Avt020 ts vid004 guardian video 3 transcript v2

Guardian Video: “Inside the closed ranks of Scotland Yard’s top secret deep infiltration squad” Title of the Programme: Inside the closed ranks of Scotland Yard’s top secret deep infiltration squad Duration: 10 minutes Source:

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/video/2010/mar/14/undercoverpolice-mi5-scotland-yard

Synopsis: For four years, Officer A (who we now know to be Peter Francis as he has revealed his identity) lived a secret life among anti-racist activists as they fought brutal battles with the police and the BNP. Here he tells of the terrifying life he led, the psychological burden it placed on him and his growing fears that the work of his unit could threaten legitimate protest Key: OA = Officer A (Peter Francis) OSC = On-Screen Caption TT = Tony Thompson N = Narrator KB = Kenneth Baker BDM = Brian Douglas’s Mother P = Protester(s) 0:03

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OA: Within the Met police service, you’ve got the secret Special Branch, and within the secret Special Branch, you’ve got the even more secret SDS. OA: What you’ve got to do is you've got to get into the mindset of the group, whether or not you’re posted to anarchists, whether you’re posted to left-wing or posted to right-wing... You then are actually in character all the time.

N: For four years this man lived an extraordinary double life. He was a leading figure in a group that was at the heart of some of the most violent protests ever seen on the streets of London. He was also a serving police officer. The man, known only as Officer A, was a member of an elite secret unit known as the Special Demonstration Squad.

OSC: Former Special Demonstration Squad officer

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OA: The Special Demonstration Squad, or the SDS, was basically established in 1968 to deal with basically the lack of police knowledge of what was happening on demonstrations that were happening in the city, in the capital.

OA: Wherever public disorder has basically been highlighted, that’s where an SDS officer goes, and yes, at any one time there’s a maximum of 10. So I was deployed against an individual, and associates of this individual, who every single time there was a demonstration lo and behold this person, who all we had was a name and where they thought he was, was there. So I had to get alongside him, think ‘is he actually what they would regard as a subversive target, an agitator?’, and if he is that’s roughly where the Met Police would send you.

TT: So how do you go about establishing your undercover identity?

OA: Well basically what you first do is the ‘Day of the Jackal’ routine, it’s sort of been done to death, you get the death certificate and resurrect somebody who’s died, as in a child...

OSC: Tony Thompson OA: ...But basically what you then have behind you here is the flat, that’s what actually turns just a bit of paper, the mint, into a living, breathing human being. So I went to a college to start off with and that’s where I met most of my targets and then because I ended up joining the Youth Against Racism in Europe, in Hackney and Islington, this was the perfect flat for the location.

TT: You did get to quite a high level within the YRE? OA: Yeah well I became the Branch Secretary for the area we’re now actually standing in, so yes. No, I was trusted and went on into the organisation.

OA: So in the very easy black and white situation, I could convince myself that my role in the Special Branch was stopping subversion.

OSC: Brick Lane, 19 September 1993 P: Whether you like it or not, we’ve got a BNP councillor!

N: After increasingly brutal clashes between the extreme left and extreme right, something had to be done. The SDS had already infiltrated the Anti-Nazi

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League. Officer A was told to spy on the leader of a new group that had been identified as being at the heart of the violence following a shocking incident on Brick Lane.

TT: So what actually happened here that led to you being deployed within a few weeks?

OA: Right the BNP were selling here, their newspaper, regularly for years in Brick Lane and the area of Brick Lane. They were forcibly removed from what they regarded as their sales pitch by a group that was identified as the, leading the charge by the Youth Against Racism in Europe.

OA: Because they physically and violently removed this group that then raised up their... Basically to the point that the SDS would get involved with them, that’s why I was targeted to them.

OSC: Kenneth Baker Home Secretary 1990-92 KB: Five or six people provoking the rest, they’re out for a fight, it was vicious, it's unacceptable and I think probably the Metropolitan Commissioner’s got to have a look at whether such demonstrations should be allowed or not.

OA: So when I was first naively deployed, I was deployed against the Youth Against Racism in Europe which is a front group for a Trotskyist organisation, the Militant. For the purposes of deployment, you'd sometimes, you’d be involved in violent situations, so if there is a question, is, do undercover officers use violence for the purposes of maintaining cover, the answer is yes they do.

OSC: Welling demonstration, 17 October 1993 [sic] N: Just two weeks after being deployed with the group, Officer A faced a terrifying baptism of fire. The murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence sparked off a huge protest against the BNP run bookshop in Welling.

OA: The big demonstration at Welling, which basically the left-wing using the Stephen Lawrence murder to get a really massive demonstration, but for me what that was is my first major deployment with the targets ‘cause I was already running alongside the targets, I’d met them up in a struggle and I was running with them.

OA: Well basically this is what would be now sort of like

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the ‘ground zero’ or the battle point, whereby the Met Police and all their riot stuff, their shields, the horses, were all basically stopping all the demonstrators from going up there, which was where the BNP bookshop was, and we were also basically stopped here, so this is where you’d see the horses, on this exact spot is where you’d see the orange smoke that the demonstrators threw at the police, it’s where you saw the policemans’s shields out. This really here was an absolute battle, battle zone that was happening, which makes anything like the G20 demo, things like this, a walk to the park, having a picnic, having an ice cream, compared to what was going on here.

OA: And so for me the irony was that, not that long ago earlier, I was actually in riot police clothing behind the shields ‘cause I was a fully trained riot officer before joining the Special Branch, and for me, when I was actually doing the demonstration, all I was actually thinking about was what it was like being a policeman beforehand, and here I was now on the other side, basically on the receiving end from police.

TT: Now obviously, from the police point of view, your action undercover before that demonstration helped prevent massive disorder, and I understand that there was thanks from the very highest levels afterwards?

OA: There certainly was yeah. There’s no ifs and buts about it, basically had the SDS intelligence not said that ‘if you don’t stop the protesters from going up that very hill, then basically they’re gonna tear down the BNP bookshop.’ Sir Paul Condon himself came out, that was roughly about a week after demonstration, he actually thanked us for the work we’d done.

OA: You have a set of pressures that are extraordinary at the beginning, because you want to infiltrate these people, you have to infiltrate these people, and that’s an entirely different pressure.

OA: All the groups, be it the ALF, BNP, or the left-wing, or any other group, they are all anti-police. That is the only common trait we all have is they hate the police with an absolute vengeance, so you have to be able to succeed in a hostile police environment. So I was identified by the police on demonstrations, the police were hunting me out on demonstrations, I was being actively targeted by the British National Party, so what

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you then have is a magnitudal [sic] pressure of just constantly looking out for people who are after you.

N: A year earlier riots had erupted in Los Angeles after the notorious beating by police of an innocent motorist Rodney King. With the bungled investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, and increasing anger about black deaths in police custody, the Met were terrified that they were on the verge of losing control of London.

N: Kennington police station was the scene of a major campaign following the death in custody of Brian Douglas.

OSC: Brian Douglas's mother BDM: You wicked murderer! You kill him like a dog! You dog!

OSC: Kennington police station, 10 June 1995 P: Murderers! Murderers!

N: A few months after the death of Brian Douglas, there was indeed massive disorder outside Brixton police station following yet another death in custody, that of Wayne Douglas OSC: Brixton, 13 December 1995 P: Less than 12 months them kill two black man!

N: Public anger grew further still when inquests into the two cases ended with verdicts of misadventure and accidental death. As the Youth Against Racism in Europe’s focus shifted to support the campaigns against deaths in custody, Officer A began providing intelligence on these so-called ‘black campaigns’. The remit was that the campaigns should not be allowed to become big enough to lead to disorder on the streets, but Officer A struggled to justify his actions against these new targets.

OA: So the campaigns here were all about seeking justice but they were actually seeking justice against the police, so the irony is here’s me on this, outside this police station, but when the demonstrations were, I was actually undercover against protestors, who were protesting against police officers using extreme violence, so that's a bizarre set of circumstances.

N: Two years later the political and personal pressure on Officer A reached its peak with the announcement of a public inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence by

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Sir William Macpherson.

TT: Can you tell me about the significance of the Macpherson Report and how that affected you within the SDS? OA: When the Macpherson inquiry was first announced there was huge, huge internal concern whether or not the remit of the Macpherson would actually mean that we had to disclose that the entire time there was actually undercover police officer devoted to the ‘black campaigns’. The SDS... comes Special Branch Senior Management decided that there was no way could anybody actually know there was undercover officers deployed into those campaigns.

TT: The SDS was part of Special Branch, which was shut down in October 2006 as part of a restructuring by the Met, but did that mean the end of the SDS as well?

OA: So I certainly knew that the SDS was still in existence in October 2008. I should have dealt with this 11 years ago. I haven’t been able to. I am seeking closure for what I basically did.

N: Officer A is coming forward with his story in the belief that the public should be aware of the tactics being used against demonstrators. He wants people to be able to make an informed decision about whether or not they want such tactics to continue.

OA: If you are a political agitator that the Special Branch decrees you are, they can send an SDS officer into your home, into your life for four to five years without anybody other than the SDS knowing that’s happening.

OSC: We asked the Metropolitan Police to comment on Officer A's account, but they refused.

OSC: Archive footage of demonstrations in Kennington and Brixton courtesy of Ken Fero & Tariq Mehmood www.injusticefilm.tv