HN24 Stephen Beels was born in October 1957. He was a Special Branch officer from 1982 until its closure in 2008. He was an SDS back office and cover officer for controversial undercover officers HN104 Carlo Soracchi ('Carlo Neri’) and HN18 Robert Hastings ('Rob Harrison’), both of whom had sexual relationships under his supervision.
Immediately after retirement, he worked in the private security industry, including for a short-lived but controversial corporate intelligence firm, C2i/Lynceus. Beels then formed his own companies.
On 2nd July 2026, Beels appeared before the Inquiry. This profile was published on that day; a further update will follow.
Stephen Beels joined the Metropolitan Police in October 1977 and transferred to Special Branch in 1982. Before joining the SDS, he served on C Squad and the Public Order Desk, where he regularly received SDS intelligence to assist in public order threat assessments.
He recalled that intelligence identified as coming from the SDS carried authority because it 'would give it more value and credibility', although the identities of undercover officers remained protected by the unit's strict need-to-know culture. He also recalls that, even after joining the SDS, he could not discuss his work with his wife, despite her own service in the Special Branch.
In 1992, as a Detective Sergeant, Beels participated in the arrest of Michael Smith, who was convicted of 'communicating material to another for a purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the State'. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Christopher Andrew, in his history of the KGB, assessed Michael Smith as one of the Soviet Union's most important spies (after the Cambridge spy ring).
The SDS section of the profile is based on the few documents published before - and on the day of Beels’ hearing on 2nd July 2026. A further update will follow. This focuses on just four of the main issues of Beels’ evidence. There are many others - including those raised on the day of his testimony.
Beels joined the SDS as a cover officer in 2001. His primary responsibilities included supervising undercover officers, compiling intelligence reports, conducting debriefings, maintaining officer welfare, testing cover legends, and acting as the primary point of contact between deployed officers and SDS management.
He described himself as 'a safe pair of hands, ' responsible for supporting officers while ensuring intelligence was handled properly. According to Beels, cover officers also accompanied officers on overseas deployments, maintained regular contact with officers' partners, and expected deployed officers to telephone the SDS office twice daily.
According to Beels, the SDS existed to gather intelligence on groups capable of causing serious public disorder and politically motivated criminality. Despite the Cold War being long over, he believed the unit's practical purpose remained unchanged since then.
Beels explained how intelligence was assessed before dissemination. supervisors reviewed reports for reliability, context, and operational value before they were circulated to Special Branch 'customers'. He describes himself as the principal intermediary within this process.
Issue 1: Carlo Soracchi, cover officer, and the trip to Italy
HN104 Carlo Soracchi ('Carlo Neri’) had three relationships in his cover name. One of these women, known as ‘Lindsey’, gave evidence about a trip she believed at the time was a romantic holiday with Carlo Soracchi, 17–19 December 2001. Lindsey did not know that Stephen Beels was accompanying them. Ostensibly, he was Soracchi’s cover officer.
However, the trip was not one of political reconnaissance, but instead, as she states, a fake ‘romantic’ holiday that Carlo took her on at the taxpayers’ expense to Venice. Soracchi pretended that it was to meet Socialist Party contacts in Italy. Lindsey was adamant that no such meetings took place. Beels, although supposedly there to support Soracchi on this supposed surveillance, is established to have stayed in Verona.
Beels was supervising the fake holiday, albeit remotely from Verona.
Lindsey explains that during the holiday, Soracchi disappeared to make a mobile phone call. At the time, she assumed he was speaking to a friend in England. Since learning of the SDS, she has contacted the friends she thought he might have been calling, and none recalls receiving a call. She now believes he was speaking to Beels instead.
Lindsey reminded the Inquiry that international mobile calls were expensive in 2001, though it was an inference rather than something she could prove, but says it 'makes complete sense' to her that Soracchi had taken the opportunity to speak privately to his cover officer while she was temporarily separated from him. She added that the person at the other end of the call clearly knew who 'she' was, because Soracchi referred to her only as 'she', without using her name.
How HN104 managed to take ‘Lindsey’ on a 3-day romantic trip without the knowledge of the rest of SDS management, including Beels, raises many questions. Not least around either the competence or corruption of his supervising officers.
Questions have been raised during the Inquiry about whether Beels, as well as Soracchi, were in fact just indulging in holidays paid for out of the police budget.
Beel's own testimony in his interview with ‘Operation Herne’ makes it difficult to understand how Soracchi’s deception went undetected, as he said that overseas travel required authorisation at the Commander level.
Issue 2: Soracchi, Donna McLean and the fake rent book
Donna McLean, a second woman with whom Soracchi had an additional deceptive and abusive relationship, also gave evidence during the Inquiry. During part of this relationship, he in fact shared a one-bedroom flat with Donna. Donna said that although he occasionally contributed financially and lavished her with gifts, he never paid regular rent. A rent book recovered by the Inquiry showed that he claimed £685. For rent.
The rent book also had a ‘fake’ signature of Donna’s landlord (who lives abroad, making it impossible for him to sign). As well as raising the question of how HN104 cohabited with Donna without Beels' or more senior managers' knowledge, it seems to indicate that he was committing fraud. In testimony on 1 July 2026, senior SDS officer Mike Dell suggested that the fake rent book may not have been solely Soracchi's invention but rather a joint enterprise with other SDS officers, including Beels.
Issue 3: HN18 Rob Harrison arrest & the closure of the SDS
The arrest of former undercover officer and convicted domestic abuser HN18 Rob Hastings (‘Rob Harrison’) during the 2005 Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEi) protests at the ExCeL Centre in London's Docklands became one of the most significant operational incidents of Beels' time in the SDS. Hastings identifies Beels as his cover officer and recalls speaking to him before the protest, given the recognised risk of arrest. According to Hastings, Beels advised that, if arrested, he should maintain his cover identity.
Hastings recalled Beels 'was the duty officer over the weekend'. Beels later explained that he did not believe Hastings' arrest had been anticipated and recalled being criticised by Detective Superintendent HN314 Julian McKinney for delaying the notification of senior management while DI HN72 was on leave. He believed the incident was subsequently used as 'an opportunity to undermine the SDS', suggesting that what began as an operational issue became a wider management dispute.
Issue 4: Criticism of the new SDS management
Following the merger of SO12 (Special Branch) and SO13 (Anti-Terrorist), senior officers from outside Special Branch were brought in to manage the Special Demonstration Squad.
Beels recalls joining what he regarded as a prestigious unit, but upon arrival, he said standards began to decline rapidly and significantly. He attributes this deterioration to the 'very poor’ and ‘aloof’ management of DCI HN275 Frankie Flood and Superintendent Julian McKinney. In contrast, Beels is generally uncritical of other SDS officers.
Stephen Beels retired from the Special Demonstration Squad in January 2008. Within a month, in February 2008, he was Head of Business Intelligence for Lynceus Consultants', formerly C2i International, a private security and intelligence company.
When Stephen Beels joined C2i International in February 2008, he succeeded Rebecca Todd as Head of Intelligence, overseeing the company's intelligence function during the transition from C2i International to Lynceus. Company documents show that the department combines Technical Surveillance Countermeasures (TSCM) with the ‘Corporate Threat' capability.
This included intelligence-led monitoring of campaign groups, strategic and tactical assessments, client-specific threat assessments, real-time reporting from demonstrations and activist profiling for corporate clients. Internal proposals repeatedly referred to monitoring 'domestic extremist' activity, reflecting terminology then widely used by Association Chief Police Officers and police domestic extremism units, like the National Public Order Intelligence Unit.
Notably, other Special Branch officers, such as Wilf Knight , also worked with C2i/Lynceus.
At C2i, Beels was both 'Toby Kendall's and 'Rebecca Todd's manager. Toby Kendall was best known for infiltrating Plane Stupid and subsequently exposing it. Similarly, Rebecca Todd infiltrated radical activist groups, including Rising Tide, and was later exposed. Todd left shortly after Beels' arrival, possibly due to Kendall's outing as a corporate spy in the media, as she was his line manager and may have taken the blame for the embarrassment of his exposure, which was nicknamed 'kengate' within Lynceus.
Beels was also the author of several pitches to corporate clients, including E.on, Porsche and Canary Wharf PLC. In April 2009, it was revealed that police had been passing information on protesters to E.on. It has never been established that C2i International won a contract with E.on, but it is known that a former C2i employee, Rebecca Todd, conducted intelligence gathering for E.on through her own company, Vericola.
Beels' and Todd's employment overlapped, with Beels seemingly taking over her role as the writer of corporate threat proposals (sales pitches) to corporations that were faced with political campaigns against them after she left the company in April or May 2008. The Guardian revealed in December 2017 that Porsche had accepted the proposal. Notably, Beels' proposals (unlike Todd's) always contained a guarantee to clients that no laws would be broken, and C2i employees would not act as 'agent provocateurs', though his former colleagues at 'Special Branch ' within the 'Special Demonstration Squad ' did both on occasion.
As head of business intelligence, he also oversaw Technical Surveillance Countermeasures Contracts (bug sweeps). Beels was still working for C2i International (by then known as Lynceus) in 2010, when he was quoted in a Times newspaper article regarding the bugging of international football teams.
Perhaps because of the negative association with a company that went out of business and the negative publicity surrounding the Toby Kendall incident, Beels' time at C2i/Lynceus does not appear on his LinkedIn profile.
Beels went on to a number of other roles in the security sector. All the information below can be found on his LinkedIn profile. Between 2011 and 2018, Beels was the Owner and Director of SLB Consultants. They provided: 'advice on international police and criminal justice capacity-building, investigations, background screening, reputational due diligence, open source intelligence (OSINT), probate, asset and genealogy research'.
Between June 2012 and February 2016, he was a police advisor for Adam Smith International. An organisation that was criticised for using UK government money to pursue a free-market agenda in developing countries and was stripped of its contracts in March 2017 for unethical practices.
Between 2015 and 2017, he was the lead investigator for Valkyrie Investigations. Valkyrie is a consulting firm that provides cyber and physical security risk management, crisis management, in-depth due diligence, investigations, and penetration testing.
Founded in 2018, Auxilia Consultancy is a Brighton-based company. Stephen Beels is a director. It describes itself as a ‘bespoke security consultant and offers: background checks, due diligence, security advice and investigations.
In 2019, Beels won an award for Auxilia’s work in containing elephant and rhino poaching. Beels’ consultancy work is often based in Africa, including Tanzania and Somaliland.
Several ex-Special Branch officers have given Beels recommendations on his LinkedIn Profile. The most notable being ex-'Special Demonstration Squad ' manual author and former Peterborough Tory councillor HN2 Andrew Coles (Andy Davey’) who is also known to have had a sexual relationship with ’Jessica ’.
Between January and May 2017, Beels worked as Investigations & Security Advisor to the League Against Cruel Sports. According to his LinkedIn profile, he advised trustees, employees, and stakeholders during a period of credible threats from criminal elements, developing security strategies, tactical plans, and security awareness training.
Between November 2018 and January 2026, Beels worked as an Independent Physical Security Auditor. His LinkedIn profile states that he conducted more than six hundred physical security assessments, audits, and reviews at corporate headquarters, data centres, financial institutions, and national infrastructure sites in the UK and internationally.
Alongside these roles, Beels continued to work as an independent security consultant, carrying out physical security assessments, investigations, and intelligence training. This included delivering criminal investigation and intelligence training in Somaliland at an investigation centre funded by the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office.
In May 2025, Beels launched Integrated Physical Security Review Methodology, which he describes as a proprietary framework for structured physical security reviews, available under licence through his own organisation.
On 30 July 2018, it was decided that Beels' real name was going to be published as the application was not pursued.
On 24 April, Mitting said he was minded to refuse the application to restrict the release of HN24's real name, on the grounds that the public interest outweighed any privacy concerns. However, he said part of his evidence will have to be given in closed session, for their protection.
Beels gave live evidence to the Inquiry on 2 July 2026 - the content of which will be integrated into an updated version of this profile.
