#48: The Unliving: Spycops

From preventing climate change and defending animal rights, to fighting for global justice and national self-determination, activists and revolutionaries the world across often position themselves on the side of life, but what happens when the life of a movement itself becomes the target, what happens when the dead walk amongst us? This is the story of a series of undercover police operations which upended the orders of life and death. A story in which agents of the state targeted the vitality of protest movements by donning the identities of the dead and toying with the lives of their victims. This is the story of life, death and betrayal on the river Thames. This is the story of the unliving. From the University of Warwick and orders and decay, this is Ollie Sons and Nichols on the unliving. Close your eyes, picture a scene for a moment. It's an ordinary Thursday, you finished work and headed home to enjoy the barmy summer evening. It's still warm outside and the shadows aren't yet long. You make a pot of coffee and carry the paper with you out into the garden. Peace and calm fill you. The birds begin to cheer up their evening swell and a bee bumbles its way towards you from the underbrush. Languid, you reach across for the paper and begin flicking through its pages. And then your breath catches. A cold spike pierces the summer calm, casting an icy grip that radiates from your core up into your throat. For staring out at you is the picture of a man you once knew from what feels like a lifetime ago, someone you once told yourself you were in love with. Nobody has seen nor heard from him in over two decades, and yet here he is, looking out at you like ghosts from the past. Imagine the pain of discovering years later that someone who mattered to you was never who they claimed to be. Imagine if it turned out that they were someone else all along. Unfortunately, we don't need to imagine. From 1968 to 2010, at least 12 women and an as yet unknown number of men were duped into entering long term romantic and sexual relationships with undercover police officers working for the Metropolitan Service. Each and every one of them was targeted because they were involved in various forms of activism. These officers, known by the false names and identities they adopted, would later disappear from their lives. Amidst the wreckage, some even left behind the children that they'd fathered whilst undercover. It's only now, many years later, that we're beginning to piece together the fragments to understand the true scope of what really happened. From the earliest reports by British journalists in 2010 to the ongoing inquiry now due to publish its delayed final report in late 2023, a dark history of subterfuge and manipulation has begun to emerge in which agents of the state worked for decades to penetrate, monitor and repress social movements in the United Kingdom. This is the story of these operations. The question at the heart of this story is why? Why did these officers invade the lives of their victims and what did they seek to achieve? Deeper than this, however, is the question of what these operations can tell us about the nature of sovereignty, its attitude toward social change and its vital investment in the continued reproduction of public order. Ours is not a ghost story, nor a tale of the paranormal, although it may contain many of these tropes and motifs. Rather, ours is a story of the infranormal, of that which lies hidden beneath the normal, within the familiar, uncanny, swarming, abject. If the traditional ghost story is about that which invades our experience of normality from elsewhere, this is instead the story of what is buried deep beneath its surface. So how did we get here? Well, let's begin at the beginning. In 1968, the Special Demonstration Squad, or SDS, was established within the Met, carrying out operations until its dissolution in 2008. Alongside it was its sister outfit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, or NPO unit, which has now been absorbed into the Met Specialist Operations Directorate. These were the bodies out of which the majority of these undercover officers operated to target social movements. To understand how and why we got here, let's set the scene. 1968 is often seen as the culmination of an upswell of public radicalism, both in Britain and abroad. In London, a pitched battle occurred at US Embassy in Grosvenor Square on 17th of March 1968, in which approximately 30,000 protesters gathered to demonstrate against the UK government's support for the Vietnam War. Scuffers broke out, stones and firecrackers were cast, and mounted police armed with battalions charged with added crimes. All together, over 130 people were injured, whilst estimates put the arrests at around 300. To the authorities, caught flat footed and increasingly alarmed, these upsurges of radicalism were a key turning point. The shock, not merely the unexpected force with which public desire announced itself, but the more fundamental threat that within each demand was articulated a new vision of reality, a new public order, a new form of life. As the then Chief Inspector of the Metropolitan Police, Conrad Dixon wrote shortly following the Grosvenor protest, "The climate of opinion amongst extreme left-wing elements has shifted to active confrontation with the authorities to attempt to force social changes and alterations of government policy. Indeed, the more vociferous of the left are calling for the complete overthrow of parliamentary democracy and the substitution of various brands of socialism and workers' control." What was at stake was no longer simply the quelling of particular movements and their specific demands, but as Jeremy Bentham emphasised in A Fragment on Government, the reassertion of that fundamental element upon which top-down conceptions of sovereignty are taken to depend, the habitual obedience of the populace to the sovereign superior will. Not only did the people need to be reminded who was in charge, but the state needed new techniques of pacification which would allow it to identify and stem public unrest before it could blossom into these competing visions of life. Ultimately, what was called for then was a new technique of policing, a new means of mapping, understanding and acting upon the populace that could locate the pulse of the body politic, identifying its moods, its desires and its tensions before these could coalesce. And thus, from the depths of British statecraft, the special demonstration squad and national public order units were unleashed. Hold on. This may have been a beginning, but it wasn't THE beginning, surely? Indeed, the SDS and MPO units were themselves offshoots of the so-called Met Special Branch, which traced its lineage to the surveillance and repression of the Irish Republican movement of the late 19th century, and the paranoiac hunt for domestic dissidents who appeared too sympathetic to Marxist Leninism in the 1920s and 1930s. Recalling Amir Césaire and Hannah Arendt's prescient comments on the so-called boomerang effect, we need not dwell too long on how colonial oppression came to be re-imported from the peripheries back to the Metropole. That's a story for another time. What matters for us here is that the SDS and MPO units were revenants, born of a darker time. Their modus operandi? Infiltration. So, what is police infiltration? To answer this question, let's turn to the experts. My name is Michael Lodenfall and I serve in a number of different roles. Chiefly, right now, I serve as a postdoctoral research fellow for the Center for Cyber Strategy and Policy at the University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati, Ohio in the States. So, how should we understand police infiltration? Well, infiltration serves as one tactic and one strategic framework within a larger field of oppression. And infiltration is simply, you know, police, intelligence agents, private corporations, individuals misrepresenting themselves in order to gain access to spaces in which they wouldn't otherwise have access to, specifically for the purposes typically of mapping social networks, exfiltrating information and disrupting those networks. Okay. So, if the British ruling elite of the 1960s envisaged the upsurge of popular radicalism as both the articulation of alternative forms of life and as a vital existential threat to the existing sovereign order, there nevertheless remains to be explained today. Why is this the story of the unliving? How do the concepts of life and death help us make sense of what happened here? To answer this, let's first consider how these operatives went about their work. The most egregious and shocking element of these undercover officers' conduct was their manipulation of activists, often forming sexual and romantic bonds in order to bolster their access to and social capital within the spaces and groups they sought to infiltrate. This was not only manifest in the more immediate and major forms of manipulation they engendered, such as deceiving activists into sleeping with them or forming relationships with them, but also in the slow and minor forms of violence that these operations entailed, the abuse of trust, the spurning of libidinal investments and the forcible and unjust distribution of shame, angst and suspicion. These all played out on the canvas of activists' effective lives. In his 2014 book, Encountering Affect, Ben Anderson offers a basic definition of affect as "the body's capacity to affect and to be affected". Such affectivity may be examined at the level of the individual body or the collective body, but is never entirely isolable to either, because affects necessarily circulate between both individuals and collectives. Affect is often associated with the more commonplace idea of emotion, insofar as we may experience affects, such as passion or greed, but it's not simply another word for emotion. Indeed, a prominent school of thought holds that affects are akin to a preconceptual datum, which, whilst experienced in their immediacy, are only afterwards evinced and rendered legible to us, once clothed in the language of emotion. Hence, alongside affects such as passion or greed, we can also talk of affects in terms of moods, zeitgeists or atmospheres. What's essential is that affect is a) an always-already relational appness to move and be moved by bodily forces, whether or not we are aware of them, and b) is inherently and inescapably tied to our capacities, constituting our contingent inclinations and limits, and impelling or suppressing us in a number of ways. For Anderson, affective life is simply the name for the varied and heterogeneous assemblages or networks, backgrounds, organizations, through which affects come to flow and congeal. Leftists, which would be inclusive of anarchists and communists and Marxists and all sorts of folk, tend to operate in a horizontal structure. So they tend to avoid bureaucracy and hierarchy as much as possible. If you're talking about groups that are engaging in street protests, you know, active groups, not NGO groups, we're talking about typically people using the affinity group model and an affinity group is what the name implies. It's a group of people who share affinity. These affinity groups are linked to one another at a regional, national, international level through informal ties. Maybe they know each other, maybe they're friends, maybe they have the same, you know, political framework. So in order to have these groups operate safely, it is based on a high degree of trust and a high degree of kind of secondary and tertiary trust. In other words, I know everyone in my affinity group, I trust them, and one person in my affinity groups knows one person in another affinity group, therefore these two affinity groups trust each other. In this respect, the concept of affectivity, when applied to these horizontal, trust based organizational networks that left wing movements tended to adopt, offers insight into the ways in which undercover officers worked to hijack and instrumentalize the affective lives of those belonging to these movements. For in each case, the officer's access to these spaces involved not only passively predicting and navigating the moods, desires, and sensibilities of the activists they encountered, but also came to depend on intervening upon and managing these affects for their own purposes. In so doing, the affective lives of these collectives would take not only as object targets, but also as object instruments, as tools for sovereign agents to use in the accomplishment of their tasks. This wasn't the only form of instrumentalization that these state agents engaged in, however. The manner in which undercover officers first constructed their identities invoked a particularly macabre practice, what was, in essence, a form of ritual necromancy. In order to avoid detection and confound suspicion, officers would pour through birth and death records held at St Catherine's house in London, looking for children who had died some years before. These deceased children would then become the basis of their undercover personas, with significant personal details such as names, dates, and places of birth, all serving to legitimize their false personas. As former SDS officer turned whistleblower, Peter Francis said, "You go to St Catherine's house and you're looking for someone of a similar age to you who died, starting at age three or four, and up to age fourteen or fifteen. You have to use people. You end up using a lot of people." The tactical justification for this ritual, inspired by a Frederick Forsythe novel in which an assassin adopts the same ruse, was that the existence of official documents would lend credibility to officers' stories and provide some degree of cover should suspicious activists begin digging into their backgrounds. Even if the paper trail that activists found proved to be contradictory or confusing, the thought was that a contradictory paper trail offered better cover than no paper trail. More fundamentally, however, this dark ritual also seemed to have had a performative function for the officers in question, helping them bring their fictions to life. According to one unnamed SDS officer, "Your choice of name was of fundamental importance, because on that would rest your whole identity, sense of security, confidence, and ability to do the job. You're feeling vulnerable right from the first day. All the work you did before you started the job, you felt paid off, because you felt more comfortable, more confident, and stronger within that identity." The adoption of these macabre personas was far more than a simple technique of craft designed to allude wary activists. It also worked at a deeper level to offer these officers themselves a sense of ontological security, a stable foundation upon which their personas could rest, and a sense of continuity in their performances. From the moment they adopted these names and began to inhabit them, these officers became the unliving, neither truly real nor entirely fictional, both living and dead. If the story so far has been about how these officers infiltrated social movements, we've yet to really consider why. What were the goals and effects of this ghoulish practice? One fascinating theory is advanced by Professor Lodenthal in his 2014 paper When Cops Go Native, Policing Revolution Through Sexual Infiltration and Phenopticism, based on his reading of Michel Foucault. The idea that Foucault proposes is that there is a change in nature of power and repression from kind of public punishment to privatized self-policing. As statecraft matures, it attempts to reduce the amount of juridical violence, monarchical violence, while increasing the level of social control. But in Foucault's model, he describes his kind of shift from the monarchical to what he calls disciplinary power. Disciplinary power is the power in which we self-police. He uses Jeremy Bentham's model of Panopticon. Now again, a Panopticon is a very long story short. A prison in which a guard in the center can see every inmate, yet the inmates cannot see the guard. How does this relate to what we're talking about? Any time an activist hears that another activist group was infiltrated or so-and-so was arrested based on information when undercover, it has this self-disciplinary effect. It reminds the activists that they exist within a Panopticon of policing. It reminds the activists, even if it's not true, they remind the activists that they're under constant surveillance. It reminds the activists that someone's always watching. This is an attractive reading in its own light, suggesting as it does that the scope of the SDS and MPO units' impacts were not limited either to the passive collection of information, nor the simple repression of these movements, conceived of in purely negative terms. Instead, it indicates that alongside such probative and directly prohibitive functions, the undercover operations also had a more indirect, productive, and sinister effect. The proliferation of a certain form of positive effective subjectivity amongst activists, characterized by atmospheres of paranoia and a gradual self-disciplining that encouraged oscility and disengagement. On this reading, then, the control becomes increasingly internalized, a newfound element of the group's effective life. Although Professor Lothenthal suggests in his paper that he thinks it unlikely this was the founding intention of these policing operations, perhaps we could close by venturing one step further. If the disruption of the orders of life and death has so far characterized each step of the story, is it such a stretch to imagine that the death, or gradual necrosis of these movements themselves, was, or came to be, one of the state's core goals in undertaking these operations? What if the purpose all along was not simply to chart and pacify these activist spaces, but to turn them into inhospitable death escapes, realms whose effective life was characterized by an overwhelming paranoia, suspicion, and disengagement, zones not of effective life, but of the unliving?