HN340 ‘Andy Bailey’ was born in the 1940s. He joined the Metropolitan Police in the late 1950s and applied to work in Special Branch in the mid-1960s. He was recruited to the SDS in late 1969 by HN1251 Phil Saunders, spending several months in the SDS back office before being deployed in July 1970.
Bailey says he was not tasked to infiltrate a specific group, but started attending meetings of the International Marxist Group-run North London Red Circle. He also spied on the Irish Civil Rights Solidarity Campaign (ICRSC) and, in October 1970, attended the founding conference of its successor organisation, the Irish Solidarity Campaign (ISC). Bailey co-wrote a report on the event with fellow undercover HN68 ‘Sean Lynch’.
He regularly attended meetings of both the Red Circle and ISC until he was withdrawn from his deployment for his own safety in June or July 1972. Bailey says this was prompted by him reporting to SDS managers that the landlady of his cover accommodation had overheard someone with an Irish accent threatening him when she took a phone message for him.
After a few weeks working in the SDS back office he left the squad some time after 1 September 1972. Bailey says he left SDS in March or April 1973, but there is no corroborating evidence for this.
Unless otherwise indicated, the information below is taken from the first witness statement and oral testimony of HN340 ‘Andy Bailey’. In his witness statement to the Inquiry, Bailey said he thought a large number of his SDS reports had not been released: ‘There is a significant quantity of information which is not present that I would have provided at the time.’
Bailey joined Special Branch as a detective constable in the mid-1960s and his postings included C Squad; for an explanation of the different squads see the page on Metropolitan Police Special Branch. As Special Branch operated on a ‘need to know’ basis, Bailey said he was unaware of ‘the hairies’, a colloquial term for the SDS until late 1969, until shortly before he was recruited into the unit.
Other undercover officers, for example HN339 ‘Stewart Goodman’ , have given evidence that the existence of the SDS was in fact an open secret in Special Branch.
Already married when he joined the SDS, Bailey says he did not discuss his work with his wife, beyond saying he would be doing more work in the evenings and weekends and she did not ask for more information. He said he had no idea how long his deployment might last.
The SDS rented a flat in west London where undercovers went most afternoons, to type up their reports, discuss issues arising from their deployments with managers and relax. Once he was undercover, Bailey says he never went to Scotland Yard.
Special Branch’s need-to-know approach to information-sharing persisted in the SDS flat, according to Bailey, where he claims undercovers did not share details of their deployments with each other. This seems odd given both the overlap between different groups' activities and the potential benefits of information-sharing.
He says he was afforded ‘significant discretion’ in his undercover work, but was instructed to follow a specific course of action on two occasions.
The first was when he was ordered to attend the Red Europe conference in Brussels on 22 November 1970 and the second was to repeatedly decline the IMG’s invitation to become a member in 1972, which he thinks may have have contributed to his cover breaking down. Neither of these events are mentioned in reports published by the Inquiry.
In his witness statement and oral testimony Bailey stated that while in the SDS he suffered migraines and nosebleeds, which with hindsight he ascribed to the stress of undercover work. He did not ask for or receive any welfare support to manage this stress.
Recruitment
Bailey was invited to join the unit in a superficially casual way by SDS boss HN1251 Phil Saunders who he knew from a previous posting in the mid-1960s. He says Saunders stopped him in a corridor in Scotland Yard and asked him if he wanted to join ‘the hairies’.
After a chat in which Saunders explained the undercover work was to gather intelligence on demonstrations and the groups that took part in them and that it would involve irregular working patterns, Bailey joined.
It sounded like interesting work that would make the job of our uniform colleagues easier and so I agreed without much question.
Bailey thinks Saunders’ decision to ask him to join the squad was unlikely to have been as casual as it appeared: ‘Knowing him, it would not have been a one-off decision. He would have had chats with people and canvassed opinion from people who knew me.’
Training
Bailey says he was given no training or ethical guidance other than being told to ‘play it by ear’ by fellow undercover HN135 Mike Ferguson , who also advised him to arrange a cover job, accommodation and name.
During his time at SDS, Bailey said, officers were ‘trusted... to use our common sense and good judgement, reinforced by our previous police training'. He added:
As far as I was aware, nothing had gone wrong in previous deployments, and so there was no perceived need for additional training.
In fact things had ‘gone wrong’ just as Bailey was starting his deployment, with HN68 ‘Sean Lynch’ becoming the SDS’ first undercover officer to be convicted under a fake name, therefore misleading the court. This appears not to have prompted any additional training.
Tradecraft
HN340 was advised to arrange cover accommodation and employment and a false name. He initially gave evidence that his cover name might have been ‘Alan Nixon’ or ‘Andy Bailey’ but, after looking at written evidence, said he thought it was more likely he had used Bailey as his false identity.
Bailey rented a bedsit near Highgate tube station in north London which he visited at least once a week but ‘very rarely’ slept at. His cover employment was as a sales rep for a small shop in Walthamstow. He visited the shop in his undercover identity but never did any work there.
He used a van rented by the SDS as a prop for this job, putting some appropriate equipment in the back, though he says he did not give other activists lifts. He does not think he had any documents, such as a driving licence, made in his fake name. He grew his hair and a beard and stopped wearing suits to change his appearance.
Bailey was a sports enthusiast in his real life and continued to compete in public sporting competitions under his real name. His managers knew about this and sometimes refused him permission to enter these events, because they were worried about the potential for his cover to be blown.
Bailey infiltrated IMG discussion group, the North London Red Circle and reported on the Irish Civil Rights Solidarity Campaign (ICRSC) which later became the Irish Solidarity Campaign (ISC). Arguing he would have attended its events as a representative of his Red Circle group, Bailey’s dozens of reports on the ICRSC/ISC show him to have been closely involved in its activities and being present at at least one meeting of its national executive committee.
Beyond these two groups, Bailey reported on a film screening organised by the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign on 12 September 1970 and a public meeting of the International Socialists on 28 February 1972.
Bizarrely, he also attended the 1970 Isle of Wight music festival where, he complained in his witness statement, Jimi Hendrix’s guitar playing kept him awake. He did not explain why the SDS had thought it important to send an undercover officer to a rock festival and expressed surprise that no written report on this event had been disclosed to the Inquiry.
More seriously, Bailey’s reports discussed Bernadette Devlin, then MP for mid-Ulster, a leading Irish Republican campaigner and joint president, until April 1971, of the ISC.
During Bailey’s oral testimony, the Counsel to the Inquiry pointed out that the reports mentioning Devlin did not list a corresponding Special Branch registry file number for her name that would have indicated the Metropolitan Police was keeping an intelligence file on her. This was significant because the Special Branch was not supposed to gather intelligence on MPs.
North London Red Circle (NLRC)
Bailey claims he started attending meetings of the North London Red Circle (NLRC) on the advice of Tariq Ali, who he approached after a public IMG meeting at Conway Hall. Reports by Bailey on the NLRC released by the Inquiry cover the period 24 July 1970 to 4 April 1972. He says he would have been regarded as a member.
NRLC was a small, open discussion group associated with the IMG. In Bailey’s assessment, ‘it was not in the nature of the North London Red Circle to engage in truly subversive activity, however much they talked about revolution’. He therefore sought to justify the contents of his reports in terms of their use to policing public disorder, though the NLRC participated in very little of this either.
Bailey attended meetings, which were held in the IMG office on Pentonville Road, King’s Cross, north London until March 1971, thereafter in various Islington pubs, at which leading IMG members such as Gery Lawless and Tariq Ali would occasionally appear.
As a core participant in the Inquiry, Tariq Ali was asked if he remembered Andy Bailey, but wrote that without being provided with a contemporaneous photograph or a copy of Bailey’s witness statement, it was very hard to say. Shortly after Bailey started his deployment, the NLRC decided to affiliate with the ICRSC in a meeting on 25 August 1970.
Bailey also sold the IMG journal Red Mole at Archway tube station and occasionally went on marches with members at weekends. At one point, he says, he became the Red Circle’s tea-club secretary in order to find out members' surnames but otherwise kept his distance as his cover identity was too flimsy to withstand much scrutiny.
In his witness statement, Bailey wrote: ‘The North London Red Circle, for all its revolutionary posturing, was a talking shop which passively supported revolution rather than contributing to it actively. Violence would have been the last thing on many of their minds.’
Red Europe conference
Bailey was tasked to attend the Red Europe conference in Belgium in November 1970 by SDS managers. No reports from the conference authored by Bailey have been released by the Inquiry but he discussed it in his witness statement and was asked about it during his oral evidence. He says it was easy to arrange – an ‘IMG representative’ asked for volunteers to attend from the Red Circle and he and two other members simply put their hands up.
He was issued with a temporary passport in his cover name and travelled by coach to Brussels via the Port of Dover where he worried that the Special Branch officer on duty would recognise him: Special Branch’s Ports Squad placed officers at all ports of entry to the UK.
As the whole of Special Branch contained about 300 officers and they rotated through placements in different squads it was plausible that the officer, who Bailey recognised but did not know, would also have recognised him.
Bailey says he does not remember much about the conference other than he slept in a hall with other activists. He was not the only undercover sent to infiltrate the conference.
HN326 ‘Doug Edwards’ , who had infiltrated the Independent Labour Party (ILP) , took the same coach from the UK to Brussels and discovered that the passports issued to him and Bailey had consecutive serial numbers.
In his witness statement to the Inquiry Edwards described the SDS’ organisation of his trip to Brussels as ‘amateurish’. Commenting on Edwards’ view, Bailey wrote: ‘I do not share the security concerns that HN326 raises, even though it was a particularly stressful occasion.’
Irish Civil Rights Solidarity Campaign/Irish Solidarity Campaign
On 18 September 1970, less than a month after the NLRC agreed to affiliate with the ICRSC, Bailey submitted his first report on its Islington branch, having attended a meeting in a private house.
The Islington ICRSC had previously been infiltrated by HN135 Mike Ferguson from July 1969 to May 1970. Bailey said in his oral testimony that he could hardly remember anything about the ICRSC/ICS but had the groups been directly involved in violent activities he thought he would have remembered that.
In ISC reports after 13 October 1971 Bailey’s cover name is listed as one of the participants in the meeting, alongside ISC activists, and his reports are signed by a manager instead of him. This appears to have been part of an erratically applied strategy to protect undercover officers’ identities even within the reports they made. Bailey’s contemporaneous reports on the NLRC, however, continued to be signed by him.
Referring to this in his written evidence, Bailey could not explain the change in reporting style, stating that it could have been a security measure to further protect his undercover identity or simply because of a change in administrative processes in the SDS back office.
Bailey was one of the six delegates from the ICRSC Islington branch who attended the founding conference of its successor organisation, the ISC, in Birmingham on 10-11 October 1970. Bailey and HN68 ‘Sean Lynch’ , who had infiltrated a London branch of Sinn Fein , submitted a long and detailed joint report on the conference, for which they were praised for their insightful analysis.
The conference and Bailey and Lynch’s report on it are discussed further in Lynch’s profile. Bailey also reported on one meeting of the ISC’s national executive committee held on 6 December 1970.
On 12 October 1970, the Islington ICRSC met and voted to rename itself the Central London ISC. Lynch attended one of the new Central London ISC’s first meetings at the Earl Russell pub in St Pancras on 29 October , but subsequent reports show that Bailey attended later meetings alone. The ISC was dominated by the IMG; its members included leading IMG activists Bob Purdie and Gery Lawless.
Issues discussed at Central London ISC branch meetings included affiliating with other groups, organising marches and pickets, campaigning for the release of political prisoners, developments in Irish Republican politics, and various actions of the Official or Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), such as the former’s February 1972 bombing of the Aldershot army barracks.
A few of Bailey’s reports on ISC meetings record debates on whether it was a revolutionary duty to support the IRA’s fight against British imperialism, including the use of violence on the British mainland. In his written statement, however, Bailey said that he had never come across any evidence that the ISC was itself a violent organisation.
One incident where Bailey says he suspected the ISC might have been involved in violence was mentioned in his written evidence, although the incident he described in fact had nothing to do with the group.
He writes that he had been at an ISC social very close to the Post Office Tower a few hours before it was bombed at 4.30am on 31 October 1971 and was contacted by Special Branch the following day to provide details of who had been at the event in case there was a link.
There is no evidence, however, that anyone from the ISC was questioned over the matter as a result of his intelligence, and anarchist group The Angry Brigade later claimed responsibility. No reports were released by the Inquiry relating to the ISC social on 30 October that Bailey says he attended.
In addition to reporting on ISC meetings, in November 1970 Bailey helped to identify members of the ISC from photographs of an ISC meeting in Nottinghamshire forwarded by the local constabulary.
Another short report of his from 23 December 1970 concerning the employment details of a member of the ISC and North London Red Circle, was released to the Inquiry by MI5, possibly indicating that it stemmed from a request from the Security Service for specific information about an individual.
Bailey, however, claims he did not know that his reports were copied to the Security Service and that he had no contact with MI5. An alternative explanation could be that Bailey was asked to gather employment information as part of the creation of a Special Branch reference file on the individual.
A report on a well-attended ISC meeting on 22 March 1972 contained discussion on recent police raids on the homes of current and former ISC members. Commenting on this in his written evidence, Bailey stated he did not know whether the raids were as a result of his reporting.
It is likely that these raids were part of the police response to the Aldershot barracks bombing by the Official IRA on 22 February 1972, which killed six people. Bailey’s report on an ISC meeting on 25 February had noted expressions of support for the Official IRA.
According to later SDS manager HN34 Geoff Craft , the unit supplied information which contributed to the conviction of Official IRA member Noel Jenkinson for the attack.
The last report from Bailey’s deployment is dated 23 June 1972. It accompanied a copy of the ISC News, in which minutes were reproduced from a recent national executive committee that revealed plans for the ISC to merge with the Anti-Internment League (AIL).
One further report dated 1 September 1972 and signed by Bailey was released by the Inquiry. Bailey wrote in his witness statement that the report, which gives information on a female ISC member, was ‘clearly written’ after his deployment had ended, when he says he was working in the SDS back office.
Bailey’s deployment ended suddenly around the beginning of July 1972 after the landlady of his cover address told him about a troubling phone call she had received from someone with an Irish accent. Bailey explained in his witness statement: ‘My landlady had told the caller that I was not in, but then overheard him say to somebody else: "He’s not there at the minute, but we’ll get the bastard", or words to that effect.’
After reporting this to SDS managers, Bailey was immediately withdrawn for his own safety. He did not have time to prepare an exit story, so just disappeared from meetings. He described his withdrawal from deployment having been, effectively, a ‘midnight flit’. He added that HN326 ‘Doug Edwards’ erroneously claimed that Bailey had been ‘outed’ as a police officer in his evidence to the Inquiry.
Bailey’s evidence on this is partially redacted but the alleged ‘outing’ concerned suspicions that Bailey had been identified after competing in a public sporting event. He says this was around the same time as his landlady received the troubling phone call that contributed to the decision to end his deployment. Bailey was denied permission to compete in further sports events after his deployment ended in order to protect his cover identity and, he says, ‘the SDS and [Special Branch]’.
An alternative explanation for why activists may have become suspicious about his identity was that Bailey repeatedly refused invitations to join the IMG, on the instructions of his managers.
‘The height of the naivety was that they wanted me to stay involved on the fringes of the IMG even though I was not joining them,’ Bailey explained in his witness statement. ‘It was the beginning of the end of my deployment as it resulted in people starting to question me and my background: I had no back-story to speak of and so this became awkward very quickly.’
Bailey gave evidence that he ‘believe[d] that my chain of command was concerned that my joining the IMG could potentially interfere with the political process in a way which was inconsistent with my role as a police officer’. In fact, it is more likely that it was because the IMG had already been infiltrated by other officers, such as HN338 and HN299/342 ‘David Hughes’.
After his deployment ended, Bailey worked in the SDS back office, which was unusual for a former undercover, until he moved to a different Special Branch squad.
Immediately after leaving SDS Bailey says he was moved to another Special Branch squad that was not involved in gathering intelligence or monitoring ‘domestic extremism’ and therefore falls outside of the Inquiry’s remit so no details have been provided.
He retired in the late 1980s, on grounds of ill health, at the rank of detective sergeant. Bailey has not worked in paid employment since leaving the police but says he has had a number of voluntary roles.
On 29 November 2017, lawyers for the Metropolitan Police made an application to restrict the real name of HN340 ‘Andy Bailey’. Inquiry Chair John Mitting indicated his inclination to grant their request in a Minded-To notice on 15 January 2018.
No application was made to restrict his cover name, which was published on 26 June 2018. HN340 ‘Andy Bailey’ made a witness statement on 10 July 2019, which was published on 16 November 2020, the same day that he gave oral testimony to the Inquiry.
You can find the the documents mentioned in this page via the Procedural tab of this profile.