Thousands of surveillance reports compiled by undercover police officers who spied on political campaigners were routinely passed to MI5, documents obtained by the spycops inquiry have revealed.
Police sent undercover officers on long-term deployments to infiltrate mainly leftwing protest groups and gather enormous quantities of information about their political and personal activities.
It can now be revealed that most of those clandestine reports were sent to MI5, helping the Security Service to build up large files on peaceful protesters who were engaged in democratic protests for an array of causes.
Many of the reports were handed over at the height of cold war paranoia when MI5 and the police spies collaborated to monitor a large number of leftwing campaigners.
MI5 still retains these surveillance reports in its files today.
The scale of the long collaboration between covert police officers and MI5 from the late 1960s until the 1990s has been illuminated by the spycops inquiry, which has published a trove of internal MI5 records, as well as copies of the surveillance reports.
Officers have been criticised for spying on thousands of political organisations such as campaigns against racism and nuclear weapons, the Socialist Workers party, justice campaigns and trade unions.
Their reports logged personal information about protesters, including their marriages, sexuality, holiday plans and bank accounts, as well as their plans for political action such as demonstrations.
The reports recorded the political beliefs of children as young as 13, along with photographs of them. They also recorded the births of campaigners’ children and noted details about the lives of politically active parents, such as the fact they had a child with Down’s syndrome.
Their surveillance reports were sent to MI5 at time when the Security Service was being criticised by civil liberties groups for overzealously snooping on leftwing and progressive campaigners. Even Stella Rimington, who led MI5 in the 1990s, said it was “over-enthusiastic” in targeting leftwing groups in the cold war.
MI5 maintained voluminous files on individuals which it used to secretly vet people applying for certain government posts. According to MI5, the agency was screening out people who could have leaked official secrets that damaged the nation but the service was accused of unfairly blocking many people it deemed too leftwing from getting government jobs.
MI5 frequently asked the undercover police officers to supply specific details of individual campaigners, even requesting “shopping lists” of information such as home addresses, as well as photographs of individuals.
In a statement to the spycops inquiry, a senior, unnamed MI5 official said it was “highly likely that some (possibly most)” of the information it requested from the undercover officers was used to vet the political views of people applying to work for the government.
The documents show that the undercover officers’ surveillance reports were a key source of information for MI5 which paid tribute to their “valuable” and “very significant” work.
Stamped on the surveillance reports are a tell-tale sign – Box 500, a nickname for MI5 based on its wartime postal address – which confirms that they were sent to the Security Service by the police spies. MI5 also gathered information from other sources such as informants and telephone tapping.
Working in tandem, senior police officers running the undercover spies and MI5 met regularly to discuss the political groups they wanted to infiltrate. On several occasions, MI5 warned that particular police spies were in danger of being rumbled by activists.
Ben Gunn, a former senior police officer who oversaw Scotland Yard’s undercover unit, the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), told the inquiry: “The Security Service knew exactly what we were doing in the SDS. They lived off the product. They enjoyed the product. They even targeted and helped targeting.”
MI5 has been required to give evidence to the spycops inquiry which is examining how police used its undercover officers to spy on political groups between 1968 and at least 2010. The undercover police’s close cooperation with MI5 is one of the strands being examined by the inquiry.
Sir John Mitting, the retired judge leading the inquiry, is scrutinising a series of controversies involving undercover officers such as deceiving women into intimate relationships and spying on grieving families.
The unidentified MI5 official, representing the Security Service, told the inquiry that for decades it monitored political activists as it was tasked with identifying so-called subversives.
This ill-defined term – officially supposed to be confined to activists who had the capability to threaten the safety of the state, or overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy – in practice enabled the state to spy on many who merely held anti-establishment views and opposed government policies.
The MI5 official said the Security Service formally stopped investigating subversion on an “active and wide-ranging” basis in 1996, as the threat posed by subversive groups had diminished. After that date, “MI5 retained a watching brief in order to monitor any threat from subversive activities in line with its statutory functions”, added the official.
However, MI5 has said that it started “investigating rightwing, leftwing, anarchist, and single-issue extremism in 2020”. The exact scope of these investigations, and the identities of the groups being monitored, is not known.
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