Fredericks was born in the 1940s. He joined the Metropolitan Police in the mid-1960s and Special Branch in 1970 or 1971. In 1971 he was a member of the SDS for less than a year before being removed and asked to undertake a psychiatric assessment, though he disputes the reasons for his removal. He then continued working within Special Branch until at least 1972.
Describing himself in his witness statement as being of ‘mixed heritage’, in the SDS he was tasked with infiltrating Black Power groups and others relating to Bangladeshi independence, as the Bangladeshi Liberation War with Pakistan was then taking place.
Fredericks' most controversial statement during his live witness testimony to the Inquiry came responded to questioning about sexual relationships that many undercover officers formed with members of their target groups. He replied that, like undercover drug-squad officers, it would only be natural for SDS undercovers to 'sample the product'. Fredericks also admitted contacting a woman he met during his deployment years after he had left the Metropolitan Police.
Unless otherwise noted, the information in this profile comes from Fredericks’ written witness statement and oral testimony to the Undercover Policing Inquiry.
Fredericks is a notable exception in accounts of officer recruitment for the Tranche One period of 1968-1982; he had been working undercover in the Metropolitan Police before joining Special Branch. His written statement glossed over this role as 'street crime' but it seems to have involved hanging around in pubs and other venues.
There, Fredericks encountered people involved in anti-apartheid, Black Power and Ireland-related protests and reported back on them. This led to several informal meetings with interested Special Branch officers, including HN294 , who was an SDS detective sergeant between 1968 and 1969 and an inspector between 1971 and 1973. In his written statement, Fredericks commented:
My [pre-Special Branch] undercover work showed I had an aptitude for getting into places that I should not be. I was a sociable person and would meet all sorts of people while undercover, including artists and singers. I would find things out by-the-by about Black Power groups and the Stop the Tour movement just from the kind of people that I was associating with.
Fredericks claimed Special Branch headhunted him. In contrast, all other officers stated they applied to join Special Branch on their own initiative.
In his written statement, Fredericks explained clearly his developing relationship with Special Branch and recruitment into the SDS. In his oral testimony, however, he conceded that his recollection of these 50-year-old events was far from faultless.
Having come to Special Branch attention, Fredericks says he met four or five of its managers in a pub, including HN1251 Phil Saunders , who was an SDS inspector in 1968-1969 and chief inspector in 1970-1971. They recruited him to C Squad , which dealt with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), Trotskyists and anarchists.
Based on his witness statement, Fredericks can only have been on C Squad for a year at the most when he was asked to join the SDS. He said he was invited to a meeting with Ken Pendered, a senior officer in Special Branch who was a chief superintendent in 1972 and later became commander. Fredericks explained:
He showed me a folder with a letter in it from the Security Services [and] told me not many people with my short service record got a commendation from MI5.... It was suggested to me that I join the SDS and that I would be given a new name and false address. I agreed because I found undercover work interesting, and I was pleased to have been singled out.
If accurate, Fredericks' recollection of events reveals that, unusually, MI5 had a role in his recruitment to the SDS. As with many of Fredericks’ claims, however, there is no corroborating evidence.
In his witness statement, Fredericks explained that he would have authored far more reports than the Inquiry found in his name: 'I would expect there to be at least one report for every meeting of significance that I attended.'
The earliest report that mentions Fredericks is dated 17 February 1971. The author, whose name is redacted, wrote about having attended a Socialist Labour League rally at Alexandra Palace with Fredericks.
The next of Fredericks’ documents released by the Inquiry is from two months later, underlining large gaps in his disclosed reports. Dated 15 April 1971, it concerns Abhimanyu Manchanda who, as the report states, was the founder of various Maoist groups including the Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist League and the Britain Vietnam Solidarity Front , of which he was secretary.
Manchanda and his then partner Diane Langford were among the SDS' main targets in 1968-1973 and Langford was a core participant in the Inquiry. The report is an update on Manchanda’s movements and activities, including trips abroad to Algiers and France in 1969 and 1970.
In 1971, several SDS undercovers – HN45 Dave Robertson , HN346 Jill Mosdell and HN348 'Sandra Davies' – spied on groups associated with Manchanda, and with Langford who made witness statements to the Inquiry.
Fredericks' name appeared on a poster-parade report, dated the following day; 16 April 1971. 'Poster parade' is what Special Branch called reports on demonstrations that routinely noted details of banners and placards. This report covered a public meeting on the Vietnam war at the Laurel Tree pub, Camden, north-west London. Speakers included Gerry Lawless and Tariq Ali, two activists who featured frequently in SDS reports.
Fredericks' SDS deployment was extremely short – around six months. The Inquiry's timeline of officer deployments obscures his precise dates but gives them as some time between March and December 1971. However, Fredericks signed two non-SDS Special Branch reports in April 1971, which suggests he started his deployment in May at the earliest.
His evidence was marked by uncertainty about the groups he monitored and some conflicts between his written and oral evidence. This is not unique to Fredericks, but he explained his removal from the SDS and interactions with several individuals, giving unconvincing anecdotes of Cold War intrigue that could not be fact-checked.
Adding to difficulties verifying Fredericks' evidence, the Inquiry published just five reports connected to him, dating between February and September 1971. Of these, only two were from his brief deployment in the SDS. Both concern the Black Defence Committee , an offshoot of the International Marxist Group (IMG) , one of the earliest targets for the SDS.
Tradecraft
Fredericks was one of two SDS officers to use a false name and persona they had established before joining the SDS. The other was HN344 'Ian Cameron' , who had already infiltrated the Northern Minority Defence Force while working in B Squad. Fredericks' pretend employment was as a delivery driver for a car dealership.
Other than that, Fredericks wrote, his cover story was thin. He said he had little training or knowledge about how to operate as an undercover. With no false documents in his cover name, Fredericks knew not to carry his police warrant card with him only from his previous undercover experience:
Operations were not sophisticated in those days. The SDS was in a hurry to get the ball rolling. Everything happened in a muddle with maximum trust.
He described his undercover appearance as: 'longish hair (as many had in the 1960s), a beard, and Che Guevara moustache, again much like everyone else then’. His accommodation was a bedsit at 9 Disraeli Road W5, off Ealing Common in west London.
Road-traffic accident
Discussing a road-traffic accident that occured while he was deployed undercover, Fredericks recalled that another car had driven into him and damaged his car. In his oral testimony, he explained that he felt obliged to report the accident due to his early police training. When Fredericks refused to give his police identity card to the officer at the station, however, they became suspicious, putting him in danger of being detained.
Fredericks said he then called an 'emergency number' he had been given, which he 'had pencilled in the lining of my jacket.' It seems that Fredericks' boss, HN1251 Phil Saunders , who intervened in at least three other incidents involving the arrest of SDS officers, stepped in to ensure there were no further repercussions for Fredericks or the SDS.
Racism
Fredericks identified as being of 'gist: mixed heritage’ in his statement yet said he never encountered racism during his time in the SDS. During the Inquiry hearings, Rajiv Menon KC asked Fredericks whether his 'mixed heritage' was more visible during his time with the SDS than currently, implying that Fredericks might now pass for white.
Replying that a 'preoccupation with racial origin is a more recent phenomenon', Fredericks conceded that he was possibly the only non-white officer in Special Branch at the time. Despite this, he maintained that he had never experienced racism himself or even heard another officer making racist comments.
Fredericks' attitude to racism was also illustrated by him drawing an equivalence between the views of the overtly fascist and racist National Front and the Black Power movement. ‘The Black Power movement was… advocating for the independence of Brixton from the rest of London. The National Front was in favour of this too, which sounds like a strange alliance until you realise it effectively amounted to segregation’, he remarked. ‘It was a time of political change’, he added.
Fredericks stated that alongside Black Power organisations, groups campaigning for Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan were his main target. As previously mentioned, no Special Branch intelligence reports were found by the Inquiry, leaving only Fredericks' uncorroborated account. In the SDS' 1971 Annual Report , however, 'Action Bangla-desh' is listed as one of the groups penetrated, something also mentioned in the Special Branch Annual Report of that year.
Black Defence Committee
The only two reports by Fredericks from his time in the SDS released by the Inquiry were both about the Black Defence Committee (BDC). Dating from September 1971, there is a gap of five months between these and the previous two reports bearing Fredericks' name.
The first report , dated 16 September 1971, concerns a BDC meeting addressed by Carl Brecker, described as a 'coloured South African student' who recounted his first-hand experiences of South African apartheid. The listing of a code by Brecker’s name shows that there was already a Special Branch registry file for him.
The second report concerns a small BDC meeting at the George IV pub in Islington, north London on 24 September 1971 at which a left-wing lawyer, Michael Seifert, addressed attendees on the international solidarity campaign for jailed US Black Panther Angela Davis.
The only other report on the BDC published by the Inquiry is dated 13 December 1971 and does not mention Fredericks' name. This could mean he had been removed by then and replaced by the report's author, HN338. The latter had already started reporting on groups associated with the BDC's parent organisation, the IMG, from 12 May 1971.
Operation Omega and Action Bangladesh
Operation Omega and its sub-group Action Bangladesh were part of a campaign by War Resisters International, an internationalist pacifist group founded in 1921 that still exists today. They launched in response to military intervention by the Pakistani government to stop the secession of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, resulting in a devastating war from March to December 1971.
Fredericks gave the Inquiry the names of the group's main organisers, all redacted, in his evidence. He described their motivations and actions and recalled the group met in a private house in Camden Town, north-west London. He was doubtful of the group’s name, which he could not remember, saying: 'Action Bangla Desh I think relates to a larger, better-organised campaign than this group.’
It is likely that Fredericks was confused over this, as another similarly named group, Bangladesh Action Committee was indeed a much larger organisation but the group he was involved with was Action Bangladesh.
He said that typically ten to twelve people attended the Operation Omega meetings and that the ones he went to were administrative, for example involving envelope-stuffing, rather than where strategic decisions were made.
His other interactions with the group consisted of going to four demonstrations, including one in Slough, Berkshire, which he described as large but peaceful. He admitted helping with fly-posting for the group; despite its minor criminality, he said he was not worried about taking part, even though on one occasion ‘a police officer gave chase’:
I was driving, and I deliberately slowed down. I drove down a cul-de-sac. He reprimanded me, saying he had better things to do, and then let me go. I thought this was the best way to deal with the situation and to square my role as a police officer without losing face in front of the targets.
For a more in-depth look at how SDS undercovers dealt with situations like these, see the page on Undercover Arrest Policy.
Commenting on his infiltration of Operation Omega, Fredericks said he took things very slowly. ‘I'd made some progress out on the street; now I'm being invited to these meetings on a regular basis. And I felt if I behaved myself, the time would come, and I'd be able to take the next step.’
This meant he did not achieve a position in the organisation that enabled him to report on its decision-making.
I just felt I wasn't where I needed to be. I needed to move up further. And asking questions all the time draws unfavourable attention… it was my view to sit quiet, mix with people.
Fredericks described trying to get into a big meeting at an opulent house opposite the Albert Memorial in South Kensington, central London, where Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, one of the key leaders of Bangladesh’s independence struggle and later the newly independent country’s prime minister, was speaking alongside British MPs John Stonehouse and Bruce Douglas-Mann.
He recalled being ‘steered away’ from the meeting room by a woman he had met during his undercover deployment, and hinted cryptically in his oral testimony about a mysterious motive for it:
I became aware that something was not quite right, and I found out later on what it was. But there was already - I was steered away by someone - the person whose family contributed £6,500. And … I knew something was wrong.
It is unclear what Fredericks was implying, but it reflects his fondness for inserting mysterious elements into his testimony.
Through the Operation Omega meetings, Fredericks met another woman, a journalist, who he thought had a 'further agenda'. He wrote that he went to a restaurant with her a few times, 'trying to discover what this might be but did not get anywhere'. Asked to explain this in his oral hearing, Fredericks said the woman's friends were all 20-30 years older than her and 'there was just something wrong; I can't explain it'.
He thought he might have met an American agent but had no corroborating evidence beyond the fact that the CIA was interested in the Bangladeshi independence struggle. In response to questions, he stated there was no romantic involvement with the female journalist.
Young Haganah
Fredericks also remembered a group called Young Haganah (YH) that was involved in the Bangladesh independence movement in England. He recalled YH as a ‘humanitarian’ organisation and described its members as ‘two females… in their 50s… [who] just wanted to help people who were suffering’. In a telling insight into the sexist attitudes of the SDS, he said it was a source of amusement to him and his senior officer HN1251 Phil Saunders that the members of Young Haganah were middle-aged women.
Another organisation named Haganah was the main ‘Zionist paramilitary organisation of the Jewish population in Palestine between 1920 and its disestablishment in 1948’, according to Britannica.com. Whether a group called Young Haganah did indeed exist and why it would be campaigning for Bangladesh's independence remains a mystery.
Black Power
Fredericks is the only known undercover to attempt to target Black Power groups directly. Frustratingly, however, his recollections are vague, the names of people he interacted with are redacted from his witness statement and no written reports have been disclosed.
In his written statement, he claimed he had some casual contact with Black Power activists prior to joining Special Branch. However, in his oral testimony, he directly contradicted this, stating he did not pass on information about Black Power movement before joining Special Branch: ‘The Black Power groups came later.’
This contradiction is illustrative of Fredericks' faulty memory and a further warning of the weight that should be given to his testimony. Fredericks stated that his
main link with such groups was through [Privacy], and a man who supported the American Black Power movement. I do not know if he ever went to the US. He worked with figures from the Black Power movement in the UK.
This contact attended activities at Speakers' Corner and in Notting Hill. Fredericks did identify the individual he was talking about, but the Inquiry redacted the name. Recalling a specific Black Power meeting where he thought that his true identity had been discovered, Fredericks wrote:
I remember a meeting in West London, that took place just off Ladbroke Grove, particularly vividly. There was a lecture on violent protest and the speaker was from the Black Power movement in the US. It took place in a marquee filled with around 80 or 90 people. The speaker said something like, there is someone from MI5 here. I felt my lips go dry and my heart was pounding as if it were about to burst. I do not know the name for this state of shock, but everything slowed to slow-motion, and I went deaf for 4 to 5 seconds. He was joking, but he fooled me. I thought l was going to get kicked to death.
When questioned about the groups listed in the 1971 SDS Annual Report as having been infiltrated – which included the Black Defence Group, and the Afro-Asian American Association – Fredericks could not say whether either he or any of his SDS colleagues had infiltrated them.
He was also asked if he could recall the Mangrove Nine trial, which took place between October and December 1971, at which nine Black Power activists were tried for riot following battles with police at a march in August 1970. This was one of the most well-known events in the history of British Black Power, yet Fredericks claimed he could not remember it at all. This speaks to his peripheral involvement within the movement.
His apparent lack of success in infiltrating Black Power groups was reflected in the SDS 1971 Annual Report, which stated that little or no progress had been made in infiltrating the movement. Presumably referencing the lack of Black officers in the Metropolitan Police at that time, it commented that how to infiltrate Black Power groups 'remain[ed] an obvious problem'.
Although Fredericks was adamant that he never engaged in a sexual relationship, there would have been no ethical quandary for him if he had. Asked when he knew about sexual relationships between SDS officers and their targets, Fredericks replied that it was only within the last two years – presumably when the Inquiry had contacted him – that he had become aware of them occurring. Questioned during oral testimony to the Inquiry, Fredericks said he:
was surprised that the matter had been raised. If you ask me to infiltrate some drug dealers, you can't point the finger at me if I sample the product. If these people are in a certain environment where it is necessary to engage that little more deeply... I find that acceptable.
Having made this disturbing analogy, he then conceded that he did 'worry about the consequences for the female and any children that may result from the relationship. That would be dangerous’.
Cross-examined on this issue by Ruth Brander KC, Fredericks reiterated that relationships could be a necessary part of undercover work in his opinion, saying, 'my view is perhaps they [undercover officers] had no choice'.
Fredericks was removed from the Special Demonstration Squad less than a year after joining. He wrote in his witness statement that he ‘did not have an exit strategy. I simply left the field’. He does not recall any debriefing.
He discussed possible reasons why his deployment was cut short in both his written and oral statements. Having disclosed his true identity at a police station after a car crash might have been one of these, but he did not mention it.
According to his written statement, Fredericks was told he had to leave the SDS because of his poor report-writing skills and because he compromised a fellow officer on 'discreet observation duty’. On being questioned in the Inquiry, however, he responded: ‘I have never done anything like that. I have rarely worked with any other officers whom I could embarrass.’
In support of this argument, he cited an example of when he was discreet after coming across a fellow Special Branch officer, HN1251 Phil Saunders on a surveillance operation. Fredericks noted that his literacy and report writing skills were also unfairly criticised.
In keeping with his other narrative excursions into Cold War tales, however, Fredericks argued that he was transferred out of SDS because one of his referees was deemed a security risk due to being a Soviet double-agent. To have a referee turn out to be a Soviet double-agent seems extraordinarily bad luck, to say the least.
Without documentary evidence to back them up, Fredericks' stories seem doubtful, which undermines his reliability as a witness.
Uniquely for a Tranche One SDS officer, he was 'told it was a requirement that I see a psychiatrist at the end of my term of office'. No psychiatric evaluations were offered to his contemporaries. Fredericks did not find the experience supportive, concluding: 'I did not think that she understood what undercover work is like, and it was not helpful.'
Fredericks said he was 'posted' out of Special Branch and retired from the Metropolitan Police in the mid-1970s; the exact date was redacted. He then worked in the private sector. After his time in Special Branch had ended, he said he 'noticed someone that may have recognised me from my SDS days'. He notified the Special Branch about this, but no one called him back.
Curiously, Fredericks admitted to visiting a former target from his SDS deployment years after leaving the Metropolitan Police. This appears to have been a woman, henceforth referred to as ‘Woman B’, connected to Action Bangladesh and Operation Omega.
Fredericks explained his visit not wholly satisfactorily in his witness statement, writing: ‘I knocked on the door of her home on a whim, only because I was in the area. I had no quarrel with the MPS or with the people I dealt with in my undercover identity.’
He elaborated in his oral testimony:
‘I was in Camden Town, and I had parked the car a short walk from this particular house that I had visited many times working undercover… I thought, drop in and have a cup of tea, have a cup of coffee, say hello.’
It was a relative or friend of the woman in question who answered the door. Fredericks says she invited him in, and there was a photograph of Woman B in the room. The person who had answered the door then informed him that Woman B had died by suicide. Fredericks then said he bumped into another person as he left the flat who, inexplicably, asked him whether he was working for the Pakistani government.
This visit was unethical and implies a closer relationship to a female activist than Fredericks has admitted to. He described the visit as 'impromptu' and 'no big deal'. Setting aside the ethics of reigniting a friendship exclusively based on deception, an out-of-the-blue visit seems remarkable given that it purportedly took place between three and five years after Fredericks' deployment had ended.
What could Fredericks' motivation have been for visiting Woman B if their old friendship was neither romantic nor close? Under questioning, Fredericks said while there was no 'spark' between them; he found her intriguing due to her intellect.
The documents referred to below can be found in the Procedural tab of the Documents section of this profile.
Initially Fredericks was thought to be dead, but once it was discovered he was still alive, the Inquiry granted the Metropolitan Police further time to submit an anonymity application over his identity.
On 4 October 2017, the Metropolitan Police made an application to restrict his real name only. This was agreed on 4 November 2018 by Inquiry Chair, John Mitting.
Fredericks’ cover name and target groups were published on 8 April 2018. He wrote a witness statement on 20 August 2019, which was published on the day he appeared before the Undercover Policing Inquiry on 19 November 2020.