In the 60s and 70s, the militant left knew they were under surveillance. Everyone knew phones were tapped: in fact, you could sometimes hear the breath of the officer listening to your conversation or even find yourself speaking to them directly. Houses were being watched too. Diane Langford, a trade unionist deeply embedded in left movements, observes that she simply became accustomed to a white van with wires poking through the roof parked outside her front door. Being so obviously tailed made for some comical interactions – Langford recalls taking the police cups of tea once, letting them know their presence had been noted. Another time, her partner, Abhimanyu Manchanda, told the conductor of a London bus that the two Special Branch officers sitting a few rows away would pay their fares – and they did.
The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign was the SDS’s first target. Post arrived dogeared from being opened, read, and resealed. Special Branch officers also attended demonstrations and paid close attention to what was said to the crowd. With some measure of pride, Tariq Ali quips, ‘it was nice to know that my speeches were being preserved for posterity, especially as I never write a speech.’ Later, in Street Fighting Years his ‘autobiography of the 60s,’ he reflects on the long hours he spent on the phone talking politics with everyone from literary agent, Clive Goodwin, to John Lennon:
I wonder sometimes whether the Special Branch destroys tapes of conversations that it deems useless or keeps them safely in some archive. I hope the latter is the case because when all the files are one day opened they will constitute a magnificent treasure-trove.
If that treasure-trove exists, it has not been opened to the public yet. The files declassified by the ongoing Undercover Policing Inquiry are curiously dull – a typical document released by the inquiry is a grainy scan of a record submitted by an undercover officer. It usually details the time and place of the meeting, the names of any speakers, the broad topic covered. The town is terse, bureaucratic. There are sometimes offensive details. The exiled Filipino artist, David Medalla, is described as having ‘Asian features and colouring, dirty appearance, very poorly clad.’ Women’s attractiveness (or lack thereof) is noted. Assumed homosexuality sometimes gets a mention.
While these details are disturbing, they are the exception, not the rule. When you read these documents en masse, it is not the moments of brazen prejudice that stand out, but the clipped tone, the grinding repetition, the horrifying sense of counting. Usually attention is a measure of love. Here that ordinary fact is inverted; this attention is derisive, both in the moments of explicit contempt and in the blunt fact of of the surveillance.
Michel Foucault, writing in the same period as the Special Demonstrations Squad (the unit charged with infiltrating the left) was launched, wrote about how the logic of surveillance is essential to how the modern subject comes to be. He uses the model of Bentham’s panopticon. The panopticon, however, is a structure that explains why we come to self-censor in response to the possibility of surveillance. If one may, at any moment, be being watched, one behaves accordingly. But in a small activist group, however clear the security protocol, however careful one tries to be, the assumption becomes that one is among friends, that one can speak freely. Infiltration, then, is rather a different form of surveillance.
Broadly, from the SDS files, one gets a sense of a grinding boredom. Having attended more than my fair share of left wing meetings, I can attest that sometimes they are rather dull. It’s true that deciding who will pick up the flyers, who will run the creche can be rather tedious. It’s also true that the left can be highly factional, perhaps even more so in the period in which the SDS was established. In the late ‘60s and ‘70s, tensions between Leninists, Trotskyists and Maoists were rife, and matters of disagreement about the political programmes of distant socialist regimes – whether the USSR, China, Vietnam or Cuba – could fracture already small leftist organisations in London into even tinier pieces. Activists could spend hours making speeches, whole weekend-long conference writing up utopian political programmes, arguing over the finer details.
I’ve sat through many such a meeting myself, though I think in the late 60s, with a more fervent political atmosphere and a closer sense of revolution and urgency, a less defeated left, a greater sense of hope and purpose, I imagine that these conversations felt a little different. The new, disorienting, heady social world of the Women’s Liberation Movement, for example, allowed women to act in concert with each other, to be together without the excuse of childcare or work. When women couldn’t order a full pint in a pub, dreaming up a world in of feminist liberation must have felt extraordinarily bold, a feat of imaginative daring. The dreaming and daring can’t be glimpsed in the surveillance records.
The archives left by the activists themselves tell a much more complex story, one in which factionalism is balanced by solidarity, commitment, creativity and hope. The archives sing with intelligence. They are also a record of the tremendous work that goes into organising. The Special Branch officers were being paid – often relatively handsomely given that they also had use of a seemingly endless expense accounts – to watch people perform this work, to write down their names, observe who did what, keep track of who volunteered to be treasurer, who put themselves forward to take minutes or paint the banner. Looking through the archives last year, I wondered: where will the record of our own labours be held? And who will read them?
Last year, working with the Undercover Research Group, I started to write up the biographies of groups spied on by undercover police. These will be part of a new website that will try to make the documents disclosed by the ongoing Undercover Policing Inquiry easier to navigate and access for activists and researchers. As part of that process, I spent some time reading Special Branch reports and combing through activist archives in the MayDay Rooms. This piece reflects on that process.