HN244 Angus McIntosh served as a Special Branch officer from 1964 until his retirement in 1998. He was posted to the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) as second in command with the rank of detective inspector in 1976.
During the three years he was in the SDS, McIntosh helped to manage 16 undercover officers, around half of them deployed at any one time. The majority of these undercovers infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in various districts of London. Although McIntosh stated that he played no part in decisions about which organisations to target, he was involved in discussions about how to achieve and sustain infiltrations.
McIntosh’s main role in the SDS was the management and welfare of the undercover officers. This involved providing practical support such as financing and procuring transport, maintaining safe houses and, in some cases, travelling to other police-force areas to protect undercover officers at demonstrations. He discussed with undercovers any personal problems they might have and, in a few cases, met their spouses as part of the recruitment process.
McIntosh was also tasked with collecting intelligence from the undercovers, written and verbal, and passing it on to the SDS back-office staff to be collated into reports. These reports were signed by him and disseminated in Special Branch, MI5 or other Metropolitan Police departments.
McIntosh stated that he was unaware at the time of any sexual or intimate relationships between undercover officers and members of their target groups. This was despite evidence given by an unnamed SDS undercover that McIntosh was directly involved in resolving at least one example of this activity. However, McIntosh did recall discussions over the difficulties of undercovers not being in a sexual relationship with a member of the target group.
McIntosh submitted a witness statement to the Undercover Policing Inquiry and gave oral evidence at the hearings on 19 May 2022. You can listen to McIntosh’s audio-only Inquiry testimony via the Gallery Tab.
Unless noted otherwise, the following information draws from McIntosh’s witness statement or from his spoken evidence to the Inquiry.
Angus Bryan McIntosh was born in 1940 and joined the Metropolitan Police as a cadet in 1957. Due to age restrictions, he was unable to become a uniformed constable until he was 19. He was posted to the West End Central police station from 1959 to 1964.
In 1964, McIntosh joined Special Branch at the rank of detective constable (DC). For the following 12 years, he undertook various roles working in A Squad, responsible for Ports, E Squad dealing with the Middle East, and D Squad investigating naturalisation enquiries.
His work in D Squad included a spell working overseas in the British Overseas Territory of Anguilla in the Caribbean. McIntosh was promoted to detective sergeant (DS) in 1969, and detective inspector (DI) in early 1976.
Although McIntosh did not undertake any extended undercover work while in Special Branch, he explained it was commonplace for officers to ‘attend meetings and demonstrations in plain clothes without revealing their identity’.
McIntosh had some awareness of the existence and role of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) before he joined. He noticed that ‘some of his colleagues disappeared from their regular duties’ and when he met them on social occasions they ‘had long hair and were less formally dressed’.
One of his acquaintances was future head of the SDS, HN135 Mike Ferguson , an undercover officer in the unit from 1969-1970. Throughout the history of the SDS several former undercover officers were appointed to manage the unit. However, these appointments seemed to depend on whether a former undercover became available at the right time – it was not an SDS policy requirement.
At some point in this period, while wearing his undercover garb, Ferguson took refuge in McIntosh’s home wanting to be ‘off the street’ and in ‘a safe place’. Neither McIntosh nor his wife recognised Ferguson until he spoke. Despite these experiences, McIntosh claimed he ‘did not know for sure that the squad [SDS] existed at that stage, or what it was called’.
McIntosh did not apply to join the SDS; he was posted to the unit in April 1976. He said he did not know why he was selected, and merely ‘joined the SDS because I was told to’. This was the norm for Special Branch management postings at the time. Holding the rank of detective inspector, McIntosh was effectively the SDS’ second in command.
His appointment coincided with the promotions of the existing head of the SDS, HN608 Kenneth Pryde to superintendent and, some months later, HN34 Geoffrey Craft to fill Pryde’s previous position as detective chief inspector (DCI).
Early in 1978, Craft was replaced by McIntosh’s friend and colleague DCI Ferguson. Below McIntosh in the hierarchy were detective sergeants HN1668 Lesley Willingale , and HN368 Richard Walker , who worked with him in the SDS office at New Scotland Yard.
Willingale and Walker were eventually replaced respectively by HN2152 Richard Scully and HN308 Christopher Skey.
Training and guidance
In 1976 McIntosh was attending general police training courses over several months at the National Police College, Bramshill and another, related to his recent promotion to DI, at Hendon Police College. However, these courses were largely unrelated to his Special Branch or SDS activities.
McIntosh stated that there was no formal training in place for his position in the SDS. This, he explained, was not unusual in Special Branch at the time; it relied on newcomers being trained ‘on the job’, with a more senior officer acting as a mentor.
However, McIntosh could not remember receiving any guidance from the head of the unit, Geoffrey Craft. Instead, he stated that he was mentored by Mike Ferguson, who headed the unit after Craft had been promoted. McIntosh recalled:
I received informal guidance from Mike Ferguson on the whole operation of SDS as it then was – from the administration duties, to how cover identities were created to the methods of introducing new officers, and meetings with undercover officers.
Duties
McIntosh stated that his primary duty as a DI in the SDS was management and welfare of the undercover officers, a task he shared with the DCI heading the unit.
Over McIntosh’s three-year term in the SDS, the number of officers deployed undercover was never more than nine at any one time and he managed 16 undercovers in total. Of these, eight were already deployed when he arrived in the SDS. A further eight officers were recruited, mentored and deployed during his tenure.
McIntosh’s day-to-day duties included ‘keeping diaries, checking diaries, monitoring overtime and training in relation to their [undercovers’] police duties, maintaining contact with the officers’. He would also process requests for intelligence from his superior officers in the SDS chain of command, from other squads of Special Branch or from the A8 division of the Metropolitan Police.
A8 was responsible for policing large protests, demonstrations and marches in the capital. McIntosh also managed the information upon its return from the SDS undercovers, either formally via the SDS backroom staff or by reporting directly to the requestees by telephone.
McIntosh also had a role in recruiting undercovers for the SDS. This was an informal process where individuals in Special Branch would be recommended to him or a more senior officer and recorded. These recommendations often came through the two detective sergeants in the back office, Lesley Willingale and Richard Walker, as they were contemporaries of rank-and-file Special Branch officers in other squads.
If a vacancy arose in the SDS, McIntosh and the DCI would approach the candidate’s senior officers to collect their assessment of the ‘nominee’s suitability for the role’. McIntosh described the kind of people they were looking for:
You would want stable, reliable people – especially those who were amateur dramatics enthusiasts as effectively we were asking the officers to be actors. Essentially, we were looking for someone mentally relaxed and dependable, but able to be convincing in their role.
According to McIntosh, he and DCI Ferguson only recruited one undercover who wasn’t married. They regarded marital status as a major factor in recruitment, assuming married men had ‘domestic stability’ and were thus less likely to be drawn into the ‘temptation of any sexual liaison whilst undercover’.
It is likely that this policy was instigated after the first known SDS officers to have relationships in their cover identities were either single or had recently remarried. This policy was perhaps a tacit, though not explicit acknowledgement of that fact. This would prove to be a questionable assumption. At least three of the eight undercovers recruited during McIntosh’s tenure had sexual relationships in their cover identities; two were married.
McIntosh claimed that he always spoke to the prospective undercover’s partner as part of the recruiting process. The evidence suggests however that this practice was not routine until late 1978, more than two years into his post, after DCI Mike Ferguson had become head of the SDS that year.
Another of McIntosh’s duties was mentoring new recruits and assisting with their practical requirements. This included helping to create their new identity through taking details of deceased children and creating cover occupations and employment.
McIntosh claimed that DCI Ferguson took the lead with most of these activities, having previously worked undercover for the SDS. McIntosh would deal with more ‘logistical matters such as location and maintenance of the safe houses and welfare’.
This involved McIntosh in procurement and management of safe houses. Typically, the SDS ran two active safe houses on the basis that this reduced the number of visits to each. The back-office detective sergeants would source the properties, and McIntosh would carry out maintenance on them, a perhaps surprising role for a relatively senior police officer.
This was to save the SDS’ limited budget and to reduce the security risk of having to engage ‘safe’ plumbers and electricians. McIntosh recalled three safe houses during his tenure, one in west London, another south of the river; the third, he could not remember.
McIntosh was also responsible for practical and financial administration for undercovers’ vehicles, although he claimed obtaining cover documents was not his job, and arranging the weekly meetings with the undercovers once they had been deployed.
According to McIntosh there were three reasons for these regular meetings with SDS undercovers; to deal with any practical problems they had, to assess their welfare and obtain the latest intelligence information. He also claimed that:
I wanted to make sure that the officers retained a connection to the police, and to their partner – and equally wanted the officer's partner to have the opportunity to refer concerns to us.
In certain circumstances, McIntosh also took an active role in protecting undercovers whilst they were on duty. He recalled travelling to anti-fascist demonstrations in Blackburn and Leicester to ‘watch over’ SDS undercovers who were present. Presumably this protection involved intervening with local police forces in the event of their arrest or injury.
In his written and oral evidence to the Inquiry, McIntosh claimed that he played no role in selecting groups or individuals for targeting by SDS undercovers. He stated that these requests came from a series of sources; from other squads within Special Branch, MI5 and other police or government departments. He noted:
It would be highly unusual for anyone lower than a Detective Inspector to have any contact with the Security Service, and even in that capacity it would only be accompanying a more senior officer.
McIntosh claimed he only became fully aware of the origin of these requests later in his career, as during his time in the SDS he merely received orders regarding targeting via his superior officers. In regular meetings with his line managers, a DCI and superintendent, these requests were discussed, as he recalled:
Targeting was never done instantly. It had to be plotted and planned, and the feasibility had to be examined. So, in these daily conversations… would cover all sorts of topics/subjects.
Once these decisions had been made, McIntosh would relay these orders to the SDS undercovers.
According to McIntosh the choice of which district or branch of a targeted organisation to infiltrate was largely based on geographic considerations. SDS undercovers were dispersed throughout the city, not clustered in one area. The infiltration of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in London in the period of McIntosh’s posting followed this pattern to an extent.
In chronological order over three years, HN354 ‘Vince Miller’ Vincent Harvey was deployed to Walthamstow in the north east, HN80 ‘Colin Clark’ to Haringey in the north, HN126 ‘Paul Gray’ to Cricklewood in the north west, HN356 ‘Bill Biggs’ to Plumstead in the south east, HN96 ‘Michael James’ to Clapton to the east, and HN155 ‘Phil Cooper’ to Walthamstow once again.
Although these deployments broadly agree with McIntosh’s assessment, other factors such as the long-running Grunwick Strike in Cricklewood, north-west London and the success in infiltrating the SWP national office in Hackney in east London may have also played a part in these decisions.
Considering the supposed remit of the SDS for providing information to prevent violence at demonstrations, an obvious client for targeting requests in the Metropolitan Police was A8 division, responsible for policing mass protests.
McIntosh denied ever being given a target from A8. He commented: ‘We fed them, they didn't feed us’, suggesting that in this case at least, the flow of intelligence information was one-way, from the SDS to Special Branch and then to A8.
McIntosh also touched on the apparent lack of targeting of far-right organisations by the SDS in the period when he was a manager. During this time (1976-1979) the National Front (NF) , National Party (NP), British Movement (BM) and League of St George (LSG) were ascending, on the street and in the ballot box.
There were major violent confrontations between these organisations and local communities, left-wing and anti-racist groups in Lewisham in 1977 and Southall in 1979. Clashes in Southall ended with anti-fascist protester Blair Peach dying at the hands of the Metropolitan Police Special Patrol Group (SPG).
When asked why ‘there was a high-level policy decision not to infiltrate the extreme right wing’, McIntosh explained:
[[The far right]] was a very violent section and it was often involved in crime, so to put an undercover officer into that would be very, very, very difficult. Also, it was felt that a lot of information about the right-wing activities was actually available through the left wing, because they were particularly interested in what the right wing were doing.
And he confirmed that, during his spell in the SDS, although ‘we always had in mind that we may need to infiltrate extreme right-wing groups’, there was no attempt to do so.
Reporting process
McIntosh described the process for creating SDS intelligence reports. He passed the written information he received from the SDS undercovers in the weekly safe-house meetings to back-office detective sergeants at New Scotland Yard. Information phoned in from the undercovers, typically regarding an ‘imminent event or demonstration’, was recorded either by McIntosh or the back-office sergeants, then disseminated internally or added to the weekly reports.
McIntosh made a clear distinction in his witness statement between what he called ‘approving’ documents and ‘assessing’ them. The former, he argued, was merely signing a report off, the latter involved ‘undertaking a qualitative evaluation of the contents’.
He claimed that he signed off the intelligence reports when provided with the final versions by DS Scully but, crucially, did not assess the contents. This he explained was because:
The assessment of the reports would come from the recipients, who are the people who asked for the information in the first place. I was not in a position to assess the intelligence as intelligence was not gathered for the SDS, it was obtained for other police or security departments. I was not, and could not have been, in a position to assess the quality of the information obtained.
He also claimed that he had no ‘recollection of having a role in the onward dissemination of intelligence reports’, though he was aware that they were ‘filed in the general Special Branch registry’, and some of the reports were sent to the Security Service (MI5), known as ‘Box 500’.
The Battle of Southall and death of Blair Peach
McIntosh was deputy head of the SDS in April 1979 when the Metropolitan Police, including the Special Patrol Group (SPG) engaged in violent clashes with the local south Asian community and anti-racist protesters in Southall, west London.
The violence, largely instigated by police actions to protect an election meeting by the National Front (NF), injured hundreds of civilians and police officers, some seriously. Protester Blair Peach died. Despite campaigning for many years, Peach’s friends could not bring the perpetrator/s to justice.
One unnamed SDS undercover, HN41 , who was present in Southall has stated that his managers advised him – and presumably, other undercovers – not to attend the protest, having had advance information that ‘the uniform police were going to clamp down on the demonstrations’.
HN41 argued that he had to present, as he had been asked to go by his target group. Unusually, other than HN41, no other SDS officers were present at what turned out to be the most violent public-order incident of the year. By way of contrast, 18 Special Branch officers were present at the Battle of Lewisham in 1977. This suggests the undercover SDS officers took their managers’ warnings seriously.
Questioned about this, McIntosh denied knowing about the planned ‘clampdown’ in Southall by the Metropolitan Police and the SPG. He also denied having warned any SDS undercovers about the dangers they might face, though he did offer an explanation about why officers might have been advised to stay away from Southall:
Well, we don’t want our [SDS undercovers] officers arrested. We don’t want our [SDS undercovers]] officers involved in violence. It’s as simple as that.
McIntosh was also questioned about systematic spying by SDS undercovers on Peach’s funeral and afterwards on the campaign for justice led by his partner, Celia Stubbs. This spying operation continued for at least 20 years after Peach’s death. Asked about Peach’s funeral, where SDS officers identified and named more than 50 attendees, passing these details to Special Branch and MI5, McIntosh responded:
I can understand some people being upset by it, particularly people close to the person’s funeral. However, in public disorder – and I know I’m quoting Northern Ireland, for instance – funerals were often a hotbed of problems. And it wasn’t the true friends and relatives of the… person whose funeral it was; it was because there was an opportunity of demonstrating against whatever they got in mind, but it would be anti-police in one way or the other…
Some might question the validity of conflating a funeral during the war in Northern Ireland of a victim of paramilitary or British military violence with the funeral of an anti-racist murdered by police.
Reporting personal information
Of the 16 undercover officers deployed or who began deployment under McIntosh’s supervision of McIntosh, many gathered questionable personal information about members of the public. These include details of medical and mental-health issues, relationships and their breakdown, sexuality, domestic violence and alcoholism.
Officers sought and recorded information about individuals inside and outside the target groups, children, families and even people who merely attended social or cultural events.
Questioned in the Inquiry about whether there was ‘any sort of limit on the types of intelligence’ being gathered for Special Branch, MI5 or even A8 by SDS undercovers, McIntosh responded:
No, the answer has to be no, inasmuch as when you’re dealing with intelligence, you have to group in as much as you can to ascertain whether or not the intelligence, the overall intelligence, is valid or not. So I’d say no, there wasn’t any boundaries.
Undercover officers giving evidence often deferred this responsibility to their managers, stating that a filtering of their raw intelligence would occur somewhere within Special Branch’s bureaucracy. McIntosh went one step further, claiming that it was the ‘organisation which wanted the information’ that made the decisions over validity, not the SDS.
Essentially, he shifted the responsibility for boundaries in intelligence-gathering to the customers of the SDS. With his denial of any responsibility for ‘fact checking’ the reports or ascertaining their relevance to any intelligence customer’s need, McIntosh effectively refused to be accountable for the reports in any sense.
Positions of influence in target organisations
The question of whether SDS undercovers were encouraged and sanctioned by their management to take on positions of responsibility in their target groups is particularly relevant to the period while McIntosh was deputy head of the unit.
Of the eight undercovers that began their deployments under McIntosh, almost all took on positions of responsibility within their target organisations. Six of the undercovers infiltrated the SWP. Of these, four – HN354, HN126, HN356 and HN96 – took on roles in their local branches and were then promoted to district committees. The roles included treasurers, organisers for distribution of Socialist Worker and chairing private and public meetings.
The remaining two – HN80 and HN155 – infiltrated the SWP national office, took on major organisational roles in national campaigns including the Right to Work (RtW) campaign and were involved in meetings of the Central Committee and the Party Council. MI5 praised the volume and quality of this intelligence information.
This pattern of evidence suggests that taking on positions of influence within targeted organisations was encouraged amongst all the SDS undercovers in this period. However, McIntosh claimed that:
It was not the case that prior permission was required before a UCO [undercover] could assume such a position, nor was it a case of them solely exercising their judgement.
Instead, McIntosh explained, he and the chief inspector would respond in the regular meetings had at the safe house to suggestions from undercovers to take up such positions. The only caveat that McIntosh could recall was:
If it was a role which obviously involved future activities, conspiracy or whatever, we wouldn't advise them. In fact, we would go against them going into that.
McIntosh claimed that if it was ‘undesirable, we would tell them they needed to refuse the post’. However, he could not ‘recall an example of an undesirable potential appointment’, which explains the prevalence of this practice amongst the undercovers. Essentially, no one in the management was saying ‘No’ to their proposals to take on positions of influence in their target organisations.
Sexual relationships
McIntosh denied having known of any undercover officer having a sexual or intimate relationship while in their cover identity. When questioned in particular about three undercovers during his tenure HN300 ‘Jim Pickford’ , HN354 Vincent Harvey ‘Vince Miller’ and the unnamed HN21 , all of whom had evidence linking them to sexual relationships while deployed undercover, McIntosh denied any knowledge of these activities until coming across it at the Inquiry.
However, evidence from an unnamed SDS officer contradicted this denial. This pertained to the case of HN300 ‘Jim Pickford’ who as an undercover was already considered a ‘womaniser’ and ‘sexual predator’ by several of his colleagues.
In late 1976, six months after McIntosh had joined the SDS as its deputy head, Pickford had supposedly ‘fallen in love’ with an associate of his target group. Pickford confessed to a fellow undercover who immediately contacted the SDS office. Pickford was summoned to a meeting with McIntosh and the outcome, presumably McIntosh’s decision, was to withdraw Pickford from undercover duties. Pickford completed his deployment shortly after.
In his oral evidence to the inquiry McIntosh admitted that he had regarded Pickford as a ‘womaniser’. However, he claimed he could not recall any meeting regarding Pickford’s future as an undercover and believed his deployment had ended without incident and on time. This led the chair of the Undercover Policing Inquiry, Sir John Mitting, to comment:
Although Angus McIntosh was doing his best to tell the truth as he remembered it, I am satisfied that his memory of these events is imperfect.
However, in a joint statement, the women deceived by SDS officers counter that it is simply not plausible for McIntosh and other managers to deny all knowledge of these relationships.
One subject McIntosh could recall was discussions that took place during his tenure in the SDS concerning the ‘issue of girlfriends’. This referred to the social nature of target groups where the ‘lack of a girlfriend made it difficult for officers when dealing with female members of the organisations’.
The suppos ed problem was that ‘it was difficult for an officer who was in a group for a long time to continue to decline advances without comment’. McIntosh recalled having conversations with DCI Ferguson and other SDS officers about how to deflect suspicion about undercovers not being in a sexual relationship with a member of the target group.
This included the suggestion that they should create ‘fake girlfriends’ for social events involving the target groups. McIntosh recalled:
And so the pressure was building up there, and they [SDS undercovers] were coming to us saying … "I'm in a situation here. Is there any way I [McIntosh] could produce a lady?"
The suggestion was rejected by McIntosh and Ferguson on the grounds of it being ‘operationally impractical’.
In Mcintosh’s oral evidence to the Inquiry regarding sexual relationships between undercovers and members or associates of their target groups, it became clear that the primary concern for him and his superior, DCI Ferguson was not the welfare of the victims, the undercovers, or officers’ families: it was the security of the SDS operation.
McIntosh made this clear in the following exchange concerning undercovers engaging in sexual relationships with members of their target groups:
Q. So it was the – the anxiety for the SDS, you say, was the – was that this could jeopardise the operation –
A. [McIntosh] The whole security of the operation.
Q. Did you also consider that an officer engaging in sexual activity in those circumstances was abusing his position and his power at that time?
A. [McIntosh] Not at all, no.
This explains why McIntosh and Ferguson took no action to discipline undercovers such as Pickford. As long as any security threat to the SDS was resolved, they were satisfied.
McIntosh confirmed that meetings took place between Special Branch and MI5, though when he was first posted into the SDS these were held with more senior officers at superintendent level in S or C squads.
The former was the Specialist Support department dealing with technical matters including surveillance. The latter, originally set up to spy on the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), was concerned with counter-subversion and domestic extremism. Decisions over targeting and the intelligence required by MI5 were made in these meetings and then relayed to the SDS management to be actioned.
Towards the end of his tenure there is evidence that SDS management, including McIntosh and Ferguson, and representatives of MI5 were holding regular monthly meetings. They were typically engaging with F6 and F7 sections in MI5, the former dealing with Trotskyist and radical organisations, the latter with a wider range of groups including anarchist, feminist, pacifist, black power, nationalist and fascist parties.
McIntosh left the SDS in autumn 1979, after gaining a promotion to detective chief inspector. He joined B Squad in Special Branch, responsible for combatting Irish republican terrorism.
From there he moved to the anti-terrorist branch, then returned to Special Branch where he remained until he was promoted to detective chief superintendent. For the final part of his career, he was National Coordinator of Ports Policing and was awarded the Queen's Policing Medal shortly before leaving the police force.
No anonymity application was sought over HN244 Angus McIntosh’s name. He submitted a written statement to the Inquiry on 3 December 2020 and appeared at a hearing on 5 May 2021.