Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (3 page)

As with any closed group, the SDS quickly developed its own culture and language. The more accomplished members of the squad – those capable of totally submerging themselves into
their undercover roles – became known as ‘deep swimmers’. Less committed spies were ‘shallow paddlers’ and derided for not managing to access the heart of their selected political movement. The SDS, which was 10-strong for many years, also had a
nickname
for the targets they were spying on. Political activists were called ‘wearies’, in recognition of what police saw as their ‘
wearisome
’ dedication to a political cause.

The SDS cherished their reputation as the Hairies, but
insiders
had another nickname for the unit. ‘The 27 Club’ was a name that recognised the date of the unit’s official foundation on
October
27 1968, the day of the second large demonstration against the Vietnam War. The club even had its own unofficial motto that encapsulated the squad’s approach to undercover policing: ‘By Any Means Necessary’.

There is no doubt that many squad members relished the adventure of espionage, the thrill of constantly living on the edge at risk of being found out. Managing to make friends with
activists
and gaining their confidence was only half the battle. Protest groups were often on the lookout for infiltrators and the slightest slip-up by the police officer could stir suspicions. One spy says he was nervous every time he changed clothes and converted himself into his activist persona.

Life is full of weird, unpredictable coincidences, and the spies always ran the risk of unexpectedly bumping into someone they knew in their real life while undercover. SDS officers knew that at any moment they could be walking along the street with activists and randomly bump into someone who knew them as a police officer.

According to SDS folklore, that is precisely what happened to one officer who went undercover in the Socialist Workers Party in the 1970s. He was on a demonstration when a uniformed colleague recognised him through his dishevelled disguise. The
SDS man’s reaction was instinctive and decisive: he attacked the police officer, grabbing his balls until he backed off. The spy then quickly slunk away.

These stories about what had gone wrong with past
deployments
were relayed to new recruits as a warning. Another cautionary tale handed down through the years concerned an undercover officer who was embedded in a tiny Trotskyist group, the International Marxist Group. A telephone tap had revealed to the SDS that his targets were growing suspicious about him. He was later invited to a pub by his activist friends, plied with alcohol and asked detailed questions about his past.

‘I remember drinking something in the region of nine or 10 pints of beer,’ he says. ‘I was very concerned that I was getting to the point where my guard would slip, that I would reveal
something
which would give something away or expose a colleague and I remember my mind seeming to stay ice cold. The rest of me felt like jelly but they had drunk along with me so they were showing considerable signs of wear as well, and I don’t know if I satisfied them or not but I was allowed to go and then I was met shortly afterwards by a colleague, then I just collapsed. I was absolutely drunk as a skunk, but I’d held it together until then.’

The episode told the SDS spy and his managers that it was time to quit. He had not enjoyed the undercover life and, in any case, it was affecting his family life. Every SDS officer knew that if the suspicions grew and they were compromised it would mean the end of their mission. They only ever had one chance; it was plainly too risky for a spy who had been rumbled to disappear and then reappear in a new group.

After the anti-Vietnam protests, one of the next movements to attract the attention of the SDS was the campaign against
apartheid
in South Africa. In the late 1960s, opposition to the regime was growing. A coalition of students, liberals and Christians
sprang up to confront and disrupt white South African sportsmen competing in Britain. In late 1969 and early 1970, the activists laid siege to the South African rugby team with imaginative forms of civil disobedience.

Buying tickets like ordinary spectators, campaigners would gain access to grounds and jump over the barriers, past police and onto the pitch to interrupt the game. The battle of wits between the protesters and the police lasted months. Authorities deployed more police to form a barrier to guard the pitch and keep watch for activists leaping out of the crowd. At one game, barbed wire was laid down to deter incursions.

Campaigners adapted their own tactics. One slipped into the South African team’s hotel and glued the door-locks to their rooms. Another disrupted the tour by dressing in a smart suit and telling the driver of the team coach that he was needed inside the hotel. When the driver was gone, the activist sat in the driver’s seat and chained himself to the steering wheel.

Among those who were placed under surveillance by the nascent SDS was Peter Hain, an activist who would later become a Labour cabinet minister. One of the SDS spies who joined Hain’s campaign was called Mike Ferguson. The SDS operative’s handler, a fellow Special Branch officer named Wilf Knight, says the mole used cunning to climb the ladder of the anti-apartheid campaign. Knight recalls how, at one meeting, Hain told the group he believed they had been infiltrated by a spy. ‘There was one poor devil that Mike Ferguson looked down the room at and said, “I think it’s him,”’ says Knight. ‘He got thrown out, and Ferguson survived – bless him.’

Finger-pointing at bona fide activists, and wrongly
accusing
them of being infiltrators, become a well-used technique among the SDS officers who wanted to deflect attention.
Ferguson
survived any suspicion anti-apartheid campaigners may have
had and completed his undercover tour. He later progressed to become the head of the SDS.

Another early target of the SDS was the International Marxist Group, a collection of left-wing revolutionaries at the vanguard of the campaign against the Vietnam War. ‘A small group
numerically
, but significant as an idea-producing faction,’ was how Dixon summed them up in one of his reports. Prominent in the group was a well-known radical of the time, Tariq Ali, who had, in Dixon’s view, ‘natural gifts as a mob orator’. Ali would later become a leading left-wing figure for many years.

The SDS spy who targeted Ali and his friends was sufficiently trusted to be allowed to guard the office of the anti-Vietnam war campaign. ‘I was aware that some of the keys that I was holding when I was babysitting those offices gave access to offices that we, or the Security Service, might be interested in,’ he recalls. When activists were out of sight, the SDS officer pressed keys into some Plasticine to make a mould from which copies could later be made. The filing cabinets of the campaign group were later apparently rifled through by MI5.

Breaking into the premises of campaign groups would become another common tactic for the SDS. The legality of such a tactic was dubious, but this was the SDS, the unit which believed ‘any means’ were justifiable and took its cue from the security services. This kind of stuff was routine for MI5, and they had long been assisted by reliable men from Special Branch. The former MI5 operative Peter Wright famously wrote in his bestseller
Spycatcher
: ‘For five years we bugged and burgled our way across London at the state’s behest, while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way.’

Dixon was given a free hand to develop the tradecraft of the undercover unit. The squad was buried so deep within Special Branch that it was immune to many of the grudging reforms
undergone by the rest of the force. The branch operated on the traditional principle of ‘need-to-know’ – only those officers involved in an operation would be briefed on its details. Intelligence provided by SDS spies would be shared with other departments in the Met without anyone disclosing how it was obtained.

The SDS turned out to be a surprisingly easy secret to keep. Its spies were out of the office and out of sight, meeting only in safe houses across the capital. It is perhaps a cliché to call the SDS an elite squad, but to an extent it was. It prided itself on recruiting only the very best officers within Special Branch, which considered itself a cut above the rest of the Met. The covert squad did not operate like the rest of the police. There were very few rules and the spies did not feel bound by their rank when they discussed operations. The operatives were expected to approach problems in a creative way, eschewing the obedient, plodding mindset of a bobby.

The spying game was initially considered a man’s world. It appears that SDS operatives were all men until the early 1980s, when women police officers were needed to infiltrate the
women-only
peace camp set up outside the American nuclear weapon base at Greenham Common in Berkshire. Two female police officers were selected and duly dispatched to join the women protesters. Even after that, women were rarely recruited to the SDS. Insiders describe the unit as macho and competitive, a team in which it was frowned upon to discuss emotional issues despite the very obvious psychological strain being placed on operatives.

The unit was not just the brainchild of Dixon, but very much a product of Special Branch, which already had a controversial reputation for conducting a covert war against enemies of the state. The branch was founded in 1883 to capture Irish
republicans
who were planting bombs in London. Since then, its primary job had been to gather intelligence to protect the nation’s
security. Some of its work was relatively uncontroversial. It included protecting public figures considered to be at risk,
monitoring
ports and airports for unwanted visitors, carrying out surveillance on embassies and helping to vet foreigners applying to become British citizens. But Special Branch, with its close links to MI5, was considered by many to be Britain’s political police. Its officers were characterised as foot soldiers for the security services, acting as their ‘eyes and ears’ on the ground.

Over the years, Special Branch had spied on suffragettes, pacifists, unemployed workers, striking trade unionists,
antinuclear
activists, anti-war campaigners, fascists, anarchists and communists. The job of Special Branch, as the then home
secretary
Merlyn Rees put it – perhaps too honestly – in 1978, was to ‘collect information on those who I think cause problems for the state’. In more formal terms, Special Branch spied on those deemed to be ‘subversives’. But the definition of subversion was a contentious one and there was always the concern police would target people they should not.

In 1963, five years before Dixon founded the SDS,
subversives
were officially defined as people who ‘would contemplate the overthrow of government by unlawful means’. By the late 1970s, the net had been cast wider and the definition amended to include all those who ‘threaten the safety or well-being of the state, and are intended to undermine or overthrow parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means’. By 1985, concerned MPs on the home affairs select committee noted that the branch was acquiring ‘a sinister reputation of a force which persecutes harmless citizens for political reasons, acts in nefarious ways to assist the security services, is accountable to no one, and represents a threat to civil liberties’.

When Dixon was putting together his squad, Special Branch was expanding to cope with the perceived growth in the subversive
threat. Indeed it seemed that the branch was constantly growing. The 225 officers attached to the Special Branch in the early 1960s had expanded to 300 by the end of the decade. By 1978, there were 1,600 Special Branch officers. Originally based only in London, branch officers spread out across the country into
provincial
forces. Much of the increase was a consequence of the urgent need to deal with the Irish terrorist threat following the outbreak of the Troubles in the late 1960s.

But the expansion was also attributed to the growing
surveillance
of political campaigners, thousands of whom ended up in confidential Special Branch files. Much of the intelligence in these files was generated from publicly available information. For
example
, desk officers scoured press clippings, noting down names of activists quoted in articles or recording the names of people who had signed petitions.

When the homes of activists were raided, branch officers would comb through the contents of address books, letters and cheque-stubs to work out whom they were in contact with. Moving up the scale, phones were tapped and mail was opened. This was the routine, systematic work of the branch.

SDS officers had the more glamorous role. They left office duties behind them to inveigle themselves into key positions in protest groups. Becoming the treasurer was an established method of quickly gaining access to financial records. So too was becoming secretary, or minute-taker. The spies were told to avoid rising so far up the hierarchy of a group that they became its leader. ‘As a rule of thumb, you could allow yourself to run with the organisation, but you had to stop short of organising or directing it,’ recalls an SDS spy who infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party at the time of the Falklands War. The best position was that of a trusted confidant, a deputy who lingered in the background.

Although Dixon brought the SDS into existence, he did not hang around for long. In 1973, just five years after constructing the apparatus for long-term infiltration of protest movements, the chief inspector quit policing altogether. He did not want to be desk-bound, grinding his way up the police hierarchy for the rest of his career. The former police officer went to Exeter University to study economic history and then completed a doctorate in the working conditions of merchant seamen. Bizarrely, in 1975 Dixon was a contestant on the popular television quiz show
University Challenge
. A black-and-white photograph shows the Exeter team seated in the familiar line-up of the show, waiting to answer questions, or as the programme’s famous catch-phrase would have it, their ‘starter for 10’.