At least five undercover police officers spied on the anti-nuclear movement during a period when it was posing a significant challenge to government policies, a public inquiry has been told.
One was sent to infiltrate the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common after she was told by a superior that Margaret Thatcher, then the prime minister, wanted to know what the “Greenham women were doing”.
The judge-led inquiry also heard allegations that information gathered by the undercover officers was exploited by Thatcher’s government to undermine the anti-nuclear activists just before a general election.
The surveillance of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and allied groups was stepped up when they grew enormously in the 1980s. Membership of CND rose from the low thousands to more than 300,000. They used nonviolent methods to pursue their objectives.
The activists feared the outbreak of nuclear war with the Soviet Union during a dangerous phase of the cold war. They opposed the Thatcher government’s plans to develop the UK’s arsenal of nuclear weapons and permit the stationing of US nuclear missiles in Britain.
The reports gathered by the undercover police officers were routinely passed to MI5, which was mounting extensive surveillance of the anti-nuclear campaigners.
The deployment of the undercover police officers was revealed in detail on Monday as a large cache of surveillance reports were disclosed at the inquiry. They spied on local groups in for example Hampstead and Hackney in London as well as national meetings.
A retired judge, Sir John Mitting, is heading the inquiry, examining the activities of about 139 undercover officers who spied on more than 1,000 mainly leftwing political groups since 1968. This phase of the inquiry is on espionage that took place between 1983 and 1992.
One of its tasks is to look at why the anti-nuclear campaigners were spied on and whether the surveillance was justified.
Giving evidence, Kate Hudson, CND’s general secretary, said the extent of the infiltration of CND was “truly shocking, completely unjustified and antidemocratic.”
During the 1980s, there was considerable controversy about the state’s surveillance of CND after Cathy Massiter, a whistleblower who worked for MI5, revealed that it had used telephone tapping and informants to spy on the movement.
Thatcher’s government argued the surveillance was necessary because CND was allegedly controlled or influenced by communists and subversives – a claim that by 1985 MI5 had concluded to be largely unfounded.
Hudson alleged that the Conservative party had used the undercover officers and MI5 to help their “propaganda war against CND” in the 1983 general election campaign.
She said Thatcher’s government had set up a special unit within the Ministry of Defence to counter CND’s arguments. This unit, she said, drew on information that had been collected by MI5 and the undercover officers.
This information was in turn passed to the media to discredit CND, Hudson added. One article alleged CND was largely run by communists, Marxists or other leftwingers. She said the undercover police had spied on most of those named.
One of the most well-known anti-nuclear campaigns was run by women who camped outside the Greenham Common airbase in Berkshire to protest at plans to site American nuclear weapons there.
They were infiltrated between 1983 and 1986 by an undercover officer who used the fake name of Lee Bonser.
The officer has said a police superintendent approached her to go undercover, telling her “the then prime minister wanted to know what the Greenham women were doing”. She said she “was asked to help the police find out”.
