAM was infiltrated by the SDS.

STOP THE SEVENTY TOUR

While the AAM resorted to mainstream methods, younger people wanted to do more. This is how the Stop The Seventy Tour (STST) was born, its immediate and principal aim was to stop the white-only South African cricket team from touring in the UK in the summer of 1970. More broadly, its aim was to make a very strong political point that people representing apartheid were not welcome in the UK.

STST used all classic forms of non-violent direct action (NVDA), pitch invasions being the most prominent. They sought to follow the well known principles of civil disobedience learned from recent history such as the struggles for Indian independence by Mahatma Gandhi and for black civil rights by Dr Martin Luther King.

They would run on to cricket pitches and sit down. Painting slogans on the walls outside Lords cricket ground, and even these were things like ‘stop the tour’ and ‘go home’ rather than anything more profane or aggressive.

According to Prof Jonathan Rosenhead (non-state core participant):

‘Stop The Seventy Tour was a nice floppy liberal alternative organisation, which many people could join. There was no party line and no ‘militancy’ as such, and the only thing everyone agreed on was the need to end apartheid.’

Yet the STST was infiltrated by the SDS.

SPECIAL ACTION GROUP

A small group of anti-apartheid activists believed in direct action and organised in private to add an extra layer to the campaign – calling themselves the Special Action Group (SAG). Rosenhead, who took part in the SAG, refuted the suggestion of the Inquiry calling them ‘the covert arm’ of the Stop the Seventy Tour, saying they just wanted the element of surprise.

For instance, one of them would check into the hotel where the rugby team stayed, overhearing their room numbers to either glue their locks, or write a message on their bathroom mirror with shaving cream At a certain point the team just wanted to go home.

The SAG was infiltrated as well.

DAMBUSTERS MOBILISING COMMITTEE

The Dambusters Mobilising Committee (DMC) was a coalition of groups including the AAM, that opposed the construction of the vast Cabora Bassa dam project in Mozambique.

The dam was a collaboration between South Africa, Rhodesia and Mozambique’s colonial ruler Portugal. It displaced local people without compensation in order to supply electricity to apartheid South Africa, and undermined United Nations sanctions.

The DMC campaigned to dissuade British (and other European) companies from financing or otherwise becoming involved in the Cabora Bassa project.

DMC meetings were small, attended only by representatives of the organisations in the coalition. They spent a lot of time researching companies involved in the dam. Some campaigners bought shares so they could attend Annual General Meetings of various companies, such as that of Barclay’s Bank who were guarantors of some of the dam’s financing, and pose pertinent questions to the meeting.

Even this Coalition was reported on.

MCCARTHYIST QUESTIONING

There was something both incongruous as well as slightly offensive in the line of questioning pursued by the inquiry throughout the week, repeatedly pushing to imply STST activists were violent and attempting to demonise their actions.

This is especially galling given the murderous racist violence of the South African apartheid regime they were protesting against. Adding to this, that within the UK it was STST protesters who were routinely assaulted by the police, stewards and some rugby supporters.

Peter Hain at a press conference called by the Stop the Seventy Tour (STST) campaign, 7 March 1970. Left to right: Jeff Crawford (Secretary of the West Indian Standing Conference) England cricketer Mike Brearley, STST member Mike Craft, & STST Chair Peter Hain.

On the final day of the week, the Undercover Policing Inquiry was devoted to hearing evidence from just one person, Lord Peter Hain. He had a rich career as an activist, and hence a thick secret police file that include decades of reports from undercover officers of the SDS

Hain founded and chaired the STST campaign, from its launch in September 1969 until it was disbanded in late May 1970.

Hain refused to be put in a position where, as an activist, he had to defend his campaigning, telling the Inquiry this attitude put both them and the police at the wrong side of history.

Like earlier in the week, the Inquiry opted for a line of questioning reminiscent of the McCarthy Un-American Hearings of the 1950s, in which guilt by association with radical groups or ideas is seemingly used to justify the State’s spying.

Their first question was whether Peter Hain’s parents, who had fled South Africa, were ‘communists’, when it is well known they were active members of the Liberal Party.

WASTE OF POLICE MONEY

Asked if it was understandable that police ‘faced with these novel, rather effective tactics’ should seek to gather all the information they could on campaigners’ secret plans, Hain cut in:

‘I know what you’re trying to insinuate, but… we were transparently public, some might say unwisely honest, about what our intentions were, which was to stop the tour by non-violent direct action.’

Hain made the point that the Anti-Apartheid Movement suffered extreme violence from agents of the South African State in London. This included the bombing and arson attacks on their offices, letter bombs being sent to their homes. Hain himself was sent one – it was opened by his teenage sister, and the matter was never fully investigated by the police. Hain demanded to know why this was.

Hain put it to the Inquiry that the SDS was a completely disproportionate waste of police resources: ‘

Why were they not targeting the agents of apartheid bombing and killing and acting illegally and violently in London at the time?’

In response to the Inquiry’s repeated suggestions that the STST took risks with their actions, that could have led to violence, Hain insisted that the main violence came from the other side. He described the brutal response to a pitch invasion at the Springboks’ match in Swansea in November 1969:

‘They ran on, they sat down, they interrupted play for, as I recall, over ten minutes, as it was intended. They were then carried off by the police and thrown to rugby stewards, rugby vigilantes, if you like, recruited for these purposes, and thoroughly beaten up. A friend of mine had his jaw broken, a young woman demonstrator nearly lost an eye…

‘They could have been carried out of St Helens, but there was clearly a pre-planned attempt to beat the hell out of the protesters, and that’s what happened.’

‘SOUTH AFRICAN TERRORIST’

The mindset and political framework of the undercover policing units seems not to have changed over the years.

A police report from 1993 – as the apartheid regime was collapsing and Nelson Mandela, three years out of prison, was poised to become president – refers to the Anti -Apartheid Movement as ‘Stalinist-controlled’. If that is the type of thinking of these units, Hain said:

‘we have a particular ideology of undercover policing which frankly cannot be defended.’

He has also learned recently, from a document revealed last month in Kate Wilson’s case in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, that in November 2003 he was described as a ‘South African terrorist’ by undercover police officer Mark Kennedy.

Kennedy was in the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, a parallel unit to the SDS, and deceived Kate (and other environmental campaigners) into a relationship.

At the time this spycop was calling him a terrorist, Hain was was a member of the British Cabinet, Secretary of State for Wales, the leader of the House of Commons and the Lord Privy Seal.

Hain retorted with a with a question that summarises the hearings of this week effectively:

‘What is it in the DNA of undercover policing that allows its officers to get such a biased and reactionary view of the world, that they make these kind of biased and completely unrepresentative and libellous and defamatory statements?’

<<Previous UCPI Weekly Report (21-23 Apr 2021)<<

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On 21 April 2021, Tranche 1, Phase 2 of the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) began. It will last for just over three weeks, examining the actions of the Metropolitan Police’s undercover political unit, the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), from 1973-82. Subsequent hearings will look at the unit’s later years.

This report summarises the main points of the first three days. For more details, see our daily reports: Day 1: 21 April, Day 2: 22 April, and Day 3: 23 April. For background information on the Inquiry, see our UCPI FAQ.

ABUSE WAS THE PURPOSE

In stark contrast to previous claims of it all being the fault of ‘rogue officers’, then ‘rogue units’, the vintage evidence newly released by the Inquiry for these hearings confirms clear knowledge of SDS operations and tactics within the Metropolitan Police, MI5, and to the highest level of the Home Office.

These operations included:

• deliberately deceiving activists and other women into forming intimate sexual relationships with them
• stealing the identities of dead children to create their undercover identities
• rising to the highest levels of the groups they infiltrated, directly influencing and undermining those groups

SDS Annual Reports always included a list of groups targeted during the year. Apart from one officer spying on the far right (and only because the left-wing group he was infiltrating asked him to do so), all the groups are on what can broadly be seen as the left: communist, socialist, anti-nuclear, Irish liberation, women’s rights.

As with the opening day of the November hearings, some previously unmentioned groups were named as having been spied upon. And as before, this information comes too late to be of use to people who were legitimate members of those groups.

The Counsel to the Inquiry questions witnesses (unlike a trial with different lawyers pressurising witnesses from different directions). It is immediately apparent that, of the many witnesses who should be called, only a fraction has actually been invited.

This is directly owing to the police, who have delayed the Inquiry for so long that many of those who should be giving evidence are now either too frail, or actually deceased. The latter includes two Home Secretaries and three Met Commissioners who have died since the Inquiry was announced in 2014, as well as numerous senior officers who rose through the ranks from the SDS, plus four of the 22 officers whose cover names have been made public.

JUSTICE DELAYED

Delays and loss of witnesses have also been caused by the Inquiry itself, who have failed to contact or even try to find those who were spied upon, despite having their names, and have refused to provide cover names or photos of those who did the spying, which means their victims don’t get the chance to identify them and come forward. They even refused offers from spied-upon Core Participants to provide photos of undercover officers, and never thought to ask the officers themselves.

The delays continue to mount up. ‘Tranche 1 Phase 3’ hearings – dealing with the unit’s early managers from the SDS’s foundation in 1968 until 1982 – were scheduled to take place in October 2021, but have now been put back to the first half of 2022.

The Inquiry no longer expects to look at ‘Tranche 2’ (covering the years 1983-1992) next year – now to be dealt with in 2023 at the earliest the soonest.

This means a potential wait until 2024 for Tranche 3 (covering the SDS in 1993-2007), and even longer for Tranche 4, covering the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (1999-2011), which deployed the likes of Mark Kennedy.

Sir John Mitting

The main cause of delay in this Inquiry has been the excessive demands for redactions made by the police and State bodies. Kirsten Heaven, representing some of the Non-Police, Non-State Core Participants (ie, those who were victims of SDS tactics)spoke of their anger and frustration at these new delays. She reminded the Chair, Sir John Mitting, that his predecessor Lord Pitchford, original Chair of the Inquiry, had intended to conclude in 2018.

Mitting responded that delays are inevitable and the most recent ones have been caused by providing documents to a new core participant, a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), who is to give a witness statement. Mitting says there is so much vintage police material on the SWP that this cannot be done by October.

Ironically, existing Core Participants were meant to get police documents for the current hearings in mid-March 2021, but another 2000+ pages were added in April, only a couple of weeks before these hearings began, and people were expected to be able to read and respond to it.

The Inquiry needs the help of those who were spied on and, on a more personal level, those people have already waited too long for answers. They must be given full disclosure of documents relevant to them with plenty of time to analyse and reply so they can expose the lies. People should be given the files that mention them immediately The Met have said they’re happy to do this, if the Inquiry decrees it. Mitting has stated that that ‘perhaps the request cannot be fulfilled’. He gave no reason at all as to why this might be.

As for the new SWP Core Participant, the Inquiry made no attempt to contact her until recently, and this is not the only time this has happened.

A pattern is emerging of the Inquiry failing to contact Non-Police, Non-State Core Participants about evidence that involves them, and failing to ask state and police core participants for evidence in a timely manner.

Last week we learned that spycop ‘Alan Bond‘ (HN67, 1981-86) may well have fathered a child while undercover, but is now said to be too ill to give evidence. The Inquiry has known of his condition for three years yet has not taken a statement from him.

Heaven recommended that the Inquiry prioritise collecting statements from all former officers and managers, and provide a full list of all Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) managers from 1968-82 who are due to give evidence in Phase 3, along with regular updates on their state of health.

EXCLUDING THE VICTIMS

Two of the many women who were targeted and spied on gave evidence this week. Diane Langford was a founding member of the Women’s Liberation Front during the time this phase of the hearings covers, and has been an activist for over 50 years. ‘Madeleine’ was an active member of the Socialist Workers Party from her teens onwards, and was spied upon and deceived into a sexual relationship with a spycop.

Diane Langford has only recently become a Core Participant at the Inquiry, thanks to the work of the Undercover Research Group. Her name appeared unredacted in many SDS reports disclosed at the previous round of hearings in November 2020, but the Inquiry only reached out to her just beforehand.

By the time she knew that ‘Sandra Davies’ – who had spied on her and voted to oust her as the leader of the group she had founded – was giving evidence to the Inquiry it was too late to book a place at the limited screening venue.

The Inquiry failed to ask Langford to give evidence, or tell her that she could seek legal representation. It’s not just about her own inclusion but, as she said:

‘how many others who were spied on are completely unaware that their names appear in these files?’

The Inquiry only contacted ‘Madeleine’ in February 2020, yet she was known about in 2017, when the Inquiry first dealt with the spycop who abused her, ‘Vince Miller‘ (HN354, 1976-79). They reneged on promises to send a female officer to bring her the news and put her touch with Police Spies Out of Lives, a group which represents and supports women deceived into relationships by spycops.

Rajiv Menon QC, representing Piers Corbyn, made some excellent points about the Inquiry’s insistence on secrecy:

• Out of an estimated 18 surviving SDS officers deployed during 1973-82 whose cover names have been disclosed, only eight are being called to give evidence. This was a critical period in the history of the SDS. We should be hearing from as many spycops as possible.
• Evidence from seven SDS officers whose real and cover names have been restricted is not being disclosed. Instead, it is redacted, edited and amalgamated into an eight page ‘gist’. We need to know what they did individually, if their information is to be of any use at all.
• Most frustrating is the redaction of the names of 130 groups spied on and infiltrated by the SDS between 1969 and 1984. Why, 35-50 years later, must these remain secret, at the insistence of those who did the spying? It’s a betrayal of the purpose of the Inquiry.

After the public hearings are finished in mid-May, the following three weeks will be taken up with spycops giving evidence in secret. At least one of them appeared in the BBC’s True Spies documentary talking about his career, so it is unclear why he cannot give public evidence to the Inquiry.

WHO WAS SPIED UPON, AND WHY?

The newly disclosed documents show that the decision of who was targeted by the spycops came either straight from the top (MI5 and the Home Office) or straight from the bottom (the spycops deciding for themselves). In both cases, it was left-wing, equality, and social justice campaigns which were infiltrated and undermined. There is only one exception to this.

‘Peter Collins‘ (HN303, 1973-77), infiltrated the Workers Revolutionary Party. Not knowing he was a spy, they asked him, in turn, to infiltrate a breakaway group of the far-right National Front. This is bragged about in the 1974 SDS report, showing a total lack of awareness that their only foray into the far-right was instigated by a left-wing group and done to maintain cover.

SEEING THINGS IN CONTEXT

Police lawyers insisted that the actions of the SDS be seen in the historical context of the period and judged by those standards.

Very well then: the 1970s saw the rise of many campaigns, which attempted to improve the lives of all those in society and are now seen as mainstream, such as women’s rights and anti-racism groups.

Simultaneously, the far-right and fascist groups such as the National Front and Column 88 were on the rise.
According to the police’s lawyers, the spycops were politically neutral and did not target one kind of group over another. This is a ridiculous claim given that hundreds of groups and individuals perceived to be on ‘the left’ were targeted, while the far-right, who created fear through their use of violence, were not policed in the same way.

In fact, the SDS Annual Reports consistently downplayed the threat posed by the far-right. The police’s lawyers suggested there was no need to infiltrate groups like the National Front, because they ‘tended to cooperate’ with Special Branch.

At this time, Column 88 were threatening to burn down the homes of SWP members. The National Front were attacking Bengalis in Brick Lane, smashing up reggae record shops and vandalising mosques. There was firebombing and murder.

Instead of investigating the racist firebombing that killed 13 young black people in New Cross, the SDS were reporting on school children and providing MI5 with copies of Socialist Workers Party babysitting rotas.

As Diane Langford said:

‘To read these reports is to see some of the greatest ideas of our time crushed into the narrow confines of a mentality absolutely lacking in the capacity to comprehend them’

WOMEN AND CHILDREN

Many of the reports on the SWP have photographs of children attached. These were either the children of Socialist Workers Party members, or children who were engaged enough with their society to be part of the School Kids Against the Nazis. Reporting on children was a new development for the SDS, but then happened frequently.
One report, signed off by very senior officers and copied to MI5, included details about someone’s brother and his wife, and contained a line about the couple having a ‘mongol child’, a derogatory term for someone with Down’s Syndrome.

Another, attributed to ‘Barry Tompkins‘ (HN106, 1979-83), includes details of a woman activist who had an abortion, and speculation about ‘the putative father’. This kind of invasion of privacy cannot be justified.

The Women’s Liberation Front was targeted, with reports detailing such subversive events as jumble sales and a children’s Christmas party.

The youth wing of the Liberal Party was targeted by ‘Michael Scott‘ (HN298, 1971-76) in order to gather intelligence about anti-apartheid activist Peter Hain. The spycops cynically targeted all sorts of non-radical groups, displaying an utter contempt for civil society. Despite this, the 1975 SDS Annual Report claims that officers ‘concentrated on gathering intelligence about the activities of those extremists whose political views are to the left of the Communist Party of Great Britain’.

‘Madeleine’ wonders whether her father, a double war hero who fought fascism all his life, would also have been considered a ‘subversive’ and a ‘dangerous extremist’.

Dave Morris, one of the two defendants in the McLibel trial and spied upon by multiple officers, described his activism:

‘The essence of my personal motivation and political beliefs has remained constant throughout the last 50 years or so – the desire to tackle injustice, to seek improvements in society in the public interest, and to encourage and empower people to have as much control over their lives as possible.’

He confirms that judging by the standards of the time, as requested, a proper risk assessment of threats to society would have set its sights on other dangers – not just the far-right but fossil fuel companies, tobacco companies and car manufacturers.

ANTI-APARTHEID CAMPAIGNS & RACISM

One of those dangers would have been the South African State’s security service that was active in London in the 1970s, targeting the African National Congress and Anti-Apartheid Movement.

Bombings and murders were committed against anti-apartheid campaigners in Britain. Military materials were used. Few charges were ever brought. In 1972, Peter Hain received a letter bomb, opened by his 14-year-old sister. The incident remains uninvestigated. The spycops seem to have been wholly uninterested in pro-apartheid violence. Instead, they obsessively collected information on a wide range of left-wing groups that opposed it.

Racism was a huge issue in this era. There were violent confrontations. SDS officers were involved in the fascist rally and anti-fascist counter-protest, known as the ‘Battle of Lewisham’, in August 1977.

THE BATTLE OF LEWISHAM

Battle of Lewisham plaque, unveiled in 2017

The Inquiry were shown a BBC film and an Associated Press report on the ‘Battle of Lewisham’. The SDS Annual Report for that year suggested that this was a triumph of SDS intelligence, minimising the clashes and violence.

Even just these film clips, and the fact that the demo is now known as the Battle of Lewisham, makes this claim of negligible disorder laughable, and casts doubt about the accuracy of the other information in these Annual Reports.

It was mentioned that one SDS officer complained that the intelligence supplied in the run-up was ignored by police planning for the demo.

‘Madeleine’ emphatically refutes a claim made by spycop Vince Miller – and repeated in the SDS Annual Report that year – that bricks were stockpiled at various locations by the SWP along the planned NF route and that members of the SWP carried weapons to the march in bags. The police were, in reality, undermining efforts to fight fascism and combat racism.

‘Madeleine’ continued:

‘The Battle of Lewisham is now rightly considered a watershed moment like Cable Street in the fight against fascism in this country. Unable to control the streets, the National Front went into decline and the event is now proudly remembered as the moment when the far right was again defeated. It is now commemorated by the local council and seen as a symbol of a community coming together to say yes to black and white unity and no to the forces of hate.’

In the early 1980s, East London Workers Against Racism – a subgroup of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which supported victims of racist attacks – was infiltrated by SDS officer ‘Barry Tompkins’. This meant that Tompkins reported on the victims of racist violence.

Spying on victims of racist violence and the groups supporting them is a pattern that endured, something we will see when we look at the 1990s and the spying on the family of Stephen Lawrence, Ricky Reel, and many others.

WOMEN’S LIBERATION GROUPS

Diane Langford knew of two that undercover officers spied on her. The Inquiry have now told her it had been six.

Her full statement is compelling, articulate, and moving. Here we summarise some of her main points.

As with many others, Langford’s commitment to the women’s liberation movement was fuelled by personal experience. She gave the example of how, when she was in her early twenties, her 19-year-old flatmate died from an illegal back street abortion:

‘The memory of her death remains vivid for me still, at the age of 79.’

She listed three dramatic events that spring to mind when recalling the period under scrutiny:

• Dave Robertson threatened my friend with violence when she outed him as an undercover.
• Robertson ignored an allegation of attempted rape at a meeting, instead focusing on my domestic arrangements and ridiculing my partner
• Banner Books was burned down by fascists while undercover officers had surveilled and had access to the building, and a man was reported to have died. This needs investigating.

When told that ‘Sandra Davies’ (HN348, 1971-73) spied on 77 meetings, of which 55 were related to the women’s liberation movement, Langford responded:

‘Sounds like more than I did! Why is the women’s movement not a focus of the Inquiry? The Inquiry is colluding with the state to limit the search for evidence’.

Indeed, the list of groups that were spied on contains numerous women’s rights organisations, despite ‘Sandra Davies’ being the only female spycop deployed in this period – and only active from 1971-73.

The surveillance of the women in these groups by men, seemingly because women’s equality was viewed as a form of subversion, starkly illustrates the degree to which the SDS was institutionally sexist and abusive.

WOMEN DECEIVED INTO INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS

The Inquiry has found no documents from this era (1973-82) that instruct spycops officers either to have or to abstain from sexual relationships. But managers indeed know about it. ‘Graham Coates’ (HN304, 1976-79) mentioned in his statement that he even heard comments and jokes about relationships from spycops at meetings with their managers.

During this time, all of the spycops (and their managers) were male. The SDS went these ten years without any women officers, which may well have had an influence of the unit’s culture. The vast majority of these men were married, which was noted at the time of recruitment. It was perhaps thought that this might deter the undercovers from getting too close to their targets, but clearly it didn’t prevent them initiating sexual relationships.

It is now clear that in the era being examined, numerous spycops had sexual relationships with women while using their undercover identities. Some of these women were the targets of their spying operations, others came into contact with the spycops socially.

To quote Langford again:

‘We see the callous use of women’s bodies by misogynous male officers who see such abuse as a perk of the job, and a confluence of the sexist behaviour and patriarchal attitudes of so-called left wing men in socialist groups and that of those spying on them.’

The practices and culture established in this period were the foundations of the long running sexism which infected the SDS. officers’ reports rate women’s attractiveness and comment on the size of their breasts. No account was taken of the impact of the officers’ behaviour on their wives and families.

NO NECESSITY FOR THESE RELATIONSHIPS

Spycops gave no thought to the dignity of women, to their right to choose who they had sex with, the risk of harm if they found out the truth, or what would happen if they got pregnant. Most officers involved readily admit there was no necessity for these relationships. It was gratuitous and a grossly intrusive invasion of private citizens’ lives. Any spycop who deceives someone into sex should forfeit their right to anonymity.

We were told in the past that these deceitful relationships only rarely occurred, but the evidence now being published provides a different picture. We now know that in the era examined by the current hearings, 1973-82, at least a third of the officers in the unit engaged in sexual relationships while undercover. Of these, ‘Jim Pickford‘ (HN300, 1974-76), and perhaps ‘Alan Bond‘ (HN67, 1981-86), had children with women they’d spied on.

Despite all these officer being known to have deceived women into relationships in this era, the Inquiry is only calling one, ‘Vince Miller‘ (HN354, 1976-79), to give evidence.

BLAIR PEACH

Blair Peach

An important issue in these hearings will be the killing of Blair Peach by the police in 1979, the subsequent police cover-up, and the campaign for justice by his then-partner Celia Stubbs. She has campaigned all her life, always to strengthen civil society, and was targeted by the undercovers as a result, even before Peach’s death. She recently spoke movingly about it, and spycops, to Channel 4 News.

The killing of Blair Peach and its cover-up remains one of the most notorious events in British police history, a national disgrace, and a permanent stain on the Met.

Peach and Stubbs were both members of the SWP as well as active anti-racist campaigners. Both Stubbs and Peach had spycops files kept on them, opened in 1974 and 1978, long before Peach was killed. The Inquiry has not released any of the documents involved that pre-date Peach’s death.

On 23 April 1979, there was a plan to march and sit down at Southall Town Hall protesting at a National Front meeting. Special Patrol Group (SPG) officers piled out of a van and one struck Peach, killing him. All six SPG officers refused to cooperate with the investigation that followed. And no officer was ever brought to justice for due to a major police cover-up.

The 1979 SDS Annual Report describes the Peach campaign as a main focus, yet the Inquiry has disclosed suspiciously few documents relating to this. The Home Office’s response in 1979 was to renew the SDS’s funding.
The SDS reported on the campaign for promoting actions like writing to MPs and local newspapers, and phoning in to radio shows. A number of spycops even attended Peach’s funeral, while police evidence gatherers photographed the attendees for later identification by the SDS.

Combined with the cover-up, it is clear that the infiltration of the Blair Peach campaign was about preventing guilty police officers from being held to account.

THE SPYING HASN’T STOPPED

Celia Stubbs, 2021

The spycops units have continued to take an active interest in the Blair Peach campaign ever since. A commemorative event was organised for the twentieth anniversary of his death in 1999, and this too was targeted by spycops, with the excuse that such campaigns were ‘anti-police’.

Police lawyers told the Inquiry last November that the SDS and NPIOU never directly targeted justice campaigns. But the documents we see in these hearings prove that is untrue. Officers were tasked to spy on the Peach campaign.

Celia Stubbs was also involved in the Hackney Community Defence Campaign and Colin Roach Centre, both of which were targeted by spycops. She is extremely disturbed about the fact that her lawyers were put under police surveillance, and Special Branch files were opened on them.

For Stubbs, this conspicuous lack of evidence is just one more obstruction to truth and accountability.

EMPLOYMENT BLACKLISTING

Many eyebrows were raised by the police lawyers’ insistence in their November Opening Statement that the SDS did not infiltrate trade unions and were not involved in blacklisting. The unit 1972 Annual Report contains references to trade union activity and strikes (the miners, the dockers and building workers), as well as the union-initiated Shrewsbury Two campaign.

The police lawyers tried to fend off the fact that SDS officers illegally supplied personal details of activists to employment blacklists. They claimed that police received material from sources beyond that as well, so we can’t be sure that what they called ‘so-called blacklisting’ definitely involved information from SDS officers.

The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) seized a blacklist of more than 3,200 people at the offices of construction industry blacklisters The Consulting Association in 2009. In 2012 the ICO’s investigations manager confirmed that there was information in the files that ‘could only be supplied by the police or the security services’.

In 2013, SDS whistleblower officer Peter Francis said that he believed information he’d reported when undercover in the 1990s had ended up in blacklist files.

Kirsten Heaven reminded the Inquiry that it was Operation Reuben, the Met’s own investigation, that found:

‘police, including Special Branches and the security services, supplied information to the blacklist funded by the country’s major construction firms, the Consulting Association and other agencies.’

According to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, all Special Branches routinely gave details of politically active people to the construction industry blacklist.

The Blacklisting Support Group are outraged by this reference to ‘so-called blacklisting’ organisations. There is no doubt that blacklisting occurred. It is plain, indisputable historic fact. Any attempt to belittle it is deeply offensive to its many victims and their families.

STEALING IDENTITIES OF DEAD CHILDREN

At the start of the SDS, undercover officers simply invented names to use for their cover identity (apart from ‘Michael Scott‘ (HN298, 1971-76) who stole the identity of a living person), undercover officers used fictional identities to build their cover story in the early days.

But from around 1974, after a change of management, undercovers started to use the identities of dead children and were instructed and/or expected to do so. Officers who queried this were told it was the usual process.

They searched for people who had been born around the same time as themselves, preferably with the same first name. The practice continued into the late 1990s – the most recent known being ‘Rod Richardson’ (EN32/HN596, 1999-2003).

Police have told the Inquiry that it was important that an officer have a real birth certificate in case the group they were infiltrating became suspicious and looked for one. But those same people could also find the matching death certificate.

While there are no reasons why a living person would have a death certificate, there are plenty of reasons why a birth certificate might not be found (eg, if someone was born abroad, or adopted), there is no reason why a living person would have a death certificate, and the cover would be blown. And this is exactly what happened.

Richard Clark (‘Rick Gibson’ HN297, 1974-76) was one of the first infiltrators to steal a dead child’s identity, and it blew his cover. He became active and influential in the Troops Out Movement (TOM), and then infiltrated to Big Flame.

They, however, became suspicious when Clark applied for full membership, started an investigation into his background, and confronted him with the death certificate, at which point his deployment ended.

Fictitious identities had actually offered better cover to spycops than stealing dead people’s identities.

LIFE IMITATING ART?

In last year’s hearings, police lawyers spoke of the ‘essential operational imperative’ to steal real identities But other police units doing undercover work, such as Regional Crime Squads, did not do this. So why did the SDS?

Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal was published in 1971 and the film released in 1973, showing the practice of stealing dead children’s identities in just this way. So, rather than official police policy, was it instead a work of fiction that inspired this ghoulish practice? Whistleblower SDS officer Peter Francis (1993-97) said that the process was known as ‘the jackal run’ among SDS officers.

There was no justification to start the practice, and certainly none to continue after Clark was exposed. And yet, the practice continued for over 20 years. Stealing identities simply became an embedded practice in a unit that lacked accountability and effective supervision.

Very few former SDS officers seemed to have had any qualms of conscience about stealing dead children’s identities, let alone acting immorally in the dead person’s name, deceiving women into relationships, getting arrested and convicted.

In 2013, shortly after the spycops scandal became public knowledge, a Home Affairs Select Committee report insisted on the truth being told about SDS infiltrators stealing dead children’s identities and demanded all affected families be told and given an apology by the end of 2013. The Met simply ignored it. It has fallen to the Inquiry to belated start informing families.

ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP

‘Madeleine’, deceived into a relationship by ‘Vince Miller‘ (HN354, 1976-79) when she was an SWP activist, stated:

‘I have also discovered, to my horror, that MI5 has had files on me since 1970 when I was aged 16, more than 6 years before HN354’s deployment. We know the SDS was formed in 1968 and that extensive spying was happening at that time. I therefore wonder if I was spied on as early as 13, when I was a schoolgirl?

‘Miller has even reported on the pregnancy of a woman in our branch and the name her baby was to be given. This went straight to MI5.’

The SDS officers recorded extraordinary and gross levels of detail. The birth of anti-apartheid activist Ernest Rodker’s son, and a note saying that Ernest himself had been admitted to hospital, were reported and copied to MI5, as were reports about who was at Peter Hain’s family home, including his younger siblings.

Were these details requested by, or relevant to, MI5? The SDS, acting as their foot soldiers, neither knew nor cared, even when they had been instructed by MI5 or the Home Office to target particular individuals or groups.
According to police lawyers, every spycop simply hoovered up all the information they could and reported it unfiltered. It was not up to them to discern, nor is it their fault they reported irrelevant things.

Why did MI5 retain the seemingly trivial stuff for so long that it is still in their files and now being shared with the Inquiry?

FOOT SOLDIERS OF MI5

MI5 did indeed retain thousands and thousands of documents, luckily for the Inquiry, as the Met seem to have lost or destroyed almost all of the SDS intelligence reports. Witness Z, a senior officer in MI5, has made a statement on behalf of the Security Service, that confirms that the SDS has always been subordinate to MI5.

However, we won’t be getting any further explanation, as Witness Z is no longer going to give evidence to the Inquiry. No reason has been given as to why they were withdrawn.

Frankly, this is incomprehensible. Witness Z’s statement, only just released, shows they have extensive, vital knowledge about the roles of the SDS and MI5, and the cooperation between the organisations. It contains the admission that supposedly subversive organisations were not actually considered a high threat at this time, but that pressure to spy on them often came from the Prime Minister and Whitehall.

At the time, MI5 defined subversion as ‘activities threatening the safety or well-being of the State and intended to undermine or overthrow Parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means’. Most, if not all, of those spied on by the SDS could not possibly be described as ‘subversive’ according to this definition.

SECRET LUNCHES

The SDS was well known to the most senior members of the Met, as well as MI5 and senior civil servants and politicians.

‘Michael James’ (HN96, 1978-83) reported that the Commissioner himself visited the SDS safe house. This practice has been confirmed for other periods by ‘Doug Edwards’ (HN326, 1968-71) and Peter Francis (1993-97) who both added that their Commissioners presented them with bottles of whisky.

From 1983, there is a programme and briefing pack prepared for Sir Kenneth Newman, the then Met Commissioner. It includes a brief profile of each member of the SDS at the time, ahead of an extended buffet lunch with the SDS officers at what is described as an ‘in-field location’.

It would be nice if the Inquiry could question Sir Kenneth about his knowledge of the SDS, unfortunately he is one of three ex Commissioners who have died since the Inquiry was announced.

But there can be no doubt that this phase of the Inquiry will put the nails in the coffin of senior officers’ claims that the SDS was a rogue unit, somehow totally secret and unknown even to the rest of the Met.

The 1975 SDS Annual Report emphasises the paramount importance of secrecy about the unit’s existence to avoid ‘an embarrassment for the Commissioner’ as well as maintaining officer security. This is a tacit admission that they knew the SDS was illegitimate. Why would there be any embarrassment if the unit were using reasonable methods to protect the public from genuine threats to their safety?

INFILTRATING, TAKING CHARGE & SABOTAGING

Police lawyers said the Inquiry should look at contemporaneous publications by the groups that spycops targeted to see how extreme the ideas were. It sounds fair enough at first, however throughout the existence of spycops, officers have written material for the campaigns they infiltrated.

From John Graham writing about the anti-Vietnam War protest in a 1969 edition of Red Camden to Mark Kennedy’s Indymedia posts, via Roger Pearce writing for Freedom, Bob Lambert cowriting the McLibel leaflet and John Dines’ anti-police section of the Poll Tax Riot booklet, it’s been common practice.

Spycops writing for campaigns pales in comparison to them being instrumental in running the organisations. A basic initial principle of the SDS, laid down by the unit’s founder Conrad Dixon, was:

‘members of the squad should be told, in no uncertain terms, that they must not take office in a group, chair meetings, draft leaflets, speak in public or initiate activity’

Despite this, the vast majority of spycops in the era begin examined, 1973-28, held positions of office in the organisations they infiltrated.

Most tend to ‘have forgotten’ the roles they had, or claimed they don’t know how they landed there. Alternatively, others say that the role was not really a position of trust at all. The institutionalised dishonesty creeps into every aspect of their evidence.

RICHARD CLARK: RISING THROUGH THE RANKS

One indisputable example of the exploitation and manipulation of both the people and the groups targeted, is the career of undercover officer Richard Clark (‘Rick Gibson’ HN297, 1974-76), who rose through Troops Out Movement (TOM) in order to get access to Big Flame.

Drawing together SDS reports and the statements of two people Clark spied on, Inquiry Core Participants Richard Chessum and ‘Mary’, James Scobie QC showed the Inquiry that Clark abused his friendship with Chessum and his sexual relationship with ‘Mary’ (and three other women) to reach his goal.

TOM was advocating self-determination for the people of Ireland and withdrawal of British troops from Ireland. Their methods were lobbying MPs, drafting alternative legislation, and raising awareness with the occasional low-key demonstration, doing talks and film screenings.

TOM had already been infiltrated, as recently as 1974, by ‘Michael Scott‘ (HN298, 1971-76) who concluded that:

‘It had no subversive objectives and as far as I am aware did not employ or approve the use of violence to achieve its objectives.’

Despite this, in a carefully prepared strategy, Clark wrote to TOM head office in December 1974 asking for a local branch to join, knowing there wasn’t one.

By February 1975, Clark had succeeded in creating an entirely new branch of the TOM. There were five founder members; Mary, Richard Chessum, his partner, another student, and Clark. Rather than infiltrating a branch, he had actively established his own one. He generated something to spy on.

Neither Mary, Chessum, nor his partner had Special Branch files on them until their involvement with Clark. Their lives were then reported upon to an extent that was both sinister and ridiculous. Their physical appearances, commentary on their body size, health issues, addresses, theatres visited, holiday destinations, right down to the brand of cigarettes they smoked. This information was passed to MI5.

WORKING HIS WAY IN

Clark had no back story. He needed to develop a place in the social network of political activists. To do that, he developed a close friendship with Richard Chessum and initiated a sexual relationship with Mary.

He also had relationships with at least three other female activists to gain position and tactical advantage. The other women were Mary’s flatmate, and two activists from the group Big Flame, Clark’s ultimate target. (His story also confirms that forming targeted sexual relationships started early in the SDS.)

As one of the founder members of the South East London branch of TOM, Clark gained access to the national movement, with an astonishing level of ruthlessness. By March 1975, he was the Secretary – the top position in the branch. He and Richard Chessum were then elected as voting delegates to the TOM Liaison Committee conference.

That move gave Clark access to the national leadership, knowing he’d be accompanied by Richard Chessum, a man with a proven track record of genuine commitment. His cultivated friendship with Richard Chessum gave him credibility.

In April 1975, Clark got himself elected as a delegate to the London Co-ordinating Committee of the Movement and the All London meeting. Clark attended a private meeting of senior members of TOM, with leader Gerry Lawless. There were only ten people at the meeting.

Clark saw his post under threat. Workers Fight was trying to take over TOM. One of them was voted to go to a London conference that would elect national posts. Clark then competed against his supposed friend Chessum for the second post and won by two votes. It’s believed one of them would have been from Mary’s flatmate, whom he had deceived into a relationship.

NATIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES

It worked – Clark was elected to the Organising Committee for London, a national position. This spycop had deceived a second woman into a sexual relationship in order to oust Chessum, a decent man who supported the movement, and take his place.

Lawless then nominated Clark for a position on the National Secretariat and he got it – he was now one of seven people in charge of the whole of TOM.

He continued to attend meetings at Richard Chessum’s home and reported on him. Mary and her flat-mate largely disappeared from Clark’s reporting, now that they had served their purpose.

Due to Lawless’s paternity leave, Clark became acting head of TOM for several months and did great damage. He cancelled delegations to Ireland. He criticised certain members. At least one prominent organisation withdrew its affiliation. And by the time Gerry Lawless returned, two members of the Secretariat had resigned.

Clark then turned against Lawless. He held a meeting with Big Flame in his flat to organise opposition to Lawless’ leadership, decapitating TOMof its long-time head.They planned a coup in the next conference. The new leadership proposed was five people, including Clark himself. Was this about TOM, or getting in Big Flame’s good books?

Clark also embarked on sexual relationships with two female members of the Big Flame. For him, sexual relationships were a tried and tested tactic of getting exactly where he wanted to go.

CAUGHT IN THE ACT

However, Big Flame rumbled him. We don’t know quite how. Telling different stories to different women and them comparing? Was he seen as Machiavellian? Or was it simply a lack of political authenticity?

It was not unusual for Big Flame to investigate new people who wanted to join if they did not trust them entirely. Members of Big Flame looked into background information ‘Rick Gibson’ had provided, and could not confirm any of it. Then, as mentioned above, they went to the government’s birth and death records archive to discover Rick Gibson’s birth certificate. And they also found his death certificate.

They confronted Clark with both. His ambitious plot to unseat Gerry Lawless was over.

Clark took flight and disappeared from the political scene altogether. Richard Chessum later saw a dossier that Big Flame had prepared, that included a letter from Clark written to one of the female activists, saying that he ‘had to go away’.

There was no retribution against Clark after his exposure. It stands out that none of the groups infiltrated were interested in violence unless in self-defence. This shows the Met’s applications to the inquiry for anonymity for spycops for fear of reprisals are highly questionable.

In this era, from Clark onwards, every single spycop took a role in the organisation they infiltrated (except for ‘Graham Coates’ (HN304, 1976-79) who was infiltrating anarchists without hierarchy or official roles). In some case officers took national leading roles. What resulted from this was not just information, but also the opportunity to have a say in the direction of the organisation, and ultimately the ability to derail that organisation.

CONCLUSION

In her statements, Diane Langford connected the spying in the past to the new Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill rushed through Parliament just before the November hearings in 2020, which allows police to self-authorise to commit any crime. This undermines much of the point of the Undercover Policing Inquiry which is tasked to make recommendations for undercover policing in future.

In January 2020, the current counter-terrorism spycops unit listed peace protesters as extremists. One of them was the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign seeking to uphold international law and to promote peace, yet it is targeted as a problem to be undermined. Not much seems to have changed since the SDS was officially disbanded in 2008.

The Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings continue for another three weeks, after which it will be a year before there are any more.

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The third week of the Undercover Police Inquiry’s hearings brought revelations and frustrations.

The former undercover officers of Britain’s secret police engaged in a parade of selective amnesia, admitting what their vintage documents confirmed, but not a lot more.

And yet, we also brought the murky world of the spycops further into focus, learning the names of another MP who was spied on and a senior officer who illegally colluded with industrial blacklisting, as well as catching the Inquiry itself covering up for a criminal spycop.

CELEBRITY GUERRILLA COVERAGE

The Inquiry still refuses to live-steam its hearings, only giving us a live transcript that can’t easily be paused or rewound – a challenge to stare at for hours on end.

The women from Police Spies Out of Lives, representing women deceived into relationships by spycops, took matters into their own hands with a live reading of the transcript on their YouTube channel.

They took this inspired idea a stage further later in the week, with actors Maxine Peake, Siobhán McSweeney, and Barnaby Taylor speaking the words of the spycop witnesses.

There is, of course, no reason why the Inquiry can’t provide us with an audio-stream of the hearings. It would be no different to the read-a-long in terms of security. It’s further evidence of the way the Inquiry regards victims of spycops as marginal and the wider public as an irrelevance.

OVERVIEW

In the last three weeks, the Inquiry hearings have focussed on the formation of what began as the ‘Special Operations Squad’ (SOS) in 1968, and the years leading up to its re-naming as the Special Demonstrations Squad (SDS) in 1972.

It has confirmed the names of more than 100 groups who weren’t previously known to have been spied on.

There’s no good reason why the list couldn’t have been published by the Inquiry before, allowing members of those groups to come forward with relevant testimony in time to contribute.

The movement against the war in Vietnam was the original target for this new method of deep surveillance, and during this period the spycops also reported on anarchist, socialist, communist, Irish and anti-racist groups.

‘THROWN IN’

One after another, the former spycops described:

• being asked to join the unit, rather than formally applying;
• receiving no formal training or briefings;
• being initially sent out without even a target group or movement, just to see what they could join;
• not being steered away from groups that were clearly no threat to anyone;
• no advice as to what information to report, just a vague indication that all information was good information;
• deployments lasting much longer than the 12 month maximum stipulated by SDS founder Conrad Dixon (unless something went wrong & it was ended early);
• no psychological care during or after deployment.

Spycop ‘Dick Epps’ said:

‘I was never sat down in a classroom or a training room and given a training manual, or training lectures… We were all, if you like, being thrown in to a maelstrom, and seeking to find some sense of what we were trying to do’

Rather than merely gathering information on public order issues, it is abundantly clear that spycops were foot-soldiers for the Security Service, and most SDS reports were copied to MI5. It’s also a fact that details of activists were illegally shared with employment blacklisting organisations.

This overlap has been starkly, if unwittingly, illustrated by spycops who flitted between the concepts of democracy, national security, government policy, and corporate convenience as if these were all one and the same.

The spycops talked about targeting groups who ‘want to overthrow our form of democracy’, yet they spied on numerous democratic organisations, including political parties whose very function was to participate in our form of democracy. They sent one officer after another into the anti-apartheid movement, whose sole objective was to help bring democracy to South Africa.

NO SET TARGET

Giving evidence, the spycops admitted very little beyond what their own vintage documents proved, unless it served to distance them from responsibility. Their denials were risibly implausible, claiming to be unable to recall some of the central campaigns they were spying on.

When forced to concede that many groups they spied on posed no threat to the public, they tried to defend their deployments by saying the innocent groups were allied with more dangerous ones who were the actual focus.

None of them could explain why they failed to join the supposed real targets, nor why they were reporting personal details of the people in any and every group they came across.

Epps claimed anarchists were always the likely cause of any public disorder, but when asked why he didn’t infiltrate them instead of peace campaigns, he said:

‘I don’t know that it ever occurred to me that that was a route that I might find useful. But some of them were, as I say, harebrained and a little overexcited at these moments, and I didn’t feel drawn to that sort of grouping.’

Epps infiltrated the International Marxist Group (IMG) because they ‘took part in every demonstration going’. He was instructed by his managers to make a copy of the IMG’s office keys. He admitted he didn’t remember any IMG members being violent or disorderly at demonstrations, but claimed ‘they were much busier than other groups’ – as justification in itself.

OFFICER HN340 ‘ANDY BAILEY’

Officer HN340, ‘Andy Bailey’ (or ‘Alan Nixon‘), was, like Epps, deployed between 1969 and 1972. He said a lack of instruction was a continual feature of his work, and that he just made up his methods and activities. He presumed he was doing the right thing because his managers never told him otherwise.

Bailey joined a tiny left-wing discussion group, the North London Red Circle. In his written statement he described the Red Circle as ‘a talking shop’, saying:

‘It did support a revolutionary agenda and was subversive to the extent that it advanced the overthrow of the established political system in the UK, albeit never took any concrete steps… violence would have been the last thing on many of their minds’.

He said it was a ‘recruiting ground for the International Marxist Group’, with an implication that the IMG was in itself a serious threat to public safety even though, as we heard from Dick Epps, other officers knew that wasn’t the case and they’d only spied on the IMG because they, in turn, was supposed to be adjacent to the real targets.

IRISH ISSUES

Bailey also infiltrated the Irish Civil Rights Solidarity Campaign (ICRSC). Irish republican politics was a popular cause with the left at the time. As in the early years of the Troubles, Republicans were only attacking military targets in Northern Ireland it was, for many, a cause with little moral dilemma.

In October 1970, Bailey also attended the founding conference of the Irish Solidarity Campaign (ISC) in Birmingham. For an SDS officer to go to another constabulary’s jurisdiction, the unit must have either secured the permission of the local police, in which case they were complicit in what the spycops did, or else it was done without local approval, which is a serious breach of police protocol.

That Irish Solidarity Campaign founding conference was also attended by Bailey’s colleague, SDS officer HN68 ‘Sean Lynch’, whose deployment focused on Irish solidarity groups. A report was produced afterwards, with both their names attached to it, which contained a long list of all the groups and ‘fraternal delegates’ who attended the conference.

He explained:

‘They were there and so I reported it; it was then down to the back office to do their filtering, vetting, or whatever you call it’

The report was sent to both MI5 and the Home Office. The Met’s Deputy Assistant Commissioner commended the ‘first class work’ and asked that the officers be praised.

It will have been obvious to that senior officer that the depth of knowledge in the report can only have come from sustained infiltration.

It is already clear – and getting even clearer – that the SDS’s work was known and approved of at the highest levels of the Met, as well as its paymasters in the Home Office. There is, therefore, no way to sustain the claim that the SDS was a rogue unit, so secret that nobody outside really knew what was going on.

Bailey could not recall ISC members ever taking part in any acts of violence, nor any public disorder at any demonstrations organised by the ISC:

‘I’m sure something like that would have stuck in my memory and it definitely doesn’t.’

ANOTHER MP SPIED ON

Bailey’s reports would specifically mention whether or not events were attended by Bernadette Devlin, a young independent Irish republican MP.

According to Bailey:

‘if she was known to be going to attend any meeting or demonstration or whatever, then of course that would increase the likelihood of more people arriving at the demonstration’.

Devlin joins the growing list of MPs confirmed as having been spied on by the SDS, the unit that was supposedly formed to frustrate those who would overthrow parliamentary democracy.

SPYCOPS ABROAD

Bailey’s managers had instructed him not to join the International Marxist Group because it was ‘recognised as more of a political party’. This doesn’t tally with the fact that his contemporary, ‘Doug Edwards’, was not merely a member of the Independent Labour Party but the Tower Hamlets branch treasurer.

His managers did, however, instruct him to attend the Conference for a Red Europe in Brussels in November 1970, organised by the Fourth International (of which the IMG was a part).

As with the ISC conference in Birmingham a month earlier, Bailey says there was no direct contact between him and the other spycop who attended. That other officer was officer HN326, ‘Doug Edwards’, who complained about the trip in his evidence to the Inquiry.

This is the earliest known instance of spycops travelling abroad. It’s unclear whether the SDS followed protocol and got permission from their counterparts in Belgium (and any countries they passed through).

It is yet another example of spycops’ being engaged from the start in an activity that has been explained away as a later aberration.

TRADE UNIONIST DAVE SMITH

Blacklisted trade unionist Dave Smith was initially forbidden to deliver his opening statement to the Inquiry, as it mentioned the real name of spycop ‘Carlo Neri’ – which is Carlo Soracchi. The Inquiry insisted on nobody saying the name Soracchi out loud, even though it has been in the public domain for 18 months.

Dave Smith

Smith spoke on behalf of the Blacklist Support Group (BSG), representing union members who were unlawfully blacklisted by major construction firms.

When the BSG first spoke about being blacklisted for union activities, they were ridiculed as conspiracy theorists. But it’s conspiracy fact – and it involves the collusion of the police and the security services.

Established in 1993 using an existing blacklist from the Economic League, The Consulting Association (TCA) was a secret body comprised of most major construction companies. Between them, they illegally orchestrated the blacklisting of thousands of construction workers.

Every job applicant on major building projects had their name checked against TCA’s blacklist. If there was a match, the worker would be refused work or dismissed. These checks were done on hundreds of thousands of workers a year.

It wasn’t just the major firms who kept union activists under surveillance and contributed to blacklisting – it was the same political police who are at the heart of the Undercover Policing Inquiry.

The police’s internal spycops investigation, Operation Herne, produced a report on blacklisting which concluded:

‘Police, including Special Branches and the Security Services, supplied information to the blacklist funded by the country’s major construction firms, The Consulting Association’

SPECIAL BRANCH INDUSTRIAL UNIT

The Special Branch Industrial Unit was established in 1970, ‘with the aim of monitoring trade unionists from teaching to the docks’. Special Branch files were effectively a database for MI5, private firms and others to find out about trade union activists.

Spycops often worked for the Industrial Unit, before or after being deployed undercover. One was HN336 ‘Dick Epps’, who told the Inquiry that Chief Superintendent Herbert Guy ‘Bert’ Lawrenson, head of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch’s union-monitoring C Squad in those early days, went to work for the Economic League.

One can readily imagine Special Branch Industrial Unit officers had a ready exchange of information with Lawrenson, their former boss, the man who quite possibly hired and trained them.

The Operation Herne report confirmed that, prior to The Consulting Association’s foundation in the 1990s:

‘Special Branches throughout the UK had direct contact with the Economic League’

MODERN POLICE HELP FOR BLACKLISTERS

As well as Special Branch files, police intelligence on political activists was later kept on the National Domestic Extremism Database, which holds files on thousands of citizens whom the State considers ‘domestic extremists’, many of whom have committed no crime whatsoever.

One of the units responsible for the database was the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (NETCU), whose Detective Chief Inspector Gordon Mills gave a presentation to a secret Consulting Association meeting in 2008. This was a senior police officer helping TCA, a company whose work was illegal.

NETCU and the Special Branch Industrial Unit, along with all the spycops units, are now absorbed into the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command. State spying on unions is now classified as counter-terrorism.

PERSONAL TARGETING

Page from undercover officer Mark Jenner’s 1996 diary, showing his attendance at a UCATT meeting

Smith then focused on a small group of union activists on the blacklist of which he was part. From the early 1990s until mid 2000s, they were spied on by three separate spycops: Peter Francis, Mark Jenner, and Carlo Soracchi.

Mark Jenner joined the construction union UCATT as ‘Mark Cassidy’. He attended picket lines, protests, and conferences, and even chaired meetings. Smith flatly accused Jenner, and through him the British State, of interfering with the internal democratic processes of an independent trade union.

When Jenner’s deployment was coming to an end, another spycop, Carlo Soracchi, using the name ‘Carlo Neri’, was sent to spy on the same group of activists. Soracchi was an agent provocateur, trying in vain to incite union members to commit arson against a charity shop he claimed was run by Roberto Fiore, leader of Italian fascist party Forza Nuova.

Jenner deceived ‘Alison’, an activist for the National Union of Teachers, into a five year co-habiting relationship during his deployment. Soracchi deceived two women into relationships with him during his deployment – Donna McLean, a Transport and General Workers Union rep from a homelessness charity, and ‘Lindsey‘ who was also an active trade unionist.

SDS officer Carlo Soracchi

If the purpose of the spycop units was genuinely, as the police claim, to detect serious criminality or public disorder, why, in over ten years of spying, were none of these people ever charged or prosecuted with a serious criminal offence? This is nothing to do with disorder or crime, it’s purely political policing.

Smith said the police can claim all they like that they were protecting democracy. But by spying on trade union members and colluding with blacklisting, spycops are actually just protecting big business and capitalism. Capitalism and democracy are not the same thing.

OFFICER HN348 ‘SANDRA DAVIES’

Giving over a long session to questioning Special Demonstration Squad officer HN348 ‘Sandra Davies’ seemed something of an odd proposition, as she appeared to have had an uneventful deployment.

As it turned out, this was the point; her testimony demonstrated the pointlessness of many deployments, and the total absence of any consideration of the impact of this intrusion on the lives of those targeted.

The SDS’ annual report of 1971 confirmed that she was recruited for her gender:

‘The arrival of a second woman officer has added considerably to the squad’s flexibility and has proved invaluable in the comparatively recent field of women’s liberation.’

Davies infiltrated the Women’s Liberation Front (WLF). A small feminist group with Maoist leanings, its meetings were attended by about 12 people, hosted at one of the member’s homes.

As a constable, she had the same powers and responsibilities as her male colleagues but, as a female officer, was only paid 90% of the men’s salary.

In the SDS, she was sent to spy on the WLF who, according to her, mainly campaigned for equal pay, free contraception and free nurseries.

SUBVERSIVE BAKING

Davies reported on the WLF supplying home-made sweets and cakes for a children’s Christmas party organised by the Black Unity and Freedom Party. She also reported on the WLF holding a jumble sale. Both of these reports were copied to MI5.

She was elected treasurer of the WLF. As part of the six-strong executive committee, she took part in the expulsion of several members that led to the group’s decline.

Looking back, she continued:

‘I do not think my work really yielded any good intelligence, but I eliminated the Women’s Liberation Front from public order concerns’

That is a mitigation that could be applied to thought-crime spying on literally anyone. More to the point, it was a fact that must have been obvious very early on in her deployment. And yet she spent two years, full-time, spying on that group.

There was no suggestion that her managers gave much thought to whether what she was doing was worthwhile. As with other deployments, it seems that once they had their spycops in place, keeping them there was more important than the substance of the information they gathered.

The rights of the people being spied on – who had police officers in their lives and homes week after week – didn’t get a look-in.

MENTAL GYMNASTICS

Davies has been granted anonymity by the Inquiry. In her ‘impact statement’, she said that she wanted anonymity because she would be embarrassed if the group’s main activist found out the truth. She also said her reputation would be tainted if her friends found out she had been a spycop.

This is an extraordinary mental gymnastics – when we question the purpose of spycops, the police tell us that they’re doing vital & noble work ensuring the safety of everyone, yet when we ask why they want anonymity, they say it would be humiliating to be known as one.

SUMMARY WITHOUT QUESTION

Rather than insisting that all of the surviving former spycops give evidence, the Inquiry has chosen not to ‘call’ the majority of them.

Instead, the Inquiry team have prepared a short summary of each officer’s witness statement, and read it out. There is no opportunity for anyone to question the spycops, giving rise to a worry that their real history will remain hidden.

Less anticipated was that the Inquiry would be more inclined to cover up an officer’s wrongdoing than the officer themselves.

OFFICER HN339 ‘STEWART GOODMAN’

Officer HN339, ‘Stewart Goodman’, was deployed undercover from 1970 to 1971, initially against the anti-apartheid groups. He joined the Lambeth branch of the International Socialists (now the Socialist Workers Party), where – mirroring Doug Edwards’ and Sandra Davies’ roles – he became treasurer.

Speaking for the Inquiry, Elizabeth Campbell summarised:

‘HN339 recalls being involved in some fly-posting while in his cover identity, but no other criminal activity. Near the end of his deployment, HN339 was involved in a road traffic accident while driving an unmarked police car, which necessitated the involvement of his supervisors on the SDS.

‘HN339 states that he does not remember much about his withdrawal from the field, but suspects that this event may have been a catalyst for the end of his deployment.’

Goodman was not merely ‘involved in a road traffic accident’.

For those willing to wade through the documents, on page 18 of Goodman’s witness statement he said:

‘I crashed my unmarked police car. I had been at a pub with activists and I would have parked the car away from the pub so as not to arouse suspicion. I drove home while under the influence of alcohol and crashed the car into a tree’.

The car was a write-off. When uniformed officers arrived, Goodman breached SDS protocol and broke cover, telling them he was an undercover colleague. Rather than arresting and charging him, they drove him home.

He was eventually charged and went to court, accompanied by his manager Phil Saunders. He believes he was prosecuted under his false identity and that Saunders briefed the magistrates. He was convicted and fined.

INQUIRY COVERING UP THE TRUTH

It is utterly outrageous that the Inquiry told the public that the only crime Goodman committed undercover was fly-posting and then, literally in the next sentence, referred to a much more serious criminal offence.

Investigating the often-corrupt relationships between the spycops and the courts is one of the stated purposes of this Inquiry, yet here they are deliberately burying examples of wrong-doing which the officers themselves admit.

Because Goodman wasn’t called to give evidence to the Inquiry in person, there was no way to question him about the possibility of judicial corruption.

Beyond that, we are left wondering what else has been covered up in this way, and lies there among the hundreds of pages the Inquiry bulk-publishes after it has finished discussing a given officer’s deployment.

OFFICER HN343 ‘JOHN CLINTON’

Another summary was given for HN343 ‘John Clinton’, who served in the SDS from early 1971 until late 1974, infiltrating groups including the International Socialists (IS).

Clinton considered the IS to be subversive, though he had an exceptionally broad definition of the word, writing in his witness statement:

‘I witnessed a lot of subversive activity whilst I was deployed undercover… During industrial disputes they would deploy to picket lines and stand there in solidarity.’

He reported on campaigns and issues supported by the group, such as women’s liberation, tenants’ rights and the Anti-Apartheid Movement.

WHAT HE DIDN’T SAY

Clinton was infiltrating International Socialists in London in the summer of 1974, yet he made no mention of their involvement in the large anti-fascist demonstration on 15 June 1974 at which a protester, Kevin Gately, was killed by police.

It was the first time anyone had died on a demonstration in Britain for over 50 years. It was a huge cause célèbre for the left. Clinton didn’t mention this, nor any of the vigils for Gately and campaigning that followed among IS and the broader left.

It is a glaring omission that arouses suspicion. Given the SDS’s avid focus on such justice campaigns later on, it would be very odd indeed if their officer in IS didn’t participate, let alone fail to recall it as significant.

As with Stewart Goodman earlier, because this was an Inquiry lawyer reading out a hasty summary, nobody was able to question Clinton about any of this.

OFFICER HN345 ‘PETER FREDERICKS’

Barbara Beese on the protest for which she would be arrested as one of the Mangrove 9, Aug 9 1970

Spycop HN345, ‘Peter Fredericks‘, describes himself as being ‘of mixed heritage’. He was deployed by the SDS for about six months in 1971.

Fredericks was asked if he thought he was asked to target the Black Power movement because of his race.

‘No. I never came across anything vaguely associated with that statement,’ he replied, as if the police might have sent a white officer to infiltrate Black Power groups instead.

ANOTHER FAULTY MEMORY

Fredericks was asked if he remembered the case of the Mangrove 9:

‘Not clearly, no’.

The disbelieving scepticism of the barrister asking was clear even on the plain type of the transcript:

‘It doesn’t ring any bells at all? Let me see if I can help you.’

The Inquiry was then told how, on 9 August 1970 – a few months before Fredericks joined the SDS – there was a demonstration in Notting Hill about the police harassment of the Mangrove restaurant. As a result of that demonstration, nine black activists were arrested and prosecuted for riot.

There was a defence campaign set up, and their trial started at the Old Bailey in October 1971, while Fredericks was undercover in Black Power groups.

Fredericks said:

‘I was not involved closely with them. I would have read about it in the papers. I would have known something, perhaps.’

As with John Clinton’s failure to mention the death of Kevin Gately, this absence of memory is simply not credible. Even the barrister knew it:

‘And you don’t remember any conversations with any of your SOS colleagues, or anybody else in Special Branch, about this seminal event in the history of the Black Power Movement?’

Fredericks determinedly kept the lid on the can of worms:

‘Definitely not. Definitely not.’

In fact, the totality of Fredericks’s recollections of Black Power seemed to amount to very little at all.

‘SAMPLE THE PRODUCT’

When asked about intimate relationships between undercover officers and the people they spied on, his jaw-dropping response led to collective gasps of horror:

‘I have, if you like, a phrase in my head which helps guide me here. If you ask me to infiltrate some drug dealers, you can’t point the finger at me if I sample the product.

‘If these people are in a certain environment where it is necessary to engage a little more deeply, then shall we say, I find this acceptable, but I do worry about the consequences for the female and any children that may result from the relationship. That would be dangerous. So yes, it shouldn’t be done.’

Tom Fowler was live-tweeting from the Inquiry venue, watching on a screen. He reported:

‘Reading the words from the transcript is bad enough, but when you see it delivered with a wide grin, tongue darting in & out of the mouth, with the final “it shouldn’t be done” tacked on to the end with a complete lack of sincerity, it reveals an extreme misogyny as well as a certain sadism; a psychopathic willingness to use people for political ends, whilst enjoying it at the same time’

It serves to underline the problem of the Inquiry only providing a live transcript and thereby missing all the tone and inflection, something highlighted on the COPS blog earlier in the week.

WHAT NEXT?

The Undercover Policing Inquiry will now take a break to prepare for the next set of hearings. These will examine the Special Demonstration Squad 1973-82, and are expected to be held in March or April 2021.

Whenever they happen, COPS will be live-tweeting the hearings and producing daily reports, as well as weekly summaries like this one.

All our daily and weekly reports are linked from our Inquiry page.

<<Previous UCPI Weekly Report (9-13 Nov 2020)<<

>>Next UCPI Weekly Report (21-23 Apr 2021)>>

Undercover Policing Inquiry
Weekly Report 2
9-13 November 2020

After seven days of opening statements, and six years since it was first announced, the Undercover Policing Inquiry finally started taking evidence from witnesses this week.

This phase of the Inquiry concerned the earliest days of the Metropolitan Police’s spycops unit, the Special Operations Squad (later called the Special Demonstration Squad), for the years 1968-72.

The week began with the final opening statements from the significantly affected people whom the Inquiry has designated ‘core participants’.

HARROWING STORIES

Some came from the women deceived into relationships by officers, many of whom were directly responsible for the uncovering of the spycops who abused them. We touch on their accounts here, but cannot do full justice to these often harrowing stories.

On Wednesday, we heard from the very first witness, Tariq Ali. A 77-year old journalist, writer and broadcaster who has been politically active most of his life, Ali was spied on by many undercovers, right from the inception of the units in 1968 through to the 2000s. And for the first time we heard the undercovers themselves, with three sessions on the final two days from officers who were part of the unit when it was formed.

Given breadth of the hearings, in this report we will focus on bringing out the main themes and highlights of the week, rather than going into specific detail. All of the detailed daily reports can be found on our UCPI public inquiry page.

ONGOING PROBLEMS

The opening statements heard this week powerfully repeated points those who were spied on have been arguing for years.

They put the case that in order to get to the truth, we need to know:

• Cover names and real names of the spycops. These have still not been released. Lawyer Heather Williams reiterated that with the Inquiry only giving an identifying number for spycops, it is impossible for spied-upon people to actually know they were spied upon, and be able to come forward and give evidence. We will be left with just the officer’s unchallenged account of their activities.
• Information about what they did during their deployments, and which groups they targeted. We know that more than 1000 groups were spied on, yet less than 150 have been named. When they were on holiday with people they spied on, was this ordered or sanctioned by their managers?
• Photographs of the spycops, as they looked at the time, as this is likely to have far more effect jogging people’s memories. Tariq Ali said if he had been shown a photo of ‘Dick Epps‘ (who spied on him in the 1960s) he might have been able to recollect more about him. Non-state core participants have provided the Inquiry with personal photographs but the Inquiry has chosen not to publish them.
• What is in the files: what data was gathered about individuals and the groups they were part of? The vast majority of non-state core participants have been provided with nothing at all so far. A small number have been given access to the ‘hearing bundle’, but this 5,500 page stack came just five weeks before these hearings began; far too much to comprehend, while still but a fraction of the million pages the Inquiry has.

Another point reinforced was the demand, argued for years now, that the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, urgently needs the assistance of an advisory panel, made up of people with more life experience and expertise than him. It is clear he lacks the understanding to investigate the institutional racism and sexism which lie at the heart of this scandal.

These initial problems with the Undercover Policing Inquiry, and more, are detailed in our report from last week.

NEW PROBLEMS: LIVE STREAMING & REPORTING 

Sir John Mitting

Although this was already known about last week, the loss of public access to the live-streaming of the hearings from Wednesday morning has caused even more than the expected difficulties. A few things changed in light of protests from those attending, but there are still significant problems for those present and those prevented from attending.

There is considerable upset that people could only follow it properly by travelling to central London during a pandemic. However, Mitting is still flatly refusing to live-stream the whole thing on ‘security grounds’, even though other inquiries dealing with sensitive material, such as Grenfell and Manchester Arena, are live-streaming their hearings.

It’s clear it’s technically possible; it was done for the seven days of opening statements. Indeed, Mitting is still permitted his own personal live-stream, and two more are in the rooms provided for no more than 60 people to watch proceedings. The rest of the world had to deal with video of a live transcript of what was being said. One core participant trying to follow it described it as watching ‘speeded up Ceefax’.

IMPOSSIBLE TO FOLLOW

Another problem was that many of the documents being referred to were not shown, making it near impossible to follow some of the key details. The video feed couldn’t be rewound to check things that had been said. If you missed something, that was it.

This led to outright anger from some of the media, as well as victims’ lawyers. Journalists said it was making it impossible for them to report on issues. Many people trying to follow it from elsewhere were bitterly frustrated with how difficult it had become. These complaints resulted in some minor improvements such as a different video process and the documents being released on the same day.

The Inquiry video venue is also proving problematic for those attending; the two live-stream rooms are windowless and unventilated.

CARLO SORACCHI

Spycop Carlo Soracchi

Another significant issue this week is Mitting’s continuing refusal to let the real name of spycop ‘Carlo Neri’, which is Carlo Soracchi, be used in proceedings. This is on the application of his ex-wife.

Soracchi was deployed 2001-2006, infiltrating trade union, socialist and anti-fascist groups.

Mitting’s ban on anyone saying his real name has affected two of the women he deceived into relationships, and the Blacklist Support Group (BSG).

As a result, Dave Smith of the BSG was unable to give his Opening Statement. This is despite the fact that Soracchi’s name has been out in public for quite some time, reported in newspapers and on social media.

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED IN THE SECOND WEEK OF UCPI HEARINGS? 

One of the most shocking facts to emerge this week is that many of the abuses, previously portrayed as the unsanctioned acts of rogue officers that were only perpetrated in recent years, have all been going on since the very beginnings of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS). These include:

• Relationships with activists. Far from being some recent deviation, spycops were forming deceitful intimate relationships with activists from 1968 onwards. These include a long-term sexual relationship between ‘Mary’ and spycop ‘Rick Gibson’ in 1975, and the strong indication of officer Helen Crampton having a relationship with an activist within weeks of the SDS’ foundation in 1968.
• Travel to other countries. Whistle-blower Peter Francis genuinely believed that he was the first spycop to be deployed abroad when he travelled to Germany in 1993. Yet ‘Doug Edwards’ (HN326), who left the job in 1971, stated he ‘went to Brussels with this other officer whose name I can’t even mention’. Evidence also showed that another of the undercovers travelled to Scotland in 1969.
• Attending family events of people they were spying on. Birthdays, weddings, and funerals were all attended by spycops as far back as 1969. Not only were the details of private family occasions collected by the State, but memories (and many of the photographs) of them are now marred by the knowledge that one of the people there was the very opposite of a friend.

POLICE FOCUS ON VIOLENCE

A repeated theme this week has entailed barristers for the Inquiry asking about the violent tendencies of protestors, and the protestors emphasising the peaceful nature of most of the groups and campaigns they were part of.

Black Dwarf, June 1968

Back in October 1968, protestors were asked not to bring fireworks and marbles to the demonstration against the Vietnam War, let alone anything else. Tariq Ali edited left-wing magazine Black Dwarf which published an article titled ‘Softly, Softly’ which stressed that, to ensure the protestors’ buses made it to the demonstration, nothing should be carried that could give the police cause to stop them.

A decade later, Ali was the Socialist Unity parliamentary candidate in Southall. During a confrontation between the National Front and anti-racists, local organisers put Ali in a safe house to keep him out of any trouble.

Police raided the house and the occupants, including Ali, were made to run a police gauntlet as they were ejected. Ali was truncheoned so severely that he passed out. The skull of the man he was with was fractured, leaving him in a coma for five months.

That was the same day, and in the same area, that Blair Peach – who we have already heard about in this Inquiry – was killed by the police. When the police unit responsible for killing Peach had its lockers searched, weapons found included a crowbar, metal cosh, whip handle, stock ship, brass handle, knives, American-style truncheons, a rhino whip and a pickaxe handle.

When considering which groups were the most violent and heavily armed, the police – with their arsenal of illegal weapons, aggressive attitude and fatal injuries – were clearly more of a threat than the activists.

Tariq Ali told the Inquiry in a written statement:

‘my strong feeling is that this Inquiry is likely to be a monumental waste of time. This is because the direction of travel is clear from the questions – to dissect the politics of the victims of police spying, and therefore to turn the spotlight away from the actions of the police. This is the politics of “blame the victim”.’

CREDIBLE THREAT OR DAFT IDEAS?

In order to continue operating, the SDS and other undercover officers had to  convince superior officers that what they were doing was worthwhile. The groups they were infiltrating had to be seen as a credible threat to society.

Tariq Ali

In some cases, police provocateurs provided evidence by creating it themselves. Tariq Ali described a group of ‘hippy anarchists’ who spent the night in the offices of Black Dwarf. The group made a crude painting of how to make a Molotov cocktail on one of the walls, just in time for it to be ‘found’ during a police raid.

This tactic of provocation is seen over and over again throughout the entire history of the spycops, no matter what acronym they used.

Taking just one spycop that we know of, Bob Lambert, as an example, provocation ranges from writing or co-writing articles, such as the ‘What’s Wrong With McDonald’s?’ leaflet, to allegedly planning and committing arson in the firebombing of the Harrow branch of Debenham’s in 1987.

Once again, this behaviour must be contrasted with that of the spied-upon groups; in 1968 the VSC were actively expelling groups that wanted to use violence on the anti-war marches. In many cases it is clear that the police were creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The factor which made groups a ‘serious, credible threat’ was the spycops themselves.

FROM THE (POLICE) HORSE’S MOUTH

This assessment is borne out by evidence given by several spycops this week. Seemingly unaware that they were undermining their own justifications, various officers described the groups they had infiltrated as ineffectual at best, and deluded at worst.

As officer ‘Doug Edwards’ said on Friday:

‘They got an exaggerated idea of their own importance. They sort of had daft ideas’

‘Don de Freitas’, SDS officer HN330, infiltrated Havering International Socialists in 1968. His evidence portrayed a peaceful group, whose aims were not subversive, with most members ‘unwilling to support civil disobedience or terrorism’ (as if the two activities were comparable).

John Graham, who infiltrated Camden Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in the same year, viewed the members as ‘revolutionary’ because, even though they eschewed violence, they sought a change of government by trying to ‘persuade people to their point of view’.

Edwards, who in 1969 reported on the ‘Action Committee Against NATO’, said ‘I do not remember what the group stood for or what they did. I do not remember how I infiltrated the group or why I infiltrated them’. Obviously, it made very little impression on him. This is not what we’d expect from a dangerous group committed to serious disorder, which is what the SDS claims it existed to spy on.

There are many more examples of this attitude and experience from officers in our daily reports.

IF THEIR TARGETS WERE A THREAT, WHY WEREN’T SPYCOPS TRAINED?

Even before the officers’ evidence that the groups were not actually a serious risk to public safety, there is the lack of training to consider. If the spycops were indeed being sent to infiltrate dangerous organisations which threatened society, why weren’t they better prepared?

It was clear from the police statements there was a lack of direction in how to begin approaching their targets, exactly which groups to target, or other ‘fieldcraft’. ‘You had to play it by ear,’ ‘Doug Edwards’ explained.

If we’re to believe the Inquiry when it says spycops must have anonymity because, even now, being named would risk their lives, they need to explain why officers were left to do the job on a whim instead of being given instructions.

Spycop Joan Hillier asserted that SDS officers didn’t really need training as they were all experienced Special Branch officers (despite Hillier herself only joining Special Branch shortly before the SDS was formed):

‘Instinct would tell you what you shouldn’t do and what you should do.’

Officers would instinctively know not to get involved in people’s personal lives, form intimate relationships, commit crime, or appear in court under a fake identity, she said.

What Hillier refers to isn’t actually instinct, it’s personal individual morality. If it allows the officer to spy upon grieving families, undermine anti-racist and anti-fascist campaigns, and sabotage groups working for a healthier global environment – all whilst using the stolen identity of a dead infant – it is corrupt.

The fact that spycops did actually do the things Hillier lists them ‘instinctively’ avoiding, when she was an officer and afterwards over generations of deployments, shows it was not left to the individual, it must have been suggested and encouraged.

INSITUTIONAL RACISM & SEXISM 

Undercover political policing’s core traits of institutional racism and sexism aren’t news to anyone who has been following this topic, but the more evidence is heard at the Inquiry, the more inescapably obvious it becomes.  

Phillippa Kaufmann QC

Some of the most shocking testimony this week came from the women activists who were deceived into intimate and often long-term relationships by spycops.

Phillippa Kaufmann QC and Heather Williams QC spoke on behalf of over twenty of them; we cover this in detail in Monday’s summary of events. Kaufmann’s written statement gives further details of each woman’s story, and we strongly recommend that you read it.

Kaufmann also highlighted how both opening statements last week by Counsel for the Inquiry and whistle-blower spycop Peter Francis severely understated the role the women have played in exposing the spycops scandal. It was the women who, in the aftermath of their ‘loved one’ disappearing, uncovered the truth. Their unflinching determination cannot be overlooked.

Trying to summarise their evidence in this report cannot do it justice. Many of their experiences, in their own words, are gathered on the Police Spies Out Of Lives site and should be read there.

On Tuesday, the leading focus was the targeting of Black family justice campaigns and groups. In particular, we heard from the barristers representing Doreen and Neville Lawrence, The Monitoring Group, and Mike Mansfield QC. The Inquiry was reminded again of how it has an uphill struggle to even convince these core participants that it is capable of preventing yet further injustice, let alone of tackling the issue of institutional racism.

‘YOU WILL BE SILENCED’

Sir John Mitting, who is so sure of his own lack of bias that he’s refused input from any perspective other than his own, has treated Rajiv Menon QC, barrister for the victims of spycops, very poorly.

Rajiv Menon QC

As the very first police witness gave evidence, Menon wanted to ask a series of questions. Mitting was clearly unhappy with this, describing his own decision to permit Menon questions on a single issue as ‘exceptional, and I do not propose to invite you to ask questions on any other topic’.

Menon tried to protest and explain why it was important for the non-police  core participants, at which point Mitting’s hostility became overt, telling Menon to obey or ‘you will be silenced’.

On Wednesday, Menon questioned Tariq Ali about a closed meeting of the Stop the War Coalition steering committee in 2003. As the public were not allowed at this meeting, the report must have come from a committee member or a recording device.

Mitting’s reaction to this simple statement was extraordinary: immediately and forcefully interrupting to warn Menon that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 prohibits any reference to intercepting communications unless Mitting deems it necessary in advance. ‘You will be committing an offence if you persist’, he intoned. ‘I would warn you not to’.

Menon, a barrister of 26 years’ experience and well aware of the law, explained that he was talking about the committee being bugged by a recording device, rather than an interception of communications, and therefore, the Act doesn’t apply. Mitting apologised, but it’s clear that he is giving Menon very little credit, and even less chance to pursue vital lines of questioning.

POLITICAL POLICING

Mitting’s attitude and performance so far fall completely in line with the overarching theme that the State and the spycops are there to support each other in maintaining the norms and values of the current government.

Spying upon anyone who they wanted to spy on was not only justified, but good, simply because they did it. National security, public order, and the convenience of the government of the day were fully interchangeable concepts for them. Any intrusion was justified because every citizen is a potential subversive.

Joan Hillier said that personal details – dates of birth, home addresses, etc – of those not even suspected of anything untoward would be routinely added to Special Branch files ‘in case it was needed in the future’.

By the spycops’ own admission, their aims were hazy, their training ranged from the informal to the non-existent, and they often didn’t feel like they accomplished anything.

On Thursday, Counsel to the Inquiry David Barr quoted from spycop John Graham’s written statement on Special Branch’s role regarding policing political groups:

‘I understood the role of Special Branch to be carrying out enquiries concerning the security of the State, in other words gathering intelligence on activities that sought to undermine the status quo, the government of the day and the political establishment’.

The conflation of national security with the convenience and policy of the government has always been a central factor in what spycops do. This Inquiry is, thus far, no different from the spycops’ operations.

WHAT NEXT?

There will be three more days of evidence from police (Monday, Wednesday and Thursday), with the possibility of unfinished things being heard on Tuesday and/or Friday.

After that, the Inquiry will take a break to assess what it’s heard. It will be back next year for another batch of hearings covering the SDS 1973-82. That’s currently expected to be around April 2021.

Hearings concerning the SDS 1983-1992 are expected in the first half of 2022, and those examining the SDS 1993-2007 are likely to take place in the first half of 2023.

Some time later there’ll be hearings on the National Public Order Intelligence Unit 1999-2011, then other undercover policing, then mid and senior rank officers, other agencies and government departments.

The Undercover Policing Inquiry has no set end-date, but is expected to perhaps conclude around 2026.

COPS will be live tweeting every hearing, producing a summary every evening, and a weekly report like this one at the weekend. All our daily and weekly reports, and our UCPI FAQ, are linked on our UCPI Public Inquiry page.

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Undercover Policing Inquiry
Weekly Report 1
2-6 November 2020

After five years of waiting, the Undercover Policing Inquiry finally got off the ground in earnest this week. This first round of hearings will be split in two parts. First, Opening Statements from all the core participants. Second will be actual evidence for the period 1968 to 1972.

The Opening Statements are a chance for the various parties to essentially lay out how they view things. They began with the Counsel to the Tribunal, David Barr QC, presenting a general overview of where we stand.

This was followed by barristers for police and those who were once in the world of police but are no longer. Finally came the non-state/police core participants, whose statements will continue into this coming week. In this report we will try to summarise what was a lot of material, and reflect upon the words of the lawyers.

Barr noted that much of what the spycops did during their deployment is already public knowledge:
• deceived more than 30 women into long-term intimate relationships
• fathered children with some of these activists
• stole the identities of dead children to provide convincing cover stories
• deceived grieving families, and worked to prevent them learning the truth
• undermined anti-fascist, anti-racist, environmental, and other social justice campaigns
• were responsible for the blacklisting of thousands of workers for wanting safe working conditions or being politically active

Despite acknowledging this, it is disappointing that Mr Barr failed to properly credit the activists. The women deceived into relationships were a fundamental part of exposing the spycops. The existence of this Inquiry is based on their work.

This phase will also look at various documents and hear evidence from 1968–1972. It does not cover the actions of spycops while outside England and Wales, despite them being active in around 20 other countries during their deployment.

There were also some surprising pieces of previously undisclosed information, and statements from people previously unheard from.

How and why was the Special Demonstration Squad set up?

Police on horseback charge demonstrators against the Vietnam War, Grosvenor Square, London, 17 March 1968

Following the windows of the US Embassy being broken during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in March 1968, Special Branch attempted to gather information on the next demo. Their usual tactics being unsuccessful, they created the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) who went deep undercover, living as activists among various anti-war groups.

The next demo in October 1968 was less volatile, and this was taken as a sign of the new unit’s success. Mr Barr has stressed that the Inquiry must decide not if it was successful, but if it was a necessary or disproportionate response.

The SDS rapidly widened its scope and began investigating subversion and demonstrations and disruptions of public order. Any organisation seeking social change could easily be said to be covered by their remit. By the early 1970s, the SDS was aiming to profile anyone ‘within weeks’ of first showing interest in ‘extremist ideas’.

One of the police barristers, Oliver Sanders QC (representing 114 spycops, the majority of former and current undercovers), stated that the main function of the SDS was to assess public order threats. In the period currently being examined by the Inquiry, 1968-72, many of these came from political protests. Their secondary function was providing intelligence on ‘subversion’ to MI5.

What was the role of MI5 and the Home Office?

Since the story of the spycops surfaced, the events have been framed as the work of one rogue officer, then several rogue officers, then rogue units. Those higher up unfailingly point the finger at those lower down.

It is now clear that from the very beginning, the SDS was funded by the Home Office and reported to MI5.

Sanders provided new information:

• MI5 and spycops were so allied that MI5 considered funding the SDS
• They liaised to ensure they didn’t duplicate spying, which might have resulted in spying on each other’s officers
• MI5 recommended tips to SDS spycops, and they asked for specific info
• Most SDS intelligence reports were copied to MI5 with the file reference numbers of the people / group already added
• the SDS weren’t in a position to question MI5’s focus, thinking and efforts, but were just following orders. ‘The SDS was a politically neutral cog as part of a much larger apparatus,’ he said.

Despite the Home Office directly funding the unit for over 20 years, a 2014 report commissioned on the link between the two institutions noted the key file was suspiciously missing. However, a lot of SDS reports have been retrieved for the Inquiry from copies sent to MI5.

How are the police lawyers attempting to portray the actions of the SDS?

It is now clear the various police lawyers are switching tactics and actually trying to justify the actions of the SDS. They describe the spycops as a benevolent and useful group, indispensable to the safety of the public, who only wanted political information so that demonstrations could be effectively policed.

Claim: Police never intend to harm anyone, including the women deceived into relationships

Peter Skelton QC, for the Metropolitan Police, told the Inquiry that the Met is ‘aware of continuing anger and distress of victims of spycops’. He said the Met stands by its 2015 apology to women deceived into relationships by spycops (despite the fact that it still won’t let women see their files, and is delaying civil claims by some of them).

Richard Whittam QC, representing a smaller group of undercovers and managers, also mentioned the apology naming such activity as ‘abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong’. But, he said, spycops committing crime is essential for national security and the prevention and detection of other people committing crime. The apology should be seen ‘in context’, by which he seemed to mean it should be disregarded.

This echoed other police lawyers, who have implied that it was acceptable to abuse people because times were different then, and it was all done for the greater good.

Claim: Spycops are better than the alternative

Blair Peach

Repeatedly, police noted that people have been killed on protests – citing two cases from the 1970s, Blair Peach and Kevin Gately – and there would be more death and injuries if it wasn’t for the undercovers ensuring demos were policed properly.

Contemptuously, they failed to mention that Blair Peach and Kevin Gately actually both been killed by the police; Gately in 1974 on an anti-fascist protest organised by heavily spied-on groups, and Peach in 1979 as a member of the most spied-on group of all, The Socialist Workers Party, on an anti-racist protest.

Discussing spycops stealing of dead children’s identities, Sanders said that though it was regrettable, it was necessary to prevent risk of exposure. The alternative to spycops with stolen identities was paramilitary police on demonstrations, he said. This is a patently ridiculous excuse.

Claim: Intelligence must be gathered indiscriminately

Spied-upon groups which were newly named this week include Justice for Rhodesia, Croydon Libertarians, and the St Pancras & Camden United Tenants Association. This contrasts strongly with police insistence that spycops saved the public from violent riots, murder and mayhem by infiltrating these groups; that it was necessary to spy on people who were committing no crimes in order to get to the ‘real criminals’.

The SDS essentially turned belonging to groups such as Hackney United Tenants Ad-Hoc Committee into a valid reason for the state to target you for surveillance. A report from 1973 gives the names of three people who had merely asked about the International Marxist Group.

They did, however, say they found it difficult to infiltrate black power movements; a rather telling sign that they were lacking in Black police officers.

Claim: Even though they’re bad, we can’t judge them because it was a long time ago

Essentially, police lawyers found various ways to say ‘what the spycops did may have been bad but it was a long time ago, lessons have been learned, it’s different now, nobody need lose their job or pension, move on, there’s nothing to see here’.

This directly contradicts documents that make clear the government was aware from the very beginning that what they were doing was deeply unethical, and would cause public outrage if discovered. Even by the standards of 1968, the spycops’ behaviour was blatantly immoral.

This refrain was accompanied by police barristers stating that other types of undercover work keep the public safe from paedophiles and terrorists. This is of little relevance to the activities of political secret police.

It ignores that the spycops of 2010 – long after the supposed new regulatory framework of the Human Rights Act, and Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act – were, if anything, committing even worse abuses than their 1968 counterparts.

The Inquiry also heard from representatives of the groups and individuals who were spied on

Families of the dead children whose identities were stolen

The Grave of Mark Robert Robinson whose identity was stolen by spycop Bob Lambert

The Inquiry recently informed 19 families that their dead children’s identities were stolen by spycops. The Home Office Select Committee demanded in 2013 that affected families be told, yet the Met refused. Skelton conceded that the Met hadn’t cared about the families of these children.

Sanders said this procedure was invented in an earlier time when people felt differently about death and risk (once again using the ‘it was a long time ago’ excuse), yet the practice continued until the 1990s.

Additionally, one family whose living child’s identity was stolen has been informed.

Justice campaigns of grieving families, represented by Richard Parry and Jane Deighton

These were families in mourning who just wanted answers about what had happened to their loved ones so that they could have at least some closure; in many cases the parents and relatives of people who were barely more than children, and died violent deaths under traumatic circumstances.

Instead, their efforts were blocked and police were openly hostile to them and spycops infiltrated their campaigns for the truth. Police resources that should have been spent catching killers were instead spent on obstructing justice.

As a teenager in 1993, Duwayne Brooks survived a racist attack in which his best friend Stephen Lawrence was murdered. Brooks was spied upon in an attempt to discredit his evidence. He said this week that he won’t testify unless he can see his whole police file first.

Skelton said the Met is ‘grateful’ for Duwayne Brooks’ and Stephen’s mother Doreen Lawrence’s work.

Workers with trade unions and/or politically active workers who were blacklisted

Dave Smith

Reports show that trade unions were targeted and spied on from as far back as 1973. Yet, Sanders unequivocally stated that the SDS did not have any involvement in industrial blacklisting.

It did not target justice campaigns, members of parliament or trade unions directly, it was merely inevitable collateral collection while spying on other things, he claimed. These are lies, with ‘collateral damage’ as an excuse. Whether accidental or deliberate, it’s still spying.

Dave Smith, a trade unionist and co-author of Blacklisted: The Secret War Between Big Business & Union Activists, was due to give evidence on Friday 9 November but was gagged by the Inquiry after a legal challenge to the content of his prepared statement.

Three wives (now ex-wives) of spycops, represented by Angus McCullough QC

For all but one of the wives of the undercover officers, it is the first time their words have been heard. In most cases they are now ex-wives, such was the stress their relationships were subjected to due to the activities of their husbands.

There can be no doubt that they were deceived and abused as badly as any other victim of the spycops. They were told that their husbands were gone for long periods in the interests of national security, not that they were on holiday in Thailand or Crete with women they’d manipulated into believing were the loves of their lives.

McCullough described how although they were vetted as support for their husbands, the wives and their children were offered no support during the periods of deployment. Nor were they years later, when the Met knew that the stories were about to hit the press and yet did not deign to warn them.

The officers themselves were flatly told that there would be very little support during deployment. They were given no prior warning of the psychological impact that going deep and long-term undercover would have on them. They received even less support than they’d been promised.

Skelton admitted the Met ‘hasn’t always understood’ how to support the spycops officers. Their wives, all of whom are mothers with children to care for, were used by the SDS and the Met as free, unqualified, in-house emotional support and therapy for their officers.

Peter Francis, represented by David Lock QC

SDS whistle-blower Peter Francis

Peter Francis, the only spycop whistle-blower to have come forward, was an SDS officer from 1993-98.

This week he requested a cast-iron guarantee from the Metropolitan Commissioner of immunity to prosecution for information about spycops he revealed prior to the Inquiry starting. Under the Inquiry’s terms, witnesses including Peter Francis cannot be prosecuted for anything that he says during the proceedings.

However, he could be charged under the Official Secrets Act for his previous public statements. His pension hangs in the balance, and he will not testify without absolute confirmation he will not be charged.

It should be obvious that without his evidence, this cannot be a properly informed inquiry. Under the current timetable, the Inquiry doesn’t intend to take evidence from Francis until 2023.

People from a vast range of groups targeted for their political beliefs and activism, overwhelmingly from the left

By the Inquiry’s own admission, over 1000 groups were spied upon (although Sanders and the police themselves now deny this).

This week, they revealed the previously unknown names of just 44 of them. This comes too late for members of those groups to ascertain which of their friends or intimate partners never really existed, let alone participate in their only current chance for some kind of justice.

New photos of SDS officers published

The Inquiry also published previously unseen photos of various officers. Only one was a spycop; the rest were mostly back office staff, apparently all at the same festive event in 1968.

People are excluded from the Inquiry, including core participants

Lawyers for the non-police side noted that without names and photos of spycops it is impossible to reach all the people who were their victims. It is grossly unjust that they will not be represented through the deliberate choice of the Inquiry to exclude them.

There are a great many people who, even though they know they were spied on and have come forward, will also be excluded. Another deliberate choice by the Inquiry is to refuse to livestream the proceedings.

After this week, the hearings will be conducted in secret. Despite that fact that secure livestreams have been set up due to Covid-19, only the text will be made available after the proceedings have finished.

As already stated, over five years into the Inquiry many victims still have no documents. Many more have no names or photographs that would answer otherwise impossible, unanswerable questions.

People giving evidence who were spied on during this time were only provided with relevant documents – a total of 5,263 pages – five weeks ago. Attempting to read all of them before the start is roughly equivalent to reading all of Lord of the Rings twice a week for five weeks straight.

No diversity, no understanding

Sir John Mitting

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, is not just preventing the victims’ access to full understanding, he’s determined to prevent his own. From the very beginning, calls have been made for a diverse panel of people with relevant life experience to advise and guide the Inquiry. This is standard practice for other inquiries, yet Mitting refuses to follow precedent.

The goal of this Inquiry should be to unflinchingly and honestly deal with institutional sexism, racism, and attacks on workers’ rights and the conditions of the disadvantaged. As an old white cis male Knight of the Realm who is a member of the men-only Garrick Club and finds the Macpherson definition of institutional racism ‘controversial’, comprehending these realities is beyond him.

As Ruth Brander, representing the Non Police/ State Core Participants, told him this week, ‘With respect, the concern is you, sir’.

A wise and impartial man would ask for help. Instead, Mitting refuses the offer of information that would increase the chances of a fair conclusion to the proceedings.

What next?

After two more days of opening statements from victims of spycops, the Inquiry’s first evidence hearings (Phase 1 of Tranche 1) will start on Wednesday 11 November. They will cover the formation of the Special Demonstration Squad in 1968, in response to protests against the war in Vietnam, and why it continued beyond that. They will continue until Friday 20 November.

The next set of hearings after that, taking evidence of events from 1973 to 1982, are expected in spring 2021. The Undercover Policing Inquiry has no set end-date, but is expected to perhaps conclude around 2026.

COPS will be live tweeting every hearing, producing a summary every evening, and a weekly report like this one at the weekend.

For more information including an FAQ, see the links on our UCPI Public Inquiry page.

>>Next UCPI Weekly Report (9-13 Nov 2020)>>