Revisited: the spy cops scandal (part 2)

The Guardian

09-03-2025

This episode first aired on 9 December 2020.
In 2018, Frank Bennett's sister Honor received a hand-delivered letter from a public inquiry about their 18-year-old brother Michael Hartley, who had been reported missing at sea, believed dead, 50 years before. For a moment, they thought Michael had been found, but in fact, the letter revealed that their dead brother's identity had been stolen by a police officer who had penetrated two leftwing organisations. Using this false identity, the police spy had deceived a woman into a sexual relationship and had been prosecuted during his deployment. Frank talks to Anushka Asthana about his childhood and the impact his brother's death had on him and his family. Knowing that, years on, his brother's name had been used by police has had a huge impact on his mental health, he says. Frank describes the police's behaviour as 'disgusting'.
Anushka also talks to Guardian investigative editor Paul Lewis and Guardian investigative reporter Rob Evans about their decade-long investigation with activists to uncover the activities of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS). Over four decades, at least 139 police officers were given fake identities to closely monitor the inner workings of more than 1,000 political groups. Some of those identities had been stolen from dead children to lend credibility to their aliases – and some officers, in a macabre ritual, even visited the graves of the children whose identities they were using.
The work of activists and the Guardian has resulted in a judge-led public inquiry on a statutory level with other significant inquiries, such as Lord Saville's investigation into Bloody Sunday and the Chilcot examination of the Iraq invasion.
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