During its existence, the SDS ran 112 undercover officers who targeted political groups and campaigns, for the most part left-wing in nature.
In its time it developed much of the standard tradecraft used by undercovers when deployed into the field, including changes of appearance, cover legends and false jobs.
It also developed other controversial tactics such as the targeting of women for relationships and the theft of dead children’s identities. Recruitment was done ‘in house’ within Special Branch, and training, such as it was, largely came from existing undercovers. At no point were its officers required to undergo the advance undercover training required of other police undercovers and managers.
It was founded by HN325 Chief Inspector Conrad Dixon in July 1968 in response to the March 1968 Grosvenor Square riots, when anti-Vietnam War protesters attacked the US embassy. For the next 40 years it deployed as many as 12 undercovers into target groups at any one time. Its purported aim was to collect intelligence for Special Branch to be able to assess the need for police responses to protests that had the potential for public disorder or violence.
However, it soon became a source of intelligence on what was deemed ‘subversive’ political groups, sweeping up considerable amounts of information which was stored in Special Branch records and also passed on to the Security Service. Some of the SDS’s tasking is known to have come from MI5.
Initially, the majority of its targets were the Trotskyist and Irish support groups of the 1970s. However, this expanded in the 1980s to cover animal rights, family justice and police accountability campaigns and even the likes of Liberty and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
It had little filter on the information filed in its reports - often containing intimate personal details, financial information and commentary (sometimes racist, homophobic and sexist in nature) on those targeted, as well as reports on the day to day activities of groups. SDS officers would also take part in direct action, and were arrested on occasion. This has led to miscarriages of justice. It is also known that some personal information was unlawfully given to blacklisting agencies that targeted trade unionists.
The SDS’s only activity was gathering information and it maintained a public secrecy about its activity. This extended to allowing officers to be witnesses in court cases or be prosecuted and convicted under their cover names, rather than disclose the existence of an undercover to the infiltrated group and wider world.
Its unofficial motto was apparently ‘by any means necessary’. It maintained several safehouses throughout London which the undercovers attended meetings several times a week. There they were debriefed, passed over their reports and socialised with each other.
The head of the unit was a Detective Chief Inspector who oversaw a small team of an Inspector and several Sergeants. Officers waiting to enter the field or who had just left it would also help out in the back office, located in New Scotland Yard, and later at St Vincent Square. The unit’s position within the Metropolitan Police Special Branch structure changed over time.
A number of the unit’s managers were former undercovers themselves. Many of the managers and some of the undercovers went on to high ranking positions within the police. Managers also prepared Annual Reports which were shared with the Home Office, which provided funding and other assistance to the unit.
From 1999-2002 the SDS assisted with the founding of, and was closely connected to, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit.
The SDS was closed down in 2008 following internal reviews amid a general restructuring of Special Branch functions within the Metropolitan Police and concerns about the unit. A source later told The Guardian:
It was worse than out of control. It was actually a force within a force, operating to a set of standards and ethics more suited to guerrilla warfare than modern policing. Quite simply, they lost their moral compass and as a result nothing was out of bounds. A quite shocking vacuum of any supervision and leadership allowed this to happen.
When the spycops scandal broke, various details emerged, partly due to the efforts of whistleblower, the former spycop Peter Francis. He disclosed that there had been attempts to find dirt on the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence during the Macpherson Inquiry. This, along with the emerging narrative around sexual relationships, caused the Metropolitan Police to establish Operation Herne to investigate its activities.
The UCPI has provided timelines of when undercovers and managers served in the unit, and which other officers were line managers higher up within the Metropolitan Police.