An undercover police officer has accused a colleague of fathering a child with a campaigner who was part of a leftwing group, a public inquiry has heard.
Malcolm Shearing, an undercover officer who infiltrated revolutionary communist groups, has blown the whistle on his colleague, saying he is “certain” that he is telling the truth.
The claim is denied by the colleague, known as Alan Bond, who also infiltrated leftwing campaigners.
It appears that the woman has apparently not been traced and is unaware of the claim.
If true, the child would be the fourth born out of a relationship between a woman and an undercover police officer formed while on deployment infiltrating political movements.
The accusation has been made at the public inquiry that is scrutinising the conduct of about 139 undercover officers who spied on more than 1,000 political groups since 1968.
The inquiry is looking at how the undercover officers regularly deceived women into sexual relationships, often lasting years, while hiding their real identities from them.
One woman, known as Jacqui, described how she had been deeply traumatised after discovering more than 20 years after the birth of her child that the father, Bob Lambert, was an undercover officer sent to spy on campaigners.
On Thursday, the inquiry heard how Shearing came forward unprompted to make the accusation against his colleague. He said he did not “relish” becoming a whistleblower, but had decided to tell the truth.
Shearing spent four years undercover in the early 1980s. Bond was undercover for three years during the same period, spying on the Socialist Workers party. Both worked for a highly secretive Metropolitan police unit, the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), which spied on mainly leftwing and progressive activists.
Shearing said that during their deployments, he and Bond had gone for a drink in a pub when Bond “volunteered” that he had fathered a child. Shearing asked if the mother was an activist whom he had met with Bond months earlier while selling leftwing newspapers outside Brixton underground station in London, and Bond replied that she was, according to Shearing.
Shearing said he was “dumbfounded”, adding that since then, he had thought about the woman who was never going to know the true identity of the father of her child.
He also said Bond gave him the impression during another conversation that he had fathered the child.
Bond, who has denied the allegation, is too ill to give evidence. He has admitted having a “one-night stand” with a different woman while undercover.
Shearing said he believed others within the unit knew about the claim. He recalled a conversation with another SDS undercover officer in a pub about what they would do at the end of their deployments. He said the officer “said words to the effect of, ‘well, at least you don’t have to … worry about a baby as [Bond] does’”. This is denied by the other officer.
The inquiry heard that Carlo Neri, an SDS undercover officer who spied on leftwing campaigners in the early 2000s, was also aware of the claim. Bond returned to the SDS in the 1990s as a manager for three years.
The Metropolitan police have apologised to the women for the “deceitful, abusive and manipulative” relationships. The force has admitted that amid a widespread culture of sexism and misogyny, the managers of the undercover officers had failed to prevent the relationships from happening.
