HN343 'John Clinton' joined the SDS in early 1971 but did not go undercover until October 1971 because of a long period of illness followed by several months working in the back office while preparing for his deployment. He infiltrated the International Socialists (IS): the Croydon branch from October 1971 to March 1972 and then the Fulham and Hammersmith branch from November 1972 onwards. He reported back on branch level and, most frequently, national IS business.
Clinton asked to end his deployment and spent several weeks planning his exit before telling the IS activists he was spying on that he planned to go travelling and leaving in September 1974. He says he was transferred to ports duty outside London and then had a long, successful career in Special Branch before retiring after 30 years' service in the mid-1990s at a senior rank.
Unless indicated otherwise, the information in this profile comes from John Clinton's written witness statement to the Undercover Policing Inquiry (henceforth, the Inquiry). He was not asked to give oral testimony. Documents relating to Clinton released by the Inquiry only cover the period 13 October 1971 to 14 January 1974, so the dates of his deployments into specific IS branches are estimates.
Clinton joined the Metropolitan Police in the mid-1960s and moved to Special Branch near the end of the decade. His pre-SDS role included attending public meetings of left-wing groups, whose literature Special Branch would monitor, but he did so in plain clothes, using an ad hoc fake name if asked to give one rather than an undercover identity.
Clinton wrote that he 'suspect[s] that the directive to set up the SDS came from the Home Secretary himself rather than from someone within Special Branch’. He says that the rumour in Special Branch was that the SDS was set up after pressure was put on the Home Secretary, James Callaghan, to prevent further public disorder on the scale of the March 1968 Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) demonstration. (For more information on the relationship between the SDS and the Home Office see the page on this.
In his witness statement, Clinton sought to justify Special Branch's use of undercover officers by saying they provided more reliable information than could be gained from informants. They also allowed police officers to attend private meetings, 'where you would get a true feel for the level of passion that actually existed, how many people would be attending a demonstration, and whether there was likely to be trouble'.
Clinton says he was tasked by SDS managers Chief Inspector HN1251 Phil Saunders , Detective Inspector HN294 and later Detective Inspector HN3378 Derek Brice.
After an initial instruction to simply infiltrate the IS, subsequent tasking was verbal and would have taken place at the weekly meetings of all undercovers at the SDS safe house. This was a flat, whose location changed from central to south-east London while Clinton was undercover.
Clinton says he had 'considerable discretion as to what I reported on during my deployment within sensible parameters' and 'knew the kinds of things that the MPS would be interested in by reference to the major issues of the day: Ireland, Anti-Vietnam protests, Industrial Disputes’.
He says he never visited Scotland Yard during his deployment, though knew HN103 Dave Smith worked in the SDS back office there. His reports, which Clinton says he wrote by hand, were passed to managers at the safe house, or phoned in if they contained urgent information. In both cases, they would have been typed up in Scotland Yard by a Special Branch typing pool.
He understood the SDS' remit to include countering subversion as well as preventing public disorder and knew his reports would be shared with MI5:
Monitoring and gathering intelligence on subversive groups was one of the key roles of Special Branch. It was always a partnership with the Security Service, who had national responsibility for subversion...
Claiming he witnessed 'a lot of subversive activity' while undercover, Clinton gave as an example IS members joining picket lines during industrial disputes, which was both legal and would not have been considered subversive, even by the broad definition that existed at the time.
Nonetheless, he wrote that, 'During my time on the unit I believe the SDS was... hugely effective in gathering intelligence on subversive groups operating in the UK'.
Recruitment
Aware of the SDS' existence before he joined in early 1971, Clinton says he knew very little about it. He was invited to join by Phil Saunders and remembers he was 'flattered ... as I knew that not many people were selected to join the unit'. There was no interview process – if you were asked to join, you were in, but selection was as often due to factors such as availability and relative inexperience which meant you were less likely to be known as a police officer than as personal attributes.
Training
Clinton was off sick from work for several months after joining the SDS and therefore delayed preparing to go undercover. Once well, he worked in the back office for three to four months, he estimates, to prepare for his assignment before being actively deployed.
Young and single when he joined the SDS, Clinton says no one spoke to him about the potential impact of going undercover, though he understood his assignment would be open-ended and long term. Working for SDS did not increase his salary and he says that any overtime he accrued he took back as leave.
He writes that being an undercover police officer, 'definitely changed me as a person', but does not explain how. As his deployment was terminated at his request, however, one might infer that his experience was not entirely positive.
Clinton recalls that his training, if it could be called that, consisted of reading lots of reports by other undercovers. In contrast to many other undercovers’ recollections, he states that he talked to other contemporaneous undercover officers, who he met regularly outside of Scotland Yard with SDS managers Saunders and HN294 at the weekly safe-house meeting.
He does remember attending a course for Special Branch officers on how to avoid inciting or participating in criminal activity while undercover, but says this was not connected with the SDS. He also recalls that he was told he could ring the SDS office if 'I ever had any issue whilst I was deployed undercover'.
In Clinton's view, SDS officers would have been chosen for their 'common sense and good judgment'. He did not think, 'it would have occurred to SDS management that they would have needed to tell police officers not to have sexual relationships with members of groups they infiltrated', stating, 'It is common sense that you would not do something like that.’ (See the page on undercovers' sexual relationships for more information about this.)
Clinton says he cultivated an image of a flaky and unreliable person to avoid getting close to other activists or being asked to assume positions of responsibility in the branches of IS he infiltrated. Even so, he was able to access and share lots of information and documents about the IS National Committee with his managers at the SDS.
Tradecraft
The majority of the information about how Clinton chose his cover name has been redacted from his witness statement to the Inquiry, but he said he did not use a dead child's identity. He grew his hair longer, cultivated a bushy beard and started wearing 'comradely attire' of an army-surplus jacket, flares and boots, instead of a suit. His fake persona was of a politically engaged but undependable van driver. The SDS provided him with a cover vehicle.
Clinton said the location of the safe house changed from central to south-east London during his deployment. He slept at the SDS safe house in one of those locations for a few weeks before he found a bedsit in Fulham to rent advertised in a newspaper and stayed there regularly, including, he states, after any meetings he attended undercover. He made the bedsit look lived-in, in case anyone visited, which he says they did unexpectedly on a couple of occasions. Clinton acquired a library card in his cover name and did not carry his police warrant card.
Clinton was not tasked to join a specific branch of the International Socialists (IS) but says he eventually decided to infiltrate the Fulham and Hammersmith group and would have been regarded as a member. Reports released by the Inquiry show, however, that Clinton started his infiltration of IS by attending meetings of the Croydon branch between at least October 1971 and March 1972, only then moving onto Fulham and Hammersmith from November 1972 until at least October 1973.
The most important aspect of his reports on both these branches was that he was often able to report on the IS national committee internal discussions, decision-making and documents. Otherwise, his branch reports usually concern small meetings of little consequence.
Clinton thinks the Inquiry does not have a complete set of his reports, which he states he submitted approximately weekly throughout his deployment but which, he wrote, may not all have had his name on them. During an average week, Clinton says he would have attended a couple of evening IS meetings and a weekend demonstration with branch members, as well as spending time at his cover accommodation.
The Inquiry has fewer of Clinton's reports from 1973 onwards but he does not think this reflected an actual decrease in his report writing at the time.
He says he attended lots of demonstrations while undercover, but few of his reports are about them. Explaining this in his witness statement, Clinton says that reports on demonstrations were often compendia of information from many sources and therefore would not have carried his name as the author.
Clinton acknowledges that IS did not set out to cause trouble at the demonstrations they attended and wrote that 'violence would rarely come directly from IS members’. Yet Special Branch continued to report on it, partially using the justification of preventing public disorder.
The majority of Clinton's reports concern national events and issues rather than branch business, which makes it hard to pin down on which dates he infiltrated different local groups. He seems to have been able to access a great deal of documents and information about national IS business via the Croydon and Fulham and Hammersmith branches.
For example, on 23 November 1971 Clinton reported back from the October IS national conference on a split between the main body and the Trotskyist Tendency and included internal position papers from the two sides. An attached minute sheet shows that Clinton and the SDS received praise from Special Branch's Commander of Operations for a 7 December 1971 report on the result of elections for the IS National Committee.
The following report, concerning a special conference in Birmingham on 4 December 1971, explained that a vote had been won to divorce the Trotskyist Tendency (Workers Fight) from the IS and that members had four weeks to decide which organisation they wanted to stay in.
His 18 January 1972 report contains copies of an internal political document and the draft programme for a forthcoming national conference. On 10 March 1972 his report included the IS National Committee's Annual Report for 1971.
Between the end of March and mid-November 1972 all his reports released by the Inquiry are exclusively about national IS business, though it is unclear whether this was because he was directly involved in national committee business or simply received the information through attending branch meetings.
Clinton's final report mentioning the Croydon branch concerns a meeting on 16 March 1972 at which recent Special Branch raids on the homes of four IS members from other branches were discussed. The raids were carried out as part of a wider police operation in response to the IRA car-bombing of Aldershot barracks on 22 February and are also mentioned on in the profiles of HN68 ‘Sean Lynch’ and HN34 Geoff Craft.
Clinton wrote that Croydon IS members 'generally agreed that Special Branch would not be so politically naive or misinformed to suspect IS members and that the incident was simply being exploited by the police so as to gain information on IS members and 'wave a big stick.'
Clinton says he chose to spy on the Fulham and Hammersmith branch of IS because Irish politics were often discussed in it, but with a few notable exceptions his reports hardly mention the subject.
Clinton first comments on the Fulham and Hammersmith branch in a report on 20 November 1972, after which time a handful of reports discuss branch issues until a final one on 24 October 1973, concerning a member who had left to go to Essex university to study a 'very Marxist' postgraduate degree in sociology.
The final report bearing Clinton's name released by the Inquiry was submitted on 14 January 1974 and concerns a rally in support of trade unionists the Shrewsbury 24 held on 17 December 1973. There is no documentary evidence to show what Clinton did between this date and leaving the SDS in September 1974.
Clinton's reports are testament to the breadth of surveillance Special Branch was undertaking. His reports range far beyond the confines of the IS, including references to a wide range of people and organisations active on the left, from trade unions and charities to academics. Clinton says he only reported on other groups' activities if they were discussed at IS meetings or when he met other groups and their members at demonstrations.
He states he did not directly spy on or try to infiltrate any groups except IS. Groups mentioned in his reports include: the Anti-Apartheid Movement ; Black Panther Movement; Clann na h'Eireann ; Anti Internment League ; Women's Liberation Movement; Clerical and Administrative Workers' Union; Rhodesia Emergency Campaign Committee; Amnesty International; and the International Marxist Group among many others.
According to Clinton, his Metropolitan Police personnel file shows that he left the SDS in September 1974. He says he asked to leave the unit as he had, 'just had enough of the life of being an undercover officer', which prevented him having a real personal life. His recollection is that the SDS management happily acceded to his request.
He planned and executed his departure over a few weeks and told the activists he was spying on that he was going travelling. Special Branch found a new posting for him outside of London, in the Ports Squad, which Clinton says was a common destination for ex-SDS undercover officers. He did not take any time off, was not debriefed and did not undergo welfare checks after leaving the unit.
Clinton says he had a long career in Special Branch after leaving the SDS, most of the details of which have been redacted by the Inquiry, though it revealed he worked in C Squad for a short period in the late 1980s. (For an explanation of the different squads see the page on Metropolitan Police Special Branch. ) He asked not to be placed in one role, which he thought carried a risk of exposing his undercover activities, but was overruled. He retired in the mid-1990s at a senior rank.
The MPS applied to restrict the real name of HN343 'John Clinton' on 1 June 2017. On 3 August 2017, Inquiry Chair John Mitting issued a notice that he was 'minded to' restrict Clinton's real name, writing that media interest would be likely to disrupt his work and personal life if his real identity were released. His cover name was published on 8 February 2018.
Mitting held a hearing on the restriction order applications on 21 March 2018 and made a final ruling that Clinton's real name would be restricted on 27 March 2018. Potential intrusive media interest was also cited as the reason Clinton was excused from giving oral evidence.
You can read all the documents referred to above by clicking the Procedural tab in the Documents section of this profile.