Exclusive: Do the Security Services have total impunity?
This Circle of Hubris
What are you doing at this time, tomorrow night? No idea yet?
Well I'll tell you what MI5, Special Branch, The Met Police, Greater Manchester Policew, the Police Service of Northern Ireland, South Wales Police, and The Five Eyes (a cooperative intelligence network that monitors the electronic communications of citizens and foreign governments) will be doing.
They will all be tuning in to watch the first episode of a three-part documentary series on ITV1 called The Undercover Police Scandal: Love and Lies Exposed
The story is told by five women who each suffered significant trauma as a consequence of becoming the unwitting victims of this scandalous undercover police activity. They came together to form a group of eight who worked together to expose one of the biggest scandals in the history of British policing.
Think of how serene a duck looks as he glides around a pond. All the while underneath the pond's surface his little webbed feet paddle furiously. That's been the Security Services for weeks, months, years as they saw this day, this era approaching.
For decades they have worked with near total impunity as they identified, pursued, surveilled and in some cases fitted up left wing activists and journalists.
In December 2024, Channel 4 New reported that a massive police covert surveillance operation involving the Northern Ireland and Metropolitan police forces had been found unlawful by a panel of judges.
Two Belfast journalists, Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey, were arrested in 2018 after they made a documentary about apparent collusion between the police and Loyalists suspected of a notorious massacre. This will come of no surprise to people following the ongoing #SpyCops inquiry.
Prospect Magazine also reported on it. I can only assume all the other newspapers, online magazines and broadcast channels were too afraid.
Prospect Magazine noted that,
On 18th June 1994, two members of the Ulster Volunteer Force dressed in boiler suits and balaclavas walked into a bar in Loughinisland, County Down and opened fire. Six people were killed.
Nobody has ever been charged with the Loughinisland massacre. In 2018, two men were arrested roughly in connection with the crime—but they weren’t loyalist gunmen, they were Northern Irish journalists who had made a film about collusion between police and paramilitaries in the killings. The journalists were subsequently released but they had a hunch: the police were spying on them.
Now we know they were right.
It also found that more than 800 other people had been the target of similar operations over many years. Other forces, including the Met Police, were involved, raising huge questions about the spying operations of police and security services across the UK.
While I admire these two journalists, the women who have contributed to the documentary series are particularly heroic.
Last week the Guardian revealed the names of twenty-five undercover cops who infiltrated groups such as Youth against Racism in Europe, Anti-Fascist Action, Anti-Nazi League, Right to Work campaign, Troops Out movement, Animal Liberation Front and others.
The expose also lists two women, including Christine Green, who infiltrated Animal rights groups between 1994-99.
At least 25 undercover police officers who infiltrated political groups formed sexual relationships with members of the public without disclosing their true identity to them, the Guardian can disclose.
The total shows how women were deceived on a systemic basis over more than three decades. It equates to nearly a fifth of all the police spies who were sent to infiltrate political movements.'
Four of the police spies fathered, or are alleged to have fathered, children with women they met while using their fake identities to infiltrate campaigners
But it's the women's stories who should take precedence. It's their words that matter.
“The customer for the intelligence product was MI5, so the security services definitely knew.”
- Alison Smith
According to Rob Evans at the Guardian:
John Dines, who had used the fake name of Barker during his four-year undercover deployment, has said he never loved Steel. He has told the public inquiry into undercover policing that during their two-year relationship, he used Steel to bolster his fake identity and collect “as much useful and valuable intelligence as possible” about leftwing protesters.’
Women such as Helen Steel, Alison Smith and Jacqui (not her real name) have done more public service than any of these undercover cops have in over fifty years.
On the 30th July I interviewed Tom Fowler, for the What a Hell of a Way to Dad podcast. Tom has been relentless in documenting the current Spycops inquiry, .
He was targeted by undercover officers for many years whilst part of South Wales Anarchists and active in environmental and social justice campaigns.
Four days later all my social media accounts were hacked, almost simultaneously. Later that evening I found that my laptop had also been tampered with.
It wasn't until a month later when I had been hacked a few times more, began to suspect human surveillance and had moved from hotel to friends' couches to hotel, that I got rid of my phone, (someone had given it to me three years earlier when my phone began to play up.)
I left it on a bus at the end of August and hightailed it out of London for a few days. It turned out Bristol wasn't far enough.
Following the Guardian’s expose, my friend Nate, who hosts the What a Hell of a Way to Dad podcast and edited our interview, said this about Tom's revelations:
The detail that stuck with me the most is that they assumed the identity of people about the same age as them who'd died young, stole their personal information, and in one case the victim was someone who'd disappeared at sea and whose body was never found.
So when the infiltrator who stole his identity disappeared, concerned activists tried to find him and contacted people in the community he claimed to be from, leading the family to be under the impression that their son might have actually survived and might be in London doing vegan activism.
But no, in fact their son was dead but the cops had stolen his identity to use as a cover story
He moved here from America, so added,
Tbh I was always a little taken aback by how much people in the UK left seemed to immediately suspect infiltration of any political movement etc, but after learning about what special branch did I feel like, if anything, people have a right to be even more suspicious than they are.
Last week I found out that my X/Twitter account had been accessed 513 times on the Web over a 2 month period by someone other than me.
I don't use the app on the Web, only on my android phone.
Today I found the sessions had been cleared from my X/Twitter account. Again not by me.
It's unlikely I’ll ever find out exactly who did that either. I don't often DM people. I won't ever again now.
Long time readers of this newsletter will know that I reported the hacking and surveillance to the Met Police. It was an attempt to document the intimidation campaign officially. Readers who have been here even longer will remember a newsletter I published named, I Demand a Spy Cops Inquiry Fit for Purpose.
I unpublished it some time ago at the encouragement of some new friends 👋🏿. However I was naive even to imagine that a comprehensive inquiry, would ever happen. That's my hubris.
The Security Services’ hubris is that they assumed they could do these crimes against women and men, they could foster misogyny in their ranks and dole out these abusive tactics and they would never be exposed. And even more ridiculous, that the state would protect them. How are you feeling now?
"They were supremely arrogant.... they just never, ever thought they'd be exposed. They had a god complex and we were being contained and managed."
- Alison Smith
Last year in the midst of the intimidation campaign I faced, I quoted Tom Fowler in an exclusive for the Canary.
Criminal Justice Act and Public Order Acts are a hallmark of British governments. They come out every couple of years. There were numerous bits of legislation all through the 70s… the closest thing was RIP, the Regulatory Investigatory Powers Act, released in the early 2000s, which gives a certain sort-of free framework, and more recently, the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, the CHIS Act which legalises basically anything – you can murder as an undercover officer, and it’s perfectly okay.
According to the government’s own factsheet:
The Bill provides an express power to authorise CHIS to participate in conduct which would otherwise constitute a criminal offence.
We shall see, but the State may still protect them. After all it's as much as a boys club as the media.
Watch the first of a three-part documentary series for ITV1 and ITVX: The Undercover Police Scandal: Love and Lies Exposed tomorrow night, 6th March, at 9pm.
Drop some cash into Tom Fowler’s fund so he can recoup his expenses and continue to report on the under-reported Spy Cops Inquiry. As, apart from The Guardian's Rob Evans no one else is.
P.S I know there is going to be some non-black women and /or middle class women who try to take my experiences and use them as their own. Trust me, I will hunt you down if you do and you will catch these hands.