Searchlight are not the only people with a long track record of infiltrating groups like the British National Party so as to be able to use agents to disrupt and divide their targets. In recent years, mainstream newspapers have revealed details of two separate police intelligence units whose members do exactly this. 

On 14th March 2010, for example, The Observer revealed the existence of the Special Demonstration Squad. This long-standing undercover intelligence unit of the Metropolitan Police admitted to having infiltrated the BNP. The paper also revealed that SDS operatives weren’t just there to observe, but worked actively to disrupt target organisations by spreading black propaganda lies about senior officials: 

“Once the Special Demonstration Squad are inside an organisation it is effectively finished,” the Observer reported one SDS officer as boasting. The full story, published on the British National Party website on 10th January this year, follows:

Stifling Dissent, Another Undemocratic Waste of Taxpayers’ Money: Nick Griffin Analyses the Most Important Story in Today’s News

Dramatic events at Nottingham Crown Court yesterday highlighted yet again the British state’s widespread use of long-term undercover infiltrators to gather intelligence on, and disrupt, radical groups, including the BNP, writes British National Party leader Nick Griffin MEP.

The collapse of the trial of environmental activists arrested after protests at Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station near Nottingham in 2009 has exposed the existence of a previously unknown police spying organisation, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit. 

According to the Guardian, this organisation was set up in 2003 to “monitor so-called domestic extremists”. The NPOIU targets not only environmentalist, animal rights and ‘anti-racist’ groups, but also ‘far-right’ organisations such as the British National Party and English Defence League.

The trial collapsed after Pc Mark Kennedy, who had infiltrated the group, was exposed as a long-term ‘mole’ and, either through fear or remorse, ‘went native’. He said he has now left the force and would give evidence on behalf of the arrested activists. 

Double Life

The Guardian report gives a detailed account of how Pc Kennedy, and other officers with different targets, use activism, organisational skills and money to gain the confidence of genuine members of the groups they infiltrate, and how they live double lives for years on end:

“Mr Kennedy had a wife and children but under the alias Mark Stone he led a second life as an environmental campaigner in Nottingham, where he also had a girlfriend. 

“The undercover agent had become a key member of the group since 2000 until his secret was discovered by protesters last October. 

“But the activists claimed that, rather than simply watching the group, Mr Kennedy had been intimately involved in planning protests and bringing new members into the group. 

“Danny Chivers, one of the six defendants, said: ‘We're not talking about someone sitting at the back of the meeting taking notes — he was in the thick of it.’

“He said Mr Kennedy had been helping to plan the Ratcliffe-on-Soar demonstration for "months" and had driven a team in his van to recce the site ahead of the protest. 

“Mr Kennedy had also been one of the ‘key people’ in organising protests against the 2005 G8 summit at Gleneagles, he claimed.”

Pig in a Ponytail

So active was Kennedy in his role as environmentalist crusader that he was highly popular among protesters, 200 of whom attended his 40th birthday party. With his ponytail, pierced ear, goatee beard, tattoos and penchant for scruffy black T-shirts, he was able to pass himself off as a ‘crusty Green’ for seven whole years. 

As well as revealing the extraordinary story of Pc Kennedy’s double life, including a near bigamous family life, the paper explains how activists eventually became suspicious of him when he apparently led them into a trap in which many were arrested. It then goes on to give details of his police career:

“Kennedy's career as a police constable in the Metropolitan police began around 1994. It was almost 10 years later — in early 2003 — that he was selected as a candidate for a classified operation.

“Police have been infiltrating protest movements for decades, but Kennedy was to be one of the first to work for the newly formed National Public Order Intelligence Unit, which monitors so-called ‘domestic extremists"’.

“That summer he was issued with a driving licence and passport bearing his new identity — Mark Stone — and a plausible backstory that explained his long absences. 

Claiming to be a professional climber, Kennedy told people he encountered in Nottingham — many of them connected to Earth First — that he often had well-paid work abroad.”

Cover stories

All sorts of cover stories are liable to be used to explain how an infiltrator can afford to ‘do so much for the cause’. Well paid occasional work overseas is one, being ‘long term sick’ is another, or they could claim to be in a well paid job where the boss isn’t very strict and they have plenty of holiday entitlement. 

If anyone really looks at their cover story, it might unravel, but idealists tend to be trusting, so all too often no-one gives it much thought.

This is not the first time that the Guardian has exposed the use of police plants to infiltrate, monitor and disrupt ‘radical’ organisations.

On 23rd October 2002, in a major article entitled Inside Job, it revealed the existence of another police unit carrying out this sort of work. 

The Special Demonstration Squad was formed in the late 1960s and its officers join and work undercover for years in groups including the BNP — at a cost to taxpayers of £250,000 each per year.

With that much backing, and decades of experience, it’s no wonder that SDS officers, like their National Public Order Intelligence Unit colleagues, find it relatively easy to bury their way into their target organisations. 

“Once the Special Demonstration Squad are inside an organisation it is effectively finished,” according to another officer whose involvement was revealed in an article in The Observer on 14th March 2010. That report also admitted that the British National Party was also an SDS target for infiltration and attempted disruption.

It also discusses the problem that officers face in being efficient enough to rise into the middle ranks of the organisation, without doing so much that they actually help it. 

This is why, for all their show of efficiency, such people would often hold up activities by being late, lower morale by outbursts of negativity, or carelessly contribute to some organisational failure.

Eventually, of course, the time comes for such officers to leave. Or perhaps removal from key positions within their target organisations suggests that they have been rumbled and their handlers decide to pull them out. 

They are then liable to be used in one last act of disruption, exploiting friendships and the respect in which they are held, trying to foment splits by spreading lies about those in charge and setting up dead-end ‘rival’ groups. 

Someone who previously appeared to be a stalwart of the Cause suddenly can’t say a good word about anyone still involved and does everything they can to give aid and comfort to our enemies, including the BBC.

In addition to such state-financed infiltration, it is also a matter of record that the BNP has been the target for ‘plants’ from well-funded far-left or ultra-Zionist groups like Searchlight. 

Their modus operandi is very similar and it likely that several dozen are involved at any specific time. Enough, at a time of particular opportunity for our party, to work together to give the impression of real internal divisions in the hope of driving us off course. 

Real life example

The best known of these to date was Ray Hill, who in the early 1980s helped first to split the National Front, then moved on to wreck British Movement by launching a phoney leadership challenge based on groundless allegations of financial impropriety. 

When he was expelled he went on to set up a so-called Nationalist Unity Committee, using calls for ‘unity’ as cover to spread more black propaganda against real nationalists. 

According to his autobiography, The Other Face of Terror, Hill also calculated that his role in creating a new party would put him in the perfect position to split it a year or so down the line, so perpetuating a cycle of instability which would leave nationalism divided and powerless.

Fortunately, that operation came to nothing. But it is impossible to believe that the powers-that-be and our opponents would sit back and do nothing when the British National Party has risen to the point where it can elect two MEPs, become a household name respected by millions, and can build up campaigns that threaten the credibility and stability of the elite’s whole twisted ‘multi-cultural experiment’. 

Similarly, our increasingly effective and popular mobilisation of opposition to the Afghan War is a challenge to the ruling elite that they are bound to try to answer with subversion, smears and dirty tricks. 

The more we understand about how they work and what they do to try to disrupt us, the better able we are to withstand their attacks and to continue to make progress in our fight for justice, fairness and a future for our people.

You can read more about Ray Hill’s campaign of subversion here.