Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police

by Lewis, Paul

  What few people at the time knew was that what had appeared to be an ordinary prosecution was anything but. The truth was concealed and only pieced together from long-forgotten archives years later by Schwarz, the activists’ lawyer. His client, the man who had sworn he was ‘Peter James Sutton’, did not, in fact, exist. He was not called Sutton and he was not born on April 24 1967. The signature that adorned official documents was a forgery. Indeed, the only accurate declaration in the documentation was his height: 5ft 8in.

  The spy had gone through the entire prosecution process from arrest to acquittal under a false identity. Lawyers, clerks, witnesses, members of the public in the gallery, the judge, and by extension the British judiciary itself, had been hoodwinked by the SDS.

  Shocking though this is, at least in this case no one was hurt by the deception, though no doubt court officials would have taken a dim view of the situation if they had known the truth. However, it is an arguably more serious problem when innocent people are caught up in someone else’s lie, and suffer direct harm to their own lives as a result. Jim Boyling discovered this for himself when he met a young woman towards the end of his deployment. That much was routine for the SDS. But what happened next was a historic first.

  CHAPTER 11

  Invisible Men

  If there was one tactic that was the signature of the Special Demonstration Squad, it was the use of long-term relationships with women activists who could help give undercover operatives the credibility they needed. In fiction, the likes of Ian Fleming base entire storylines around spies sleeping with the enemy. But in the real world, the use of intimate relationships is considered dangerous and even poor tradecraft. Irrespective of the morality of agents of the state having sex with citizens, how can operatives remain detached or provide objective intelligence if they are romantically involved with their targets? The SDS had a few rules to prevent their officers from becoming too emotionally tied to the opposite sex. For a long time, the squad only recruited men who were married or had stable relationships, assuming they would be less inclined to develop strong connections with the women they slept with. There was informal advice that they should use contraception. And they were told to avoid falling in love.

  Intimate relationships with political activists undoubtedly gave covert officers superb cover. But it was also their Achilles heel. To put it harshly, there was always the tricky question of what to do with their girlfriends when their time in the field came to an end.

  *

  John Dines, aka John Barker, the tough-looking, mullet-haired SDS man who had been deployed in London Greenpeace between 1987 and 1992, was one such officer who faced this question. In large part his success in infiltrating the group and its McLibel campaign was down to his relationship with Helen Steel, one of the two defendants in the long-running trial. She had the courage to take on the might of McDonald’s. Dines started courting Steel in 1990.

  ‘He engaged me in quite a few deep conversations about personal subjects. He asked me out a couple of times. He sent me a Valentine’s card, a birthday card, expressing love for me,’ she says. One day, he asked to borrow money from Steel so he could fly to New Zealand for his mother’s funeral. ‘The night before he got the flight to go there, he stayed at my place and kind of poured his heart out,’ she says. ‘We became emotionally close. When he got back, we got together.’ There was no funeral in New Zealand and Dines had no need to borrow money. But Steel had known Dines as a fellow protester for three years and had no reason to suspect him. The couple ended up in an intimate relationship for two years.

  ‘He said he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me,’ she says. ‘In a short space of time I fell absolutely madly in love with him in a way that I had never fallen in love with anyone before or since. He said he wanted us to have kids. He used to say he had once seen an elderly Greek couple sitting on a veranda gazing into the sunset, and that he pictured us growing old like that.’ By the summer of 1991, as part of an exit strategy, Dines began exhibiting symptoms of a mental breakdown. ‘He kept talking about how he had nobody left apart from me,’ Steel said. ‘His parents had both died. He had no brothers and sisters. The only woman that he had ever loved before me, a woman called Debbie, had left him. He said he was convinced I was going to do the same to him.’

  Dines gave the impression he wanted to run away to escape his inner demons. ‘I saw him crying loads,’ Steel says. ‘He told me that he had thrown all of his mother’s jewellery into a river because he thought she never loved him. He told me his parents had abused him.’ In March 1992 he left a message for Steel saying that he had put a letter in the post to her. Four days later she received it, saying that he had been at Heathrow Airport about to fly to South Africa as he could not handle things any more. After that, Steel received two letters with South African postmarks. Then her boyfriend vanished altogether. ‘I was very worried about his mental state,’ she said. ‘I was also sick with worry that he might kill himself. After he left, I was on a complete rollercoaster of emotions. I did not know whether he was alive or dead.’ Steel contacted the British consulate in South Africa and frantically phoned hostels in Johannesburg where she thought he might have stayed. She eventually hired a private investigator, who could find no trace of her partner.

  For some of the time that Steel thought her boyfriend was missing abroad, he was actually working in the same city as her. Dines had lost the mullet, and returned to a desk job at the Met headquarters in Scotland Yard. A Special Branch officer who came across Dines around this time recalls him looking ‘a moody, miserable fucker’ who ‘seemed to be carrying a lot’. ‘He looked like he was always going to kick off,’ the Special Branch officer said. Dines left the police by 1994 and was given a pension to compensate for his ill-health. He later returned to New Zealand, where he had said he had spent some of his teenage years.

  In her search for clues to find him, one of the first things Steel did was locate a copy of what she assumed was her boyfriend’s birth certificate. The document confirmed the details he had always given her: he was born in Derby in January 1960. She had no idea that the identity was a forgery, or that the real John Barker had died of leukaemia aged eight.

  In April 1993, desperate after a year of searching, Steel decided to visit Barker’s family home in Derby in the hope of finding any surviving relatives, but when she knocked on the door of the terraced house there was no answer. The boy’s parents, Thomas and Nora, had conceived another boy and moved to a house around the corner, but Steel was unable to find them. Looking back, Steel wonders what would have occurred if the dead child’s parents had opened the door. ‘It would have been horrendous,’ she says. ‘It would have completely freaked them out to have someone asking after a child who died 24 years earlier.’

  It was another 18 months before Steel decided to inspect the national death records. She was walking past St Catherine’s House, the government office that contained the birth, marriage and death certificates. ‘I just suddenly got this instinct to go in there and look through the death records.’ She was astonished to find the real John Barker was dead. ‘It sent a chill down my spine,’ she says. ‘When I got the certificate itself, it was so clear. The same person. The same parents. The same address. But he had died as an eight-year-old boy.’

  The discovery turned Steel’s world upside down. ‘It was like a bereavement but it was not something I could talk to people about. Now suddenly he didn’t exist. This was a man I had known for five years, who I had lived with for two years. How could I trust anybody again? I don’t even know the name of the person I had been in a relationship with. This person who I’d spent so much of my life with, and who I really loved, and who I lived with, and I don’t even know his name. All the photographs I’ve got, all the memories I’ve got are of a nameless stranger. What do you do with that?’

  Steel now knew her boyfriend had lied about his identity, and the idea he might have been a police spy crossed her mind, but he could also have worke
d in corporate espionage or had some hidden criminal past.

  Steel had two clues to go on. One was the name of a woman in New Zealand who Dines had told her was an aunt. The other was a letter in which he had made a curious reference to his biological father being a man he had never met, called Jim Dines. The woman in New Zealand was not his aunt but, bizarrely, the mother of Dines’s real wife. Stranger still, Jim Dines was, in fact, the police officer’s real father and had brought him up in London. Steel has no idea why the undercover police officer chose to compromise his deployment by giving her cryptic references to people in his real life. Perhaps he was psychologically traumatised by his dual identities and wanted to leave a trail that would allow Steel to find him.

  Whatever his reason, the clues led Steel to a public archive in New Zealand. It was there, in 2002, that she made a crucial connection: a document that linked Dines with the woman he married, Debbie. Steel instantly realised they must have been a married couple. Back in London, she ordered the couple’s wedding certificate. She immediately recognised her boyfriend’s handwriting. ‘What hit me like a ton of bricks is that he listed his occupation as a police officer,’ she said. ‘When I read that, I felt utterly sick and really violated. It ripped me apart basically, just reading that.’

  Steel was now agonisingly close to the truth. She knew that Dines was a police officer when he married his wife in 1977. But there was still a possibility that he gave up his job before becoming a political activist. She shared the evidence with friends and family. Some cautioned her against concluding Dines had been a police spy. ‘I remember my dad and others said: “You’re being paranoid – that would never happen in this country.”’

  Over the course of a decade, through ingenuity and perseverance, Steel had all but worked out the true identity of her boyfriend. It had been an accomplished feat of detective work, and one that did not go unnoticed in Scotland Yard. Senior managers at the SDS had been watching Steel, tracking her moves as she found new pieces of the jigsaw.

  In 2002, when they feared that Steel was getting close to Dines in New Zealand, they took a remarkable decision. At considerable cost to the British taxpayer, they decided to uproot and relocate their former spy to another country.

  *

  She was not the only woman searching for an invisible man. Around the time that Steel was being drawn to New Zealand, a woman named Alison was searching for her boyfriend, a burly Scouser named Mark Cassidy. The couple had lived together for four years. Alison, a secondary school teacher, first met Cassidy when he appeared on London’s left-wing political scene in late 1994. It did not take long for her to feel drawn to him. He was friendly and up for a laugh. Cassidy could be coarse – his jokes bordered on the politically incorrect – but he was also irreverent and funny. A touch over six feet tall, he had a broad neck, large shoulders and big thighs; he had a tough, working-class quality.

  Cassidy told friends he had come to London to find work. He said he was born in Dublin 27 years earlier and brought up in Birkenhead in Merseyside. He drove around in a red postman’s van that had been converted into a cosy home-from-home, complete with curtains. After meetings, he often ferried activists around, dropping them off one by one around the capital. He once collected left-wing comedian Mark Thomas and delivered him to a concert to raise money for a political cause.

  By the spring of 1995, Alison, a peaceful anti-racist campaigner, had started a relationship with Cassidy. He was living in a tiny bedsit in the deprived borough of Hackney; rent was paid in cash to a landlord who went by the name of Wally Pocket. The flat in Osbaldeston Road, Stoke Newington, was bare, even grotty, very much a single man’s abode. He did not have sheets on his bed, just a sleeping bag. He dressed like he did not care about clothes – a free spirit who eschewed the superficial world of consumerism.

  By the start of 1996, Cassidy was hardly spending any time in his bedsit, so he moved permanently into Alison’s flat. Their friends recall how Cassidy spent almost every night in the apartment for the next four years. ‘We lived together as what I would describe as man and wife,’ says Alison. They had affectionate nicknames for each other. He met her relatives, who trusted him as her long-term partner. A photograph has recorded him at Alison’s mother’s second wedding. Family videos of her nephew’s and niece’s birthdays show Cassidy teasing his girlfriend fondly. Other videos record him telling Alison’s grandmother, before she died, about his own, fictionalised family background.

  Cassidy claimed a drunken driver had killed his father when he was eight years old. His mother remarried, but to a man he did not get on with, and so he had ceased contact with his family. He had a half-brother, whom he barely saw because he lived in Rome, and a grandmother who had died. Cassidy said his grandfather was still alive, but the one time they went to visit him he was out on a church outing. It was a typical back-story for an SDS officer; a hard-luck tale designed to generate sympathy.

  With Alison as his girlfriend, Cassidy delved into radical politics. He had a particularly dubious mission: keeping an eye on campaigners exposing police wrongdoing. Cassidy became a key member of a group called the Colin Roach Centre, which was helping to uncover allegations of police corruption in Hackney. The allegations included gratuitous violence, faking evidence, planting drugs, perjury, racism, false imprisonment, fraternising with criminals, and drug dealing, and led the MP, Brian Sedgemore, to label his local constabulary ‘nasty, vile and corrupt’. The campaigners also helped people who had been assaulted, fitted up or wrongly arrested by the police to sue Scotland Yard.

  The police always liked to keep on top of campaigns against them. In the neighbouring London borough of Newham, there was a respected local organisation which since 1980 had been campaigning against police harassment and racial attacks. The SDS did not have an undercover officer in the Newham Monitoring Project at the time, but made sure to receive regular reports about its activities. ‘Every single event they were organising was being reported back to SDS,’ says Pete Black. ‘We knew everything that was going on in the NMP.’

  While monitoring the Colin Roach Centre and a campaign to improve safety on construction sites, Cassidy turned his attentions to another small left-wing group. Cassidy’s bulky demeanour made him suitable for Red Action, which sought out confrontations – and often hand-to-hand combat – with far-right groups to stop them meeting or promoting their propaganda. Red Action members admitted their group had been ‘associated with violent, semi-clandestine conspiratorial activities’ since its formation in 1981. The group’s support for the IRA’s paramilitary methods, unusual on the left, also allowed Cassidy to burrow himself into the campaigns that championed the political cause of a united Ireland.

  Early on his deployment, he went on a week-long trip to Belfast with a small group of English activists who wanted to show their solidarity with the republicans. He was not the first SDS to show an interest in republicanism; its officers had been dabbling in espionage across the border as far back as the 1970s. But this was in the late 1990s, when the IRA had declared a ceasefire, edging towards agreeing a deal to lay down its arms. Special Branch sources believe Cassidy was asked to gauge the appetite among hard-core republicans for an end to violence.

  The fact he was trusted to spy in Ireland was testament to his reputation. Among other SDS officers, Cassidy was considered a top operator. His relationship with Alison – one of the most enduring of any police spy – was crucial to his success, but it came at a cost. During the occasional spells when he was not undercover, Cassidy would be trying to live a normal, off-duty life with his wife. It is hard to conceive how he managed that. Unlike other SDS officers, who tried to take at least one or two days out of the field, Cassidy was living permanently with Alison. The couple repeatedly went abroad on holiday together – once for three weeks.

  Within the squad, it soon became known that Cassidy was having marital problems. That was not unusual for an SDS officer. What made his duplicity so astonishing was his way of coping. It
shocked some within the squad. As his relationships with his wife deteriorated, Cassidy attended counselling sessions to repair their marriage. Around the same time, he was also seeing a second relationship counsellor with Alison. ‘I met him when I was 29 … It was the time when I wanted to have children, and for the last 18 months of our relationship he went to relationship counselling with me about the fact that I wanted children and he did not,’ says Alison. The SDS officer had two separate, and totally different lives, with two strained relationships, and two counsellors.

  The end of his deployment, and his chance to disentangle himself from the mess, came toward the end of 1999. His departure was put in motion with what appears to be a typically elaborate SDS plot. The day before Christmas Eve, Cassidy told his girlfriend he had received an enigmatic message on his pager: ‘Call Father Kelly.’ He said his grandfather in Birkenhead had had a stroke. ‘I said I would go with him, and he said, “No, no, I’ve got to do it myself” and he was very odd,’ recalls Alison. It was their first Christmas apart since they had started living together.

  When he returned shortly after Christmas, Cassidy was, according to Alison, ‘a very different man’. He claimed to have had a row with his stepfather and said he punched him in the stomach. In the following weeks, Cassidy seemed on a downward spiral. He stopped smiling and looked withdrawn. He spent hours staring silently out of their kitchen window. One day in March 2000, he left.

  The note Cassidy left for Alison made painful reading. It said: ‘We want different things. I can’t cope. When I said I loved you, I meant it but I can’t do it.’ He claimed he needed time to get his head together. He returned the following weekend and said that he would stay. But most of his possessions had gone – he only had a few clothes in a kitbag. The tool bag he claimed to have used for his work as a joiner was gone. Ten days later, leaving another note, Cassidy vanished for good.