HN60 ‘Dave Evans’ was deployed as a Metropolitan Police Special Demonstration Squad undercover officer who used the name David John Evans, generally known as Dave. He infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party and London Animal Action between June 1998 and December 2005. He also used the operational codename ‘Apple Sauce’.
This preliminary profile draws on HN60’s two written statements. It was published on 21 September 2026, the day Evans gave live witness testimony to the Inquiry. A fuller, more detailed profile will follow when the Inquiry publishes Evans’ intelligence reports and supporting materials.
Evans was initially sent into the Camden branch of the Socialist Workers Party, after the disruption of an appearance by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott.
However, he was then redeployed into London Animal Action. He became one of its central figures, chairing meetings, helping with planning and administration, assisting with mail-outs, and regularly driving activists to demonstrations in the group’s minibus.
Evans reported extensively on activists’ political activities and private lives. His reports covered addresses, employment, health, sexual orientation, personal relationships and financial circumstances. He also reported information connected with civil litigation and legal advice. His intelligence was shared with Special Branch desks and passed on to the National Public Order Intelligence Unit and the Security Service.
In his December 2022 witness statement, Evans categorically stated:
I did not engage in any sexual activity whilst in my undercover identity., using
In a supplementary statement signed on 2 July 2026, however, he admitted that he had conducted a sexual relationship lasting between six and nine months with a woman given the pseudonym ‘Olivia’ by the Inquiry. Evans met ‘Olivia’ on a gardening course he attended in his undercover identity. She did not know he was a police officer. Evans said he had omitted the relationship from his first statement, because she was not an activist or a member of one of his target groups.
However, the Inquiry’s original question concerned sexual activity while he was using his undercover identity, not purely relationships with activists. The answer he gave in his 2022 written statement was therefore clearly misleading.
Evans was born during the 1960s and joined the Metropolitan Police during the 1980s.
After serving in uniform in central London, where he received a Commissioner’s Commendation relating to an incident of serious violence, Evans transferred to Special Branch in the mid-1990s. He had no undercover experience before he joined the SDS.
Recruitment
Evans recalled that two colleagues approached him in early 1997 and suggested that he might be suited to joining a secret unit. He believed they considered him appropriate because he was older than many of his police contemporaries, had attended university, and was ‘not very traditional “police” material’.
SDS managers, including HN10 Bob Lambert (‘Bob Robinson’) and HN58 , interviewed Evans in summer 1997, then he was assessed by psychologist Dr Felicity Gibling. Managers also visited Evans’ home and met his then wife.
Evans joined the SDS in January 1998 and entered the field in June. Although managers warned him that undercover work would place a heavy burden on his private life, he says neither he nor his wife understood how severe that impact would be.
Tradecraft
Evans operated as David John Evans, usually called Dave Evans. Unlike many earlier SDS officers, he says he did not adopt the identity of a deceased child. The Metropolitan Police supplied him with a birth certificate, passport and driving licence in the false name. He also maintained a bank account and rented accommodation in Camden.
From 2001 he shared two flats with another SDS officer, HN3 ‘Jason Bishop’. An internal file note called this arrangement ‘Flat Share – Apple Sauce [Evans] and Red Herring [Bishop]’ using the officers’ operational codenames.
To build his activist persona, Evans grew his hair, wore it in a ponytail, and adopted vegan clothing and food. He travelled to Cardiff and South Wales to establish elements of his cover story. Evans’ vehicles included a Volkswagen camper van and two Vauxhall Corsa vans.
Evans’ cover occupation was landscape gardening. He completed a gardening course and did genuine work for activists and others, sometimes for payment. This gave him a plausible income, access to a vehicle and a convenient excuse for avoiding demonstrations or actions where he expected serious illegality.
Socialist Workers Party
Evans was originally expected to work in the animal-rights movement. The plan changed shortly before his deployment, reportedly after left-wing protesters disrupted an appearance by John Prescott. Bob Lambert instructed Evans to spend between 12 and 18 months inside the Socialist Workers Party before moving into animal-rights groups.
Evans joined the SWP’s Camden branch, paid membership subscriptions, and attended local meetings, demonstrations, and national events. His first identified intelligence report concerned a trade union march in July 1998.
His reporting reached beyond the SWP’s internal activity. It included meetings and demonstrations associated with the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry and campaigns concerning other Black deaths.
One report recorded a meeting attended by relatives of Stephen Lawrence and Brian Douglas. Other reports concerned a rally against Metropolitan Police Commissioner HN807 Paul Condon and discussion of cases including those of Joy Gardner and Ronald Hinkson.
Evans has denied having been tasked to report on either the Lawrence family or the family justice campaign. He nevertheless passed information about both the family and the campaign to Special Branch, based on what details he could gather from SWP meetings.
London Animal Action
After a little over a year in the SWP, Evans moved into London Animal Action (LAA). LAA was a loose umbrella network, not a conventional membership organisation. It organised campaigns and demonstrations against live exports, the fur trade and animal experimentation. Campaigners also targeted the Huntingdon Life Sciences research laboratory.
Evans first attended live-export demonstrations at Dover. Leading campaigners including Paul Gravett and Brendan McNally gradually came to trust him. By 2004-2005, police documents described Evans as part of LAA’s ‘administrative circle’ and ‘one of the six central figures’ in the group.
Evans regularly attended and sometimes chaired meetings, took part in planning meetings and mail-outs and drove the LAA minibus, transporting activists to demonstrations. He worked at bars during festivals to raise funds, attended social events and provided gardening services to the people he was monitoring.
Although Evans has disputed that chairing meetings placed him in a position of authority, these activities made him part of the infrastructure that enabled LAA to operate.
Evans attended animal-rights demonstrations at which disorder and criminal offences occurred.
He described one Huntingdon Life Sciences protest in Cambridgeshire as a ‘violent and disruptive rampage’, during which protesters breached a perimeter fence, blocked a road, took keys from vehicles and damaged a McDonald’s restaurant.
He also attended or obtained advanced information about ‘home visits’ targeting people connected with the fur trade or animal experimentation. He says these visits could involve harassment, threats and criminal damage. He generally tried to avoid them by claiming he had gardening work, staying in a vehicle, or staying at the back of the group.
Evans admitted having participated in minor offences such as flyposting. He said SDS managers told him this was acceptable. In July 2005, he was arrested alongside HN3 ‘Jason Bishop’ at the G8 summit at Gleneagles, Scotland, while driving a minibus containing animal-rights activists.
Police fingerprinted Evans, took a DNA sample and charged him, under his false identity, for conspiracy to commit a breach of the peace. However, the case did not proceed. Evans’ undercover status was not disclosed through the criminal proceedings, although he suspected that Scottish police had been informed privately.
Evans reported routinely on matters extending well beyond planned demonstrations or criminal activity. He noted activists’ home addresses and telephone numbers, employment or unemployment and reported on their physical and mental health, romantic and sexual relationships and sexual orientation.
He commented on activists’ ‘campness’, their physical appearance, personal hygiene, financial difficulties, alcohol use, friendships and domestic arrangements, filing reports on vegan businesses they ran and going into intrusive detail concerning an activist who died.
One report described an unemployed activist’s efforts ‘to kick-start his career as a rock superstar’ as ‘pointless’. Another said that one individual ‘looks and smells like a vagrant’.
Evans now accepts that the latter description ‘could have been more delicately phrased’, but defended his catch-all reporting on activists as potentially useful to identify individuals and to understand group dynamics. He justified this, saying it was his job to report everything he witnessed; it fell to the SDS office to decide what to retain or disseminate:
Anything I learned, I reported: my role was an intelligence gatherer, and I did not filter the information I gathered.
Evans attended approximately six-monthly meetings with officers from the Special Branch animal-rights desk. At these meetings, undercover officers identified people from police photographs and supplied context about individuals and groups.
Evans reported on civil proceedings affecting London Animal Action, including injunction litigation brought by Huntingdon Life Sciences and Hockley Furs.
As a trusted group member, Evans had access to privileged legal information. His reports included discussions of legal strategy, the anticipated cost of proceedings and supplied telephone numbers for one of LAA’s legal advisors.
On another occasion, Evans attended a café meeting between Brendan McNally and a solicitor discussing injunctions. Having unexpectedly received a legal file, Evans claimed he attempted not to read it. He reported that the meeting had occurred, but denied having passed on the substance of the documents.
His statement confirms that Evans passed on sensitive legal information that he had obtained through covert infiltration that the SDS could then share with police-intelligence channels.
In his first witness statement, Evans asserted:
I did not engage in any sexual activity whilst in my undercover identity.
He repeated that he could not explain why other officers had sexual relationships because he was unaware of such conduct at the time. That account was false. In his supplementary statement of July 2026, Evans disclosed that in or around September 1998, when he attended a landscaping and gardening course in his cover identity, he met a woman known to the Inquiry by the pseudonym ‘Olivia’.
Their friendship developed into a sexual relationship towards the end of that year. He now says the relationship lasted between six and nine months and that he saw ‘Olivia’ two or three times a week.
‘Olivia’ was not an activist and not part of an SDS target group. However, she knew him only as Dave Evans and was unaware that he was a married police officer using a fabricated identity. Evans said he deliberately kept ‘Olivia’ away from activist social events, although they travelled together to one demonstration, probably in Cambridgeshire.
He claims that no one in the Metropolitan Police knew about the relationship. He ended it and saw ‘Olivia’ only briefly afterwards to recover gardening tools. Evans defended his failure to reveal the relationship in 2022, saying:
I did engage in sexual activity with [her] in my undercover identity, because she was not an activist nor part of any target group; I did not feel this was relevant. With the benefit of hindsight, I should have confirmed our relationship previously.
The admission is significant for several reasons. ‘Olivia’s’ right to give informed consent to a sexual relationship was compromised by the police-created deception, regardless of whether she was an activist. Having a relationship with ‘Olivia’ also helped Evans to sustain his false civilian life.
Critically, the Inquiry’s 2022 question was unambiguous – as was Evans’ answer. Asked then whether he had sexual activity while deployed in his undercover identity, Evans flatly denied it.
Evans’ deployment ended on 31 December 2005, after seven and a half years in the field, an exceptionally long deployment.
Although SDS managers had agreed an exit strategy for him since 2002, his departure was delayed because they had arranged no replacement and needed continued coverage.
Eventually, he allowed ‘Dave Evans’ to drift away as London Animal Action declined. Having returned to Special Branch, Evans says he experienced paranoia, anxiety, anger and difficulty adjusting to ordinary police work, although his first posting after the SDS involved an unspecified covert role.
Evans’ first marriage broke down during the deployment. He told the Inquiry that his undercover work also affected his second marriage and relationship with his child. Evans said his second wife knew about his SDS deployment and experienced both the deployment and its aftermath.
He strongly criticised the Metropolitan Police’s post-deployment welfare provision. Despite risk assessments, he said the force failed to give him adequate psychological and practical support. He remained in a covert policing role until leaving the Metropolitan Police after approximately 30 years’ service.
On 22 March 2018, Inquiry Chair, John Mitting refused the restriction order over Evans’ cover name.
At the time, Evans remained a serving Metropolitan Police officer. He submitted a written statement on 15 December 2022. In it, he denied having a relationship in his cover name.
However, two non-state core participants gave evidence to the Inquiry, stating that they recalled Evans having had a relationship with Olivia’. These statements prompted Evans to submit a second statement on 2 July 2026; this led the Inquiry to call him, belatedly, to give live evidence on 21 September 2026.