This is an excerpt from a profile last updated in 2018. The full profile can be found here: https://powerbase.info/index.php/Roger_Pearce Roger Pearce gave evidence to The Inquiry in 2025 on his time as a SDS undercover. It is likely he will give further evidence on his time as a more senior officer in 2025/26. A updated profile will appear here.
HN85 Roger C (Roger Thorley') is a former undercover police officer who rose to be Commander of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch (MPSB) and Director of Intelligence. Since retiring he has become an author of fiction.
As 'Roger Thorley' he infiltrated anarchist groups from 1979 to 1984. From 1980-1981 he wrote articles for the Freedom periodical It seems that Pearce used Freedom to get access British connections with the radical community in Northern Ireland. After a fact-finding mission to Belfast he disappeared from sight.
In March 2018, the chair of the Undercover Policing Inquiry John Mitting revealed that Pearce as 'Roger Thorley' - formerly know only by the cypher HN85 - had operated as a writer for the anarchist periodical Freedom in the 1970s and 1980s. With this, the Friends of Freedom Press was accepted as a 'core participant' in the the Inquiry. The former chair, Christopher Pitchford had refused to do this when they first applied back in October 2015; Mitting now wrote that in the original ruling Pitchford 'would not have taken into account Operation Herne interview notes, which suggest that HN85 became editor of Freedom Press in Whitechapel and in that capacity wrote virulent anti-police articles'.