HN344 ‘Ian Cameron’ was an SDS undercover officer who, between March and June 1972, infiltrated the Northern Minority Defence Force (NMDF) and the Anti-Internment League (AIL). HN344 adopted the cover name ‘Ian Cameron’ before joining the SDS, as he had been engaged in reporting upon the NMDF before transferring within Special Branch to the SDS.
After leaving the SDS, he continued to work in Special Branch until 1980. He was arrested shortly after leaving the police for possession of confidential documents.
HN344 lives outside the United Kingdom and did not provide the Inquiry with a witness statement. It was only when Mitting threatened to release HN344’s real name, that the former officer agreed to provide his cover name and other details of his deployment.
HN344 ‘Ian Cameron’ joined Special Branch in 1970. The Inquiry has released a handful of Cameron’s intelligence reports covering the period from 2 October 1970 to February 1972.
These focus on groups campaigning around the conflict in Northern Ireland, which suggest that Cameron worked for B Squad in this period. For instance, he attended meetings and filed reports on the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and the Irish National Solidarity Liberation Front.
Of these reports, only one during this time relates to matters other than Irish groups. This was a report from Bow Street Magistrates Court, which covered the appearance of several anti-apartheid activists who had been arrested on 25 October 1970.
Cameron’s earlier reporting, like the one from Bow Magistrates Court, probably reflects an officer carrying out standard Special Branch duties – attending meetings and other events in plain clothes or compiling desk-based reports – rather than one deployed undercover.
A report dated 3 December 1971, on a Sinn Fein meeting, could suggest that, from this point, Cameron had managed to gain access to meetings that would have been off-limits to a normal, plain-clothes police officer.
It is unknown from which point HN344 started to develop his cover personality of ‘Ian Cameron’, but Metropolitan Police personnel records dated 19 January 1972 refer to him being on ‘special operations’.
This suggests that, from this date, he was already operating undercover and was no longer an orthodox Special Branch officer. A memo from the Commander of Special Branch, Matthew Rodger, to his boss, notes that HN344 had created for himself ‘an entrée’ into the Northern Minorities Defence Force (NMDF) , indicating that HN344 had acted on his own initiative.
Cameron began his infiltration of the NMDF after being approached at a private meeting by the group’s chairman while attending a film screening on 8 February 1972. However, this indicates that HN344 had already been making contacts – and giving a credible account of himself to his targets – to receive such an invitation.
However, Cameron’s Special Branch report on an NMDF meeting of 10 February 1972 prompted Commander Rodger to recommend and authorise Cameron’s transfer to the SDS. In that memo, Rodger stated that ‘we cannot possibly have too many sources in the Irish field at this time’.
Rodger was probably referring to the heightened tensions across the UK and Northern Ireland due to the Bloody Sunday Massacre and the Aldershot Barracks bombing. The dates on the memos are redacted, but they are likely to have been sent between mid-February and mid-March 1972.
The Inquiry published no witness evidence from Cameron, so it is not clear whether his approach to spying on the NMDF and AIL changed after he transferred from ‘special operations’ to the SDS.
Unlike most SDS officers, it seems Cameron probably did not spend time in the back office, as he was already familiar with the group he was infiltrating.
As mentioned, Cameron spied-upon two groups, the Northern Minority Defence Force and the Anti-Internment League.
Northern Minority Defence Force
Cameron’s first meeting as an SDS undercover was on 29 March 1972. It was a meeting of the NMDF Officers’ Committee where he was appointed as one of the ‘Headquarters Staff’ for the organisation and put in command of the ‘North West Section.’ He was also appointed the group’s AIL delegate.
The group intended to send a unit of men to assist Active Service Units in Northern Ireland. To prepare for this, the group discussed members joining rifle clubs. On 6 April 1972, the officers’ committee said it should begin a training programme for volunteers, including instruction on radios, fieldcraft and weapon handling. The same meeting discussed obtaining land for weapons training.
Another of Cameron’s reports gave detailed information about several potential recruits to the NMDF. Many would-be recruits claimed to have Official IRA connections. Cameron suggested that many of the interviewees had formed the impression that the NMDF was a front organisation for the Provisional IRA.
The 2023 Inquiry Interim report found no evidence that NMDF’s militaristic ambitions ever came to fruition. It was not included in the three undercover deployments during the period covered by Tranche One of the hearings that the Inquiry considered to have been justified.
On 18 May 1972, Cameron reported that the NMDF had effectively split into two groupings, one supporting a more nationalistic approach and one a more socialist one.
The end of Cameron’s deployment followed two events. The first occurred late in May 1972 when Cameron was invited to visit Derry with the NMDF. However, on 27 May 1972, Commander Rodger wrote to the deputy assistant commissioner stating that it would be too dangerous for Cameron to attend, given the risk that resentment towards the NMDF from either faction of the IRA could end in disastrous consequences.
Around the same time, an exposé of the NMDF was printed in The Times newspaper on 3 June 1972. Following this, arrests were made, and one member of the group spent time in prison on remand. This is covered in more detail within the NMDF group profile.
Cameron attended two NMDF meetings in June 1972 after the newspaper report ran; one was a debrief about the newspaper having reported on a supposedly secret meeting. Although it seems that some individuals were blamed for the way that the presence of The Times journalist was managed, there is no sense from Cameron’s report that anyone was accused of being a police informer.
The report also revealed that the police had searched an activist’s car outside the meeting and found the NMDF’s membership list. It is possible that these two events combined to damage the organisation’s reputation enough to stop it functioning.
Cameron appears to have been withdrawn from the field at this point, but that decision – and why he was not deployed undercover elsewhere – is not discussed in any of the documents from the Inquiry.
Anti-Internment League
Cameron’s reporting of the Anti-Internment League as an SDS officer resulted from the NMDF’s affiliation with it and from it electing Cameron its delegate to AIL meetings.
This enabled Cameron to provide intelligence about AIL demonstrations. He claimed that the organisers of the AIL demonstration on 26 March 1972 were planning to deliberately ‘relinquish control’ of the demonstration, and so provoke disorder. However, there is no suggestion that this occurred.
Rather, the only disorder that Cameron is known to have directly reported on was from an event in Bristol, where the AIL planned to protest against the return of the Gloucester Regiment, from being deployed in Northern Ireland. Violence broke out when the crowd that had gathered to welcome the regiment turned on the AIL demonstrators.
HN344 left the SDS in 1972 and continued working for the Metropolitan Police before resigning in 1980. There are no documents stating why Cameron’s police career was curtailed.
Soon after, he was arrested for unauthorised possession of official documents but was not prosecuted on the advice of the director of public prosecutions.
Cameron later worked in the security industry in Asia. He lives abroad and was later reluctant to cooperate with the Undercover Policing Inquiry (see below) when officials contacted him in 2017 to give evidence.
On 7 March 2018, the Inquiry issued a minded-to note stating that HN344 was in his 70s and living abroad. He told the police risk assessor that although he remembered his cover name, he refused to disclose it.
Faced with this officer refusing to cooperate, Mitting suggested that he had no choice but to publish HN344’s real name. Confronted with this threat, Cameron agreed to tell the Inquiry his cover name and confirm which groups he was deployed to infiltrate.
On 3 May 2018, Mitting said that although Cameron had provided detailed information about his deployment, elements of this were ‘demonstrably false’. Mitting, therefore, doubted the accuracy of all his claims about his deployment, including the cover name(s) he provided. However, eventually, confirmatory evidence of the deployment of HN344 was supplied to the Inquiry.