To facilitate their access to target groups, undercovers built up a legend to give them plausibility and make them less likely to be identified as police officers. Taking false names and changing their appearance, they also adopted cover employment.
The level of detail and activity around employment was noticeably much more considered than other aspects; undercovers paid close attention to it, if unevenly. This is probably because cover employment supported tradecraft far beyond bolstering an undercover’s legend.
Sometimes, employing an undercover in a particular location or type of work could smooth the path of infiltration. However, for the most part, the type of job was chosen to fill out the officer’s legend such as providing a source of income and explain away any suspiciously erratic availability. As such, it would also cover time when undercovers were attending meetings at the SDS safehouse.
While the complexity of all aspects of undercovers’ tradecraft increased over time, cover employment appears to have been planned carefully, almost from the start of the SDS.
Some of the very earliest SDS undercovers, expecting to work only for a few weeks, did not organise proper cover employment but instead arranged a phone number to be answered as if it were their workplace.
HN330 ‘Don de Freitas’ told his targets that he worked as a driver for Shell, though he failed to persuade anyone at Shell to go along with his deception. He stuck with the story, reasoning he ‘could probably convince someone who had tried to check up on me by calling Shell, that due to the size of the organisation they had simply called the wrong department or spoken to the wrong person’.
It soon became a common practice by the undercovers to arrange with real businesses to pretend they worked there. Often, this was just the undercovers persuading people they knew to say they were employed at their place of work should anyone ask. Some undercovers actually did work, though most didn't.
Business owners who did these favours would not have known why the undercover needed cover employment and probably assumed it was to do with a criminal investigation. However, it did not become clear during the hearings how these arrangements came about, the details either redacted or not explored with the undercovers.
The undercovers were expected to make their own arrangements for their cover jobs, as part of their pre-deployment preparation time in the SDS back office. However, the plans were overseen by managers. Cover jobs tended to consist of low-level, relatively unskilled work so that undercovers could not be caught out on a lack of specialist knowledge and could plausibly change jobs as often as they needed.
There were a few exceptions to this – HN321 ‘Bill Lewis’HN321 posed as an ‘instrumentation and control technician’ as it was something he felt confident talking about, and the SDS paid for HN155 ‘Phil Cooper’ to be trained in coffee-machine repair to support his cover job.
Vehicle ownership and use played a central role in undercover tradecraft and, by extension, the jobs they sought out. Around two-thirds of undercovers pretended to do a job that involved driving a van.
This served many purposes. Having a van at their disposal made an undercover much more attractive to the left-wing groups they wanted to infiltrate and so speeded their entry. Working as a driver could explain why the undercover might have unusually good driving or vehicle-maintenance skills, in reality picked up on police training courses.
If they were seen in an unusual location – for example travelling to or from an SDS safe house – they could say it was on the route of a recent driving job. If they pretended to be a long-distance driver, they could be uncontactable for days without arousing suspicion, while they took time off.
Initially, undercovers shared a pool of SDS vehicles, which grew into them each having their own police-supplied vehicle if needed. After 1973, when each undercover was bought their own second-hand vehicle tailored to their cover identity, they could incorporate their vehicle into their disguise, filling them with the tools of their pretend trade to reinforce their undercover identity. See the page on cover vehicles for more information on this.
Instead of creating a cover job, or pretending to be a self-employed tradesperson, some officers went undercover as students, often where a political group they wanted to spy on was active on campus. While HN348 ‘Sandra Davies’ told people she was a student at Goldsmiths College without registering, other undercovers enrolled on courses at Goldsmiths and Thames Polytechnic, in the case of HN298 ‘Mike Scott’ attending daily lectures and taking exams. This tactic was repeated by HN297 Richard Clark ‘Rick Gibson’ and used again in the 1990s by Peter Francis.
Occasionally the choice of cover employment could be highly targeted. HN301 ‘Bob Stubbs’ took a job as a lab technician at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital to get close to a Palestine Solidarity Campaign activist who worked in the same laboratory, though he was not successful and left after a few months.
Curiously, in the second half of the 1970s, some undercovers appear to have started doing real work for their cover employers: Bob Stubbs and HN351 ‘Jeff Slater’ washed cars for dealerships, while Phil Cooper, for his third job, delivered televisions to both Special Branch and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
Cover employment stories were occasionally tested. For example, HN200 ‘Roger Harris’ told the Inquiry that after one political meeting his car wouldn’t start. Identifying the problem as a loose distributor cap, he suspected that the people he was spying on had loosened it to test whether he knew how to check an engine, as his cover employment was working in a garage.
One of the most curious stories about cover employment during Tranche One of the Inquiry came from core participant Richard Chessum, who was spied on by HN294 Richard Clark ‘Rick Gibson’ in the late 1970s. Chessum first encountered ‘Rick Gibson’ as a student at Goldsmiths College in south-east London, but said ‘Gibson’ later took him to an office above a bank in Woolwich, where he claimed to work.
When Big Flame [[link]], one of the groups Chessum was in, discovered ‘Gibson’ was not who he said he was, Chessum went back to the office to find it empty and locked. Asking in the bank below, he was given a phone number to call, which he had great difficulty getting through to. He eventually spoke to someone who said ‘Rick Gibson’ no longer worked there but asked Chessum to leave his details.