HN41 is the cypher assigned by the Undercover Policing Inquiry to a former undercover police officer who worked in the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) during the 1970s and 1980s. His real and cover names are subject to a restriction order.
HN41 was present at the Battle of Southall in 1979, where the Metropolitan Police killed anti-fascist protester Blair Peach. The officer has provided a written witness statement and gave evidence in a ‘closed’ hearing of the Inquiry.
The source for this profile – unless stated otherwise – is the transcript of HN41’s oral evidence, which has also been heavily redacted.
In addition to the officer’s personal details, the Inquiry censored dates of their SDS deployment, the names of all organisations he infiltrated, and the details of a specific event of ‘substantial significance’ to the Inquiry. In addition, the Inquiry removed details of potential compromises during his deployment and post-SDS career.
HN41 joined the SDS in the late 1970s. For the first five to six months, they worked in the SDS back office before being deployed to the field.
They then spent four to five months becoming a familiar face with the group/s he was to infiltrate, gradually allowing himself to be recruited.
Tradecraft
HN41 confirmed that they used the identity of a deceased child during his undercover deployment. This was not a decision they made, they said; the system was ‘already in place’ when they joined the SDS. He understood that the practice may have originated from the Security Service.
The officer claimed that throughout their SDS deployment, he did not form any close friendships or relationships, including sexual relationships, describing their undercover persona as that of ‘a loner’. He further stated that he was never arrested, detained, charged, or taken before a court at any time during his SDS deployment or wider police career.
The Battle of Southall
The Battle of Southall occurred on Monday, 23 April 1979, during a series of protests spread over two days after the openly racist, far-right National Front (NF) organised a pre-election meeting in Southall Town Hall in west London.
The local community, which had a concentration of people of South Asian and African-Caribbean descent, opposed the meeting, along with anti-racist groups and left-wing organisations. The Metropolitan Police protected the gathering of the NF, and in the subsequent violent clashes, mainly between residents and the police, a protester, Blair Peach, was killed by Special Patrol Group (SPG) police officers.
In the closed hearing, HN41 was quite critical of how the uniformed and riot police dealt with the demonstration, implying that officers were – at least in part – responsible for things getting out of hand. He said he understood why local people got annoyed by the policing of the protest.
He told the Inquiry in 2022 that there had been an intransigent and inflexible response by Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner David Helm and A8 , the unit responsible for policing major protests, as events unfolded in Southall that Monday. HN41 severely criticised the decision by Helm in the late afternoon to seal off the area around the Town Hall:
It upset many local people who couldn’t move to work or come back from work or go out and do shopping. It antagonised the [Redacted] and I don’t know what it achieved rather than demanding more police officers spread out further.
HN41 argued that this was why the ‘police lost control of events at Southall […] there was too much going on spread out over a wide area’. This dispersal of police resources, HN41 said, left the Special Patrol Group mobile units as the only available and effective units to address outbreaks of disorder. Additionally, in the ‘chaos’ that ensued, police units experienced organisational difficulties and communication problems.
HN41 also recounted that, unusually, his SDS managers had advised him not to attend the protests in Southall, recalling:
[I]t was because the uniform police were going to clamp down on the demonstrations […] and, therefore, I believe the management considered that the dangers were more than normal.
HN41 did attend the event but claimed to have left early.
The Inquiry published a gisted and amalgamated document containing extracts quoting several anonymised officers. For the most part, it is impossible to say which officer contributed what, but one (gisted) remark could have only come from HN41, stating that he left Southall a few hours before Blair Peach was killed.
Advising on HN41’s application for anonymity, the risk assessor stated that should HN41 be identified by people in the groups he targeted, there was a risk of an attack, and that the impact of an attack would be critical.
Inquiry Chair John Mitting stated there was a ‘real, but unquantifiable risk to the personal safety of HN41 if the real or cover name were to be published’, adding that it would ‘be neither necessary nor proportionate to run that risk’. Mitting said that publication of either his real or cover name would interfere with HN41’s private life/physical integrity, and was not justified under Article 8(2) of the European Convention oh Human Rights.
And so, in March 2018, Mitting ruled that neither HN41’s real or the cover names could be published, explaining that HN41 is a sexagenarian, married and retired. Addressing the ‘event of significant interest to the Inquiry witnessed by HN41 [...] the Battle of Southall’, Mitting wrote, the Inquiry would address this issue once HN41 had given evidence. The manner in which it can be provided has been determined.
That decision restricted HN41’s published evidence to a heavily gisted oral statement and anonymised contributions to an amalgamated extract in a written statement, that included contributions from other ‘closed’ officers.
Procedural and evidential documents relating to HN41 can be found in the Documents tab.