Born in the 1940s, HN349 joined the Metropolitan Police as a uniformed officer in the 1960s, later joining Special Branch. He was an undercover officer with the Special Demonstration Squad for around a year in the early 1970s. Perhaps the most interesting part of HN349’s evidence was that he claimed, in sharp contrast to most other undercovers, that it was common practice for undercovers to discuss the details of their deployments with each other at the SDS safe house.
HN349 says he cannot remember the exact dates of his deployment, though he thinks it was in the early 1970s. In his witness statement he refers to the SDS being part of S Squad, however, which means his deployment would have been in or after July 1974, rather than earlier in the decade.
He started his deployment by attending mass demonstrations in London and was then tasked to infiltrate anarchist groups in central London. After nine months of trying to gain anarchists’ trust without success he agreed with SDS management that he should be withdrawn and his deployment ended. He worked in the SDS back office for a short period before leaving the unit for another Special Branch squad.
Inquiry Chair John Mitting agreed to restrict HN349’s real and cover names. No documents relating to HN349’s time in the SDS have been released and he was not asked to give oral testimony. He did submit a written statement, however, which forms the basis of this profile along with his risk-assessment statement.
Born in the 1940s, HN349 joined the Metropolitan Police in the 1960s as a uniformed officer before applying to join Special Branch. He was recruited to the SDS at some point in the first half of the 1970s. HN349 says that in the SDS it was his job to report on everything he could:
The whole reason for being there was to gather intelligence about who was attending meetings so that we had a record of what these groups were up to. I would not have known which particular people were of relevance to Special Branch so I would just pass on all the information that I could. We were supposed to get as much information as we could and were not really told to filter it. This is how it worked for ordinary Special Branch officers as well.
HN349 submitted his reports verbally and in handwritten form to a manager at the safe house or phoned them in. His memory is that all reports were typed up at the back office in Scotland Yard. Unusually for an undercover working in the 1970s, HN349 says he and other undercovers occasionally visited Scotland Yard while deployed.
He gives considerable insight into the routine at the SDS safe house, then based at a west London address:
Except on our day off and when we were covering demonstrations or meetings, all UCOs would go to the undercover flat ... [on] a daily basis. We would usually attend around lunchtime and we would then have general discussions about what was going on in the SDS and provide intelligence to each other. We would also carry out general admin tasks like preparing expenses claims and writing up any reports that we needed to submit.
Unlike many undercovers who have given evidence to the Inquiry that deployments were never discussed with colleagues, HN349 says these were discussed all the time at safe-house meetings:
I would discuss anything and everything with my fellow UCOs during these meetings. I would certainly share details of my deployment with them as that was my life at the time and they would do likewise. We would exchange our experiences and offer each other advice. They were my colleagues so it was natural that we would have a general chat about our work and our personal lives. No topic of conversation would be off limits.
SDS managers attended safe-house meetings a couple of times a week to receive intelligence from undercovers and respond to any issues raised. HN349 says that it was only when an undercover was involved in a particularly sensitive deployment, that their intelligence might be passed on privately in a separate room.
Recruitment
HN349 joined the Special Demonstration Squad in the first half of the 1970s when he was still 'relatively new' to Special Branch. He says he had not heard of the squad before being approached to join it, though this contrasts with a later assertion in his evidence that: ‘After a certain length of time in Special Branch, most officers were aware of the SDS and had an idea of the kind of groups that they had infiltrated’.
He was initially approached by a detective sergeant from the SDS who introduced him to a former undercover officer. HN349 says he was told by the former undercover officer that the SDS role would be undercover, potentially dangerous and require him to be separated from the wider Metropolitan Police.
Although it was not explicitly stated, HN349 believes that talking to the former undercover would have been part of an evaluation process of his suitability for an undercover role, and that he must have satisfactorily passed it, as otherwise he would not have been sent into the field.
HN349 was married with a young child at the time he was recruited to the SDS but says no one talked to him or his wife about the impact the work might have on his family life. ‘The attitude at the time was that even our spouses could not be given details of the work we were doing but this was the case across Special Branch as well as the SDS’.
Training
HN349 says there was no formal training in the SDS. Guidance was generally given when asked for, rather than in advance, adding that it was simply ‘common sense’ that officers would know not to get involved in sexual relationships. He says he was ‘pretty certain that the issue of sexual relationships with activists never came up during my time on the SDS’.
To learn about the job he spent time working in the back office before being deployed, reading undercovers’ reports and researching information arising from them. After a few weeks he was taken to the SDS undercover flat where he met and spoke to deployed undercover officers.
Tradecraft
HN349 used a cover name but was not given instructions on how to choose it. He did not use aspects of an existing person's identity or take one from a deceased child.
Although HN349 grew a beard, wore scruffy clothes and let his hair grow, his fake identity was not well developed. He did not arrange a fake employer and says had he been asked he would have replied he was an out-of-work van driver. He found a room to rent as cover accommodation from the small ads in a newspaper but never stayed there. He says his rent book was 'the only document with my undercover name on it'.
Reflecting on his lack of tradecraft, HN349 wrote that he could not explain why his undercover identity was so underdeveloped but suggested that maybe he thought he would be able to play things by ear if confronted. As his deployment was so unsuccessful, however, his back story was never tested.
HN349 said he was ‘tasked with attending any demonstrations taking place in central London, getting to know the regular activists and reporting back. I was not tasked initially with trying to infiltrate any particular group or organisation’. After a few weeks of doing this he was asked to ‘get involved with the various loose-knit anarchist activist groups that proliferated in London’.
He struggled to do this, however, as he found anarchist activists were highly suspicious of strangers and he was unable to get close enough to anyone to develop a relationship of trust with them. It was not until HN300 ‘Jim Pickford’ was deployed in 1974 that the SDS had a dedicated officer undercover in an anarchist group, though all SDS Annual Reports from 1969 onwards contained information on anarchist activities, even while acknowledging the difficulty of infiltrating anarchist groups.
HN349 says he would have provided regular written and verbal reports on his infiltration efforts and the demonstrations he went on, so cannot account for why none of them have been disclosed as part of the Inquiry.
HN349 was asked by the Inquiry about some reports he had written that he explained did not come from his time in the SDS. These reports have not been released, but he divulged some details about them in his witness statement.
He revealed that:
he had reported about core participant Peter Hain’s attendance at a public meeting ‘because he was a prominent activist at the time and it was our job to report anything and everything about the meetings we attended.
He also said he investigated the telephone number provided as the contact for a Chelsea Young Socialists march to uncover the organiser’s identity, responded to a request for details of leading Maoists by MI5 and looked up the names of the registered owners of vehicles parked outside a Communist Federation of Britain meeting.
Writing about the relationship between Special Branch and MI5, HN349 said: ‘If the security services had requested something, you provided it without asking questions.’ He understood Special Branch’s role to include assisting MI5 with gathering intelligence on subversion and believed MI5 requests influenced SDS tasking:
I think that Special Branch and the SDS would try to accommodate any requests that related to areas that the security services had responsibility for. I believe that there were discussions between the Ch. Supt., DCI and DI in charge of the SDS and the security services about matters that the security services wished to gather information on and I imagine that would have influenced our tasking.
Although SDS would have directed its own tasking with regard to containing public disorder, HN349 believes that ‘once the threats to public disorder reduced after the Vietnam protests ceased, the security services played a more significant role in directing the work of the SDS’.
Although he did not attend meetings between SDS managers and MI5, HN349 says these happened regularly. Unusually, HN349 also claimed:
It was also generally accepted by myself and fellow UCOs that the security services provided some of the funding for the SDS but I could not say with any certainty what gave us this impression.
HN349 asked for his deployment to end once it became clear that he was not making any headway in infiltrating any anarchist organisations:
My recollection is that approximately 9 months after being deployed, I came to the conclusion that my deployment was not proving to be successful as I had not properly infiltrated my target group.
He met with senior officers who agreed that his deployment was a failure and arranged for him to return to back-office duties at Scotland Yard and switch back to his normal appearance. He says he did administrative tasks in the back office for several months before leaving the SDS. He was not debriefed or offered any welfare support upon leaving.
HN349 recalls that: ‘The general practice was that you would get yourself looking smart again and then be sent away from the Yard for a period of time.’
Shortly after leaving the SDS, HN349 worked in another part of Special Branch which often handled intelligence gathered by SDS officers. HN349 gave evidence on the symbiotic relationship between SDS and the rest of Special Branch, explaining that as well as SDS reports being disseminated to the relevant squads:
Special Branch squads would also send requests for information to the SDS if they knew that a UCO [undercover officer] was deployed into a particular area that they were interested in and might be able to gather helpful information.
He said that most of Special Branch had knowledge of the SDS’ work and which groups it had infiltrated but would only have asked the squad to make specific investigations on its behalf as a last resort.
HN349 was approached but declined to take part in the 2002 True Spies television documentary on the SDS.
The Metropolitan Police applied to restrict HN349’s real name on 26 February 2018. Two days later, it made a supplementary application to also restrict HN349’s cover name on the grounds that the deployment was ultimately unsuccessful and so served no purpose to the Inquiry, and that there was a risk that releasing HN349’s cover name might lead to his real name being uncovered.
These applications were accompanied by a risk assessment carried out by the Metropolitan Police and impact statements from HN349, his wife and adult child.
On 22 March 2018 Inquiry Chair John Mitting indicated he was Minded To restrict the officer’s real and cover names, even though he thought HN349’s fears for his family’s safety were ‘misplaced’. The Counsel to the Inquiry published an updated explanatory note to accompany the Minded To notice on 13 September 2018. On 15 May 2018 Mitting confirmed this by issuing a restriction order for HN349's real and cover names.
HN349 submitted a written statement to the Inquiry on 26 June 2019.
Given the restriction order over HN349's identity, the Inquiry has not released material relating to him into the public domain other than his written statement to the Inquiry and redacted versions of the documents accompanying the MPS’ anonymity applications.
All relevant documents can be found in the documents tab.