AT least nine officers from London’s secret undercover policing unit, known as spycops, aided the infiltration and surveillance of anti-nuclear protests in Scotland between 1978 and 1983, The Ferret can reveal.
Two spycops, who had adopted the names of dead children and pretended to be anti-nuclear activists, joined attempts to occupy the site for a nuclear power station at Torness in East Lothian in 1980 and 1981. They were both detained and then released by Lothian police.
The pair, one of whom said he was nicknamed “Trotsky”, were supported by three senior officers from the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), who travelled to Scotland to liaise with local police.
Along with four other spycops, they produced 16 reports for the Met’s Special Branch and the UK security service, MI5, on anti-nuclear groups active in Scotland. The groups included the Scottish Campaign to Resist the Atomic Menace (Scram), the Torness Alliance and Friends of the Earth.
The SDS reports contained minutes of meetings, mailing lists and funding appeals. They included details of hundreds of individuals and groups across the UK, and gave inside accounts of campaigners’ plans and problems.
The revelations come from documents released by the SDS and MI5 and published by the UK Government’s Undercover Policing Inquiry in London. The inquiry was launched in 2015 and is aiming to produce its final report in 2026.
Activists who were spied upon have condemned the SDS’s undercover operations, with one saying he felt “sick and angry”. They claimed their campaigning had suffered “profound damage”.
The Met defended undercover operations as a “vital policing tactic that continues to keep people safe”. But it apologised for officers using the names of deceased children.
MI5 accepted that spying on some groups “may appear surprising”, and said that “different judgements” would have been made if it had known then that they did not pose a threat to parliamentary democracy.
The Undercover Policing Inquiry has discovered that a total of 139 undercover officers spied on more than 1000 mainly left-wing groups across the UK over four decades. Four officers reportedly fathered children with women they were spying on.
The SDS was disbanded in 2008. In July 2023, an interim report by the inquiry’s judge, Sir John Mitting, concluded that the spying was not justified.
The inquiry’s remit, however, is only to investigate undercover policing in England and Wales. Campaigners have challenged the failure to inquire into undercover policing in Scotland, but so far without success.
Inquiry documents have now disclosed the hitherto unknown extent of spying on anti-nuclear protests in Scotland. Spycops active north of the Border have been named, and some of their undercover activities exposed.
One of the most prolific of the anti-nuclear spycops was Roger Pearce, who went on to become head of the Met Special Branch and then joined the Foreign Office as a counter-terrorism adviser. Now retired, he is the author of three spy thrillers.
He worked as an undercover officer with the SDS from 1980 to 1984 using the cover name of a deceased child, Roger Thorley. He told the inquiry that he now viewed the adoption of dead children’s identities as “a distasteful practice”.
Pearce altered his appearance to go undercover, growing a beard and shoulder-length hair. “I wore red and black clothing with a denim jacket and shoes with worn-through soles,” he said. “I was called Trotsky.”
He attended anti-nuclear meetings in London and joined anarchist groups. He travelled north for a “week of action” at Torness from May 15 to 17, 1981.
According to Pearce, his “anarchist associates” planned to cut through the Torness perimeter fence, trespass onto the construction site and set fire to a building. He said he “disappeared and found a phone box” to alert Lothian police.
As a result, Pearce claimed, the plan was foiled. “We were arrested, detained for a short while and then released without charge. I gave my cover name upon arrest,” he said.
He insisted that he was a “bystander” and had not acted as an agent provocateur, which was “completely taboo”. But he added that, if the fence had been cut, “I would have gone through the fence with them to see what happened”.
In January 1981, Pearce attended a planning meeting for the Torness protests organised by Scram in Edinburgh. He was the source for an SDS report on the meeting for the Met Special Branch in February 1981, which included the minutes.
According to the Undercover Policing Inquiry, Pearce was also the source for a further six SDS reports on Scram and other anti-nuclear groups. One gave a lengthy and colourful description of events at the Torness protests in May 1981, highlighting tactical disagreements.
As well as reporting to the Special Branch in London, Pearce said he had regular meetings with MI5. A series of memos published by the inquiry showed that MI5 was keen to spy on anti-nuclear groups.
On May 5, 1981, MI5 asked SDS for advance information on the Torness protests later that month. Another MI5 memo in July 1981 thanked the then Lothian and Borders Police for their “comprehensive report” on the Torness protests.
MI5 added the names of six people “who had come to notice” during the protests. One of them was Roger Thorley, the cover name for Pearce.
The second spycop who came to Torness used the cover name Tony Williams, again taken from a dead child. His real name has not been released by the inquiry, and he was deployed by SDS from 1978 to 1982.
He joined a radical group in London and came to Torness for a demonstration from May 2 to 5, 1980. “l would have looked silly if I had not been involved in trespass,” he told the inquiry.
“I recall that the outer wire fence was cut, which I did not do myself. I assume I went through a hole in that fence,” he said. “I was picked up by the police, but was not formally arrested.”
He added: “The police in Scotland in Torness were somewhat heavy-handed in dealing with what was essentially non-aggressive trespass.”
Williams insisted that he “never encouraged or provoked criminal activity”. He believed that his reporting “assisted with the protection of the public”.
According to the inquiry, he was the source for four SDS reports on anti-nuclear activities in Scotland. One was an 11-page report on the May 1980 Torness protests, listing 27 people who were arrested, 14 others present and 17 groups represented.
Another report recounted a meeting of the Torness Alliance umbrella group in Oxford in June 1980. A report in June 1980 listed more than 200 organisations and individuals on the alliance mailing list, one of whom was Tony Williams.
Other SDS reports referring to anti-nuclear groups in Scotland drew on intelligence from three other spycops, with the cover names Graham Coates, Phil Cooper and John Kerry. Reports were signed by senior SDS officers, whose real names were Trevor Butler, Barry Moss and Nigel Short.
In a statement to the inquiry, Butler said he went to East Lothian in May 1980 to liaise with Lothian and Borders Special Branch about the Torness protest.
“I am reasonably certain that they understood that we had an officer with the activists in the camp, even if this was never stated expressly,” he said.
Moss said that he attended Torness twice, and passed information to the Lothian police. Another senior SDS officer, Christopher Skey, also said he went to Edinburgh twice in relation to Torness.
Activists who were spied upon have condemned spycops’ surveillance.
“Many of the tactics employed were absolutely sickening,” said Dave Morris, who took part in Torness protests in 1980. “It’s pathetic, and it makes me feel sick and angry.”
Morris was involved with the Torness Alliance, and was reported on by Tony Williams. He also later came to fame as one of the McLibel Two, who fought off a 10-year legal action by the fast-food company McDonald's.
Another Torness protester, Martyn Lowe, said it was difficult to comprehend the full scale of spycops’ activities because many of their reports had been withheld.
“Yet one fact is very obvious to us all,” he told The Ferret. “The various spycops were acting as agent provocateurs, which resulted in profound damage to all our campaigning activities.”
The spycops were also criticised by anti-nuclear campaigners in Scotland.
“This is the kind of stuff you expect to hear from the bad old days of Eastern Europe,” said Dr Richard Dixon, the former director of Friends of the Earth Scotland.
“Spying on legitimate groups trying to promote peace and protect the environment – some of them registered charities – is an affront to the very idea of democracy.”
The Metropolitan Police has apologised to the families of the deceased children whose names were used. Working undercover was “a vital policing tactic that continues to keep people safe”, it said.
Commander Jon Savell added: “Undercover policing has undergone radical reform over the years. The way in which undercover policing was conducted in the 1970s bears no relation to how it is conducted today.”
In evidence to the inquiry, MI5 has also defended spycops, but said that its surveillance of “left-wing” groups had been scaled back to a “watching brief” in 1996.
“MI5 accepts that it may appear surprising to the inquiry and to the wider public that such groups were studied by MI5, particularly when viewed through a modern lens,” said an unnamed MI5 deputy director, known as Witness Y.
“MI5 acknowledges that the threat against which the counter-subversion mission was targeted (namely that parliamentary democracy would be overthrown or significantly undermined by domestic subversive activities) did not materialise,” the witness added.
“Had MI5 known during the 1980s what it now knows about the course that history subsequently took, I expect that different judgments would have been made about the extent to which it was necessary to investigate many groups and individuals.”
The Scottish Government rejected a separate inquiry into undercover policing in Scotland in 2018 because there was “no evidence of any systemic failings” by Scottish police. A review by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland had provided “reassurance” on the use of undercover officers since 2000, it said.
Police Scotland declined to comment. Roger Pearce did not respond to requests to comment via his literary agents.
Before he became a journalist, Rob Edwards was an organiser with the Scottish Campaign to Resist the Atomic Menace in 1977-78
