HN304 ‘Graham Coates’ was the cover name of a former Special Demonstration Squad undercover officer who infiltrated the International Socialists in 1976 and several anarchist groups, including the Zero and Anarchy publishing collectives, between 1977 and 1979.
He later briefly infiltrated Hammersmith Socialist Workers Party after having his anarchist deployment brought to a sudden halt. He is not recalled by any former members of the groups that he infiltrated.
Coates is the the only officer in tranche one who acknowledged that the sexual relationships between undercover officers and members of the target groups were known within the SDS, including by the managers. He was also the only police witness who spoke in detail about a broader misogynist culture within the unit.
His reporting contained many examples of derogatory and biased language. Coates also spoke about the detrimental effects his deployment had on his well-being; he left the Metropolitan Police not long after his deployment ended.
Coates submitted a written statement to the Inquiry on 11 October 2019 and gave live evidence on 7 May 2021. Unless stated otherwise, Coates’ written statement is the source of the following information.
HN304 ‘Graham Coates’ joined the MPS in the early 1970s as a uniformed officer and joined Special Branch in the mid-1970s.
Prior to joining the SDS he also had unspecified roles in B, C and E squads. Coates started with the SDS in April 1976 and finished in September 1979.
In 1976, detective inspector HN3093 Roy Creamer , then of C Squad, asked Coates to report back on a political meeting being held at North London Polytechnic. Unknown to Coates, this was a trial run for the SDS.
Shortly afterwards, he was instructed by Creamer to go to a room in New Scotland Yard where he was asked if he wanted to join the SDS.
For Coates, the clandestine nature of the unit was alluring: ‘The SDS was a secret unit within a secretive police department’. He added that, career-wise, it ‘had seemed to be a step up’.
Tradecraft
Coates admitted that his cover name was a deceased child’s identity, which he obtained from the births registry at Somerset House, London. He added that he made a trip to where the child had been born to familiarise himself with the area.
The only official identity document he had in his cover name was a driving licence. Coates had two fake cover jobs, as a photographer and a window cleaner. He said he never carried out any work in either role, but did distribute leaflets promoting his photography service.
Coates was initially deployed into the Hackney branch of the International Socialists in 1976. He transitioned into anarchist groups, including the Anarchy and Zero magazine-publishing collectives, in early 1977.
He was returned to the International Socialists, now renamed the Socialist Workers Party, in late 1979.
Hackney International Socialists
International Socialists (IS) was the group most infiltrated by the SDS. As Coates began his deployment in 1976, HN296 ‘Geoff Wallace’ and HN301 ‘Bob Stubbs’ were also spying on it in west London.
HN354 Vincent Harvey ‘Vince Miller’ , also a contemporary of Coates, infiltrated IS within the east end of London. Coates’ spying on the Hackney IS branch began in the summer of 1976.
Coates described his infiltration of Hackney IS as beginning slowly, spending time at a local community centre in Dalston and talking to activists selling newspapers on the street. Coates waited for an invite to a meeting, rather than pushing for one.
He described the Hackney branch of IS as ‘fanatical’ about meetings, but also said that there were just seven or eight people attending them. These were often held at the Centerprise Bookshop, on Kingsland Road.
Once a member, he attended meetings and sometimes took on the role of coordinating Socialist Worker newspaper sales in the area. The officer had little else to say about this part of his deployment, although he clearly took active roles in the group. For instance, a report dated 24 August 1976 recorded Coates giving a talk on the history of the Labour Party at an IS meeting.
His first known report, as disclosed by the UCPI, was on the IS Hackney branch meeting at Centerprise held on 8 July 1976. This report is notable for its racist language, out of place even for the time:
However, a negress in the audience stated that an organisation called the West Indian Defence Ctte based in Brixton was presently engaged in arming with knives and coshes as many black people in Brixton as possible and that this organisation was fully prepared to meet physical racialism in the area with physical attacks.
A later report on the branch recorded details of four IS members purchasing a house together. Coates claimed this was relevant information as it demonstrated that the activists were on low incomes. He remarked that Special Branch officers were trained to record all information that came their way – no matter how tangential it had seemed to be.
For instance, one report recorded the details of an IS member, but also noted the name of his wife, who was not involved in the group. Coates’ interpretation of recording this single piece of information gives insight into the Special Branch mindset and bureaucratic process when writing the reports:
We were encouraged to report in this way because no man is an island. In this instance, it was likely that his wife was sympathetic to his views and suggests she might, eventually, become an activist too. If she had previously come to the notice of SB, her reference would either be mentioned in S[pecial] B[ranch] records or she would have had her own file and that reference would have been quoted. The person typing up this report would have added that file reference.
From the mid-1970s, the National Front was especially active and posed a physical threat in the form of racist and homophobic attacks. Left-wing groups and their meetings were also under threat, which Coates’ reporting reflects.
For instance, a meeting of Hackney Community Relations, a local government organisation, was a target of NF members, who disrupted it on 22 July 1976. IS members, presumably including Coates, formed a defensive picket, while the attendees left in groups for their own safety. Another report, thought to be from the officer, covers a similar situation at a meeting of Islington Community Relations.
In August 1976, a talk titled ‘Women – the fight for equality’ was delivered at an IS meeting. Inappropriately, Coates commented in the report that the female speaker was ‘attractive’.
During January and February 1977, Coates was moving to the anarchist scene. One of his last reports on IS included an Islington branch meeting on the ‘Islington 18’ Defence Committee. Later, Coates, when entering the anarchist milieu, was also to spy on the same legal defence campaign (see below).
There was a transition period of a couple of months in 1977, when Coates attended both socialist and anarchist meetings with his last Hackney branch report dated 3 May 1977.
Anarchist Groups
Coates had said that his move from IS to infiltrate anarchist groups was at least partly motivated by ‘a fascination within me about the subject of anarchism’. In the oral hearings, the CTI made the suggestion that Coates was a ‘policeman with anarchist leanings’ – which Coates gladly accepted.
He also claimed that when he wrote articles for Anarchy magazine he was expressing views he genuinely held. Consequently, Coates was asked about whether there was any sympathy among SDS officers for the groups they were infiltrating:
I think that if every undercover officer told the truth, they would have to admit that at some point during their deployment they had some sympathy for the ideas and tenets of the group or groups that they were involved with. Sort of like an (sic) Stockholm syndrome.
However, Coates qualified this as a ‘mental exercise, a mental construct within an individual’s mind’. The anti-authoritarian and anti-state theories at the centre of anarchist political philosophy would also seem hard to reconcile with the duties of any police officer, not least one tasked to spy on political groups.
Zero Collective
Coates became involved with anarchist publication the Zero Collective.
The Zero Collective was the first anarchist organisation that Coates was deployed to spy on.
The group was based in the rundown Docklands area of east London.
Coates described the premises to be in need of renovation, something that he then volunteered to help with.
Although, Coates said, the group was not a threat to anyone:
the Special Branch hierarchy were always interested to hear about these little groupings even though they must have known they were harmless from HN300. I suppose they could not ignore them given the bombings carried out by the Angry Brigade, and they did not want to be caught out again.
Details for many of the meetings that Coates attended would have been openly listed in Freedom Newspaper, or other anarchist publications.
Coates reports on the very first meeting of the group, held on 24 February 1977. It indicates that he was already active in anarchist circles at this point. His reports on this collective cover internal discussions and, in particular, tensions between Zero Collective and the Anarchy Collective.
The Anarchy magazine collective
The Anarchy Collective was another, longer-established publishing collective. Again, much of Coates’ reporting did not cover planned demonstrations or subversive activities, as Coates admitted:
They had weekly meetings of only around 3 to 5 people […] The meetings were all a bit theoretical: they seemed to just love talking about things, critiquing and discussing them. […] Their main focus had been to publish their magazine.
Coates had said in his oral testimony that he was not aware of the collective being involved in any public disorder. He added that although he was aware that some activists had ‘tenuous’ connections to the activities of the Angry Brigade he saw nothing along those lines in his deployment.
Much of the disclosure mentioning the Anarchy Collective is administrative in nature, describing the kind of run-of-the-mill organising that it took to publish a magazine. Coates says in a report that it was a ‘gathering of friends’ and ‘very little of political interest emerged.’
Instead, Coates reported details of the lives of those who attended the meetings. One such report notes that one of the Anarchy Collective belonged to a tenants association and intended to become a school governor where his daughter attended nursery. The children’s names were recorded in the report by Coates.
One report also contains personal information on a member of the Anarchy Collective who had two young children. Coates said:
The purpose of reporting the existence of these children is that it enables Special Branch to anticipate [Privacy]’s movements. She may have scaled down her activities or taken an interest in educational groupings due to her having young children. For example, she was unlikely to be leaving the children at night to go on long vigils. The information gives a broad picture and allows SB to consider what they could expect from a young mother.
In another report, Coates describes the child of a couple attending the meeting as a ‘mongol’. Seeking to justify his language, Coates said:
The fact the child had Down's Syndrome would have been included simply because it was information about a known activist. The appropriateness of reporting such personal information was never discussed. I appreciate that the term "mongol" is now considered offensive, but this was not the case at the time.
Another report of a personal nature focused on a member of the Anarchist Workers Association. It questions the parentage of the children of a couple who are cohabiting:
is living with, [redacted] have three young children (exact parenthood not known) and seem content to exist in conditions of the utmost squalor.
Coates said in his statement that he wrote several articles for Anarchy and Zero magazines.
I said I would write an article about "work" and gave an impromptu talk about true work and exploitative work. I then wrote an article in greater depth on the same subject. I recall volunteering for this as I felt that eventually I would be asked to write or say something anyway. I thought that, if I could do so on my own terms by giving an acceptable talk on a topic of my choosing, I could avoid having to do so later on a topic I knew nothing about.
This article would appear to be from Issue 24 of Anarchy Magazine in 1977, titled ‘Work and Non-Work’, which bears the initials ‘GC’.
Coates claimed in the Inquiry hearing that the article expressed his genuine feelings about the subject matter – even though it was from an anarchist viewpoint.
Persons Unknown
The Persons Unknown support group was created to provide solidarity and legal assistance to a high-profile trial of seven people who had been arrested in 1977. Six people were charged with ‘conspiracy to cause explosions’, but replaced with charges relating to conspiracy to rob based on a found cache of firearms and explosives. Four of them were eventually brought to trial in 1980, and found not guilty.
The group’s name came from the conspiracy charges against the defendants, stating that they ‘conspired with persons known and unknown’. The idea was that with the vagueness of the conspiracy charges anyone else could be a potential suspect. Graham Coates reported on the legal support group.
The 1978 SDS annual report boasted that two of the people put on trial were identified by the SDS. Special Branch detective inspector HN3093 Roy Creamer , formerly of the SDS, oversaw, or at least was involved in, this investigation. However, in his evidence to the Inquiry he did not mention the SDS’ role in this, which calls into question whether the claim in the annual report was accurate.
Graham Coates also said in his statements to the Inquiry that he never had direct contact with people who took part in such serious offences. Just prior to the group being set up, a Coates report discussed the predicament of one of those charged, Iris Mills, who was being held in solitary confinement in the men’s prison in Brixton.
The support group was also discussed in umbrella organisation Federation of London Anarchist Group (FLAG) meeting on 3 June 1978, where Dave Morris announced that a group had been set up. Morris said the group was intended to run along similar lines as the support group for another significant political trial during the late 1970s, the ‘ABC Case’.
The Persons Unknown prosecution was also discussed at an Anarchy Collective meeting on 8 June 1978. There is even a report on the benefit gig for the Persons Unknown defendants on 11 January 1979 at North London Polytechnic, which provides details of those attending.
There follow reports on the support group itself, including one from 16 June 1978 that outlined the group’s intentions to use the original conspiracy charges during the trial. One of the issues discussed in the Inquiry has been undercover officers’ access to, and reporting on, sensitive legal information, which has always been prohibited.
Dave Morris and other target groups
Graham Coates claimed he befriended Dave Morris, a well-known activist within the London anarchist scene and core participant in the Inquiry.
Coates used his fake friendship with Dave Morris as an entrée into many groups. This is supported by the first report where Coates mentions the Anarchy Collective, on 25 May 1976, which focused on Dave Morris. It included details of Morris’ employment as a postal worker.
Despite the targeting, Morris did not recall Coates. In fact, none of the handful of people that were contactable and involved with either Anarchy or Zero collectives have any recollection of him at all.
In one of Coates’ reports on the Anarchy Collective, it was implied that Morris has confided to a close friend that: ‘He regards it as inevitable in fact that he will eventually have to resort to violence in order to achieve his ideals.’ However, when the Counsel to the Inquiry asked whether Coates ever witnessed Morris being violent, or whether he thought he was violent, Coates answered ‘no’ to both questions.
Another report focused on a meeting involving Dave Morris, looking to form a worker-focused anarchist network. There is also a single report on a newly formed group named the British Anti-Nuclear Group. This again named Dave Morris amongst its organisers.
Dave Morris commented on Coates’ monitoring:
Looking back on the surveillance and infiltration of groups I was involved with in the 1970s […] and how I was personally targeted, I feel disgust at this cynical and blatant breach of trust. Not just for me but also for the other victims I knew and know – such as the family with young children whose home was where the Anarchy Collective held meetings.
Another group that Coates reported on was Black Aid, which focused on the treatment of imprisoned Red Army Faction (RAF) members in Germany. The SDS singled out its monitoring of Black Aid when it wrote to the Home Office in 1979, asking the government to renew its funding.
Issue four of Zero Magazine, from December 1977, has a lengthy article on the captivity and death of some of the RAF members.
Coates also produced reports on East London Libertarians (ELL). Coates said he could not remember them at all despite there being 11 reports on ELL between 8 Feb 1977 and 5 May 1977. In addition, during 1976 and 1977 several reports were also filed on the umbrella group, Federation of London Anarchist Groups (FLAG) , whose members included the Anarchy Collective.
Redeployment: Croydon SWP
At some point during 1979, Coates was stopped from spying on anarchist groups and moved to the Croydon branch of the Socialist Workers Party. Coates said that this was a sanction, due to his lack of output during the previous few months of surveillance of the anarchist groups. Coates commented that he did not report much on Croydon SWP group as by this time he was ‘burnt out’.
Graham Coates broke ranks with other police witnesses who gave evidence that covered the initial years of the SDS operations (1968-1982). He testified to a widespread misogynistic culture present in the SDS safehouses, including jokes about undercover officers having sex with activists.
In Coates’ view, it was inconceivable that managers at the time did not know that sexual relationships were occurring. This contrasts with evidence given to the Inquiry by SDS managers denying they had knowledge – or even suspicions – that such relationships happened.
Misogyny in the SDS Safehouses
Coates described how SDS officers came to discuss female activists in a derogatory way:
The overlap and intermingling between the various activist groups meant that different UCOs would sometimes come across the same individuals who would sometimes be discussed at group meetings. These discussions could spill over into more informal banter and comments, and this had possibly been the context for the joking, e.g., about a particular woman.
Coates was also questioned about the degree of sexism within the police. Coates said that in the late 1970s there was a widespread misogynistic culture, but that even by those standards many people would have found the SDS banter deeply offensive.
Knowledge of sexual relationships
In Coates’ view, it was inconceivable that managers at the time did not know that sexual relationships were occurring between undercover officers and members of their target groups. This contrasts with evidence given by SDS managers to the Inquiry denying they had any knowledge – or even suspicions – that such relationships happened.
Former SDS bosses giving such evidence included HN34 Geoff Craft and HN307 Trevor Butler , who denied to the Inquiry that they knew anything about any sexual relationships.
Coates told the Inquiry that managers must have at least known that sexual relationships were ‘almost bound to happen’ because officers like HN300 ‘Jim Pickford’ and HN297 ‘Rick Gibson’ had ‘a predilection for chasing women... before, during and after’ their time with the SDS.
Coates was clear that he never had any sexual relationships while undercover himself. Nor did he witness such relationships. However, he gained the impression via his interactions with other officers in the safehouses that those relationships had, and were, taking place, and – as importantly – were widely known within the SDS.
He stated:
I am aware that some UCOs did engage in sexual activity or relationships while undercover, although this was not commonplace or routine and was nothing to do with their official duties. I had no first-hand knowledge of or involvement in such matters, but jokey remarks were occasionally made in SDS meetings which I took at face value and believed to be based on truth. I assumed that the women said to have been involved were activists but cannot say whether this was the case or not. My supervising officers would have been aware of these remarks because they were present at the meetings when they were made.
He said SDS management never told him explicitly not to have sexual relationships with activists. Nor did Coates witness anyone challenging the behaviour – or the nature of the ‘offensive’ jokes in the safehouse. Instead, he said, management’s attitude was to turn ‘a blind eye’ to the whole issue.
Given some undercovers’ reputations with women, SDS managers including HN34 Geoff Craft and HN307 Trevor Butler must have known that sexual relationships were ‘almost bound to happen’, Coates stated, as some officers had ‘a predilection for chasing women’.
Asked what he knew about particular SDS officers regarding this topic, Coates provided information about two; HN297 Richard Clark ‘Rick Gibson’ and HN300 ‘Jim Pickford’.
Managers, being around the safehouses, would have overheard, or even joined in with, sexual banter about Rick Clark’s relationship with ‘Mary’. Coates had firm recollections of ‘banter’ about Clark’s sexual activity and said it was his understanding that a sexual relationship had taken place.
Coates recalled Jim Pickford as ‘someone who was always chasing after women’ and that Pickford was widely known within Special Branch as a ‘philanderer’ – ‘his name would be mentioned as a gauge’ when joking about women.
Asked to spell out Pickford’s reputation, Coates said:
it was common knowledge outside – within and outside of S squad that that was the nature of the person, that he could not be in the presence of a woman without trying it on.
Coates also recalled Pickford talking about having sex with someone he met while undercover.
Again, this recollection contrasts with SDS bosses including HN34 Geoff Craft and HN307 Trevor Butler denying to the Inquiry that they knew anything about this or any other sexual relationships.
There are only two MI5 documents provided in Coates’ disclosure. The first is an account of a meeting between MI5 and SDS manager detective inspector Mike Ferguson.
The connection with the undercover is slight, being a discussion about the ‘indoctrination’ of MI5 desk officers in the identification of SDS’ sources – ‘particularly [in the] anarchist field’. The other MI5 document mentions that Coates was asked to identify photographs of a demonstration outside the Persons Unknown trial in 1980.
In 1978, while still in the field, Coates received a glowing personnel report. However, a year later Coates described himself as ‘not happy’ during his last weeks of deployment and admitted ‘not performing well’ because he had issues within his life at home.
He added:
I made an error of judgment on a particular day which resulted in my immediate withdrawal and posting back to Scotland Yard.
Coates said the ‘error of judgement’ occurred during a traffic stop by uniformed police. He gave his real name by mistake even though he had his driving licence in his cover name – contrary to SDS policy.
Although the police officer let Coates go, the incident somehow reached SDS management. His manager detective inspector HN135 Mike Ferguson was ’incandescent with rage’ and immediately terminated Coates’ deployment. And so Coates’ deployment came to an abrupt end, with no exfiltration process.
Coates also said that he did not admit this in an interview with officers from Operation Herne as he was embarrassed by his mistake. He offered additional reasons why Ferguson might have been dissatisfied with his work:
The dip in my level of work refers to the fact that I attended fewer meetings and produced fewer reports toward the end of my deployment. I am not known for being a depressive person, but the undercover work got me down and for one reason or another I did less as a result.
Coates said working within the SDS had ‘significant’ effects on his mental health that contributed to ending his relationship with his partner and to him deciding to leave the Metropolitan Police:
In the initial months after my deployment, I was very twitchy when I was out and about in public, even though I had cut my hair and was no longer wearing my thick-rimmed glasses. I was out in central London on one occasion when I recognised someone, and just took a detour down a side street to avoid them.
On 15 January 2018, Inquiry chair John Mitting ‘minded to’ grant a restriction order over HN304 Graham Coates’ real name. On 3 July 2018, HN304’s cover name and targeted groups were released by the Inquiry.
Later, on 2 October 2018, the application by the Metropolitan Police to restrict HN304’s real name was released. On 8 November 2018, Mitting accepted this application, and the restriction order was made public on 23 October 2020.
Coates submitted a written statement to the Inquiry on 11 October 2019 and gave live evidence on 7 May 2021.