Renting a room or bedsit under a cover name to create a plausible cover (‘duff’) address was a core part of tradecraft employed from the start of the Special Demonstration to the end of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit.
Apart from a few of the very earliest SDS undercovers, whose deployments lasted a matter of weeks, all undercover officers had somewhere they could claim to live. They could give this address to those they were reporting on, to have material sent or to register as a member. The cost of renting was a significant expenditure for the undercover units.
SDS head HN325 Conrad Dixon wrote in 1968:
Officers should also have cover addresses – generally small flats and bed-sitting rooms – to receive mail, back-up their cover-stories, and frustrate enquiries and observation by the opposition.
It was part of an undercover’s work in the back office to acquire their accommodation, usually by looking through the classified adverts in newspapers. In the late 1960s and 1970s, landlords did not normally require references and deposits and it was normal to pay rent weekly in cash. Undercovers used their rent books, signed by their landlords, to evidence receipt of rent, to support their fake identity.
As rental properties became scarcer and as property agencies asked for bigger deposits and for references, renting became more expensive and complicated, particularly in the 1980s. Accommodation costs constituted a substantial part of the total SDS budget. From 1974 onwards, every SDS Annual Report mentions how difficult it is to find cheap suitable accommodation.
A short experiment in cost-saving was introduced in 1975, having two undercover officers share the same rental flat. However, the SDS abandoned the practice the following year as it increased the risk that exposure of either flatmate would require the withdrawal of both. However, at least two later undercovers, HN3 Jason Bishop and HN60 ‘Dave Evans’ shared a rental in the 2000s.
Undercovers in the tranche one phase one period (1968-1972) did not often stay at their cover accommodation. Some never slept there at all, while others spent only a night or two a week there. The 1974 SDS Annual Report, however, noted that undercovers needed to spend more time in their cover accommodation as they became more deeply embedded in the groups they were spying on. A little-explored theme in the Inquiry is how much this time apart impacted on the families of the undercovers.
Cover accommodation was minimally furnished, a theme that persisted throughout the history of the SDS. People who visited undercovers in their fake addresses often spoke of how sparse and unlived-in their homes felt. Some undercovers had to weave this into their legend, for example, explaining that they had to leave their possessions behind when a previous relationship broke up.
However, few undercovers invited the people they were spying on to visit them at home, though many travelled to and from activist meetings from their bedsits in case they were followed, only later returning to their real homes.
The SDS accommodation budget covered both the safehouses, referred to as ‘HQ flats’ in the SDS Annual Reports, and individual undercovers’ cover accommodation. From 1973, there were two separate HQ flats in different parts of London. Their locations changed periodically to maintain secrecy. Their purpose was to allow the undercovers to meet with management without the undercovers having to go to police premises. These safehouses were rented residential properties, generally located in west or south London. It was part of the duties of the back office staff to locate and organise the renting and furnishing of these flats.
Undercovers who were not yet deployed were sometimes asked to sleep at an SDS safehouse to make it appear occupied. Early undercovers recall HN328 Joan Hillier keeping her possessions in one safehouse. HN343 ‘John Clinton’ gave evidence that he often slept at another safehouse before finding his own cover accommodation.
Undercovers’ attempts to create plausible cover addresses were not always successful. HN45 ‘Dave Robertson’ was exposed as an undercover when a woman who lived in a neighbouring flat to an SDS safehouse, recognised him at an activist meeting. According to evidence given by core participant Diane Langford, the woman knew he was a police officer as it was widely known in her block of flats that the apartment was rented as a safehouse and being used by the police.