HN126 ‘Paul Gray’ joined the Metropolitan Police in the late 1960s, spending almost all his career in the Special Branch. In late 1977, after nine years of service in Special Branch, he joined the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS).
‘Paul Gray’, a married man, used the name of a deceased infant to create his undercover identity. He was deployed into north-west London in early 1978 to infiltrate the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which he achieved by joining the Cricklewood branch.
By July 1978, he was elected branch Socialist Worker organiser, in November he was chairing the Kilburn branch, and in January 1979 he was elected onto the North West London District committee of the SWP. Earlier that Spring, Gray infiltrated the Anti-Nazi League and, in October, was elected to the committee of the newly formed Camden Against Racism/Anti-Nazi League (ANL) West Hampstead and Hampstead group, acting as chairman.
In April 1979, Gray reported on proposed counter-protests against pre-election meetings and rallies of the National Front (NF) including in Southall, and the campaign for justice for Blair Peach. Gray’s spying on the SWP and ANL was marked by his focus on personal details of adult and, in particular, child members of these organisations.
In mid-1980, Gray and his wife were involved in divorce proceedings when she discovered Gray was having an affair with a serving police officer. After sending an anonymous letter to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner threatening to expose the SDS, Gray’s wife was investigated and then visited by SDS managers, after which she took no further action.
Although Gray denied it, a SWP member of the time, Neil Hardie holds a strong belief that Gray had a relationship with another SWP member, Ros Gardner.
Gray was withdrawn from active service in the spring of 1982 after five years’ deployment, and left the Metropolitan Police in the 1990s.
Unless otherwise indicated, the information below is taken from the first and second witness statements, and the oral evidence of HN126 ‘Paul Gray’.
Gray joined the Metropolitan Police in the late 1960s and joined the Special Branch at the rank of detective constable (DC). He was assigned to the West End Central police station in London and was present outside the American embassy in riot gear in Grosvenor Square on 27 October 1968 during the Anti-Vietnam War demonstration. He stated:
There were thousands of protestors, and it is some of the worst violence that I had witnessed at that time. Many of my fellow officers were injured and the memory of that day has stayed with me since…
In the nine years before he joined the SDS in late 1977, he had several postings. These included C Squad , which dealt with ‘left-wing extremist groups’, and specifically the ‘industrial section’. Gray claimed that he ‘had not done any undercover policing work or any work using a cover identity prior to joining the SDS’.
Gray could not recall when he first heard about the SDS, but remembered he had been approached in the ‘mid-1970s’ by a friend and colleague who was an undercover in the unit, and suggested he ‘would be absolutely ideal for the job, and that [he] should join up.’ Due to his personal circumstances at the time, Gray turned the offer down.
Recruitment
Several years later, in 1977, Gray was once again approached by his colleague who had now left the SDS and was working in a different squad in Special Branch. This time, as his ‘personal circumstances’ had changed, Gray acquiesced to the invitation to join the SDS and was invited for an interview. Gray described the nature of the Special Branch in the period and the informal selection process for the SDS:
The [Special] Branch was a small, collegiate work environment, everyone knew everyone else, and we all called one another by our first names. Whoever was responsible for making the decision about whether to bring me onto the unit [SDS] would probably have known who I was, and would likely have had a chat to other senior officers about me. I do not think there was any formal selection process or a selection committee who decided who should be invited to join the unit.
The interview with the chief superintendent of the SDS lasted about half an hour, at the end of which Gray was offered the post. According to Gray, he was made aware that work involved being undercover, that this would always remain secret and that his anonymity would be protected. He was not warned about the possible impacts of the deployment on himself or his spouse, and the SDS management did not speak about these issues to his wife.
Gray’s recruitment was the result of two SDS undercovers, one unknown, the other HN200 ‘Roger Harris’ , coming to the end of their deployments in September 1977, when the latter had unexpectedly been withdrawn due to ill-health. Harris and, it is likely, the unknown undercover had infiltrated the International Socialists (IS), the precursor to the SWP. Harris had been operating in branches of the IS in south-west London and then had become detached from the organisation after a split to form the Workers League (WL).
Training and tradecraft
Gray stated that there was no formal training when he joined the SDS, instead, he began his career by working on administrative tasks in the back office of the unit in New Scotland Yard. He recalled that over the period of his deployment there were 12 undercovers in the field, and typically two recruits in the back office preparing for deployment for around six months. When Gray joined, another officer, HN356 ‘Barry Biggs’ , who was ending his deployment, helped Gray through the process of training and creating his cover identity.
Gray remembered that he gained knowledge about the task from the SDS office staff but also from undercovers who returned to the unit as managers. In particular, he described Detective Inspector (DI) HN68 ‘Sean Lynch’ and Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) HN135 Mike Ferguson as ‘absolutely brilliant, very experienced’ officers. In his back-office role he was also able to peruse the reports being produced from the SDS undercover intelligence.
In addition, twice a week Gray would attend the meetings of SDS undercovers and their managers in safe houses. This was an opportunity for him to question those who were actually in the field about their deployments, and to take guidance about their tactics and tradecraft. Sometimes these informal meetings would take place in the pub, after the safe-house meetings were over.
Outside of these informal advice sessions, Gray stated that there were no SDS training materials nor a tradecraft manual as such. Neither was he party to the Home Office circular 97/1969, titled ‘Informants Who Take Part in Crime’. This document asserted that police officers ‘should not counsel, incite or procure the commission of a crime’ or mislead a court.
In a similar vein, Gray denied that there had been any discussion or advice about how far it was acceptable to become involved in the private lives of those he targeted or how close his relationships could be while undercover. This included entering sexual relationships with members of target groups whilst deployed. Gray added: ‘We were police officers. We were expected to use our common sense and judgement’.
The only situation that was covered, though briefly, by SDS managers was if the undercover was arrested. Gray stated that he was told that if that happened, they were to use their statutory phone call to contact the SDS office and inform them.
Undercover identity
Gray described in his witness statement how he was ordered by Superintendent (DSI) HN608 Kenneth Pryde to go with the more experienced Biggs to St Catherine’s House, to create an identity. With Biggs’ guidance, he found the death certificate of an infant four years younger than himself, ‘Paul John Gray’, from July 1951, who had only lived for a few months. He removed the middle name and took ‘Paul Gray’ as his cover name.
As far as Gray was concerned, the practice of taking deceased children’s names to create identities had been normalised in the SDS by 1977. He initially referred the origins of the practice back to DCI HN325 Conrad Dixon , who had founded the SDS in 1968, though he then suggested it was related to the release of the film The Day of the Jackal in 1973, where the technique was famously popularised.
What was understood by SDS officers at the time was that the identity-creation process was not foolproof. When questioned about the possibility of being presented with the death certificate of the individual whose identity he had selected, Gray responded:
I was very aware of one of my predecessors having had that done to him a couple of years earlier. It was very much in all our minds when we joined the Squad [SDS].
This was a reference to HN297 ‘Rick Gibson’ , who had been exposed as a ‘police spy’ by this method in 1976.
According to Gray, he was issued a passport and driving licence in his cover identity, though he suggested the lack of evidence of such documents at either Her Majesty’s Passport Office or the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority was a sign that they had ‘not been put in the official records’.
Gray’s cover employment was as a van driver, and he was provided with a suitable vehicle by Special Branch along with a cover employer in south London. He chose the profession because if anyone phoned his employer, they could say he was ‘out on errands’. In practice, Gray never did any actual work for the cover employer. Another benefit of having a driving licence and large vehicle was recounted by Gray:
It was useful for driving members of my [target] groups around. You got to know where they all lived in that way.
Prior to his deployment, Gray was made aware that he was going to be targeting the north-west London region of the SWP. This guided him regarding cover accommodation. Gray recalled that Biggs advised him on how to obtain a cover flat, using local newsagents and newspaper adverts in the target area. At the start of his deployment, he moved into a flat in north-west London, close to Kilburn Square, in the Queen’s Park area. Later, after he believed his cover identity could be compromised, he moved to a flat in the Paddington area.
Over the months Gray was in the SDS before his deployment, he altered his appearance from suit-wearing, clean shaven and short hair to a beard and long hair. He wore his own casual clothes and did not wash them very often. He also taught himself to write in a different style of handwriting. Other than these provisions, Gray did not visit any places or people to prepare his legend, nor did he live in his cover identity for a time before being deployed. As far as he knew a typical deployment would last three to four years ‘if things went well’, although he was also aware that some had lasted only one to two years.
Socialist Workers Party
The interest of Gray’s SDS managers in the north-west London region of the SWP was due to the long-running Grunwick industrial dispute in Willesden. By the beginning in the summer of 1976, the strike had developed into a series of mass pickets. These much larger events were interspersed with regular daily picketing.
Key to the success of the dispute for the strikers and their supporters were the actions of postal workers in ‘blacking’ mail at the nearby Cricklewood sorting office. This underpinned the focus of SDS managers and their superiors on the North West London District of the SWP and, in particular, the Cricklewood branch of the party.
Gray stated that he began the infiltration process by first buying Socialist Worker, the SWP’s paper, from street sellers, over several weeks. He was then invited to the SWP Cricklewood branch meeting, which he regularly attended, making sure to go to the pub with his fellow members afterwards. His use of a vehicle also helped him to socially integrate into the group:
I was the only person with a van so they would all get a lift from me back from demonstrations, particularly when the demonstration was out of town. I became friends with… [them], and would spend time with them socially. They were a good drinking crowd.
The first report of his deployment, in February 1978, concerns an internal meeting of the Cricklewood branch of the SWP, which is evidence that he had successfully infiltrated the party by this point.
During the early part of his deployment Gray stated that he took part in a few pickets at Grunwick, but denied that he was a ‘key organiser’:
I was invited to go along to the pickets by members of the SWP. I attended on several days for a couple of hours in the mornings. Several of my SDS colleagues attended and reported on the Grunwick dispute. I do not recall submitting any written reports. My colleagues were far better placed to do that as I was so new into the field and did not then know the names and faces.
Regarding the absence of day-to-day written reports on the strike, Gray did recall, as did several other undercovers who had been present, that much of the intelligence was delivered to the SDS office by phone calls either before or during the pickets. This information was typically estimates of how many members of branches of target groups would be present at the Grunwick plants, where they would gather, at what time and their propensity to use force.
Ironically, from the point that Gray infiltrated the Cricklewood branch of the SWP in early 1978, support for the Grunwick strikers was in terminal decline. By July, after nearly two years of daily picketing by the strikers and their supporters, the strike was declared over, ending in an infamous defeat for the labour movement.
Gray remained in the Cricklewood branch of the SWP and was reporting regularly on its activities during the spring and summer of 1978. These reports contained details of public meetings, National conferences of SWP sub-groups such as Flame , meetings of groups associated with the SWP including the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) and School Kids Against Nazis (SKAN) , local strikes and protests.
Many reports provide lists of attendees and/or detailed profiles of individuals, their living arrangements, partners, addresses, trade union affiliations, vehicles as well as their photographs.
There is some evidence that Gray made significant errors in his reporting about individuals. For example, he claimed in one report that Neil Hardie, a fellow member of the West Hampstead branch of the ANL, had joined the Cricklewood branch of the SWP in September 1978. However, in his witness statement to the inquiry, Hardie pointed out that he had never been a member of the party and that assumptions that the ANL was a ‘front organisation’ for the SWP ‘is one that I strongly disagree with and is simply wrong’.
Gray seemed to have a particular penchant for spying on minors, providing personal details of at least 22 children aged under 18 during his deployment. Many were involved in groups such as the ANL, Flame, SKAN or the National Union of School Students (NUSS). The information Gray provided included photographs, home addresses, schools attended, details of their home lives, parents, siblings and speculation about criminal records and supposed violent behaviour. One report in April 1978 even descended into spying on a school-age disco in a private house after a meeting of SKAN.
In July 1978, Gray was elected to the committee of the Cricklewood branch of the SWP as ‘Socialist Worker Organiser’, effectively in charge of distribution and finance for the party’s paper at branch level. Gray claimed retrospectively that this was not an attempt to gain influence:
The reason I came to be nominated for this position was because I was the only member of the branch with a vehicle, and the Socialist Worker newspapers had to be collected every week from the printer in East London. It was nothing to do with my status in the group, it was just that without me it would have been more difficult for the branch to get the papers to sell every week.
However, he also conceded that the role increased his acceptance within the group and put him in a better position to gather information as a result.
In November 1978, Gray produced his first detailed report on the North West London District of the SWP. This document outlined the structure of the District, including the existing branches (Cricklewood, Brent, Acton, Finchley) and the new branches (Kilburn and Wembley) formed out of the sub-division of Cricklewood. It also covered sub-groups of the SWP, Women’s Voice , Flame and the Industrial branch, and associated organisations such as the ANL and SKAN.
Along with this information, it gave details of where and when each branch or group met, their relative strengths in numbers and brief roundups of their activities.
After the split of the Cricklewood branch into three groups, Gray began to attend the Kilburn branch, probably because he lived closer to the meeting place. Shortly after the formation of this branch, Gray is listed as chairing meetings, and a couple of months later in January 1979 he was elected on to the committee of North West London District of the SWP as Socialist Worker organiser. At the latter meeting Gray was ‘requested to hold regular meetings with branch officers’.
The new role demonstrated his increasing status within the party structure, and its content allowed him to gather information on all the local SWP branches and associated groups in the District. One simple way of achieving this was to sit in on branch meetings after he had made a delivery of Socialist Worker:
I would drop people off to meetings of other branches, including those in Finchley. Probably the main reason I went up there was to drop off the papers, but I went to the meetings too. People in the district knew one another so you would go to meetings of other branches.
His new role was reflected in a report Gray provided a few weeks later which listed 19 workplaces where SWP members in the North West London District were employed. It also gave details of the distribution of the SWP workplace bulletins amongst these, and outside which factories and offices Socialist Worker was being sold regularly.
He followed this up in April 1979 with an account of a private meeting of all the branch secretaries and Socialist Worker paper organisers of the North West London District of the SWP. The report listed and identified ten branch secretaries, Socialist Worker organisers and members.
In this meeting Gray was clearly making district-level decisions and issuing orders to his subordinates in the branches. Gray’s new-found authority within the District was confirmed at a meeting the previous day, when it was agreed that he would oversee organising mass sales of Socialist Worker by all the branches, in the run up to the election in May.
Just over two weeks later, on 19 April, Gray reported on a meeting of the committee of the North West London District of the SWP. This meeting was dominated by the prospect of a series of pre-election public meetings by the National Front (NF). These were in Islington, north London (20 April), Leicester (21 April), Southall, west London (23 April) and, local to the District, in Wembley (26 April).
The North West London District organised transport for SWP and ANL members to travel to Leicester, and expected their branches to support the counterprotest at Wembley. However, the party leadership warned that SWP members should only attend these counter-protests if they did not disrupt sales of Socialist Worker or scheduled SWP meetings.
The Southall NF meeting on St George’s Day and the huge counter-protests over two days (22/23 April), turned out to be the most important public-order event in mainland Britain in 1979. Commonly known as the Battle of Southall, the event is remembered for the levels of police violence, the huge number of arrests (over 700) and the death of SWP member Blair Peach at the hands of the Special Patrol Group (SPG).
Although Gray was not present on either day at Southall, he was involved for more than a year in spying on the justice campaign formed for Blair Peach. The content of Gray’s spying activities regarding Peach ranged from reporting on public meetings held in the immediate aftermath of his death and discussions in SWP District meetings about the progress and tactics of the campaign, to participation in pickets at police stations and demonstrations in central London and Southall.
The day after Peach’s death, Gray spied on an ad hoc public meeting organised by his own district to discuss the events in Southall. Using quotation marks and the word ‘adventures’, an inappropriate term considering the scale of serious injuries and a death, Gray reported:
Many of the contributors from the floor then recounted their adventures during the demonstrations in Leicester and Southall and discussed instances of ‘extreme police brutality’.
He rounded off his report by identifying more than 20 attendees at this public meeting. A few days later he informed Special Branch that the SWP had set up its own investigation based in Southall and a month later, in June 1979, Gray reported on the formation of the campaigning group, the Friends of Blair Peach Committee (FBPC).
Although Gray claimed he was not present at Peach’s funeral, he did recall:
…that myself and members of my group went down to picket in support of Blair Peach outside of the building in Southall [Dominion Theatre] where he was laid in state…
Hardly a picket, Gray was referring to events on 12 June, the day before the funeral, when Peach’s body was viewed by thousands of mourners at the headquarters of the Indian Workers Association (IWA) in Southall.
In his witness testimony, Gray conceded that although he was not present at some of the major protests concerning Peach, such as the demonstration on 28 April in Southall which attracted 15,000 people, he helped to identify the attendees afterwards. It appears the funeral, protests and pickets concerning Peach provided useful opportunities for Special Branch to identify and log hundreds of individuals.
Gray also referred to the ‘album’, a collection of images of people on protests collated by the Special Branch photographers. Gray elaborated:
As I recall, the practice was that C-Squad [of Special Branch] would park a van outside an event and take photos or videos of those that attended.
The album, which sometimes contained images from public sources, was brought to the bi-weekly SDS meetings at the safe houses. Here, Gray and the other undercovers would collectively identify individuals, who were then collated into the relevant reports for each event. This collaboration between undercovers explains the large numbers of people listed at the end of particular reports. For example, the funeral of Peach produced mass listings and individual images.
In October, as the pickets of police stations ramped up on the eve of the inquest for Peach, Gray reported on the activities of his local Kilburn branch. Gray continued his monitoring of the justice campaign into 1980, reporting advance information about pickets of Kilburn and Harlesden police stations on the first anniversary of Peach’s death in April and, briefly, after the inquest had finally been completed in May.
Spying on the day-to-day ‘business’ activities of the North West District committee and branches of the SWP, which included organising private and public meetings, protests, pickets, paper selling and conferences was not the only arena Gray was concerned with. Two interesting reports, published just before Christmas 1979, provided details of an SWP ‘house party’ and a North West District social held in a pub in Acton, west London. In the first of these two reports, Gray identified around 30 people present at the house party and in the second around 50.
Spying on SWP social events was nothing new to Gray and, even though they were often attended by non-members, ex-members or non-active members of the party, they were clearly of interest to Special Branch and MI5. For example, in December 1979, MI5 (‘Box 500’) requested Special Branch for identification and further details about a party member who had attended a social organised by the North West London District of the Socialist Workers Party, more than eight months previously.
Gray had reported on this social event, and he followed this up by confirming the party member’s identity, that he was a member of the Kilburn branch and providing details of his address and employment status. Noting that the subject was non-active in the party as the result of a motorbike crash, Gray even gave details of the hospital where he was treated for his injuries.
Providing personal information, such as confidential financial and medical data, was normal activity for Gray. In a report in March 1980, he gave the bank account details for a member of the Kilburn branch, and a month later reports on a ‘leading member of the SWP’ who had voluntarily entered a mental hospital. Gray referred to the latter as, ‘always having been a heavy drinker’, and reported that a factor in his mental breakdown had been that he believed he was being spied upon by Special Branch.
In a similar vein, on the same day, Gray reported on another female member of the party who had just been discharged from a hospital after suffering a nervous breakdown. He speculated, without evidence, that:
It is thought that the breakdown was the result of her worrying about her recent series of surgical operations for [private medical details redacted] and the ending of her long lasting friendship with [name redacted] also an active member of the SWP.
He rounded his report off by noting ‘she had been forced to give up her job’ and was ‘now living with her parents’, the home address of which he provided to Special Branch.
From 1980-1982, Gray’s descriptions of illnesses, mental health problems, domestic violence, alcoholism, personal relationships and homosexuality of SWP members and non-members appeared regularly in his submissions to Special Branch. At no point does it seem that his superiors moderated or proscribed the information he was providing, and it is unclear whether they questioned his sources.
In April 1980, Gray reported that North-West London SWP had acquired premises in West Kilburn for a District Centre. The party was sharing its new office with the Brent Community Housing Association (BCHA) which was probably sub-letting it to them. Gray noted that the BCHA had ‘over the past 18 months, provided “short-life” accommodation for about 20 SWP members in the NW London area already’.
This was apparently enough information for Gray to assert that the BCHA should be of interest to Special Branch. Senior SDS officer, DCI HN218 Barry Moss noted that the BCHA had already ‘previously come to the notice of the [Special] Branch’.
From the summer of 1980 until the end of his deployment in mid-1982, Gray reported on the party’s Right To Work (RtWC) campaign. This included providing advance information to Special Branch on a proposed intervention by the RtWC campaign at the Henley Regatta, which apparently failed to materialise, three pages of ‘industrial contacts’ for factory visits, and details of a proposed mass lobby of the TUC in 1982.
As with his earlier reports, Gray focused on school children who were members of the SWP and were taking part in the RtWC events, even providing photographs for identification and personal details of them and their siblings.
As has already been demonstrated, Gray’s reporting on SWP members was detailed and prolific, extended to minors and was facilitated by his spying on meetings, protests and social events. In July 1981, he moved beyond these boundaries by providing personal details of adults and children who merely read Socialist Worker and who, he was fully aware, were not members of the SWP.
This information could have been filtered out by his superiors as inappropriate. However, three contiguous reports were all signed off by DCI HN307 Trevor Butler , suggesting SDS managers were in happy with Gray gathering this information about non-members of the target group. Almost a year later in May 1982, DCI HN99 Nigel ‘Dave’ Short authorised a similar report from Gray.
Towards the end of 1981, Gray was involved in an undisclosed incident with other SWP and ANL members, which could have compromised his cover identity. Gray recalled:
I was still in the middle of my deployment at that point and was told by the [SDS] office that they did not want to just pull me out. They asked if I could move geographical areas, so that is what l did. I started attending meetings of the Paddington Branch of the SWP, which was in a different branch to that which I had attended before, but in the same SWP District.
This also entailed Gray changing his cover accommodation from Kilburn to the Paddington area. Apparently, this tactic was successful, with Gray first reporting on the Paddington branch at the beginning of February 1982 and continuing to do so until the end of his deployment later that year.
Reports on other groups
Although Gray encountered several groups via targeting the SWP, including the ANL, SKAN, the Troops Out Movement (TOM) and the party sub-groups, Flame and Women’s Voice, he only actively infiltrated the ANL. Although he attended some TOM protests, and briefly reported on some of its activities in SWP meetings, he claimed:
In my branch of the SWP there were a lot of Irish people. Matters involving Ireland were therefore particularly important to them and a lot of SWP people from my branch were also involved in the Troops Out Movement. I recall attending several TOM social events and a few meetings…. Other than socially, I do not recall being involved with the Kilburn branch of TOM at all. Going along to things I was invited to was part of maintaining my cover.
Anti-Nazi League
The deployment of Gray into the SWP in north-west London in the spring of 1978 coincided with the meteoric rise of the ANL. Founded in London in November 1977, by leading SWP organisers and left-wing members of the Labour Party, the ANL was always closely linked to the former. Gray recalled that although he:
was not tasked [by his SDS managers] towards the ANL […] all members of the SWP joined the ANL because it was good for recruitment. For that reason, as a member of the SWP you were expected to join the ANL.
This is reflected in one of Gray’s earliest reports, in April 1978, when he details the founding of the North-West London ANL at a meeting in Cricklewood, the location of the SWP branch he first infiltrated. Although early in his deployment, Gray identified most of the members of the new committee, those acting as contacts for the branches (Queens Park/Kilburn, Hendon, Cricklewood, Brent/Wembley, Schools/Students, Trade Unions) and provided a list of attendees. The most prominent of the latter was Peter Hain, the national press officer for the ANL and a long-time target of SDS infiltration and intelligence gathering over the previous decade.
By the summer of 1978, Gray had infiltrated the West Hampstead branch of the ANL and was taking part as a delegate for the group in organising meetings for a ‘Multi-Racial Festival’ in Kilburn. His reporting on the ANL, and the recently formed SKAN, ranges from details of meetings, planning for events and numerous detailed profiles of adults and minors identified by him at meetings, social and public events.
It was in the West Hampstead branch that a fellow member of the ANL Neil Hardie came across Gray in 1978. Hardie recalled:
HN126 was an amiable workhorse. He was the ‘man with the van’, the go to guy for the menial jobs such as delivering placards to demonstrations and collecting newspapers and leaflets from the printers.
Hardie also recalled Gray took part in illegal flyposting and counter-graffiti campaigns for the ANL, primarily as the transport and ‘get-away’ driver.
In October 1978, Gray was elected to the committee of the newly formed combined Camden Against Racism/ANL West Hampstead and Hampstead group, as delegate to the Camden Against Racism (CAR) committee. It was also agreed that Gray would act as ‘chairman’ for the first three general meetings, which suggests he was already known and trusted amongst members of both the West Hampstead branch of the ANL and CAR.
As already documented, in November 1978, Gray produced his first detailed report on the North West London District of the SWP. This also included several sections which analysed the numerical strengths (and weaknesses) of the various branches of the North-West London ANL. The report included details of where and when each ANL branch met, brief roundups of their recent activities and concluded with a list identifying around 40 SWP and ANL members.
In February 1979, Gray was invited to assist a member of the North-West London ANL Coordinating Committee at those meetings, so he effectively climbed another rung in the ANL hierarchy. This was confirmed a few weeks later at the AGM of the Hampstead and West Hampstead CAR/ANL when Gray was named as the joint delegate to North-West London ANL Coordinating Committee.
Over the year following Blair Peach’s death in Southall in April 1979, most of the ANL activity that Gray reported on, concerned picketing outside police stations and protests in support of the justice campaign. In the autumn of 1980, a new physical threat arose on the far right with the emergence of the openly racist British Movement (BM).
In November, Gray reported on a meeting of the Paddington Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (CARF) , which was concerned about a march by the BM from Hyde Park to Paddington. One feature of Gray’s report was the comment: ‘it was decided that all local ANL groups should be resurrected’, suggesting a significant lack of activity over the previous year.
Despite attempts to persuade the Metropolitan Police Commissioner to ban the BM march, it went ahead on 22 November 1980, with 600 BM supporters making Sieg Heil salutes and wearing Nazi regalia, confronted by 1,500 anti-fascists. There were 73 arrests, several injuries and some violence, as the BM supporters ‘ran the gauntlet’ of the anti-fascists in order to get home. Gray claimed in his witness statement:
I have been asked whether I witnessed any public disorder or violence whilst serving undercover in the Special Demonstration Squad. The answer to both is yes, on a very regular basis. I attended a large number of demonstrations, protests, marches and pickets at which I saw public disorder or violence.
Gray stated that he had been present at similar confrontations with the NF on Brick Lane in east London, had attended the massive Rock Against Racism rallies, took part in the Right To Work (RtWC) march from London to Brighton, a protest in Manchester and ‘IRA hunger strike’ marches from Kilburn to central London. However, despite this ‘large number’ of ‘violent’ public events that he attended, he provided little or no specific details in his testimony and noted the contradiction that:
very little of the above work [attending protests] is reflected in the intelligence reports contained in my witness pack.
In one of Gray’s final reports, in March 1982, he analysed the state of the ANL noting: ‘there are no active ANL branches in the North-West London area’. This corresponds with Gray’s testimony, when he stated:
I carried on going to meetings … throughout my deployment, but my recollection is that it [ANL] gradually fizzled out as a group over time.
Once Gray’s deployment began, he did not visit the SDS office at New Scotland Yard. Instead, there was a cover flat used for meetings by the SDS initially in west London but later in his deployment, they switched to a cover flat in south London. Meetings involving SDS undercovers and their managers would be held every week on non-consecutive days. It was at these meetings that SDS undercovers submitted their intelligence reports.
Gray stated that after an event or meeting concerning his target group or if he ‘learnt some new information that was non-urgent’ he would hand-write some notes, ‘whilst things were fresh in my mind’. He never carried out this activity at his cover accommodation, only at his home. When he had the opportunity, he would type up these notes, again for security at his home address, to produce a draft report.
The notes and the report would be stored at his home until he attended the next SDS meeting, where he would submit the document to the SDS office staff. He would then destroy the written notes by adding them to the ‘confidential waste sack’ at the SDS flat.
According to Gray, the draft reports were taken to the SDS office where the backroom staff would add the Special Branch file code references. These reports were not broken down, but there is evidence that they were sometimes amalgamated. The draft of the final report would be returned to Gray at the next appropriate SDS meeting, so he could check it; which he did by adding his initials as confirmation to each section. Gray stated that the codes in the final reports referred to those who had a Special Branch Record File (RF) or a Security Service Personal File (PF) and were added so that these records could be regularly updated with the new information about an organisation or individual.
Handing in reports at the bi-weekly meetings was not the only method for passing on information to the SDS managers, as Gray recalled:
Much of the reporting that I did was done over the telephone or conveyed orally when I saw people from the SDS office. If anything urgent had arisen, such as information about an imminent demonstration, I would not have waited until the next meeting I had with the SDS office to submit a written report, I would tell them as soon as I could on the telephone.
Gray considered the meetings with SDS undercovers and managers very important, because they carried out several functions including health and social well-being. There was a secure telephone line at the cover flats which undercovers could use to make necessary private calls, and they could discuss any ‘pressing issues’ they had with SDS managers.
Some of the SDS officers, including Gray, were studying for ‘promotion examinations’ and were helped at these meetings by SDS backroom staff. According to Gray, the safe-flat meetings were always different, the only regular item being reporting by senior officers on ‘what was happening in general back at the [New Scotland] Yard’.
The higher echelons at New Scotland Yard were certainly aware of the activities of the SDS unit. Gray remembered:
there was a couple of visits from the Deputy Assistant Commissioner during my time in the SDS. I remember there was also one visit from the Assistant Commissioner Crime. They visited the cover flat at one of the weekly meetings and told us what a good job we were doing.
Gray recalled that the senior officers from the Metropolitan Police were often surprised when they met the undercovers:
Because if you're working in a situation in Scotland Yard where everybody looks the same and they're all doing their job and you then come out to a not very tidy flat in the middle of nowhere and meet ten chaps who are smelly, hairy, not very nice, and you are told that they're your officers, it was a bit of a shock, I think. And that happened on a couple of occasions.
Outside of these unusual circumstances, Gray claimed there were certain ‘unwritten rules’:
We would never talk about our undercover jobs when we met like that, unless you needed some advice from someone who had done it before. Generally, you would have absolutely no idea what the others [undercovers] were doing.
However, these formal meetings also extended into informal socialising. Gray stated that he would sometimes meet with other SDS undercovers outside the safe flat, visiting restaurants, and drinking together. He added:
They were my colleagues. We would try to carry on normal life as much as we could away from our undercover jobs.
Outside these few but regular diversions, life undercover presented plenty of problems to deal with. Gray recalled that the ‘moment I stepped outside of my home front door, I would be in my cover identity’. He routinely checked he wasn’t carrying any identification in his real name and was required to ring into the SDS office every morning to confirm he was ‘OK’. He visited or stayed at his cover flat almost every day, though he also went home every day to see his partner, but might not sleep there. As far as he was concerned, he was working ‘all days of the week in his cover identity’.
Regarding the groups he was targeting, Gray would:
attend meetings and demonstrations … [but] would also drink in the local pubs to get to know people, live the usual life of someone living in that area. You had to do things like that to support your cover.
In comparison, Gray stated that his daily routines were ‘completely different’ to his previous work in Special Branch.
In his oral evidence, Gray accepted that his undercover deployment had a negative impact upon his relationship with his wife. By mid-1980, more than two years into his deployment, the couple had started divorce proceedings. Gray informed his SDS managers that, by this stage, he had a new partner, a serving police officer, who was known to them. He asked permission to move into police accommodation with her, to which his managers agreed.
In May 1980, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police received an anonymous letter which referred to a ‘supposed undercover Special Branch officer’ having:
affairs with members of the opposite sex who are also in the force, and in some instances actually live in police accommodation [gist]
The letter ended with a threat to expose the SDS unit:
…so what about some action before the likes of the National Front (who you are supposedly infiltrating for one) or the Press find out [gist]
Although not naming him, other than as a ‘hairy’, this letter clearly referred to Gray and his new-found relationship.
When Gray was made aware of the letter, he identified his wife as the author and offered his resignation, but this was rejected by his SDS superiors. Instead, they ‘discreetly’ obtained a sample of Gray’s wife’s handwriting, which suggested that she was the writer. In June 1980, senior SDS managers DCI HN318 Raymond Wilson and DCI Barry Moss visited Gray’s ex spouse, confronting her with the anonymous letter. Despite her denials, and after rejecting another possible writer, they were confident she was the author of the letter and stated in a report:
It is hoped that [...] that she will have been persuaded not to write any more letters to the Commissioner or, perhaps more important, to any more public source which might cause the Commissioner serious embarrassment.
Gray commented retrospectively that:
The office discussed it with me, and told me that it had been dealt with. I did not know at the time what action they took to address the issue. I have only recently become aware of the actions that they took and in my view they did a very good job of dealing with the situation.
In his first witness statement, Gray claimed that he did not ‘engage in any sexual activity whilst in my undercover identity’ and that he had no knowledge of any other SDS undercover engaging in the same, during the time he was deployed.
The former was contradicted by the witness statement of Neil Hardie, a fellow member of the West Hampstead branch of the ANL, who alleged that in 1978 Gray was having a sexual relationship with the now-deceased Ros Gardner. Gardner, also a member of the newly formed West Hampstead branch of the ANL in 1978, joined the same branch of the SWP (Kilburn) as Gray in November that year.
Hardie recalled that Gardner ran monthly fundraising events for the ANL, usually at her flat, and that Gray was regularly there. Hardie stated that Gardner and Gray had a close relationship and that Gray stayed overnight at her flat after the fund-raising parties. Hardie added:
Most people assumed that they [Gardner and Gray] were an item but I am not aware if anyone asked directly. I did not speak to anyone about it directly. I felt it was not my business and they were two consenting adults and therefore it was no one else's business. Clearly my view would have been different if I had been aware that HN126 was a Police Officer.
In his second witness statement, Gray refuted these allegations. He denied that he had had a sexual relationship with Gardner or that their friendship was ‘close’.
As far as non-sexual personal relationships, Gary stated that he socialised with a large number of people from his target groups, claiming that it was ‘a social scene as much as a political one’, and that his undercover identity required it. He named two individuals in particular who he was closest to, a North West London SWP district organiser and a female SWP member to whom he delivered Socialist Worker.
Gray was fully aware that MI5 was interested in the reports that the SDS was compiling from his intelligence, pointing out that the:
MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] and the Security Services had a close working relationship and they [MI5] received copies of all our reports.
There were several requests by MI5 (‘Box 500’ in the documentation) for confirming the identities of specific individuals involved in the groups Gray was spying on. Typically, in this period, these came from the F6 or F7 departments of MI5, the former dealing with Trotskyist and radical organisations and the latter with a wider range of groups including anarchist, feminist, pacifist, Black power, nationalist and fascist parties.
After the reorganisation of the North West London District of the SWP in December 1981, on which Gray reported in detail, there were requests from F7 for further information from the SDS on the ‘size and structure’ of the new organisation.
In March 1982, after a meeting between SDS manager Nigel ‘Dave’ Short , SDS office administrator Martin Gray and a member of F6, MI5 made further, more detailed, requests. These included understanding the policy-making relationship between the North West London District Committee, its branches and the SWP National Office. F6 also wanted to know about the financing of the various bodies, their relationships with other political parties and campaigns, and the use of SWP front-organisations, specifically the RTW campaign.
An addendum from F6 to the minutes of the meeting was anonymously addressed to Gray, praising him for his spying:
Thank you for your interesting reports on the Paddington SWP, it might interest you to know something of the background to this branch.
The following section was redacted but it is important to note that it appears MI5 was also passing information to SDS agents ‘in the field’. The requests made by F6 that were specific to Gray included obtaining the ‘vital statistics’ of the Paddington branch, ‘numbers, officials, relations with the rest of the District’ and the ‘areas/campaigns through which the branch is trying to recruit’ with a specific emphasis on ‘students in Central London’.
About a week after this meeting, Gray produced a detailed seven-page report on the organisation of the SWP North West London District by branch and the associated ANL. Along with the descriptions of the organisation, Gray provided details of the fifteen members of the District Committee as well as another 40 or so individuals and organisations.
Gray was approached by his managers towards the end of 1981 to discuss an exfiltration strategy. He recalled that this was around six months before he exited the SWP in April 1982.
His plan was to gradually drift away from the party, as if ‘I had lost interest’. He stopped attending every meeting and then spun a story that he was ‘going travelling with a girlfriend in Europe’. He confirmed this by writing a postcard to a member of his branch stating that they had ‘decided to carry on exploring’. He followed this up a few months later with a further postcard stating similar. After his apparently successful exit, Gray claimed he ‘did not maintain contact with anyone on whom I had reported or make any further use of my cover name’.
While apparently abroad Gray actually returned to the SDS, spending some 17 weeks ‘out of the field’. During this period, during which he stated he was neither debriefed nor offered any advice or ongoing support by the SDS, he wrote up a series of intelligence reports dated in May and June 1982.
After leaving the SDS, Gray remained in Special Branch until he retired from the Metropolitan Police in the mid-1990s.
On 28 May 2018, an anonymity application was made for both the real and cover names of HN126.
On 21 June 2018, Inquiry Chair John Mitting was ‘minded to’ restrict real name but refused the application over cover name. This decision was formalised in October 2019.