Donal O’Driscoll, Undercover Research Group, 25 May 2018.

In 1973, Ethel, a political activist attended to a meeting for setting up a campaign around US carpet-bombing in Cambodia. She had been invited by a work colleague active in the north London Maoist group, the Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist League (RMLL). Arriving at the meeting she recognised one of the other people there, Dave Robertson, also connected with the RMLL. Only she knew him as a Special Branch officer. He took her by the wrist and led her outside, where he told her that if she let on whom he really was, her family back in Ireland would suffer the consequences.

It is a disturbing account (from author and activist Diane Langford) of police silencing someone to protect their undercover operation by threatening their family. Curiously enough, the RMLL had suspected him already of being such and given him onerous work to do.

However, it is not a tale that comes as a great surprise to followers of the spycop saga and the story would have stayed half forgotten, another of the various accounts that litter protest movements of encounters with Special Branch. That is, until April 2018 when the Undercover Policing Inquiry revealed that he was indeed a member of notorious spycop unit, the Special Demonstration Squad.

The Inquiry also said Robertson had spied upon Banner Books and the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. Inexplicably however, it did not reveal the link to the Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist League.

Thus we received only scant and somewhat misleading information from the public inquiry. Nevertheless, thanks to historical sources we have been able to pull out a good bit of detail. And hopefully more will emerge in due course. Our concern though, is that just relying on material released by the Inquiry would not have provided a remotely accurate picture. Indeed, without the above recollection, we would not have been able to to actually place ‘Dave Robertson’ in history.

Targets

Banner Books we managed to track down as an independent Maoist bookshop on Camden High Street. Existing from 1971 to 1975, when it was burned-out in a National Front arson attack, it had been a hub for the Maoist milieu in north London and often provided a place to sleep for leaders of international liberation movements visiting the city. Once you understand who Banner Books were, it is clear that his involvement would have readily provided opportunities for Robertson to monitoring many other groups, including liberation struggles from Northern Ireland and further afield.

However, while the RMLL was Maoist, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign came from the different Trotskyist tradition and the relationship between the two was often rocky. So how Robertson came to spy on the latter is trickier to understand. The connection is, we believe, a joint project set up at the end of 1972, the Indochina Solidarity Committee, protesting against US carpet bombing in Cambodia.

It is not clear why the Inquiry did not release this and thus give an accurate insight into where Dave Robertson would have been encountered.

Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist League and other undercovers

This is not the first time the Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist League has been encountered in the spycop saga. Led by Abhimanyu Manchanda and Diane Langford, the group had played a significant role in the events of 1968, where it was monitored by Special Branch.

The RMLL worked mainly through front groups. One of these was the Women’s Liberation Front, whose address was Manchanda and Langford’s house, and at that point mainly held study meetings and attended protests. It was targeted in 1972-1973 by the spycop known as ‘Sandra’. Meanwhile, at the same time, another spycop, ‘Alex Sloan’ was infiltrating a splinter group from the RMLL, the Irish National Liberation Solidarity Front in the same period. It had been set up by Edward Davoren, who had originally been the London Convener for the Revolutionary Socialist Students’ Federation (RSSF) in 1968-69, and who had joined the RMLL.

To this mix we can add a fourth undercover officer operating in similar circles, ‘John Graham’, who reported on RSSF and had joined the Camden Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, a Maoist influenced, but independent group, who used many of the same venues that appear in the accounts of the RMLL.

So it is notable that a lot of effort was made by the Special Demonstration Squad to focus on a relatively small network of political groups all based in the Camden / Hampstead area of north London.

A final note on tactics

Finally, we note the interest in a bookshop. We think this is the first sign of a tactic better known among the spycops of the 1990s and 2000s, of focusing less on particular groups, but rather hubs were they come together, such as Lynn Watson did with The Common Place in Leeds, and Mark Kennedy with the Sumac Centre in Nottingham. And in between there is Roger Pearce (‘Thorley’) infiltrating Freedom Press in the early 1980s. It is a pattern we will no doubt see more of.

For more, see our profile of Dave Robertson.