Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (2 page)

He was one of life’s larger personalities. ‘A big guy with a booming personality’ was one description. Born in 1927 to an army family, educated at a Wiltshire public school and Oxford University, he joined the Royal Marines at the end of the second world war and after a brief stint at a football pools company was recruited to the Metropolitan police. A fortnight later, Conrad Hepworth Dixon was called to an austere police section house in Beak Street in London’s Soho, stripped naked and ushered into a small room. ‘A man in white coat came in and stared at his lower half, examined his feet, and went wordlessly away. Shortly afterwards, Dixon was transferred to Special Branch,’ records his obituary. The branch only selected those it considered to be the finest specimens. In its view, it was the Met’s elite, revered and feared in equal measure, and Dixon was one of its most
experimental
leaders. It was Dixon, a chief inspector, who first had the ingenious idea of turning police constables into pretend political activists. The story starts with him.

It was 1968, a rather iconic year for protest. It is perhaps
difficult
nowadays to understand just how turbulent the late 1960s really were. Across the globe, governments were convulsing. Workers and students were taking to the streets in Paris, Prague, Berlin, Madrid, Mexico City and Chicago in spontaneous bursts of civil unrest. They had similarities and differences; they did
not all have the same philosophy or aim, but they were loosely progressive or left-wing. They were united by their opposition to America’s war in Vietnam. And they shared what one historian called ‘the common spirit of youthful rebellion’.

In Britain, the establishment trembled as government ministers and police chiefs grew worried that protesters had the power to tear down Britain’s political and economic system. A revolutionary mood was in the air; many young people hoped there was more than a whiff of actual revolution too. They were enjoying the benefits of a good education and the prospect of a good job and they wanted to do things differently to their parents’ generation. They were more idealistic, free-spirited; they felt the world was theirs to shape. They rebelled against a society they saw as intransigent, drab and paternalistic. They distrusted authority – politicians, college administrations and police. It was a time of radical change in the arts, music, film and fashion. It felt like the old certainties were giving way to a new world. For the young, protest was the exciting engine of this change. For the authorities, it was a dangerous and very real risk to the established order.

A mood of panic gripped Whitehall as the protests over the Vietnam War intensified in 1967 and 1968. There were frequent marches in London, but one in particular shook the government: the Grosvenor Square demonstration of March 1968. Following a large rally in Trafalgar Square, thousands marched on the US embassy, which was surrounded by police. There was a standoff as the protesters refused to back down and mounted police rode into the crowd. Demonstrators broke through police ranks and streamed onto the lawn of the embassy, tearing up barriers and uprooting sections of the fence. More than 200 were arrested during a prolonged battle as stones, firecrackers and smoke bombs were hurled at the building.

Public disorder as ferocious as this had not been seen on the streets of London for many years. For some of the younger
generation
, it was a totally alien sight – and intoxicating. Black and white television pictures showing the police struggling to control the demonstrators, and punching and kicking them, shocked the country. One MP later complained about the ‘violent use of police horses who charged into the crowd even after they had cleared the street in front of the embassy’. In Scotland Yard, there was alarm – a sense that senior officers had been caught on the back foot.

That day was a watershed moment. When the protesters started to organise a second large demonstration scheduled for October that year, politicians and police were determined to clamp down. Two months before the scheduled march, Special Branch was sending weekly reports to the Home Office, chronicling how the protesters were preparing for the event. The dispatches reveal deep anxiety in police about what some feared was an impending insurrection. In one update, Dixon wrote that ‘a group of about 50 anarchists from Liverpool’ intended to attack an army recruiting office when the march snaked through Whitehall. Around 160 demonstrators from Glasgow, he reported, were ‘being advised to wear crash helmets and urged to carry ball-bearings, fireworks, hat pins and banner poles for use as weapons’.

One informant claimed that protesters would tie fishing line between parking meters to trip up police, while anarchists were reported to be devising a plan to loot shops, restaurants and travel agencies along Oxford Street. The list of buildings police believed were under threat was continually expanding and included the Bank of England, the Ministry of Defence, Home Office, the Hilton Hotel and even the Playboy Club. Bomb disposal experts were mobilised in case explosives were found. Ministers were so
worried that they considered deploying soldiers – a suggestion rejected by senior officers at the Met who insisted they could control the streets.

Meanwhile the press inflamed the febrile atmosphere with lurid but dubious articles about protesters manufacturing and storing Molotov cocktails and attempting to buy small firearms. Privately, Dixon informed a senior officer the press reports were ‘a carefully constructed pastiche of information, gathered from a number of sources and spiced with inspired guesswork’. Brian Cashinella, one of the journalists who reported the claims, says the information had actually come from Special Branch. If the purpose was to discourage people from joining the protest, the strategy appeared to work, as more and more activists distanced themselves from the scheduled march.

Still the hysteria spread. Mary Whitehouse, the self-appointed guardian of British morals, breathlessly told police about a hot new piece of intelligence she had acquired. ‘I have received
information
from an American friend of mine that an organisation called “The Doors” who are a political extremist organisation are now in England. I do not think that their arrival here in the United Kingdom is a coincidence.’ A police constable dutifully recorded the tip-off, which, like much of the melodrama, was amusingly wide of the mark about the intentions of Jim Morrison and his fellow band-members.

When the big day of the second Grosvenor Square
demonstration
finally arrived, it was a huge anti-climax. Thousands of protesters came and marched, listened to speeches in Hyde Park and then quietly went home. One section of the demonstration again attempted to break the police cordon around the embassy, but without success. As for the arsenal of Molotov cocktails, one of the demonstrators found three milk bottles containing petrol and a piece of rag and handed them in to police.

However, hearsay can be as relevant as truth when it comes to influencing a national mood and the atmosphere remained
volatile
. Many still believed the country was on the cusp of social unrest. One damp squib of a march was not going to discourage Dixon, who was already determined to invent a new tactic to help quell the upheaval.

On September 10 1968, the Special Branch chief inspector had crafted a six-page memo. Stamped ‘Secret’, it was sent to a select group of the most senior officers in Scotland Yard. ‘The climate of opinion among extreme left-wing elements in this country in relation to public political protest has undergone a radical change over the last few years,’ Dixon warned. He spelled out how this change had escalated. ‘The emphasis has shifted, first from orderly, peaceful, co-operative meetings and processions, to passive resistance and “sit-downs” and now to active
confrontation
with the authorities to attempt to force social changes and alterations of government policy.’

He continued: ‘Indeed, the more vociferous spokesmen of the left are calling for the complete overthrow of parliamentary democracy and the substitution of various brands of “socialism” and “workers’ control”. They claim that this can only be achieved by “action on the streets”, and although few of them will admit publicly, or in the press, that they desire a state of anarchy, it is nevertheless tacitly accepted that such a condition is a necessary preamble to engineering a breakdown of our present system of government and achieving a revolutionary change in the society in which we live.’

Revolutionary times called for revolutionary solutions. When Dixon was finally asked by his superiors what could be done about the protests, he unveiled his grand plan. In Special Branch
folklore
, the ebullient commander is said to have replied: ‘Give me £1 million and 10 men, and I can deal with the problem for you.’
He got what he asked for. The framework for covert surveillance that Dixon constructed that year remained intact throughout his lifetime and beyond.

His radical plan was nothing less than a new concept in
policing
. The police had dabbled in undercover work before. By the late 1960s, the police had been deploying undercover officers to infiltrate and catch street criminal gangs, but had only done so sporadically. Officers impersonated drug dealers, robbers, contract killers, gamblers or antique fraudsters. But they only did so for short periods – usually just a few days or weeks. In between these covert assignments, officers would return to their station and resume their normal duties.

What Dixon had in mind was infiltration of a different order. He wanted Special Branch officers to transform themselves into protesters and live their fake identities for several years. For the whole time they were undercover they would never wear a uniform or set foot in a police station, unless, of course, they were dragged in, kicking, screaming and handcuffed, in character as a protester. They would be equipped with false ID documents, grow their hair long, and melt into the milieu of radical politics, emerging to feed back intelligence on any gathering conspiracy. These men, who would only penetrate political groups, would have a close-up, front-row view of what was really going on.

It is unclear how Dixon alighted on such a radical idea, but it was approved precisely because the authorities were so alarmed by the threat of the burgeoning protest movement. Labour prime minister Harold Wilson’s government was so supportive of the initiative to gather more reliable intelligence that it agreed to fund Dixon’s plan directly from the Treasury.

For his new recruits, Dixon had in mind a distinctive type of police officer. They needed to be skilled manipulators who were resilient, resourceful and sharp. They would find flats or bedsits,
preferring those at the back of houses in case fellow activists went past at night and noticed the lights were off and no one was in. They would take up jobs with flexible working hours and travel, such as labourers or delivery van drivers, so they could disappear for, say, a day with their family, without arousing suspicion.

The elaborate pretence would count for nothing unless the physical appearance of the police officers was dramatically changed. The usual tidy short-back-and-sides haircut would have been an easy giveaway. These officers were required to grow their hair long, often down to their shoulders or even longer. Their hairstyles and resplendent beards fitted in with the alternative fashions of the day. One squad member recalls that he grew his hair out and put on John Lennon-style round glasses, but
struggled
to produce anything more than wispy facial hair. Another spy’s hair was so fine that he had to go to the hairdressers and have a perm. ‘I ended up looking like Marc Bolan – big hair!’ Years later, members of the unit had their hair shorn as they were sent to infiltrate Nazi skinheads.

The ragged appearance adopted by many of the police
operatives
gave rise to nicknames for their specialist unit within Special Branch. They were occasionally called the Scruffy Squad, but were more commonly known as the Hairies. More formally, the official name for Dixon’s new unit was the Special Demonstration Squad, usually shortened to SDS. Its official role was to provide ‘sufficient and accurate intelligence to enable the police to
maintain
public order’.

SDS officers evolved their own ritual over the years before crossing the threshold into their undercover lives. There were three parts to the ceremony. The first was to have a big leaving party to say goodbye to their Special Branch colleagues. For the restricted number within the branch who knew of the existence of the SDS, it was the unit into which police officers vanished.
‘It was a shadowy section where people disappeared into a black hole for several years,’ recalls one officer who infiltrated the
revolutionary
Socialist Workers Party in the 1980s.

Second, the would-be spies were taken into a room and interrogated by two senior members of the squad to test their cover stories. Another undercover officer remembers his test well: ‘What’s the name of your employer? What’s his phone number? Right, I am going to ring him now, and so on. They ask the kind of questions you might get tripped up by and make sure your cover is as solid as it can be.’ The last symbolic gesture was for SDS officers to hand in their warrant cards; it was too risky for them to be kept, even at home.

It was the final act in their transformation and it meant that police spies would never be able to arrest suspects, a factor that was key to the plan devised by Dixon. Normal undercover police who infiltrated criminal gangs gathered evidence in far shorter operations that could be presented in court as part of a
prosecution
. Like other branches of the constabulary, their job was to nail criminals. But the SDS was different: they were solely required to gain inside intelligence from political groups and slip it back to their handlers over a period of many years.

They would never be tasked with collecting evidence for use in a trial or called to be a witness in court. The reason was obvious: if any SDS officer disclosed their true identity to testify against activists from a witness box, the whole edifice of the spy operation would come tumbling down. For Dixon’s plan to work, it was essential for political activists to believe that the state would never go so far as to plant spies to live among them for years on end.