On 17 March 1968, a demonstration against the Vietnam war took place in London outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square during which disorder took place. There was a furore in the media and wider society about the size as well as the confrontational nature of the protests.
A review of the policing into the demonstration concluded that better intelligence was needed on the groups, including the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, involved in organising the protest.
Anti-war protestors planned a further demonstration 27 October 1968. It was the perceived need for intelligence about this protest that provided the catalyst for the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) to be formed.
In response to demands from the Home Office, Chief Inspector HN325 Conrad Dixon of Special Branch made a suggestion to have an undercover squad which aimed to infiltrate groups more deeply to improve the intelligence. Following meetings between the Metropolitan Police and senior Home Office civil servants, the idea was approved. The SDS formed on 31 July 1968.
The direct catalyst for forming the Special Demonstration Squad was the 17 March 1968 anti-Vietnam war demonstration in central London, which included disorder at Grosvenor Square outside the US embassy.
There was extensive media coverage of the protests and of police violence at the embassy. The spectre of student and worker-led revolts pushed the issue of policing protest up the political agenda to the concern of then home secretary, James Callaghan – 1968 was a year of global political protests.
Like many left-wing groups, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) This monitoring would have been achieved by the standard tactics of political groups using plain-clothes officers attending meetings and other surveillance methods.
A revealing Special Branch report analysed the March 1968 demonstration. Much of it discussed the causes of the protest and identified its leaders, who included Ernie Tate and Tariq Ali, core participants in the Undercover Policing Inquiry. The tone of the report indicates that Special Branch attributed the disorder to some form of plan or instruction – and to foreign influence. e It concluded that groups involved in the protest had intended for the march to ‘turn violent’ – and had caught the police unaware.
Managers concluded that the police needed better intelligence and should consider changing public-order policing strategy.
HN325 Conrad Dixon emphasised this conclusion in his self-penned obituary, which claimed that until the SDS was formed, no ‘intelligence was coming in’ from organisations such as the VSC.
The Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) was formed on 31 July 1968. It was originally named the Special Operations Squad, or SOS, a name it kept until 1972. In police circles, SDS members were nicknamed ‘the Hairies’, because undercover officers wore longer hair and dressed scruffily, male officers often sporting beards.
Dixon’s obituary gives his version of discussions with senior Metropolitan Police officers about setting up the unit:
Could he get top-grade information about the revolutionary potential, and what would he need. His reply was concise. Twenty men, half a million pounds and a free hand.
However, there are no published documents – no records of internal Metropolitan Police discussions or meetings with the Home Office – that discuss plans for, or even the need for, an undercover unit.
Nevertheless, Conrad Dixon is officially credited in Inquiry chair John Mitting’s Interim Report, both for coming up with the idea for the unit and for realising the plan. Contempoary SDS Officers such as HN326 ‘Doug Edwards’ also suggested this was the case.
Others like HN321 ‘Bill Lewis’ suggested the demand for inside intelligence came via the home secretary, and was passed down through the commissioner and the head of Special Branch, who delegated the operational planning to Conrad Dixon. HN3093 Roy Creamer recalled that setting up the squad as being a more collegiate effort. Other former SDS officers such as HN343 ‘John Clinton’ emphasised the influence of home secretary James Callaghan in setting up the unit.
What is certain is that on or around 31 July 1968, Chief Superintendent HN2857 Arthur Cunningham summoned the original intake and told the officers that they were now part of a new undercover squad, then left them in the hands of Dixon and inspector HN1251 Phil Saunders.
One officer, HN323 Joan Hillier , remembered the meeting:
I recall him [Dixon] asking at the meeting for ideas about what we should do. There were several such meetings from which, eventually, the idea came up that officers would attend some of the meetings of the groups involved in these demonstrations and grow their hair so as to fit in with the other attendees.
Hillier’s account is interesting as it suggests that plans for how the SDS would operate remained fluid after the 31 July meeting. Dixon, it seemed, had no blueprint but instead improvised, drawing on other SDS officers’ input.
However, the proposed unit was clearly a break from established Special Branch working practices . The use of cover names and adopting the appearance of protestors was a significant departure from officers in plain clothes attending public meetings.
At its inception, the SDS comprised 22 officers; Conrad Dixon, three detective inspectors working under him, two back-office staff members who supported the team and 16 officers deployed undercover. These are listed in the 'read more about' column.
Operationally, Dixon and the SDS management team were left to their own devices. Broadly speaking, most of the more junior officers assumed cover names, fake jobs and altered their appearance to spy on groups involved in the mobilisation demonstration on 27 October 1968.
For some, deployment was a short sojourn, little more than doing plainclothes work by attending public meetings. But others were tasked to join the organising groups, presenting themselves as political activists to gain access to private meetings.
It is not clear which Special Branch report is the first one that resulted from SDS surveillance. One possible candidate is a report that HN68 ‘Sean Lynch’ filed on 5 August 1968. However, this report came in standard Special Branch format, noting car registrations parked outside the meeting of the Notting Hill branch of the VSC.
One of the key differences was that SDS undercovers could now report from private, as well as public, meetings. Another SDS report based on Sean Lynch’s reporting on Notting Hill VSC, dated 4 September 1968, covered a closed meeting of the group. The report discussed internal dynamics and details, suggesting that Lynch’s insight into the group was unlikely to have come from public meetings alone.
Further details of the SDS’ operations appear in this website’s profiles of the undercover officers deployed during the period up to the October demonstration. Deployments that started and continued after October 1968 continued to evolve, both in tactics and in breadth of targeting. The decision to continue the squad is discussed elsewhere.
On 1 August 1968, the day after the formation of the SDS, a meeting took place between senior Special Branch and MI5 officers, including the head of Special Branch, Ferguson Smith, chief superintendent Arthur Cunningham, and Conrad Dixon. The three managers informed MI5 about the existence of the SDS and that authorisation had come directly from the Home Office.
The latter detail implies that MI5 was not involved in setting up the SDS. The report on this meeting outlines how Special Branch, MI5 and the Home Office also planned to liaise immediately after the 27 October anti-war march for which the VSC was building.[[Footnote: Prior to the SDS’ formation, MI5 expressed growing concern about the new protest movement. This was reflected in a report it provided to the secret Whitehall Communism at Home committee in spring 1968.
On 2 August 1968 detective inspector HN1254 Phil Saunders, as SDS second-in-command, visited Lord Clanmorris, who was standing in for the head of MI5’s subversion section, to talk to him about the formation of the squad. It was agreed that one of the SDS officers would be attached to the Security Service to facilitate greater coordination than before. It is unclear whether this occurred.