HN45 ‘Dave Robertson’ was born in the 1930s. He was an undercover officer in the SDS from at least August 1970 until 6 February 1973, when his cover was blown after he was recognised as a police officer by a woman who lived near his cover flat. He later returned to the unit as an administrator, working in the back office in 1982 and 1983. He retired from the police in the 1990s and was still alive in 2024.
He gave both a witness statement and open oral testimony to the Inquiry. These were challenged by core participant Diane Langford, a member of several of the Maoist groups Robertson had spied on, who said she remembered him well.
Langford described the events surrounding Robertson’s cover being blown very differently, in particular alleging that he had threatened to harm the family of the woman who exposed him – something Robertson denies. Langford also criticised several of the reports Robertson authored while undercover for what she described as their underlying racism and misogyny, as well as for inaccuracy.
Unless otherwise stated, the information in the pages below comes from Robertson’s written witness statement and oral testimony.
HN45 ‘Dave Robertson’ joined the Metropolitan Police in the 1960s, when he was in his late twenties. Some time later in the 1960s he was posted to Special Branch’s C Squad. (For more information about what the different squads did, see the Metropolitan Police Special Branch page).
Robertson wrote in his witness statement that he did not do any undercover work before joining the SDS in 1970, but the existence of the unit, which he knew as ‘the Hairies’, was ‘generally known about’ in Special Branch. He confirmed this in his oral testimony, saying ‘the whole of Special Branch was quite a small-knit community, and everybody knew, to some degree, what was happening’.
Robertson joined the SDS in 1970 after being approached to join the unit by HN323 Helen Crampton , who had worked in the SDS in 1968 but was, by 1970, a sergeant on Robertson’s desk in C Squad. He was single at the time and thought the work sounded interesting so agreed to join.
His first report as an undercover disclosed by the Inquiry is dated 25 October 1970, but he would have spent several weeks in the back office prior to that. He was supervised by HN294 and HN1251 Phil Saunders , though he says there were no formal processes for monitoring undercovers’ welfare beyond the weekly meetings at the safe house.
Robertson’s approach to his work for the SDS seems to have been unreflective: ‘At the time I did not really question why Special Branch or the security services might be interested in particular groups or people; that was above my pay grade.’
He says he did what he was told and didn’t think much about why he was infiltrating such small groups that, by his own admission, were peaceful and posed little danger to the state. It is an attitude he has maintained, commenting in his written evidence: ‘I have never really thought about what my reporting achieved for Special Branch or the police.’
Training
Robertson does not remember there being any formal or informal training or guidance on how he should behave, stating: ‘In fact, even the senior managers within the SDS were still very much feeling their way at this point.’
Before being deployed he would meet other SDS undercovers at weekly meetings at the safe house. Robertson says he learned a lot about undercover work while at the safe house by listening to other officers discussing their deployments, something several former undercovers have denied to the Inquiry that they did. He was not told how long his deployment would last.
Tradecraft
He chose the cover name ‘Dave Robertson’, which he says did not come from a dead child’s identity, and grew ‘a mop of hair’, a ‘big moustache’ and sometimes a beard. He developed a superficial cover story that he was from ‘a remote part of Scotland where I knew that lots of Robertsons came from’.
Diane Langford remembers him having a strong Scottish accent and telling her he was a Scottish nationalist but then being unfamiliar with an important event in Scottish radical history, which seemed odd. Robertson recalled being closely questioned about his background by activists from one of the groups he was spying on, though he cannot remember which. He believed his cover identity held up.
Robertson gave evidence that his cover job was as a driver for a garage. The garage he pretended to be employed by was owned by a friend from his real life. He visited it regularly but did not actually work there. He says he ‘never’ used a cover vehicle or had a driving licence in his cover name, although Diane Langford gave evidence that she saw him driving various cars and when she questioned him about it he told her he worked for a car hire company.
Langford further gave evidence that Robertson had said to someone else that he worked at a London pub called the Tatty Bogle and these discrepancies between his accounts of where he worked made Langford and her comrades suspicious, especially after one of them visited Tatty Bogle, where no one had heard of Robertson. He denies saying any of this.
His cover accommodation was at room 15, 287 West End Lane in Camden, north London. He said he always travelled to meetings from the flat and stayed there afterwards. He also remembers that he was often asked to stay at the SDS safe house, a series of different flats, to protect the premises and give the impression the flats were lived in. This was corroborated by the evidence of HN347 ‘Alex Sloan’ who remembered meeting at premises in which Robertson had been sleeping.
Once deployed, Robertson said he met the other undercovers weekly, usually on a Wednesday during the day, at the SDS safe house. Undercovers would either bring their handwritten reports to the safe house meetings or write them there. The reports would then be taken to the back office to be typed up and disseminated.
Robertson also visited the safe house at other times, to make a secure phone call or write up notes. As previously mentioned, in sharp contrast to other undercovers’ testimony to the Inquiry, Robertson stated that:
I would have discussed my deployment with the other UCOs at the SDS flat. We were a close-knit group and we trusted each other. We would have had general conversations about what we were up to during our deployments.
In his oral testimony Robertson tried to have it both ways – saying that officers chatted about ‘anything and everything’ in the safe house, but when asked specifically if undercovers ‘talked about things a bit more openly’ there, he replied: ‘No, not necessarily. Special Branch officers are renowned as “zip mouths”.'
As well as attending the safe house, Robertson phoned SDS headquarters regularly to let them know he was okay, or sometimes because he had time-sensitive information that could not wait until the next face-to-face meeting.
In his undercover identity he attended frequent meetings, study groups, demonstrations and protests but claims he did not socialise with his targets. He recalls he was closest to Maoist activists Abhimanyu Manchanda and his partner Diane Langford, for whom he claims once to have babysat, and Banner Books owner Gajawan Bijur.
Diane Langford stated she and Manchanda would never have needed or wanted to leave their baby in his care, but does remember regularly seeing Robertson in the pub with the people from the groups they were members of, contradicting his claim not to have socialised. Langford and Robertson do agree that he did not take an active part in discussions at meetings, something Langford says made the activists he was spying on suspicious.
In a 2015 blog that Diane Langford submitted into evidence to the Inquiry, she wrote about her experience of being spied on by ‘Dave Robertson’. In it, she wrote that she and her fellow activists strongly suspected him of being a police officer at the time, but were prepared to tolerate as he bought them drinks in the pub, gave lifts and volunteered to carry heavy banners.
In her witness statement she recalls that ‘We just treated him as a bit of a joke’, though this changed when their suspicions about Robertson were confirmed by a female friend of Langford’s who recognised him as a Special Branch officer at a February 1973 meeting.
Controversies in reporting
In her witness statement, Diane Langford points out several examples of racist and sexist attitudes in Robertson’s reporting. These include the pejorative tones he uses when discussing Manchanda, describing Black Power supporters as ‘coloured’ and his assumption that the WLF was controlled by Manchanda, rather the women who set it up.
Robertson’s response to a question from Counsel to the Inquiry (CTI) about why he had recorded the ethnicity of some members of the Postal Workers Union, who he described as ‘coloured’ in a February 1971 report, reveals much about his approach to racism.
Asked whether he had any training around what was appropriate to record regarding ethnicity, Robertson replied: ‘Race – race wasn't a problem in my day.’ The SDS regarded ‘race’ as a problem in 1971, however, tasking one of Robertson’s contemporaries, HN345 Peter Fredericks with infiltrating the Black Power movement, which he failed to do.
Robertson’s reporting on Manchanda and Langford’s personal life was detailed and intrusive. For example, in a February 1971 report, ostensibly about the RMLL, he recorded the birth date of the couple’s newborn child and commented on their childcare arrangements. In April 1971 he reported on some money Manchanda had been given by a woman he knew for his personal use.
This level of detail contrasts with another report from around the same time, on an ‘extraordinary meeting on the future of the Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist League’. In this report Robertson’s coverage of a discussion during which, according to Langford’s witness statement, a female member of the group accused one of the male members of having attempted to rape her, is both brief and dismissive.
Robertson records this as the woman ‘making a very personal attack on the private morals of [privacy] arising from an incident that had taken place some time previously.’ He does give any detail about the discussion or record the man’s response to the accusation. Langford recalls the man defending himself, saying: ‘She was too ugly to rape.’
Robertson says that he was tasked with infiltrating ‘Maoist groups’ to help Special Branch assess their threat to public order and to help MI5 to gather information ‘about any risks posed to state security’. Although he says he gathered ‘as much intelligence as I could’ to pass on to SDS management about the groups, including many personal details about members, Robertson recalls there being ‘no further remit to disrupt or distract the groups from what they were doing’.
The groups he infiltrated were small and prone to schisms. In terms of subversion, Robertson said the groups he spied on were not a risk to the state. ‘The activity that I witnessed while undercover was subversive in the sense that the whole purpose of the Maoists was to subvert the political system,’ he explained. ‘But they could not actually achieve this as they did not have the means to do so and were largely pretty ineffective.’
The people he spied on did not break the law. ‘As far as I recall, the people I gathered intelligence on were not involved in criminality other than public disorder offences,’ Robertson wrote in his witness statement, adding ‘I don't remember seeing any Maoists committing public disorder while deployed but l may have just forgotten over the years.’
Nor were they violent:
I was never exposed to risk of physical harm and never perceived myself as being in danger.
At the centre of much of Robertson’s reporting was Indian Maoist Abhimanyu Manchanda. It seems clear from the documents released by the Inquiry that he had been tasked to report back on Manchanda’s political activity as well as his personal life with his wife and fellow activist Diane Langford.
In terms of organisations, Robertson’s initial focus appears to have been the Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist League (RMLL) , of which Manchanda was the general secretary, and its associated front organisations: the Britain Vietnam Solidarity Front (BVSF) and Women’s Liberation Front (WLF).
The first of Robertson’s reports released by the Inquiry covers an open meeting of the BVSF in the Union Tavern pub in King’s Cross, North London on 25 October 1970. The handful of his other reports from 1970 are all from open meetings of the RMLL and WLF, at which Manchanda was the main or only speaker.
On 22 January 1971, Robertson made his first report from a private meeting held in Manchanda and Langford’s flat. This was a planning meeting of the RMLL, at which the group set out its strategy for the following year, including developing the WLF and encouraging members to take industrial jobs to influence union organising.
Less than a month after this report was filed, HN348 ‘Sandra Davies’ started attending meetings of the WLF, where she remained undercover until February 1973. Having filed reports on meetings of the WLF in November 1970 and February 1971, Robertson stopped monitoring the group once Davies was in place.
The only exception to this was a 2 May 1971 meeting organised jointly by the BVSF and WLF to welcome a delegation of women from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. This was reported on by Robertson, rather than both him and Davies. Robertson continued to report on the BVSF intermittently throughout his deployment, though there is little of interest in these reports.
The RMLL split suspended Manchanda and Langford in March 1971 and in August 1971 reconfigured without them as the Marxist Leninist Workers Association (MLWA). Robertson regularly reported on the MLWA from August 1971, even though it had few members and did little. In a September 1972 report, he described the group as ‘completely inactive’, commenting that ‘numerically and politically the group has no strength whatsoever’.
Robertson’s last few reports from December 1972 to February 1973 show him no longer attending meetings alone, but suddenly being accompanied by HN346 Jill Mosdell , which he explained in his evidence to the Inquiry was because he was trying to give her an introduction to the groups he was spying on.
Mosdell was present at the 6 February 1973 meeting at the London School of Economics, at which Robertson was recognised, submitting a joint report on it three days later that does not mention the incident.
In his guise as a follower of the RMLL, Robertson attended meetings and conferences of many other groups, which he also reported on in passing. These included:
- Indo-China Solidarity Campaign
- Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist)
- Hackney United Tenants Ad-Hoc Committee
- Palestine Solidarity Campaign
- Indo-China Solidarity Conference
- Irish National Solidarity Liberation Front
- North London Alliance in Defence of Workers Rights
- East London branch of the Anti-Internment League
- Friends of China
Banner Books
In addition, Robertson helped out ‘quite a bit’ at left-wing bookshop Banner Books in Camden, London, owned by Maoist activist Gajawan Bijur, who trusted him enough to ask him to take over running it in February 1972.
Robertson says he declined but the offer was considered by the head of the SDS, Chief Inspector HN332 Cameron Sinclair. Sinclair suggested in a memo to the Special Branch Commander of Operations that Robertson should accept on a short-term basis to enable to him to look at the shop’s records and mailing lists, create a plan of its layout and have access to the keys, among other things.
Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist)
Authored jointly with Jill Mosdell, one of Robertson’s final reports, on the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) (CPE-ML) , stands out because it appears to be based entirely on the opinions of a third party. In it, their source accused the CPE-ML of being a counter-revolutionary front organisation, created by the CIA or Soviet communists to discredit Chinese Communism.
The SDS did not use informants in 1972, so it is unlikely that the person who made these accusations, described as a ‘usually reliable source’ and ‘close to the Chinese Embassy’, knew they were sharing their opinions with undercover police officers. If they did know, this makes this 27 December 1972 report even more unusual. Robertson did not refer to this report in his witness statement and was not asked about it during his oral testimony.
Robertson stated that: ‘The security services were interested in everything and you did not ask questions about why they wanted certain information.’ In keeping with his general assertion that as an SDS undercover he just gathered as much information as possible and let more senior officers decide what to do with it, Robertson says he assumed many of his reports were being shared with MI5 but thought no more about it.
In March 1972, Robertson provided information on a female activist’s employment in response to a direct request from MI5. In his oral testimony he explained that receiving requests from MI5 for targeted information was ‘pretty routine’ across Special Branch.
A very similar report, from 25 February 1971, is stamped ‘Box 500’, the cypher for MI5, and also contains information on an activist’s employment, although it does not explicitly state where the request for this information had come from.
Robertson was withdrawn at short notice, with HN348 ‘Sandra Davies’ and HN346 Jill Mosdell , after he was recognised by an Irish woman called Ethel who lived near the SDS safe house and knew he was a police officer. Documents released by the Inquiry show the encounter happened at a political meeting of the Indo-China Solidarity Conference at the London School of Economics on 6 February 1973, which he attended with Mosdell.
Robertson’s version of how and when this happened differs significantly from that of Diane Langford, who was accompanying Ethel, a work colleague of hers, at the time. Langford says that after Ethel identified ‘Dave’ in the packed conference hall, Robertson took her by the wrist and pulled her out of the hall and neither returned.
After a week of Ethel avoiding Langford at work, she eventually confided that ‘Dave’ was a Special Branch officer and he had told her he would harm her family in Ireland if she revealed this to Langford and her fellow activists. Langford gave evidence that she had written about this in blog based on her contemporaneous notes in 2015.
Robertson describes the encounter as happening in December 1972 and without Mosdell present, but this is not supported by the documentary evidence. He claims Ethel loudly declared, ‘Here are Scotland Yard come to take us away!’ when she saw him at the meeting, after which he hugged her to create the opportunity to whisper in her ear not to say more, before fleeing the meeting and abandoning his deployment. He says he never saw Ethel again, did not know she was Irish and did not threaten her.
In his Interim Report , Inquiry Chair Mitting found that elements of Robertson’s version of what happened were not credible, though neither did he believe Langford’s evidence that Robertson had threatened Ethel’s family in Ireland. Prompted during his oral testimony to reconsider his recollection of the encounter in light of Langford’s evidence and his own reports from the time, Robertson refused to alter his version of events at all.
Not disputed is Robertson’s account that after the encounter with Ethel he phoned his manager HN1251 Phil Saunders who took the decision the following day to end Robertson’s deployment, along with those of ‘Sandra Davies’ and Jill Mosdell. Robertson says he was then visited separately by senior Special Branch management, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vic Gilbert and Chief Superintendent HN1254 Rollo Watts.
Robertson says they were solely concerned about how to manage the potential fallout for the Metropolitan Police should it become known that Special Branch was sending undercover officers into political groups. They instructed him, if anyone asked about undercover activity, to say he was acting ‘completely off my own bat and that my superior officers were unaware of what I was doing’.
This, Robertson recalls, made him ‘livid that they refused to take responsibility’ as they were ‘covering their own tracks’ within Special Branch. If Robertson is right about Gilbert’s and Watts’ motivation, it suggests they believed what SDS had been doing would have caused Special Branch reputational damage, even within the Metropolitan Police.
Curiously, Robertson’s exposure as a police officer is not mentioned in the 1973 SDS Annual Report, although the resulting decision to withdraw two female undercovers is. After two paragraphs, one heavily redacted, about Mosdell and Davies being withdrawn as a precaution, the report reads: ‘The avoidance in nearly six years’ existence of the irretrievable exposure of any SDS officer could induce complacency.’
This is a strange and rather misleading statement, given the events surrounding Robertson’s withdrawal.
Immediately after leaving the SDS, Robertson was transferred to another part of Special Branch without any rest time or a debriefing. He thinks he used SDS intelligence in later Special Branch roles, the descriptions of which have all been redacted by the Inquiry
He returned to the SDS from 1982 to 1985 in an administrative role, helping to type up and disseminate undercovers’ reports, once their provenance had been disguised.
This role will be further examined in Tranche Two, although he was not called as a witness.
The documents referred to below can be found in the Procedural tab of the Documents section of this profile.
The Metropolitan Police applied to have Robertson’s real name restricted on 31 July 2017, although the application was not released to the public until 4 January 2018. A closed risk assessment, dated 10 July 2017, was submitted along with a closed statement from at least one family member to support the application.
In the supporting statement, Robertson’s family asked for his real name to be kept secret to avoid reputational damage because of association with other SDS officers. In a Minded To notice issued on 14 November 2017, Inquiry Chair John Mitting agreed to restrict Robertson’s real name but refused to restrict the cover name ‘Dave Robertson’, as he said it presented no risk of revealing the real name. He provided closed (secret) reasons for restricting the real name.
The cover name ‘Dave Robertson’ and the names of two of his target groups, as well as gisted material from the evidence of HN300 Jim Pickford about Robertson’s time in the SDS in the 1980s, were released on 17 April 2018.
The non-state core participants made submissions on 8 May 2018 for a hearing on on 9 May 2018 concerning the restriction of Robertson’s real name. After the hearing, on 15 May 2018, Mitting made a restriction order covering Robertson’s real name.