True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 161: Spycops Undercover II
Aired: 2021-05-29
Duration: 01:19:49


=== Acting Strange (06:11) ===

[00:00:00]  Come around for a cuppa, Liz.
[00:00:03]  Okay, wait, hold on.
[00:00:04]  Come uh, to the listeners, because they can't see this.
[00:00:08]  Brace just stood, like, sat up straight in posture that I don't, I didn't even know you were capable of, held up a pantomime teacup, took a sip, paused, and then said, What did you say?
[00:00:25]  Have a cuppa?
[00:00:28]  I don't think that's a thing.
[00:00:30]  No, it's a thing.
[00:00:30]  Oh, you're wrong.
[00:00:32]  Wait, no, no, it's a thing.
[00:00:36]  You're wrong, Liz.
[00:00:37]  It is a thing now.
[00:00:38]  And now, despite the way I talk and my lifestyle and the things that I represent, now you look like the big fool up.
[00:00:49]  Do they say things like that?
[00:00:50]  No, it's Australian now.
[00:00:52]  No, first of all, that is literally part of the UK.
[00:00:58]  It is part of the United Kingdom.
[00:01:00]  If it's not part of the UK, then how come the Queen's in charge?
[00:01:05]  Huh?
[00:01:05]  You had to think about that.
[00:01:07]  Which technically would make this podcast part of the UK because the Queen's in charge here, too.
[00:01:12]  That's right.
[00:01:13]  Not you.
[00:01:36]  Hello, Brace.
[00:01:38]  Lights, camera, Truanon.
[00:01:40]  No.
[00:01:41]  That's how we're opening every episode from now.
[00:01:43]  I don't have to do more than a fucking, I'm not a goddamn baboon doing impression debate.
[00:01:48]  Yeah, you're a little monkey.
[00:01:51]  You're the little monkey man.
[00:01:52]  I don't, yeah, yeah, I guess I'll take that.
[00:01:55]  Yeah, or I'm grinding.
[00:01:56]  I'm certainly grinding in Oregon right now.
[00:01:58]  Rise and Grind Monkey Man.
[00:02:00]  That's my new character, Rise and Grind, Monkey Man.
[00:02:03]  Okay, just like a guy who's like really dedicated.
[00:02:05]  He's like half monkey, half man, and he's all about the Rise and Grind.
[00:02:09]  That's what you, that's what you were thinking?
[00:02:12]  No, this is my new character.
[00:02:14]  No, no, no.
[00:02:14]  The name was cute.
[00:02:15]  And then I was like, okay, I'm going to tease out the character.
[00:02:18]  But that's a terrifying.
[00:02:20]  So it's a half monkey, half man.
[00:02:21]  Every morning he goes in right up on the crypto exchanges.
[00:02:25]  Rise and grind, baby.
[00:02:26]  What does he look like?
[00:02:27]  I mean, that's a terrifying sort of image.
[00:02:29]  No, why would it be terrifying?
[00:02:32]  I mean, well, monkeys already are a type of man.
[00:02:36]  Yeah, so he's double man.
[00:02:38]  I don't like that whatsoever.
[00:02:39]  My name, my name, my name, my name is Bryce.
[00:02:45]  Awful.
[00:02:46]  My name is Liz.
[00:02:47]  Hello, everyone.
[00:02:48]  Me produce this young Chomsky.
[00:02:52]  This is Truanon.
[00:02:53]  Welcome.
[00:02:54]  I'm going to speak in cockney rhyming slang for this.
[00:02:58]  No, you're not, because that's not what you're doing.
[00:03:00]  Bush knocked down the towers.
[00:03:04]  What?
[00:03:05]  No, sorry.
[00:03:06]  I was a rap.
[00:03:07]  You just have Tourette's, but it's you just saying like 9-11.
[00:03:11]  He did, dude.
[00:03:12]  It's a song.
[00:03:14]  We have, you know what?
[00:03:16]  This is fucked up that I just did like several minutes.
[00:03:19]  I guess I did Australian accent.
[00:03:20]  We have a British guest.
[00:03:22]  Yes.
[00:03:24]  And he's going to listen to this.
[00:03:26]  And he's going to be like, these guys are assholes.
[00:03:28]  No, he'll probably think it's funny.
[00:03:30]  He has such a charming accent.
[00:03:31]  I love him so much.
[00:03:32]  Yeah, he's great.
[00:03:33]  We have, I think, one, I think, big fan favorite, Tom Fowler, back on the show, talking to us about the UK spy cops case, which is what he was on the show previously to talk about, but now we got updates.
[00:03:49]  We got updates that the lie and fake news media from both here and across the pond won't cover.
[00:03:58]  They won't cover it.
[00:04:00]  I do want to say a little director's commentary here.
[00:04:05]  When the word tranche or tranche rather is mentioned, Liz's face lit up.
[00:04:12]  She went like this.
[00:04:13]  Well, I guess you can't see it when I'm doing it either.
[00:04:16]  But I'm going to put my face really close to this high-end space age microphone I'm using and see if you can hear my skin crinkle.
[00:04:27]  You hear that?
[00:04:28]  You're so moist.
[00:04:29]  Yeah.
[00:04:30]  Well, I put on a lot.
[00:04:32]  Oh, my God.
[00:04:33]  I put on a lot of stuff this morning.
[00:04:37]  All your serums.
[00:04:38]  Oh.
[00:04:40]  Here's the thing.
[00:04:41]  Tranche is like our thing.
[00:04:43]  Yeah, we love tranches.
[00:04:45]  We always say that on the show.
[00:04:47]  Oh, we love it.
[00:04:49]  No?
[00:04:49]  Okay.
[00:04:50]  Let's not even say any of that because Brace has forgotten that we always make a face or a joke when we say tranche.
[00:04:57]  And now you're pretending like you don't remember.
[00:04:59]  I was literally, that was the point of the thing that I said.
[00:05:02]  Well, now you're acting strange.
[00:05:04]  Okay.
[00:05:06]  Liz, I'm not going to say it, but for those, I'm not going to say it.
[00:05:10]  I know.
[00:05:11]  So right now, here's the thing, listeners.
[00:05:14]  Liz is trying to get me to say that they then pussy got me acting strange.
[00:05:18]  I'm not going to say, so I'm not saying it there.
[00:05:20]  I'm just saying what she wants me to say.
[00:05:22]  Oh, my God.
[00:05:23]  I'm not going to say it.
[00:05:24]  It's such a cop out.
[00:05:26]  No, it's not.
[00:05:26]  Did you not want me to say that?
[00:05:28]  You wanted me to say, you're literally gaslighting me right now.
[00:05:31]  Oh, my God.
[00:05:31]  You're literally.
[00:05:32]  You're such a little bully.
[00:05:36]  Big brain.
[00:05:36]  Yes, I am.
[00:05:37]  Being a bully is cool.
[00:05:38]  Don't say me.
[00:05:39]  You don't bully your teammate.
[00:05:41]  I'm bullying you right now.
[00:05:42]  Yeah, that's not, that's, you're breaking the bully rules.
[00:05:46]  Bully time starts now.
[00:05:48]  Roll the interview.
[00:05:51]  That they didn't pussy really do get me acting strange, though.
[00:06:08]  All right, ladies and gentlemen, we have a special guest for you.

=== Delayed Sex Stuff Inquiry (06:28) ===

[00:06:11]  Uh, one of my, uh one of my favorite guests finally returning, Tom Fowler now of the spy COPS INFO podcast, which I have listened to and it's fantastic.
[00:06:22]  Uh, we did a previous episode with him on the spy cops inquiry and actually really just about the whole spy cops scandal.
[00:06:29]  Um but uh, but we we, the second sort of round of inquiries have been completed uh, in the Uk and uh, and now we have him back and Tom.
[00:06:39]  For those of uh, our listeners who maybe didn't listen to the last episode, can you give us kind of like a general sum up of what the is going on with this sure man?
[00:06:49]  So like um, I guess like 10 years ago now, we discovered that there was a network of undercover police officers who'd been targeting political protest groups.
[00:06:58]  Um, before long, we kind of found out that they would been going back to.
[00:07:02]  The units were formed in 1968 um, and there was like at least 10 undercover officers at any given time on like four to five year deployments throughout like left-wing environmentalist, animal rights uh, progressive causes of various types.
[00:07:17]  Um after, like it kind of came out that they'd infiltrated things like the Stephen Lawrence Family justice campaign and like other high-profile things and that they'd um, these undercover officers like fathered children and done other loads of other fucking really bad shit.
[00:07:31]  Man, they did loads of really bad.
[00:07:32]  Uh, there was a bit of a fuss and, thanks to like some internal disagreements between the then home secretary and the police, a public inquiry was called in 2015.
[00:07:41]  It only started like last year in november um, but yeah, it's kind of it's been starting from 68 and like kind of going through the various undercover officers and kind of picking apart their deployments, I guess to a certain extent I mean like uh, it's been kind of limited in a lot of ways in what it's looked at, but we've it's the first time we've really got a glimpse of these secret units and how they targeted the left.
[00:08:02]  Um yeah, so this was the second phase.
[00:08:05]  This looked at like 1973 to 84.
[00:08:08]  So it was um, it was a quite like uh, explosive time in in British political history and it's been yeah fascinating, Yeah.
[00:08:15]  And you've been following it because you have a personal connection with the entire history here.
[00:08:21]  Yeah.
[00:08:22]  So I was a member of South Wales Anarchists.
[00:08:25]  During the 2000s, we were infiltrated by an undercover officer who used the name Marco Jacobs.
[00:08:32]  He was with, like, I hung around with him a great deal for like four or five years.
[00:08:36]  We were kind of like busy mates sort of thing.
[00:08:39]  Yeah, he disappeared.
[00:08:40]  I was quite lucky compared to a lot of other people who infiltrated.
[00:08:43]  We found out quite quickly that he was an undercover cop within like a year or two.
[00:08:48]  A lot of other people spent 20 years kind of thinking that somebody in their group had been an undercover cop.
[00:08:52]  So yeah, like I was one of like when people may have heard there was like a number of women who'd been deceived into long-term intimate sexual relationships with undercover officers brought cases against them against the police, not against the individual officers, against the police.
[00:09:08]  And there was so there was like 11 women and one man and I was the one man.
[00:09:12]  So I started kind of bringing like going to court a lot.
[00:09:16]  So I started like because the coverage of this topic generally in the media has been very limited.
[00:09:22]  I've ended up like kind of using social media to cover it as much as I can really.
[00:09:26]  Yeah, I've noticed too, a lot of the coverage, I think, I mean, rightly so, like the sexual relationships that these cops entered into with women are like, I mean, it's appalling, right?
[00:09:36]  Like anybody who hears about it is like, that is a horrible fucked up tactic.
[00:09:40]  But that seems to be what like a lot of the coverage revolves around because I think because it's, it's, it's not, you know, obviously it's shocking and stuff, but it's also salacious, right?
[00:09:48]  You know, you got a little bit of sex in there and all that kind of stuff.
[00:09:52]  Oh, yeah, man.
[00:09:53]  Fucking the tabloids love the sex, don't they, man?
[00:09:55]  So like, yeah, that was definitely been like the majority of the media coverage.
[00:09:58]  Also, because like that was the big thing that came in at first, and because the police spun it as like a rogue officer and then a rogue unit, it was like, oh, this was like this thing that went on that shouldn't nerve.
[00:10:09]  And like, and then the media, like, kind of, there was a lot of coverage at the beginning about that.
[00:10:13]  And then like editors are like, well, we've covered that.
[00:10:15]  Well, since then, we found out so much more.
[00:10:17]  So much information has kind of drip, dripped out that like we realized, yeah, it's not a rogue officer.
[00:10:21]  It's not a rogue unit.
[00:10:22]  This was not like accidental.
[00:10:23]  This was like, this is systemic, right?
[00:10:25]  The whole thing's systemic.
[00:10:26]  It goes back a long way.
[00:10:27]  They had tradecraft manuals on this shit.
[00:10:30]  And like that kind of, but like, I think for a lot of reporters, they kind of picture that to their editors and they just go, well, we've covered this.
[00:10:35]  We covered this like eight years ago and it was about the sex and stuff.
[00:10:38]  So we're just not covering it anymore.
[00:10:40]  I think that's part of the problem, amongst other things.
[00:10:42]  Yeah, I mean, another thing too is that like this inquiry.
[00:10:45]  So, so, I mean, for those who haven't picked up on it yet, there is this inquiry going on out there, which is an official government inquiry.
[00:10:52]  But it's also taking fucking forever.
[00:10:54]  I mean, I was reading an interview with, I can't remember what, a victim from, I believe, a woman who was in one of these relationships in the 90s.
[00:11:03]  And she's like, yeah, like, you know, I've been going, but I'm not going to be able to give evidence until 2024.
[00:11:09]  And I mean, like we talked about last time we interviewed, this has been delayed and delayed and delayed.
[00:11:14]  But they finally did these four rounds of inquiry.
[00:11:18]  I guess four weeks.
[00:11:19]  I don't know, four rounds is necessarily the way to describe it.
[00:11:21]  Yeah, so we had like two weeks about November, and then it was three and a half weeks just now.
[00:11:28]  But then they just announced just when this one started that the next round, which was meant to be this November, is being put back to next year at some point next year.
[00:11:36]  They don't even say when.
[00:11:37]  And then also that the next phase after that will be a year later again.
[00:11:41]  So tranche.
[00:11:43]  So we're still on tranche one.
[00:11:44]  We've just done phase two.
[00:11:45]  There's like numerous phases to each tranche.
[00:11:48]  But yeah, we're probably, yeah, 2024, I think, is a bit that was Lisa who said that.
[00:11:55]  She was saying, yeah, 2024, I think she was being optimistic personally.
[00:11:59]  I think like, I mean, there's a possibility that it'll never finish this inquiry, that it'll just get like mothballed.
[00:12:06]  But as we get closer to like the present day, because like the police have been dragging their heels, of course.
[00:12:13]  One of the big reasons for the delays is the police asking for anonymity orders, putting in judicial reviews, doing everything they can to slow down the process.
[00:12:20]  Obviously, they've got the documents and they've got to release the documents.
[00:12:23]  So they've dragged their heels on every step of that on the redactions.
[00:12:27]  So like, I mean, that's what they've done for like the early 70s.
[00:12:30]  Like, how do you think they're going to get to when it's like 10 years ago, man?
[00:12:32]  It's, you know, I know.
[00:12:34]  It's like you're going to get to like the 2000s in like 10 years or something.

=== Undercover Operations Revealed (14:28) ===

[00:12:39]  Exactly.
[00:12:39]  I was going to say the first chair has already died.
[00:12:42]  We're on the second chairman of the inquiry already.
[00:12:44]  Like, I mean, if he dies.
[00:12:45]  Wait, the first chairman of the inquiry died?
[00:12:48]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:12:49]  Lord Justice Pitchford was the original chair of the inquiry.
[00:12:51]  Like, he wasn't that old, but yeah.
[00:12:52]  I mean, this guy's older, I think.
[00:12:54]  But yeah, I got to say, too, as an outside observer to the UK judicial system, is I knew they wore the funky little robes and little hair, but there is a picture of, I can't remember who it is, but in the first coverage of the week on that website, what's the URL?
[00:13:13]  The campaign opposing police surveillance.com.
[00:13:15]  Snappy, Snappy.
[00:13:16]  That's us.
[00:13:18]  But there is a picture of one of, I believe, a magistrate in it, and the man is- He's not a magistrate.
[00:13:25]  I mean, he's a judge.
[00:13:27]  He's the chair.
[00:13:27]  It's Sir John Mitting is his name.
[00:13:30]  He looks like goddamn Santa Claus, except not jolly whatsoever.
[00:13:35]  The red is a truly undignified color for a rogue.
[00:13:40]  Yeah, it's yeah, it's very phenomenal.
[00:13:42]  No fence.
[00:13:43]  But so we're talking about 72 to 84, you said, in this?
[00:13:48]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:13:50]  Famously so, in Britain, those years were dominated by the far right.
[00:13:56]  I suppose at least later, the 80s.
[00:13:58]  I mean, by the emergence of the national front.
[00:14:01]  Yeah, so in 1977, the National Front came third in the popular vote in the general election.
[00:14:07]  They didn't win any seats.
[00:14:08]  They won some council seats, Isle of Dogs was a famous one.
[00:14:11]  But like they were replacing the Liberals as like the third biggest party in British politics.
[00:14:16]  Now, I mean, Thatcher came on along in 79 and like stole all the policies.
[00:14:20]  Well, not all the policy, but a lot of the policies.
[00:14:22]  And also the shtick.
[00:14:24]  They didn't have to say this exact policies, but people knew what, you know, nudge, nudge, wig, wig, dog whistle kind of shit.
[00:14:30]  But yeah, like they really, really were on the rise.
[00:14:32]  And, you know, at the same time as they were like kind of presenting this political force, they were also on the streets in a really big way.
[00:14:39]  Certain parts of Britain, which were like kind of, they were doing marches through multicultural areas.
[00:14:44]  There was like, there was all these little splinter groups.
[00:14:46]  Like one of them we heard about the inquiry was the Dagenham Axe clan, clan with a K, that would go around and throw like axes through the windows of like, like they were in Dagenham, which at the time was a very white area.
[00:14:58]  So like, you know, they didn't have many people to go for, but they found like some mixed race woman who had a Jewish husband and they like, they, you know, they, yeah, you know, I mean, like, things like that was, it was quite common at the time.
[00:15:09]  Like, there was a lot of it happening in the UK.
[00:15:10]  So, you know, a lot, as you'd imagine, you know, the left's biggest kind of thing at the time was anti-fascism, right?
[00:15:16]  Like, that was, you know, and so you had these really big demonstrations.
[00:15:19]  Like, last time I was on, we talked a lot about the anti-Vietnam war movement.
[00:15:23]  And like, that was the original sort of group that was targeted after 68, you know, the big right in Grosvenor Square outside the US Embassy.
[00:15:33]  But the next big thing that happened was the anti-apartheid movement.
[00:15:37]  And that was the next big thing they targeted, which was, you know, solidarity with Black South Africa, you know, opposing the apartheid regime in South Africa.
[00:15:45]  And there was a thing called the Stop the 70 tour, where a cricket team, a cricket's really big in England, you may have heard of it.
[00:15:51]  And like the, it's also South Africa.
[00:15:53]  And there was a tour planned and there was like a campaign to like kind of people running on the pitch, you know, stopping these kind of these games happening.
[00:16:00]  And this was kind of, this became sort of like the number one target for the undercover police after they'd kind of decided that they'd kind of done the, I mean, they hadn't completely done it, but they'd kind of finished with the Vietnam Solidarity campaign.
[00:16:12]  And there was, actually, interestingly, we heard a bit about the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which started around then.
[00:16:16]  They infiltrated that right from the get-go as well.
[00:16:20]  Yeah, yeah, I read it.
[00:16:21]  They started like right in 67.
[00:16:23]  They sent undercover officers.
[00:16:25]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:16:26]  Well, I mean, this is one of the things which I think last time I was on, I didn't really sort of underline enough is that like these undercover officers that we're talking about, when we talk about like the spy cops, special demonstration squad, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, these are like full, full deep cover undercover officers, right?
[00:16:42]  And they were recruited from like the C-section of Special Branch, which are already political police who used to turn up to demonstrations and meetings in plain clothes.
[00:16:52]  Now, for me, for a long time as an activist when I was younger, I kind of thought that's what undercover police were, right?
[00:16:57]  They were these guys who turned up to meetings and protests in plain clothes.
[00:17:00]  But like to the police, that's not undercover officers.
[00:17:03]  That's plain clothes officers, right?
[00:17:04]  So, like, a lot of the, before these units were formed, like, they were recruiting quite heavily from people who'd done that kind of work.
[00:17:11]  And, like, a lot of the undercover officers we heard evidence from at this stage of the inquiry, they said, oh, I was, you know, I've been in C-section for years.
[00:17:18]  You know, I already was familiar with the targets.
[00:17:20]  I was already familiar with the networks or whatever.
[00:17:22]  I was just going into them now, you know, like properly.
[00:17:26]  So, yeah, what were some of the groups that they targeted?
[00:17:28]  I mean, let's start kind of with the early 70s.
[00:17:31]  I noticed that Socialist Workers' Party comes up a lot.
[00:17:33]  And that was less so now, but certainly was a pretty big group in the 70s in the UK.
[00:17:41]  Right.
[00:17:41]  Trotskyism and the UK has always had a, let's say, a special relationship.
[00:17:45]  But they seem to have like a lot of front groups, which the special branch, or rather, excuse me, the SDS infiltrated heavily.
[00:17:54]  I mean, I'm talking about some of the stuff that I was reading here.
[00:17:57]  I mean, they were the granular level of detail that they were taking from these groups and writing up reports on.
[00:18:05]  I mean, we're talking lists of who's babysitting who's kids with pictures of the kids in these sort of reports.
[00:18:11]  And so, like, you know, what actual groups were they really kind of going after here?
[00:18:19]  So, at the time, the Socialist Worker Party was originally called the International Socialists.
[00:18:24]  They changed their name to improve paper sales because the paper was called the Socialist Worker.
[00:18:27]  And I mean, anybody in the UK who's familiar will know that the SWP is all about paper sales.
[00:18:32]  Oh, yeah.
[00:18:33]  Which is really interesting, actually.
[00:18:34]  When we heard from Paul Cray, one of the undercover officers, he was still kind of a bit hung up on the paper selling thing.
[00:18:41]  You could hear it in him.
[00:18:42]  He was like kind of an, and then we do this and that.
[00:18:44]  And hopefully, we'd sell lots of copies of Socialist Worker.
[00:18:46]  And it was put to him that he wasn't a very good seller.
[00:18:49]  Yeah, well, that's the most important thing.
[00:18:51]  I mean, that's, you could say that is actually like a pretty important way to strike back at the spy cops is doing the classic Trotskyist tactic of you have to sell this newspaper every day for some reason.
[00:19:04]  Yeah.
[00:19:05]  But I mean, like, when we talk about, so like, um, there was the anti-apartheid movement was literally the name of the thing, and the Stop the 70 tour was like the original enemy.
[00:19:12]  But then the next big one was like, obviously, Ireland was like a really big, you know, I mean, obviously, Ireland is still a big issue in British politics.
[00:19:19]  But like in the early 70s, a group called the Troops Out Movement started, which was like, you know, an unaffiliated to Irish Republicanism campaign.
[00:19:29]  It was very much set itself as like kind of a, you know, non-sectarian, like bring the troops home.
[00:19:34]  You know, don't let, you know, don't have troops on the ground in Northern Ireland.
[00:19:37]  We love our squaddies.
[00:19:38]  We want them back.
[00:19:39]  I shouldn't do that.
[00:19:40]  I'm sorry.
[00:19:42]  Yeah, I mean, it wasn't, you know, I mean, like, I think there was definitely an attempt by maybe a slightly cynical attempt by those on the left to try and tap into like kind of that.
[00:19:49]  So it was like very broad-based, you know, lots of like, you know, vicars and fucking politicians involved.
[00:19:54]  But like Rick Gibson, who was one of the undercover officers, I mean, he was one of the ones who like really learned how to use having sexual relationships with people in order to get himself like up the levels of the organization.
[00:20:07]  I mean, he ended up as national convener of the organization.
[00:20:10]  I mean, like, there's there was later another undercover officer that ended up on the central committee.
[00:20:16]  Like, and not for like a short period, like 18 months, he was national.
[00:20:18]  I mean, this is not like some sort of.
[00:20:22]  He's not like in the group.
[00:20:24]  He's like running the national network, the national kind of campaign, like the whole thing.
[00:20:30]  So like, yeah, I think one of the reasons why the police really like kind of infiltrated the International Socialists and the Socialist Worker Party, their successor, so deeply is partially because it was possible to do that.
[00:20:43]  Like kind of, there's lots of elected position.
[00:20:45]  I mean, like, you know, the people who infiltrated the anarchists, the best they could do was hang around Freedom Press a lot and like kind of hope to bump into people and become buddies with people and shit to like kind of work their way up.
[00:20:53]  Whereas in the SWP, you just, I mean, like, so Rick Gibson, there wasn't a branch in the area that he was set to.
[00:20:59]  So he, he kind of, he contacted someone, Richard Chessman, to like set up a branch.
[00:21:04]  And like, he contacted the national, we need a branch in this area.
[00:21:07]  Then he became the rep for that branch.
[00:21:09]  And then he got the rep for that branch to become like rep for the region.
[00:21:12]  And then he became rep for London, you know, and he kind of moved his way up through the ranks.
[00:21:17]  Just sort of like kind of creating.
[00:21:19]  We had a few examples of that.
[00:21:20]  I mean, particularly with the Maoists.
[00:21:23]  Like there was one, which was like a three person, like one of the undercovers started his own faction with like members of other Maoist groups, like who had been expelled.
[00:21:32]  And they started this, and they produced like one pamphlet that was denouncing all the other Maoist groups.
[00:21:36]  I've got to be honest, I like, it's been an education for me in like kind of, like I'm an anarchist, right?
[00:21:41]  So like my history, I kind of know the anarchist stuff.
[00:21:44]  And I read all the old anarchy magazines, you know, we heard about Albert, it was, we heard about Albert Meltzer and like Stuart Christie quite a lot.
[00:21:50]  These are like kind of big names in British anarchism.
[00:21:54]  Man, Stuart Christie, anarchist granddad, man.
[00:21:56]  Like, I mean, it really sad that he died last year, you know, for a long time at the anarchist book for in London.
[00:22:00]  It was like one of those people you'd be like, kind of, oh, hello, Mr. Christie.
[00:22:03]  You know, it was kind of exciting to meet.
[00:22:05]  I've used, I used a lot of his work on this show.
[00:22:07]  Yeah.
[00:22:08]  Okay, cool, man.
[00:22:09]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:22:10]  Taught the citizens militia, yeah.
[00:22:12]  But like he, um, yeah, but in terms of like the Maoist stuff, I had no idea.
[00:22:16]  I didn't realize like so much of that stuff.
[00:22:18]  And it was quite interesting to kind of, they're quite small groups, but then they were heavily infiltrated like everybody else was.
[00:22:24]  Though the cops who did that, like that was like a really bum deal.
[00:22:27]  Lots of the other cops were like, oh, couldn't have done that.
[00:22:29]  Couldn't have infiltrated, couldn't have infiltrated those.
[00:22:31]  It was too much, too much reading, too much, like too involved, you know.
[00:22:35]  And the men were always getting told off, you know, for being misogynists, you know?
[00:22:39]  Well, we had here in America, actually, one of the sort of like there was a, there was a, um, a group, a Maoist group started entirely and staffed entirely by the FBI, actually.
[00:22:52]  We interviewed an author.
[00:22:53]  He not about the book he wrote about that, but there's a book called, I believe, Heavy Radicals, which is about just FBI infiltration of Maoist groups in the 70s.
[00:23:01]  And they started their own and started sending out.
[00:23:04]  And I mean, there was no actual group that you could join, but they sent out newsletters to different people and like, you know, presented themselves as like a Maoist branch of the Communist Party USA.
[00:23:13]  And so, yeah, I mean, a lot of times, unfortunately, as a Maoist, most Maoist groups do have somewhere where you can count the guys in your fingers.
[00:23:22]  But, but yeah, I saw that.
[00:23:24]  I mean, and these officers too would go from group to group to group as well.
[00:23:29]  I mean, I think like the thing with like the office, like what we found out was that early on, like officers could kind of do what they wanted.
[00:23:35]  They were like, we need someone in this part of London.
[00:23:37]  So go and join whatever's happening in that area, you know?
[00:23:40]  And like, but they were given a lot of leeway.
[00:23:42]  Like I say, like Rick Gibson started up his own group in that area.
[00:23:46]  Other people like, you know, like say Vince Miller, who we heard quite a lot about because he had a relationship with a woman who gave evidence, Madeline, he was in Walthamstow.
[00:23:55]  And like, I mean, the amount of information he had about people who'd like bought copies of Socialist Worker in Walthamstow, it wasn't just like people who like turned up to demonstrations or members of the party.
[00:24:04]  It was like people who turned up to one meeting, like public meetings about one topic, you know, like some local issue maybe, or like people who just regularly bought the paper.
[00:24:13]  You know, I mean, we heard from like Paul Gray about like, you know, just some 15-year-old lad who'd like had a problem with racists in his school who'd like, you know, kind of talked to the S had gone to SWP paper sales to get in the face of the National Front.
[00:24:25]  And I mean, like, he'd had a registry file opened on him at like 15.
[00:24:29]  You know, he's being spied on from an early age.
[00:24:31]  I mean, like, you know, so the registry files are like the MI5 files, which like the special branch have access to.
[00:24:39]  So they're like the kind of the bit of the security services as opposed to the plot, you know, the police that are like kind of go between the two.
[00:24:47]  So like having a registry file on you is like, that's your card marks and, you know, and like the people are getting these registry files on them for like very little.
[00:25:03]  You started earlier, you were saying about the difference between plain clothes and deep cover, like that, that, that kind of the perception being that they're like, we kind of understood, but the slow drip of information that's coming out is that, you know.
[00:25:18]  in order for them to infiltrate and be kind of able to infiltrate all these different groups, it's like a totally different level of intelligence that these like intelligence level training that these guys are working with.
[00:25:29]  I think that's like been, that was really surprising to me reading all of this stuff because I think I was like you, it's like, oh, I think I understand how this works.
[00:25:36]  You know, it's like everyone thinks, oh, he's a cop, oh, he's a Fed, but it's like a totally different level of training even involved.
[00:25:44]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:25:45]  And I think like one of the things which I think is really kind of like the most sort of most shocking.
[00:25:50]  I mean, like, fucking hell, you can't, there's so much shocking shit.
[00:25:53]  But like, one of the things that really kind of is how much they use trauma, right?
[00:25:57]  So a lot of people who were infiltrated had, you know, like certain traumatic things that happened in their lives.
[00:26:03]  And we see those like echoing in like later deployments.
[00:26:07]  Like undercover cops have picked it up as like, oh, this is a good like little.
[00:26:11]  So then it turns up as like a, so, you know, they've always like, their parents are always dead.
[00:26:15]  They've been fostered or adopted.
[00:26:18]  There's like, you know, the breakup of a relationship.
[00:26:20]  It's like there's certain sort of like kind of hallmarks a lot of the undercover officers had, which they'd built up from like kind of studying the lives of activists and what activists are like.
[00:26:28]  And if you look through like the tradecraft manual, you're seeing like kind of, you know, these kind of this group, they're like this.
[00:26:33]  They've got these sort of, a lot of it like kind of cartoonish and like bullshit, you know, but a lot of it is like kind of, ooh, I feel seen.
[00:26:39]  You know what I mean?
[00:26:40]  So yeah, there's like, there's definitely like a lot more kind of, there's a lot more in it than like even like, particularly like when we heard about like kind of the level to which like it's because it's not just like, you know, when I say, oh, if you bought copies of Socialist Worker in Walthamstow in the late 70s, you were on a list.
[00:26:56]  It wasn't just your name.
[00:26:57]  It was your address, your job, if you're a member of a trade union, how much you earned, who you lived with, what you looked like, what the people you lived with looked like, what they did for a job, if they were members of a trade union, where they went on to move to next.

=== Infiltration Tactics (15:28) ===

[00:27:07]  I mean, we had some files where like kind of has not been involved in radical politics for three years.
[00:27:12]  And that's the opening line, you know, about this person, right?
[00:27:15]  So I mean, like, you know, it's just literally like kind of, you know, I mean, I mean, one of the interesting ones, so like Lord Peter Hain was one of the people who gave evidence who was targeted quite a lot because he'd been very involved in the anti-apartheid movement.
[00:27:27]  I mean, he was being spied on in 2003, where he was described in an undercover police report as a South African terrorist.
[00:27:35]  Now, at the time, he was a member of the British cabinet, Blair's cabinet, right?
[00:27:38]  They've just gone to fucking war with Iraq.
[00:27:40]  He was Welsh secretary.
[00:27:42]  He was father of the House of Commons.
[00:27:43]  Like, I mean, admittedly, he was a Labour Party politician, right?
[00:27:47]  And you can never truly join the established establishment in this country unless you're talking.
[00:27:50]  I mean, like, you know, it was a Labour government, but it's the taught, like the Conservative Party is their state, right?
[00:27:54]  Britain is their state.
[00:27:56]  Like, they're always in charge, really.
[00:27:58]  So, I guess he was never fully, you know, in this country, you can't, you'll still, you'll still be spied on, like, unless you're a Tory, because we haven't found any Tories yet, but you know.
[00:28:08]  Oh, no, no.
[00:28:09]  And that sort of brings me, I mean, speaking of Tories and their, you know, sort of their little stepcousins or I would say stepbrothers in the National Front.
[00:28:18]  I mean, you talked about earlier, the National Front starts in 1977, right?
[00:28:22]  And I think that like, I mean- It didn't start then, but that's his high watermark.
[00:28:26]  Oh, okay.
[00:28:26]  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:28:28]  So I forget the year it starts.
[00:28:29]  I think it starts at like late 60s, but it's small at first, but it really grows to like being the national party of British fascism by 77 at that election.
[00:28:40]  Stands a lot of candidates.
[00:28:41]  That's also, I mean, it sort of coincides with the rise of just the skinhead movement.
[00:28:46]  I don't know what you want to call it in the UK.
[00:28:49]  And a lot of like I would say on the skinhead thing, like, I mean, it, so I mean, no, no, you're kind of right.
[00:28:54]  You're kind of right.
[00:28:54]  I mean, like, the skinhead movement's bigger than that.
[00:28:56]  I mean, like, you know, there was a lot of skinheads who were joining left-wing groups involved in anti-fascist organizing at the time.
[00:29:03]  You know what I mean?
[00:29:03]  Oh, I'm familiar with that.
[00:29:05]  It's a two-sided kind of thing.
[00:29:06]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:29:07]  Well, like, I live in South Wales.
[00:29:09]  So, like, the local like skinheads around here, like the oppressed, who are like kind of, you know, very much like, we'll never let you like mention skinheads without bringing this fact up.
[00:29:18]  So, you know, I'm a rocker baby.
[00:29:22]  I know.
[00:29:23]  I'm familiar.
[00:29:24]  I had all the Cockney Rejects records.
[00:29:27]  I got the oppressed record.
[00:29:28]  Also, unfortunately, I had the Combat 84 record, but I didn't know about them back then.
[00:29:34]  But yeah, the, but, but, you know, there was a huge surge in far-right violence just on the streets of England.
[00:29:42]  I mean, that is like, you know, without a doubt.
[00:29:44]  I think maybe American, you know, Americans might know that.
[00:29:49]  I mean, just, you might just know about it.
[00:29:51]  But, you know, there was that, what was that?
[00:29:53]  This is England movie that came out that sort of showcased that pretty well.
[00:30:00]  But what's sort of astounding is that the only case of SDS infiltration of far-right groups that I'm familiar with in this comes from a member, a cop, joining the Socialist Workers' Party, I believe, and the Socialist Workers' Party.
[00:30:15]  Workers' Revolutionary Party.
[00:30:17]  Workers' Revolutionary Revolutionary Party.
[00:30:18]  and the workers revolutionary party having them go undercover to join uh i don't know exactly which group it was but i um So it was Liga St. George.
[00:30:30]  I mean, he was infiltrating basically the local branch of the National Front, but it was Liga St. George was there kind of was, oh, he kind of went back to his superiors, but oh, these guys seem pretty serious.
[00:30:39]  Maybe we should infiltrate these.
[00:30:40]  They were like, oh, yeah, don't worry about it, son.
[00:30:42]  Don't worry about it.
[00:30:42]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:30:44]  And I think it really feeds into this thing we see a lot, you know, of like kind of, I don't know about the US, but I guess it probably is the case, same over there, but in the UK, there's this kind of feeling that whilst like left-wing politics is like sedition, like working for foreign governments, you know, kind of trying to overthrow society, that like extreme racism and fascism are like legitimate white working class concerns.
[00:31:04]  You know, we saw it much more recently with the rise of the English Defense League, like 10 years ago, where we had like senior police officers saying that the Muslim group should engage with the legitimate concerns of the English Defense League.
[00:31:15]  It's like, you know, I mean, there's this kind of this thing that like for the establishment, you know, the far right are a, well, they're useful, right?
[00:31:26]  They're like kind of they, and I think this is so much about what the actual point of these undercover deployments was, because it was about fighting social attitudes.
[00:31:34]  And like, obviously, they didn't need to fight those social attitudes.
[00:31:37]  I mean, those social attitudes like really fitted into their own agenda.
[00:31:40]  So like, why would you want to like dampen them?
[00:31:42]  Right, right, right.
[00:31:43]  So, yes, there was none in the far right, but the anti-fascists, I mean, boy, did they get fucking infiltrated in a big way.
[00:31:50]  Yeah, yeah, in a seriously, I mean, because there was, there was a really big anti-fascist movement in the UK in the in the 70s and 80s.
[00:31:57]  I mean, there was, you know, obviously searchlight magazine, all that kind of stuff.
[00:32:00]  But, but this tactic of even having members go undercover into right-wing groups was like actually a surprisingly pretty common one, which I see a lot in the UK.
[00:32:11]  Not sure how much that happened in the US, but also the US, our far right sort of manifested itself into militia movements, which were well, the FBI had a lot of engagement with them, which, you know, culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing, which the FBI did, but it not it was not the same sort of engagement as left-wing groups and right-wing groups had in the UK.
[00:32:34]  But there was the big battle of Lewisham.
[00:32:37]  Can you tell us?
[00:32:37]  Oh, but Lewisham, yes, Lewisham, 1977.
[00:32:40]  Yeah, man.
[00:32:40]  I mean, like, yeah, Lewisham.
[00:32:42]  I mean, I think like, so Lewisham was a very multicultural area.
[00:32:45]  And there was a real sort of like what the National Front sort of tactic was at the time was to go to like the most multicultural place they could and you know do a show of strength through it.
[00:32:55]  They had a section of the National Front called the Honor Guard because obviously these people are fucking weird.
[00:33:01]  Yeah.
[00:33:01]  And like they would be all like kind of in, you know, streetwear, but in uniform with like, you know, turn-up stay press jeans, bomber jackets, this certain look, big boots.
[00:33:12]  And they would go through and like, you know, there would be like increases in racial attacks in those areas after they'd done the marches, you know, kind of it was really kind of designed to sort of to make a, you know, to kick things off.
[00:33:24]  There was, you know, the far right have always been about kind of kicking off a race war, right?
[00:33:27]  So this was like kind of an attempt at that sort of thing.
[00:33:29]  And Lewisham, I think, was like the moment when, so like, we had a few undercover police talk about it as like kind of that's when British public order policing changed.
[00:33:39]  That we started seeing the rise of like the riot cop as we know them now, you know, these body armored kind of guys that like, if you, I mean, you can fight the riot cop all you like, man, you ain't hurting him.
[00:33:49]  Like when he's in all that gear, you ain't hurting him.
[00:33:50]  But back then, you could fight a cop.
[00:33:52]  You could actually fight the cop.
[00:33:54]  You know, you'd like, you'd probably lose, but you could fight one.
[00:33:56]  You know, you could actually, you know, you could, you could have a have a pop, like, you know.
[00:34:00]  You could, you could get, you could get fist to face.
[00:34:03]  Yeah, yeah, it would be physically possible.
[00:34:04]  Yeah, physically possible to knock one over.
[00:34:06]  Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
[00:34:08]  So like, this was kind of, so yeah, like Lewisham was like the moment where like kind of anti-fascists were like, right, no, fuck this.
[00:34:16]  We're like, and there was, you know, there was significant violence.
[00:34:20]  You know, nobody was killed.
[00:34:21]  There was eight, you know, there were 18 undercover officers there that day.
[00:34:25]  Interestingly, you know, we go on two years to the, oh God, I'm trying to think of the name of the bloody location of it.
[00:34:32]  Southall, Southall.
[00:34:33]  South in 1979, where a member of the Socialist Workers' Party, Blair Peach, was beaten to death by members of the Special Patrol Group, which is the specialist unit that had been set up after Lewisham.
[00:34:46]  Like only one undercover officer admits to have been there, which is obviously a fucking lie.
[00:34:54]  They were heavily, heavily infiltrating the anti-fascist movement at that time.
[00:34:59]  And like, you know, the reports we've got from that, you know, it's about everything, right?
[00:35:05]  It's about everything.
[00:35:06]  It's the same as everything else.
[00:35:07]  You know, the detail, no detail too small, right?
[00:35:10]  Everything recorded.
[00:35:11]  Particularly, of course, like the personal detail, the personal sort of, all the pretty girls, right?
[00:35:17]  They list all the pretty girls and like kind of the size of their chests and all that kind of stuff, you know, but like, yeah, but by the time you've got to like the late 70s, the National Front have really been like kind of they've become like a, you know, a significant threat, I think, to anybody.
[00:35:34]  Like, you know, there's numerous like kind of race attacks, there's splinter groups like Column 88, the Dolston Axe clan, who are like going around throwing axes through the windows of like mixed race couples and stuff.
[00:35:50]  And you get things like these community defense groups springing up, which are like, you know, admittedly like kind of inspired by the left, but it's bigger than that.
[00:35:59]  And I mean, this was the thing that the police really realized they couldn't deal, that this was the problem, you know, that they, this is why they were maybe one of the reasons why they were so desperate for like the slightest bit of information about anybody was vaguely connected because, you know, a lot of these people who are fighting the fascists back, they're not like, they're not Trotskyites.
[00:36:15]  They're not, isn't it all those fucking words mean?
[00:36:17]  They just live here.
[00:36:17]  And these are the people who are fucking making their lives misery.
[00:36:19]  You know what I mean?
[00:36:20]  So like a lot of anti-fascists weren't coming from a political place and the police were like, shit, how do we, how do we stop those ones?
[00:36:26]  You know, there was a really famous Rock Against Racism gig with like the clash in 1978.
[00:36:32]  It was in Victoria Park.
[00:36:33]  Right.
[00:36:33]  It's like a really famous concert.
[00:36:34]  It's in that film Rude Boy.
[00:36:36]  I don't know if you know the clash, but it's in the film Rude Boy.
[00:36:38]  It's like a really famous kind of.
[00:36:40]  And like it, you know, 100,000 people turned up, right?
[00:36:42]  It's like this, like the undercover officers had no idea it was going to be that big.
[00:36:46]  I mean, the organizers, we spoke to, they had no idea it was going to be that big either.
[00:36:50]  It was like, whoa, shit, this is, you know, it turned to a massive event.
[00:36:53]  And there was, there was, you know, from the like the public order unit within special branch, they weren't really angry with the SDS.
[00:37:00]  You know, we didn't, you didn't tell us there was going to be this many people.
[00:37:03]  And there's a National Front demonstration tomorrow.
[00:37:05]  And there's tens of thousands of anti-fascists in London, especially.
[00:37:08]  How are we meant to guarantee the safety of the National Front tomorrow?
[00:37:12]  I mean, that's an internal memo.
[00:37:15]  That's the key.
[00:37:15]  You surprise the organizers and then you can surprise the cops.
[00:37:20]  Exactly, man.
[00:37:22]  That's what we can learn from this.
[00:37:24]  100%.
[00:37:24]  Yeah.
[00:37:25]  I mean, actually, it really is.
[00:37:26]  You know, there's the spontaneous stuff they can't fucking deal with, you know.
[00:37:29]  Or just, yeah, I mean, I think that's such a fascinating point about, you know, the, you know, for people who don't understand the history there, but with the anti-fascist movement in Britain in the late 70s, early 80s, like being as big as it was and really being like just about like neighborhoods and families like protecting their streets, like quite literally.
[00:37:52]  And it being almost apolitical at that point, right?
[00:37:55]  And that being the biggest threat to the cops because they had no, they, they have no, like, there's no pathway for them to get into just like literally regular working people's homes that are not politically active on that kind of like vanguard front.
[00:38:10]  That's like a really important, I think an important kind of like organizing point to internalize, really.
[00:38:19]  Yeah, I think absolutely.
[00:38:20]  And I think like, you know, it's that thing of like kind of if, you know, if revolution means anything, it has to be like rooted in everyday life, all that shit.
[00:38:26]  That's really true.
[00:38:28]  Yeah, like, how do you, how do you break into family units?
[00:38:30]  I mean, the police found ways.
[00:38:32]  Private justice campaigns of which we hear that first one with the Blair Peach campaign, which is really heavily targeted.
[00:38:37]  And we heard a lot about that this phase.
[00:38:39]  But like in future phases, they, you know, they like pretty much every single person who was killed by the police or in a racist attack.
[00:38:46]  And then there was a family justice campaign about it.
[00:38:48]  They made sure they infiltrated that.
[00:38:50]  They put a lot of resources into those because they saw those as like kind of more dangerous than the left almost.
[00:38:54]  You know, these are like ordinary working class people organizing for themselves and they're ethnic minorities.
[00:38:59]  Oh my God, fucking hell.
[00:39:01]  That's like the worst thing.
[00:39:02]  One-two punch.
[00:39:02]  I should fucking imagine.
[00:39:04]  All right.
[00:39:04]  For real.
[00:39:05]  Yeah.
[00:39:06]  I mean, that is an interesting point because like, if there's anything you can learn from these inquiries and like something that, I mean, I myself am very intimately familiar with is that left-wing organizations often have a lot of problems.
[00:39:20]  I mean, everything from paranoia, which actually in this case would have been justified, but to bizarre, like, you know, parliamentary maneuverings and like, you know, the psychology of being in some of these groups, I think makes your brain a little twisted.
[00:39:38]  I mean, they're talking about, I think it was Diane Langford, who was in the Women's Liberation Front, who gave evidence.
[00:39:47]  There was an SDS, I think a woman officer from the SDS joined the women's liberation group and got her.
[00:39:55]  Sandra, got her ousted as the leader by leading a campaign against her.
[00:40:00]  Yeah, right.
[00:40:01]  Yeah, that's something we see a few times.
[00:40:03]  Essentially, like you had this thing of like kind of these officers who were like kind of getting themselves up to power, they were doing it at the expense of other people.
[00:40:11]  Like, I mean, we had a number of undercover officers going, well, I didn't do anything.
[00:40:14]  I've got elected that position, but I didn't do anything.
[00:40:16]  I didn't do any work as that position.
[00:40:18]  I just got the position because I was asked to and people elected me to do it, but I didn't want it and I didn't do anything.
[00:40:23]  But like what you actually see is like, yeah, you went and replaced a really capable person who was really driven and would have done a really good job.
[00:40:30]  And you went and sat in that position and like fucked about and like kind of denounced some people and split the group and expelled someone.
[00:40:37]  And yeah, I mean, like, yeah, you didn't do much except for, you know, make a mess.
[00:40:41]  Like you've just told on yourself.
[00:40:43]  Yeah.
[00:40:44]  I mean, I mean, she gave, she gave evidence that Sandra Davies like ignored there was like a rape allegation at one of these meetings.
[00:40:52]  And she just totally shunted that aside with the intention of focusing on Langford and her partner and like, and just like ridiculing them and getting them out of power.
[00:41:03]  And so like, yeah, I mean, these things do actually have some pretty big, I mean, even if they say like, oh, you know, I was just sort of sat in this position on this group that would have disappeared in a few years anyways.
[00:41:12]  Like, you know, I mean, certainly that may be literally true, but, you know, there's a lot of details here I think that are pretty important.
[00:41:22]  I mean, it's worth noting that like, kind of, if you read the women's, like the Women's Liberation Front, I mean, it was a Maoist front, to be honest.
[00:41:28]  But like, you know, their campaign points, you know, they're full of things which now you'd go like, what?
[00:41:33]  I mean, remember, back then, like, women couldn't have their own bank accounts in Britain, you know, like you could, yeah, I mean, like, you know, rape inside marriage was only made illegal in 1990 in the UK, right?
[00:41:43]  You know, there's a lot of things that are, you know, like the rights of somebody born outside wedlock were significantly less than somebody born inside.
[00:41:50]  All these, so many of these things, right?
[00:41:51]  Which their campaign points were kind of pretty, you know, like pretty reasonable.
[00:41:57]  I mean, like some of them kind of are quite radical even now, but like, I think we'd all probably agree with them.
[00:42:01]  But like the most of it is kind of sounds like pretty middle-of-the-road stuff.
[00:42:06]  So like, you know, like taking down those sort of groups, it's like, wow, they really were at war with certain social attitudes, you know.
[00:42:13]  It's like with the troops out movement and the anti-apartheid movement.
[00:42:15]  These were really popular things.
[00:42:16]  They had a lot of widespread support in the country, you know, and I mean, like, so the troops out movement like never really kind of got anywhere particularly, but like there was a lot of support for their line, you know, this sort of like, you know, we're not, um, we're not supporting Irish Republicanism.
[00:42:30]  We're not saying that Ireland should be reunited, but we're saying that we shouldn't have a military operation happening in Northern Ireland.

=== Audio Follows Evidence (07:20) ===

[00:42:36]  You know, and that was like quite, you know, that opinion polling kind of put that as like kind of majority position, right?
[00:42:41]  So, you know, and like same with the anti-racism, you know, the anti-fascism, these were big cultural social movements, you know, of like, kind of, which went beyond politics.
[00:42:49]  And they were fighting against them as much as they were for, like, kind of little groups that were doing something specific.
[00:43:05]  What has been, like, the most, you know, after this phase of the inquiry, like, what has been the most surprising of the, like, drip, slow drip that's come out?
[00:43:14]  Or even from a procedural standpoint?
[00:43:17]  I mean, procedurally, I mean, it's been, we've definitely kind of got a sense of how this is all going to work now.
[00:43:23]  Like, I mean, it's really telling apart from Diane Langford, who forced her way in by being mentioned so much in the first phase.
[00:43:28]  And she was like, Hang on, like, you've made you've named me repeatedly.
[00:43:32]  I like the man to give evidence of this inquiry.
[00:43:34]  Um, everybody else, apart from like Dr. Norman Temple, who obviously the inquiry, once this woman from the Maoists had like forced her way in, he was like, Well, we have to get a man from the Maoists because we can't trust a woman.
[00:43:43]  I mean, they're still dripping with misogyny itself.
[00:43:46]  It's an establishment institution, right?
[00:43:48]  So, they had Dr. Norman Temple, who was like, I don't want to slag anybody off on the anti-state side, but like he was a terrible witness.
[00:43:54]  Jesus wept.
[00:43:55]  God, he was awful.
[00:43:56]  Ed Dorian, man.
[00:43:57]  Ed Dorian from the Irish Republican Socialist Front.
[00:44:01]  Oh, he was a bad man.
[00:44:02]  He didn't like him.
[00:44:03]  He used the entire time giving evidence to slag him off.
[00:44:05]  But anyway, he was just denouncing another guy.
[00:44:08]  All right.
[00:44:08]  Classic.
[00:44:09]  Yeah.
[00:44:09]  Yeah.
[00:44:10]  He just used the classic Maoist man.
[00:44:12]  Do you know what I mean?
[00:44:12]  And like when he was asked directly about the undercover officers, oh, I didn't really know him.
[00:44:16]  It was just like, but Ed Dorian, though, Ed Dorian was like, Trump.
[00:44:18]  Oh, he was awful.
[00:44:21]  But in terms of the line of questioning that we've seen, a lot of it's been particularly early on in the proceedings, like non-state, non-police core participants, which is what they like to call members of the public.
[00:44:33]  It's like this really long-winded name to like, you know, only in only like kind of establishments.
[00:44:37]  Well, you're not the police.
[00:44:38]  You're not the state.
[00:44:39]  So what do we call you?
[00:44:40]  Oh, you're the non-police, non-state people.
[00:44:42]  It's like, no, we're the public, mate.
[00:44:43]  That's anyway.
[00:44:45]  But like, very hostile.
[00:44:48]  Yeah, right.
[00:44:49]  Yeah.
[00:44:49]  Like, we're subjects, technically in Britain.
[00:44:52]  We're not citizens.
[00:44:52]  But there's like, yeah, shit, mate.
[00:44:57]  That's honestly.
[00:44:57]  It's like fucking living in the fucking middle ages sometimes.
[00:45:00]  But there was this like kind of there's these sort of like the way that it's structured is very much like kind of, yeah, but you were being violent, weren't you?
[00:45:11]  Like, you may not have been being violent, but you could see how that disorder would be distressing, don't you?
[00:45:15]  I mean, what were the police meant to do?
[00:45:17]  How, I mean, you know, like you may say that you were engaging with the police, but there were sections within your group that were like, would cause disorder.
[00:45:26]  I mean, how else were they meant to know without putting undercover officers into your group?
[00:45:29]  Now, obviously, the nature of inquiries is, is that like, you've got to cancel the inquiry, and then like all the other sort of interested parties submit questions to them for the witnesses, right?
[00:45:39]  So we're saying, like, we want you to ask this from my lawyer, be like, oh, I want these things asked.
[00:45:43]  And the police would be like, want these things asked, right?
[00:45:45]  But like the tone and the tenor of it has been very hostile and accusatory and kind of aggressive in places.
[00:45:52]  And particularly in some cases, like really kind of like taking people back to incredibly traumatic events, whether that's like the first time they had sex with this guy who was undercover officer or like when their partner was murdered by the police and made them relive that day, which I mean, I've got to be honest, like, because I totally immersed myself in it, I got like much more emotionally upset about that than I probably should have done.
[00:46:13]  Because I just thought, fucking, like, what the fuck are these people doing this for?
[00:46:16]  And it just shows a, there's a lack of respect for the, like, the, the, the shattered lives that they've got in front of them.
[00:46:23]  At the same time, there's, you know, it's telling.
[00:46:26]  The only time that the chair of the inquiry, like, he'd, after everybody gave evidence, he'd thank them.
[00:46:31]  But the only time he ever said, oh, thank you for being an honest witness was to undercover cops who hadn't been fucking honest by anybody's fucking metric.
[00:46:39]  Like, Jesus.
[00:46:39]  I mean, things definitely changed when there was the questioning of Madeline, which was again very hostile, I thought.
[00:46:47]  And then the next day, they had the questioning of Vince Miller, who was the undercover officer who she'd had a sex relationship with.
[00:46:53]  And he was like, I don't know how the hell he was the undercover cop because he gave away every tell in the world of lying.
[00:46:59]  He was like, you know, he was sweating profusely.
[00:47:01]  He was like this on the screen, like edging off out of the corner.
[00:47:06]  He was playing with his neck and his forehead and like doing, pulling on his ear and just doing every telling.
[00:47:15]  Pull on the ear is the most obvious one.
[00:47:18]  No one even does that.
[00:47:19]  I know.
[00:47:21]  I know.
[00:47:21]  It was like a joke almost.
[00:47:23]  Because what's interesting is because none of that footage, I mean, the chair can see it.
[00:47:27]  I could see it and the people in the viewing room could see it, but that no longer exists.
[00:47:31]  The audio doesn't even exist anymore.
[00:47:32]  They don't keep the audio.
[00:47:35]  So you've just got the written record of it.
[00:47:37]  Yeah.
[00:47:38]  So like technically this whole event, if it wasn't for COVID, it would be happening all in the same room.
[00:47:44]  And there would be just the stenographer's transcript, you know, no photographs, no audio.
[00:47:49]  Oh, I see.
[00:47:50]  Because of COVID, it's been broadcast, admittedly, in a side of closed circuit, with certain people being allowed to hear the audio of it if they kind of put a request in.
[00:47:59]  But like, yeah, when it's when it's up and when COVID's over, there will be none of that.
[00:48:02]  There'll be no broadcasting of it at all.
[00:48:04]  So people have been able to follow it.
[00:48:06]  A lot of it quite easily.
[00:48:07]  The non-state corporate, well, I say easily.
[00:48:09]  I mean, it's not none of it's easy.
[00:48:11]  It's designed to be alienating and confusing the whole fucking process.
[00:48:15]  But it is possible if you get like kind of access to the audio to kind of follow things.
[00:48:20]  But once it's in person again, unless you actually physically turn up, there's no way you could follow it.
[00:48:26]  We mentioned the like lack of press coverage.
[00:48:30]  And I mean, at least in, I mean, obviously in the US, there's been literally zero.
[00:48:34]  That's not that surprising.
[00:48:36]  But, you know, the UK press hasn't been all over this stuff either.
[00:48:42]  I don't even know how many, I mean, certainly in the States, I don't even know how many people, including like journalists, are aware of this.
[00:48:50]  But it's been sort of shocking.
[00:48:52]  Yeah, I mean, I think like, so we've had like, there's Rob Evans at the Guardian, who like has been following this story since the very beginning.
[00:48:59]  And he files stories on it as often as he can.
[00:49:02]  So during the inquiry, there was a new article every day.
[00:49:04]  I mean, because the nature of the press, he's filing at like midday, early afternoon, and the inquiry is running until like seven in the evening.
[00:49:11]  And then there's another day tomorrow.
[00:49:12]  Like it's kind of what he actually kind of puts into the press is kind of it's not the whole picture at all.
[00:49:18]  And then then the Morning STAR the, THE People's Daily, the left-wing daily English newspaper, the only one, I think, in the world still.
[00:49:24]  Yeah yeah yeah, we we've had, we've had a, we've had a guy on from there oh okay cool, yeah.
[00:49:28]  So Bethany Riley from them, she was at the inquiry every day and like, fair play to her, she stayed there all day and again she had to file in the early afternoon but she actually stayed the whole thing and kind of I think she's got like, kind of she's immersed herself in it as much as any of the activists did um, and like she's, you know, filing regular reports but like in both cases, every one of them sort of like reintroduces the topic to the reader because like, and it's such a complex topic, right there's, it's a hard thing to kind of get across to people unless you go into massive depth.

=== Jackals of MI5 (15:17) ===

[00:49:56]  So if you look at the daily reports that the we did as well, the campaign opposing police surveillance, which i'm part of, um did daily reports, you know we're like so detailed because like, nobody else is doing the detail like at all.
[00:50:10]  You know it's, it's just completely missing because those who are covering it, so like Dominic Cancini from the BBC uh, and Simon Israel from Channel 4, both kind of covered it in like limited amounts but both of them had terrible trouble with their editors getting these things.
[00:50:23]  So they did like reports for the website but it didn't get on the tv news um, just because they were like, oh, we kind of covered this years ago.
[00:50:29]  You know, like we don't get it, don't get why it's a story now and like there's I mean partially, you know, I think it's um because we're learning how far it goes right, like the.
[00:50:41]  These reports were going to the home secretary these um, the directions for these undercover officers were coming from MI5.
[00:50:47]  The security services were asking for specifics.
[00:50:50]  They were asking like a lot.
[00:50:51]  I was surprised how much that was actually you saying.
[00:50:53]  What surprised you most?
[00:50:55]  I think one of the things that kind of did surprise me was I I knew that, like you know, MI5 wanted the files right, they wanted any information.
[00:51:01]  So, you know, put it in, put it in box 500, as well as everything else right, as well as our own files.
[00:51:04]  We give it to MI5.
[00:51:06]  But then the other way, the the, the requests, the memos coming from MI5 going to um, the individual officers going like we want the name and addresses of everybody in this area who's involved in anything and we want no like we need this updated.
[00:51:19]  I mean so much so that undercover officers were like sending memos back going.
[00:51:22]  This is too much work, I can't do this.
[00:51:24]  I need like another three members of staff.
[00:51:26]  I'm gonna.
[00:51:27]  They're asking me for way too much.
[00:51:29]  Um, so they were not doing some parts of it, but you're doing huge parts of it, huge amount of it, and it's starting to see that actually you know that maybe the SDS are kind of like they're, they're just like foot soldiers for MI5.
[00:51:42]  Really um, which kind of I'd always kind of thought again like kind of the MI5 weren't interested in the Soviets.
[00:51:47]  Irish Republicans, you know shit like that not like.
[00:51:50]  You know, like the Women's Liberation, not domestically.
[00:51:54]  Stop the 70 right right yeah yeah, yeah.
[00:51:57]  Well, I mean we we saw the same thing here in the in the 67, I mean up until today too is that like our intelligence services, basically a lot of the times, will use local cops?
[00:52:06]  I mean killing a Fred Hampton is a great example.
[00:52:09]  I mean that was made popular, I guess, by that movie last year but, like you know, in a lot of different cases would definitely use local cops, I mean either as foot soldiers to beat the shit out of somebody or kill somebody or just to spy on people you know, as essentially just like a manpower problem, you know.
[00:52:25]  You know you don't necessarily have enough agents at the federal level to do it.
[00:52:29]  You got to get some fucking cops, you know, on the ground.
[00:52:32]  I think what's interesting too then, is that it's a.
[00:52:35]  It's like I guess I always assumed and I don't know how, what you, what you guys think about this, but I always assumed it's.
[00:52:41]  It's like there's, it's way more informal, like that kind of um communication, you know, like that.
[00:52:47]  It's kind of like wink wink nudge nudge, like you know.
[00:52:50]  It's like your idea about what a plain clothes thing you know and oh, maybe they meet with a guy at a thing, but it's not, you know, a fucking memo.
[00:52:57]  It's not like you're saying, these boxes, get these back to me, but but the kind of like chain of, I mean it's not really chain of command, but the, the kind of like tree information and kind of intelligence tree is I.
[00:53:09]  I mean it's pretty shocking.
[00:53:10]  I had no idea how involved MI5 was, I mean it.
[00:53:16]  What's interesting actually, at the same time as the inquiry was taking place, we also had um Kate Wilson's case at the Investigative Powers Tribunal taking place just at the beginning of this.
[00:53:24]  The inquiry um, and that was looking at uh, Mark Kennedy's deployment in the 2000s.
[00:53:29]  Yeah um, now the Investigative Powers Tribunal is like a really secretive court within the HOME Office just for human rights stuff uh, and like for years doing like legal cases against the police.
[00:53:39]  It was always kind of figured that you'd never do that, but she carried on and did it and it was at the same time as the inquiry, which is really irritating because you couldn't really hard to follow both and it's really it's a really complex court and the way they work is really complex.
[00:53:50]  But we actually ended up with a lot of disclosure from that and what we saw from that is like by the 2000s we're talking like every 20 minutes.
[00:53:57]  They're talking to the handlers like the, the relaying of information, request for information it's.
[00:54:01]  It's not like kind of oh, we have a weekly, like in the 70s they're having twice weekly meetings where they're filing reports and like kind of having debriefs, but like by the 2000s.
[00:54:09]  They're like every 20 minutes text messages, phone calls constantly, constantly in touch um, and like the the the, the request that coming through.
[00:54:18]  It was really interesting.
[00:54:19]  At the inquiry we had um a, one of the bits of evidence was from um, a witness z from MI5, and I forget if it was in that or it was something that was in the Investigative Powers Tribunal pack.
[00:54:31]  But you know, this thing from like MI5 that like kind of, oh well, the problem was these were like you know these were, these were plod doing like a posh boy's job.
[00:54:40]  You know they weren't, they weren't suitably good enough at it and like this is the thing for the security services.
[00:54:45]  They're, they're very elitist very, very elitist.
[00:54:48]  You ain't getting recruited unless you've gone to one of the top UNIS or whatever.
[00:54:51]  So they have got a manpower issue, you know, because they all want to retire young as well.
[00:54:54]  So you know, you know it's like there's there's a real shortage of.
[00:54:58]  You got to go overthrow like the Seyells Government right yeah totally yeah yeah yeah, you know you kind of like expected, you know you expect way more of them than that.
[00:55:06]  So, yeah, they're real manpower issues.
[00:55:08]  And if they're looking at these sort of mass movements that are happening, they have to use local police.
[00:55:23]  A couple of things that stood out to me, too, were, I mean, again, you talked about, I think we talked about this in the first episode, but using the identity of dead children as their identities.
[00:55:36]  A couple of things about that is, one, I didn't know that they actually took that from Day of the Jackal.
[00:55:43]  Yeah, so, like, we kind of thought that was, like, kind of a joke that it would take on Day of the Jackal, because it's known as the Jackal Run within the SDL, which we'd heard from Peter Francis, who was the whistleblower.
[00:55:53]  who kind of um came forward uh, who had been deployed in the 90s.
[00:55:56]  You said oh, we call it the Jackal Run.
[00:55:58]  So we were like, oh right, so was it taken Day Of The Jackal's?
[00:56:00]  Like well, probably not, you know, but it was.
[00:56:01]  It was in the film, wasn't it?
[00:56:03]  But then literally, we had an undercover officer, um Paul Gray, who was one of the few we didn't see, and I was like why can't we see his?
[00:56:09]  We saw the video of them in the viewing room, but him, we didn't see his face, and I was like why don't we see his face.
[00:56:13]  And then I heard his voice and it all made sense.
[00:56:15]  He was so posh, it's like oh, he's posh enough that the inquiry have given him even more anonymity than the rest.
[00:56:20]  So you know, but anyway.
[00:56:21]  So he he said, oh yeah, why did you do this thing?
[00:56:24]  And he's, oh, we'd all seen Day Of The Jackal in 1972, and so by like 1973, we were all that we were doing jackal runs to get our identities and it was like what you've like really.
[00:56:35]  And he's like well yeah, I mean like.
[00:56:37]  So there was other officers were like oh no, it wouldn't have been that, but he was very, I mean, and he was someone who was, though he was a field officer, was very like uh, friendly and close to the other under the other managers, because he was obviously like, he talked about, like kind of when he talked to your managers, mostly on the squash court.
[00:56:53]  You know, I mean this was somebody who was like you know, very much of the same social class as his superiors and he was adamant no, it's from Day Of The Jackal like, I mean literally, you know, that's that.
[00:57:04]  Um, what they would do is go to Summerset House where which is the birth records they'd find someone who died when they were really young, take that identity um interestingly um, Rick Gibson uh, who's one of those officers who had numerous uh, sexual relationships.
[00:57:16]  He did that and he got, he tried to infiltrate a group called BIG Flame um, who were like kind of a libertarian socialist.
[00:57:23]  Uh, really cool, i'm like they're fucking, they're all zines man.
[00:57:26]  They're really cool like the aesthetic of them, the kind of topics that you know, one of the more interesting groups in like British uh left-wing history.
[00:57:32]  But like he tried to infiltrate them and they'd like they checked him out and they went and looked for, looked him up and they found his birth certificate.
[00:57:39]  And then they looked up the death certificates and they found his death certificate.
[00:57:42]  And that's like in the 70s, which I like.
[00:57:45]  When we first learned that a group in the 70s had found that these one of these officers existed, we were like well, why didn't they make a fuss, you know?
[00:57:51]  But actually they were terrified.
[00:57:53]  Is why they were terrified.
[00:57:55]  They put all their information, they confronted him with it, like first they tried to get rid of him without like telling him what they knew, but he just wouldn't off and he kept, oh, just ring this person.
[00:58:03]  This is my brother, he works here.
[00:58:05]  And they kept, no, this is not coming, this is not coming up.
[00:58:08]  They showed him the death certificate.
[00:58:09]  Then he was like no no, bring this person.
[00:58:12]  Next day.
[00:58:13]  It didn't show up, went around his house, cleared out house, never saw again and it was like, oh, so you knew this had happened.
[00:58:18]  Why did you continue to keep using dead children's identities?
[00:58:23]  And you know, Paul Gray went.
[00:58:24]  Well, we all knew that Rick Gibson had been found out because of all his dalliances.
[00:58:28]  Uh, not because of like, if he hadn't had all those dalliances, they wouldn't have looked him up.
[00:58:32]  So how did you know that?
[00:58:34]  So was it common knowledge within the SDS that these officers were having sex with their targets and he went?
[00:58:40]  Well, that was before I joined the SDS.
[00:58:41]  I knew that.
[00:58:42]  So we had officers saying that the SDS was secret within Special Branch.
[00:58:46]  And then we've got a Special Branch officer going like Well, I knew all the gossip about the unit before I even joined, you know, that actually the gossip about that kind of stuff.
[00:58:53]  Because one of the undercover officers who spoke was Graham Coates, who infiltrated anarchist groups.
[00:58:58]  And he, I mean, he's obviously got like a female family member who's like pulled him up and gone, look, this is fucking unacceptable.
[00:59:04]  Because he actually went, he was quite honest.
[00:59:07]  Well, I think he was honest.
[00:59:08]  It's hard to imagine these people being honest about the misogynist attitudes that existed within the SDS at the time.
[00:59:16]  There was a lot of like, good on you.
[00:59:18]  I bet he made a bite the blanket last night, like lots of talk about the sexual conquest that various undercover officers had had.
[00:59:26]  And like kind of really like kind of, you know, shined a light on like kind of which all the other people were like, no, no, no, not at all, not at all.
[00:59:33]  But then they ended up telling on themselves like by just any bits of detail, which I mean, he also claimed that there was no racism within the group, which was like ridiculous when you saw the reports, because in the reports, you'd get like, you know, people described by racial slurs, you know, use of the N-word, all that kind of stuff, just in like descriptive language, you know, not having a go at them, just going, this was a, you know, you know, like that kind of language.
[00:59:58]  And he's all, no, we weren't using racist language like in the safe house chatting, but we were in our official reports that were being filed to MI5.
[01:00:06]  So like, you know, but the, yeah, the use of the dead children's identities, like, even though it was blown open early on, they just kept doing it anyway.
[01:00:13]  And like, was that, it was put to them, like, do you not feel that it was like bad for the families?
[01:00:17]  You know, a lot of these children have died in really traumatic ways.
[01:00:20]  I mean, I should point out as well, it's not just that they stole the identity as in the name.
[01:00:24]  They like went to visit where the person would have was family were from.
[01:00:28]  Yeah.
[01:00:29]  They staked out the parents.
[01:00:30]  They like worked out where they would have gone to school.
[01:00:32]  And then they kind of constructed the fake life that this child would have had and made that their life, which obviously is incredibly fucking disturbing for the parents of those children because it's like, of course, they've always fucking wondered, oh, they would have gone to that school or maybe they'd have gone and worked there.
[01:00:47]  The local factor may have done that.
[01:00:49]  And they, these undercover officers had like thought that up and then like told people that's what their life was, you know.
[01:00:56]  Yeah, which is like, but they were even now, like, it was put to them, like, well, what do you think of it now?
[01:01:04]  Like, in retrospect.
[01:01:05]  It was like, well, I didn't think of it at all.
[01:01:07]  But now, what do you think of it?
[01:01:08]  Well, well, I'll tell you this.
[01:01:12]  I don't agree with those families going to the media and making a fuss.
[01:01:15]  It's not right.
[01:01:17]  Oh my god.
[01:01:18]  What?
[01:01:18]  You're annoyed with the families for being upset?
[01:01:20]  You fucker.
[01:01:21]  You fucking scumbag.
[01:01:22]  Well, that's the thing that really sort of most strikes me on like a sort of second level about these guys.
[01:01:27]  And you mentioned this earlier, sort of their use of like trauma as a weapon.
[01:01:30]  I mean, you sort of alluded to that earlier when we were talking about like, yeah, like when these guys would try to not only get in these groups, but seduce women in these groups, sometimes for political purposes, sometimes for quote, political purposes, they use, they would always have, I mean, all these guys would have some really traumatic backstory, right?
[01:01:51]  Like, I mean, almost always.
[01:01:53]  And that would get them in.
[01:01:54]  And this, this, you know, stealing like a dead child's identity, it's sort of another use of this like really traumatic thing as a weapon, essentially, against people who, yeah, a lot of the times, I mean, I looked at some of these goddamn reports these guys were filing.
[01:02:08]  They're talking about fucking going, like, they're writing up full reports about meetings where people were printing off flyers, you know, and like meetings where literally, I mean, anybody here has been to a political meeting where nothing gets done, which is, I would say, the vast majority of political meetings.
[01:02:28]  I mean, imagine somebody writing up an entire thing about the granular detail about exactly what went on there, who chaired it, who said what, all this kind of stuff.
[01:02:36]  I mean, the actual reports, you can read a lot of these.
[01:02:41]  I mean, they're almost, it's stupefying how useless they are.
[01:02:45]  And then, like we talked about last episode, you realize that actually the point is not what you think it is.
[01:02:50]  It's not because they thought the SWP was going to take over the take over the UK.
[01:02:56]  It's the point was to basically a means of social control.
[01:03:02]  Well, it's like the unit itself is the point.
[01:03:05]  You know what I mean?
[01:03:06]  It's like, even the like mundane infiltration is what gives cause itself to the unit existing in the first place.
[01:03:16]  You know, like it's absolutely a total mind fuck, I think.
[01:03:21]  Just, you know, this is something we talked about again on the, you know, in our interviews with scholars researching the FBI's use of this, these kind of similar tactics in the U.S.
[01:03:32]  But it's like there is this idea that it's like, you know, the cops infiltrating the Fed's infiltrating at a level in order to stop, you know, it must mean that something was so powerful they had to intervene.
[01:03:45]  And it's like, no, no, no.
[01:03:46]  Like, this is just like the kind of mundane aspects of like the way the police state works itself, you know?
[01:03:56]  I mean, I would say on that, I mean, like, yeah, you're absolutely right.
[01:03:58]  And you look at like this, the STS annual reports, which are like basically justifying the next round of funding.
[01:04:04]  Yeah, of course.
[01:04:04]  And like, they'll say things like, oh, it's been a very quiet year, but like the left is just waiting for an issue they can jump on to make a fuss.
[01:04:10]  So, you know, we still need the unit because even though not much has happened recently, like soon, boy, they'll be up to something.
[01:04:16]  Do you know what?
[01:04:17]  They'll use some death to like to stir up anti-police sentiment.
[01:04:21]  You know, this was like, they're justifying their existence, right?
[01:04:25]  But also, like, this has come across very strongly in the way the inquiry's gone about.
[01:04:31]  The dangerous thing isn't like what isn't the actions.
[01:04:33]  It's the ideas.
[01:04:34]  You know, that's what they're really like kind of upset about.
[01:04:38]  They're really like kind of concerned about is these ideas that like, you know, women should have full rights and like, you know, that maybe ethnic minorities shouldn't have to worry about being attacked in the street.
[01:04:47]  These sort of like these radical ideas, which totally go against the vested interests of the establishment, of the state in the UK, you know?
[01:04:54]  And like, it's these kind of, like we've seen a lot of the inquiry with the questions like, well, what, what, doesn't your ideology eventually lead to the overthrow of the state?
[01:05:02]  And it's like, well, yeah, but like, nobody's doing that.
[01:05:05]  We, you know, are actually engaged with, you know, selling newspapers, building a movement.
[01:05:09]  And it's like, oh, yeah, but one day, if you build a big enough movement, you could have overthrown the state.

=== Infiltration Deeper Than Expected (06:44) ===

[01:05:13]  It's like, well, I guess, man, you know, fucking hell.
[01:05:17]  And like, that kind of thing of like, when, like, I'm always like, I'm always really wary of this thing of like kind of, oh, and they were just messing around and there was nothing, there was no point of it.
[01:05:27]  It's like, there was a point.
[01:05:28]  They were holding back social progress.
[01:05:30]  They were holding back progressive attitudes.
[01:05:32]  They were like kind of, I mean, I don't know if it would have made any difference for when like apartheid fell, but I'm sure that like Britain's involvement and Britain's support of like the apartheid regime in South Africa would have ebbed away a lot earlier if the progressive grassroots social movements had been allowed to blossom in the way that like kind of public opinion suggested they would have done, you know?
[01:05:54]  And like, it's that, it's that kind of thing, which was really there, you know, that was, that's what they were about, I think.
[01:06:02]  Well, before we wrap up, what can, what are the next steps in this?
[01:06:06]  We mentioned that it's getting pushed out like a year, two years.
[01:06:09]  There's never going to be an end to this.
[01:06:11]  Never ends.
[01:06:12]  And it will never end.
[01:06:13]  I mean, like, you know, we've climate, imminent climate change will come and fucking stop us from playing around these silly games.
[01:06:18]  But like, you know, as it goes, like this, this, this will continue for a long time.
[01:06:24]  I mean, part of the thing is every phase of the inquiry is just a massive info dump.
[01:06:28]  I mean, like, when you're sat in the inquiry, you're getting like this live slide feed with people.
[01:06:33]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:06:34]  At the same time as we're hearing from somebody, they're publishing like, you know, 10,000 pages of files about it, which are like those awful scans of fucking bad copies of duplicates from the 1970s that is really hard to read.
[01:06:45]  But like, if anybody fancies themselves, if any of your listeners fancy themselves as a bit of an researcher or an investigator, I don't know if anybody listens to this show might be like that.
[01:06:54]  Like there is so much information on the UPCI website.
[01:06:57]  Like there is so much, like the undercover research group, which I'm involved with, like we do an immense amount of work sifting through that, finding like stories.
[01:07:07]  What's really like the hardest thing is taking like what we've just found out and matching it with what's always been in the public domain, things that have like in old like kind of left-wing publications and like kind of seeing significance.
[01:07:18]  Sometimes the significance only comes into view when you realize the stuff that's not in the reports, the things that was happening at the same time.
[01:07:25]  Absolutely.
[01:07:26]  And there's so much of that.
[01:07:28]  There's such a huge amount of that that like that's going to keep us busy until the next phase of the inquiry and we won't have finished it by the time, you know.
[01:07:35]  So I've started doing this podcast with some of the other people who are affected and we're just kind of going through like various strands, like picking them up and like trying to pull through them.
[01:07:42]  But like, you know, we could be doing it forever and we still won't have finished.
[01:07:45]  Like there's so much that to do that I think like that's the kind of that's what's going to keep us busy until the next time the inquiry sits again, you know.
[01:07:55]  Yeah, that's a good little call out to the little gumshoes listening that there is a lot of research to do and the and the, you know, our unfortunate blue check-y journalists listening that, you know, there's a massive story here.
[01:08:09]  And a lot of this can connect to also what we've seen in the US.
[01:08:13]  It's funny, Brace and I were talking like before we started recording.
[01:08:16]  Like we cannot imagine anyone in Congress, including the like left-wing members, ever calling for an investigation into like COINTELPRO.
[01:08:28]  Like it just is, it's like outside.
[01:08:33]  I don't even think that people would think to even ask for that.
[01:08:36]  You know, like that's how low the horizon, the like imaginative horizon is when it comes to thinking about, you know, the way the police and the feds operate.
[01:08:47]  But the majority of people in parliament in the UK who've like kind of made a fuss about this have been personally targeted.
[01:08:53]  The fact that Theresa May called for public inquiry still shocks me.
[01:08:56]  I think that's the most shocking thing.
[01:08:58]  Yeah.
[01:08:59]  She was always kind of a wild bird, though.
[01:09:02]  I don't know, man.
[01:09:02]  I don't know what.
[01:09:03]  Like, I don't know what.
[01:09:04]  I don't know what it is.
[01:09:04]  I mean, literally, I think it was just austerity is you wanted to cut the police.
[01:09:09]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:09:10]  Which is so funny.
[01:09:11]  Critical support.
[01:09:12]  But like, you know, for like, yeah, right.
[01:09:15]  Yeah.
[01:09:15]  For like, for good neoliberal reasons, you know, just too expensive.
[01:09:19]  But like that, yeah, it was such a weird thing they did that.
[01:09:22]  But like, you know, otherwise, you know, we were talking like people like Peter Hain or Jeremy Corbyn or Diane Abbott or John McDonald, they've all been targeted themselves.
[01:09:30]  They've all got registry files.
[01:09:31]  You know, that's why they're bothered.
[01:09:33]  I mean, not, you know, I don't disparage them having like, obviously, good reasons why.
[01:09:37]  But to be honest, if you actually cared about this stuff, of course there's a file on you.
[01:09:40]  Of course there is.
[01:09:41]  You know, one of the things that's been really irritating actually is like, is that there's this thing of like kind of people going like, oh, we've known this for years.
[01:09:48]  And it's like, no, we haven't.
[01:09:49]  We've guessed this for years.
[01:09:50]  Now we've got it in black and white.
[01:09:52]  It's like so much of what we're finding out is like, yeah, well, we kind of guessed that was the case, but we didn't have any actual fucking solid gold proof of it, right?
[01:10:01]  We just had like kind of a thought that this was like, you know, what was going on.
[01:10:05]  And a lot of our prejudices and like kind of theories have been like proved right, but more often than not, they've gone way further.
[01:10:12]  Like that the infiltration is much deeper.
[01:10:15]  The infiltration is much more, you know, mundane as well.
[01:10:18]  You know, like you say, like there's so much, so much about like childcare.
[01:10:21]  Like, you know, so many spying on some of the children, you know, so much like an insane amount about childcare.
[01:10:29]  But I think that's partially, it was like kind of they were disgusted that when men were doing it.
[01:10:36]  No, I think that point you bring up about the kind of attitude of like, well, we've always known this, whatever, whatever, it's like so important because it is this kind of like, it's this hurdle that I think it's like a cynical hurdle that needs to be overcome that there is a way of like foreclosing not just like curiosity, but also like a reckoning of how state power operates and what that means politically.
[01:11:00]  And it's like, we get this all the time about stuff we cover on the podcast from, you know, the 60s or the 70s.
[01:11:05]  People be like, oh, who cares?
[01:11:07]  Yeah, we know that.
[01:11:08]  Yeah, who knew, yeah, who knew?
[01:11:09]  It's like, but you didn't and you don't.
[01:11:12]  And we actually still don't.
[01:11:13]  I mean, that's the whole point is that, you know, like you say, this inquiry is completely and totally, you know, manipulate, you know, what we call like a limited hangout, right?
[01:11:22]  This is how these things operate.
[01:11:24]  You get a little bit of information, just enough, or you get like 10,000 pages so much that you can't go through it.
[01:11:29]  You know, all of these kind of roadblocks they put up.
[01:11:31]  And they do that as a way of controlling what's out there and continuing these programs.
[01:11:38]  So like, we actually don't know, I don't know, we don't know a majority of the scope of these things.
[01:11:46]  And it is important to come to terms with, least of, I mean, the, you know, least of which is just for justice for the victims, right?
[01:11:55]  Let alone the citizens.

=== Keeping Secrets Alive (07:50) ===

[01:11:58]  Yeah.
[01:11:59]  I mean, I would say, like, I don't think like many, I mean, like, as much as one of the most important parts of like kind of bringing all this stuff was like kind of grabbing the narrative, yeah, trying to control some of the narrative of people whose like lives have been controlled.
[01:12:10]  And like a lot of people have really been like, we don't want to be considered victims, man.
[01:12:14]  And like, I mean, that's always been my politics.
[01:12:16]  I'm not a victim.
[01:12:16]  I'm a combatant.
[01:12:17]  Like, you know what I mean?
[01:12:18]  Like, I was targeted, but like, I'm trying to target them back.
[01:12:20]  Right.
[01:12:20]  And that's like, I think it's important to like kind of be on the front foot with that shit.
[01:12:24]  You know, it's like.
[01:12:24]  No, no, no, right on.
[01:12:25]  Yeah.
[01:12:26]  But one of the things that's really annoyed me.
[01:12:28]  Another thing that's really annoyed me.
[01:12:30]  Now I've started thinking the things that annoyed me about this process is that like so many of the cops have had so much anonymity, right?
[01:12:34]  They've had so much like, you know, you can't see their faces.
[01:12:37]  You don't know their names.
[01:12:37]  We're referring to them by cipher.
[01:12:39]  No real names have been given out.
[01:12:40]  Even some cover names have been kept secret.
[01:12:42]  Some officers don't even have a cipher.
[01:12:45]  They're so secret that all we've got is a gist about them, which purposefully like mixes together their evidence with the evidence of others.
[01:12:53]  Now, interestingly, one of those is the only officer who was there when Blair Peach died, though he claims he left before that incident happened.
[01:13:00]  I mean, just if people aren't familiar with the death of Blair Peach, Blair Peach was beaten to death by six members of the Special Patrol Group who were using homemade weapons.
[01:13:09]  And when their houses were searched, they found they had Nazi memorabilia on display in their homes, right?
[01:13:15]  So, like, pretty fucking serious fuckers.
[01:13:18]  Like, it took 30 years for the CAS report, which like looked into what happened to be released to the family.
[01:13:24]  That named essentially the officers who would have been the ones guilty of it.
[01:13:29]  And particularly a guy called Alan Murray, Inspector Alan Murray, who had been the first out of the van, who was using a homemade kosh, which kind of fits with the blow to the head, which killed Blair Peach, murdered Blair Peach.
[01:13:39]  What's a Kosh?
[01:13:40]  So Akash is like a club, like a homemade club, but like- Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:13:46]  Yeah, like an improvised club, which he was using instead of a truncheon because it was more- And like some of the stuff they had looked fucking medieval that they were going around smashing, giving people's heads in with.
[01:13:55]  Surprise nobody died, didn't die earlier, to be perfectly frank.
[01:13:58]  But like that guy's alive and well.
[01:14:00]  He's a doctor.
[01:14:01]  He works.
[01:14:02]  He was at the University of Sheffield.
[01:14:04]  Like nothing's happened to him, right?
[01:14:06]  Like we know he beat someone to death on a demonstration, right?
[01:14:10]  Like one of the most cause celeb issues on the left, the death of Blair Peach.
[01:14:14]  There's been songs about it.
[01:14:15]  There's been films.
[01:14:16]  There's been everything about it, right?
[01:14:17]  Like we know who he is.
[01:14:18]  We know his name.
[01:14:19]  Like he appears on fucking the news sometimes talking about unrelated issues.
[01:14:23]  Like he's nobody's gone around and fucking stoved his face in, have they?
[01:14:26]  You know what I mean?
[01:14:27]  Like the idea that these undercover cops who infiltrated these other groups would are somehow in danger because if they were named now is just fucking laughable.
[01:14:36]  Yet they've got so much secrecy.
[01:14:38]  Secrecy, which is not afforded to like normal cops who infiltrate like, you know, proper crime.
[01:14:44]  Like, you know, people like Neil Woods or, you know, people like that who've like been undercover in like kind of, you know, drug gangs and stuff.
[01:14:51]  And then they, they write books and go on bloody TV.
[01:14:54]  They put away thousands of people in prison.
[01:14:55]  Like if anybody was going to shoot somebody for fucking, like Neil Woods would be dead, but he's not.
[01:14:59]  You can hear him on like a hundred podcasts every week, you know.
[01:15:02]  I mean, kind of interesting guy, really, for a cop.
[01:15:04]  But like, you know, there's this thing of like, kind of, they need so much secrecy because they're in so much danger, which is just such bullshit, man.
[01:15:12]  It's such bullshit.
[01:15:13]  And like, and it seems like the, you know, when you've got people like who you're not, they're not even knowing their cypher, they haven't got a cipher for them.
[01:15:19]  You can't even talk about them.
[01:15:21]  It's like really hard to talk about people.
[01:15:22]  You haven't even got a cipher.
[01:15:24]  So like, yeah, totally.
[01:15:25]  It's just so, you know, it's like, it really is grasping at fucking steam, you know.
[01:15:31]  And like, so you kind of get the impression that you've got some sacrificial lambs going out there.
[01:15:36]  But like the, you know, the people who did like the worst things, the people who've got the most secrets.
[01:15:40]  And like anytime like Blair Peach was brought up, like literally every cop who, some of them have been like quite open about certain things.
[01:15:47]  And then Blair Peach comes up and it's just like, they've made a vow of silence on that shit.
[01:15:52]  All of them made a vow of silence on that shit.
[01:15:54]  Was it discussed?
[01:15:54]  No, never discussed.
[01:15:55]  Never discussed.
[01:15:55]  Nothing.
[01:15:56]  Nothing ever about Blair Peach ever.
[01:15:57]  Not once, not never, not none.
[01:15:59]  Like, do you ever talk about it now when reunions?
[01:16:01]  No, no one's ever mentioned it.
[01:16:02]  We've never mentioned it ever.
[01:16:04]  It's like, fucking.
[01:16:06]  Yeah, you want to see great examples of solidarity?
[01:16:08]  Check out the cops.
[01:16:10]  I mean, right, man.
[01:16:11]  Fucking hell.
[01:16:12]  Like, if we had that, man, we'd never lose a fucking strike.
[01:16:15]  You know what I mean?
[01:16:15]  Jesus.
[01:16:18]  Well, Tom, it has been, again, despite the subject matter, an absolute pleasure having you on.
[01:16:24]  And I'm thrilled that Tom now has.
[01:16:27]  Well, I feel it's fucked up that you have a podcast because doing a podcast is a low, rotten, dirty thing for a human being to do.
[01:16:36]  But I, but for my own personal reasons, I'm glad you had one.
[01:16:39]  And to remind our fucking listeners, it is called Spy Cops Info Podcast.
[01:16:44]  You can find that like on iTunes and everything like that.
[01:16:45]  I've been listening to it.
[01:16:46]  Yeah, we'll link to it.
[01:16:47]  Everywhere, man.
[01:16:48]  And also check him out at Tom B. Fowler on Twitter.
[01:16:53]  And yeah, Tom, a pleasure.
[01:16:54]  We have, he is, I want to make this clear.
[01:16:57]  Tom agreed to come on the show despite the fact that pubs are reopening tonight.
[01:17:02]  Yeah.
[01:17:03]  Well, they reopened on the weekend indoors, but all my mates are going to the pub tonight.
[01:17:08]  And like, they've been there for the last like three hours.
[01:17:10]  But, you know, I did this anyway because this is true.
[01:17:16]  Is our indoor pub?
[01:17:18]  Are bars open indoors in LA now?
[01:17:20]  Are you like, can you go indoors?
[01:17:23]  You can, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:17:24]  But a lot of places.
[01:17:25]  Yeah, isn't that exciting?
[01:17:26]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:17:26]  A lot of places still like, they won't let me.
[01:17:29]  Yeah, it's all different.
[01:17:30]  Like all the cities are all different here.
[01:17:32]  Right, right.
[01:17:33]  Yeah.
[01:17:33]  I mean, like, so it's there's a lot of places you can go here where it's kind of shit.
[01:17:37]  You've got to sit in a booth away from you to actually see people, but like, there's some places, you know.
[01:17:41]  Like, if you know the right places, fucking hell, man.
[01:17:48]  How the fuck, man?
[01:17:49]  Like, King Grifter, what a fucking Grifter God.
[01:17:54]  He's on cameo.
[01:17:55]  Yeah, of course he is.
[01:17:57]  You can pay him like whatever, 200 bucks to like say, you know, like, oh my God.
[01:18:02]  Oh, I love you or something like that.
[01:18:04]  Like, he, he will do like a personal message for you.
[01:18:07]  And loads of people will do that.
[01:18:08]  They'll be ironically doing it.
[01:18:09]  Yeah.
[01:18:10]  It's not like kind of they.
[01:18:11]  I know.
[01:18:11]  It's like a funny idea until you realize you're literally giving him money.
[01:18:16]  Yeah, it's, yeah, don't do that, kids.
[01:18:20]  Say no to fucking Farage cameos.
[01:18:22]  Take one thing away from this episode.
[01:18:24]  Don't get a cameo on fucking Nigel Farage.
[01:18:27]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:18:27]  No UKIP cameos, please.
[01:18:30]  For real.
[01:18:45]  Well, I feel better about the cops.
[01:18:47]  Me too.
[01:18:48]  You know what?
[01:18:49]  They're just regular guys like you and me who leave their wives for five years, insinuate themselves into the lives of people who are trying to like uh campaign against apartheid, have sex with them, lie to them, get them kicked out of their groups, and then uh presumably there's some sort of payoff personally for these people in the end.
[01:19:08]  I'm not sure.
[01:19:09]  Yeah, we're like that, except we don't do any of that, we just have podcasts.
[01:19:13]  Yeah, Well, I am paid by the UK government, but that's to spread goodwill abroad.
[01:19:19]  I'm a goodwill ambassador, you're one of the five guys, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
[01:19:24]  Well, with that being said, my name, you know what, you know what, lot of tossers in this um dungeon.
[01:19:37]  Oh my god, uh, well, my name, my name, Bryce, I'm Liz.
[01:19:44]  We are, of course, joined by our producer, Young Chomsky, and we will see you next time.