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Leftist journalist and intellectual Tariq Ali was spied on by at least 14 undercover police officers who did everything possible to control his political activities, a public inquiry has heard.
Previously secret reports revealed how the police spied on Ali as he helped promote political campaigns against the Vietnam War, violent racist attacks, fascism and other progressive causes. The surveillance ran for several decades and took place as recently as 2003, when Ali was campaigning against the Iraq war.
At one point, the police informed MI5 that Ali had collaborated on a book about the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky with a cartoonist. The confidential report noted the name of the cartoonist’s girlfriend, along with her occupation, address and friends.
Ali criticized the scope of the surveillance, adding that he was “shocked” to hear that MI5 had allegedly gone so far as to rob the offices of the anti-Vietnam War campaign. The 76-year-old was the first witness to provide live evidence in the judge-led investigation, which examines how undercover police officers have monitored more than 1,000 political groups since 1968.
The investigation, led by retired judge Sir John Mitting, heard that police had started recording Ali’s political activities in 1965 when he became president of the Oxford Union, the debating society of the University of Oxford.
In the late 1960s, Ali rose to prominence as a prominent member of the campaign against the Vietnam War, often speaking at rallies. At the same time, Scotland Yard established the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), a secret squad of undercover officers, to infiltrate left-wing groups.
Ali, who became a journalist after leaving university, joined a small left-wing organization, the International Marxist Group (IMG), in 1968. Details of his political activities were recorded in 80 secret police reports between March 1968 and November 2003, with most of the information collected by undercover agents working for the SDS.
He listed 14 SDS members who spied on him between 1968 and 1976, as identified in the reports that had been revealed to him by the investigation.
The police, with the approval of the Ministry of the Interior and MI5, established the SDS following the disorder in the demonstration against the Vietnam War in March 1968. They argued that they needed to infiltrate the protesters to prevent further unrest at political events.
Ali said the police had exaggerated the possibility of disorder, adding that it would be “completely incorrect” to conclude that “the deployment of SDS agents into people’s private lives was justified based on occasionally horrifying and inaccurate reports of threats of violence. serious that never happened. “
Ali said Conrad Dixon, the first director of the SDS, “had a lot to gain by playing with the threat of violence; gave him a new unit under his personal command and a budget of £ 500,000 ”.
He accused Dixon of writing “unreliable files” and of using his “feverish imagination” to overestimate “the threat of violence to give credence to the idea that his secret unit was valuable to the British state.”
He asked the investigation to examine the allegation that a copy of the keys to the IMG and Vietnam War campaign facilities had been taken by an undercover officer to allow MI5 to then enter and steal information. “That depth of intrusive state surveillance was something I didn’t expect,” he said.
He identified a “grotesque” report that showed “how completely out of control the British spy ring was.” In 1980, the report detailed his collaboration with cartoonist Phil Evans in his book Trotsky for Beginners.
He said, “Why should Phil’s girlfriend be mentioned, not just his teaching job, but his address and friends, and why should his housemates be mentioned? What use is made of this lewd intelligence?
Ali, editor of a Channel 4 current affairs show for four years in the 1980s and who has appeared often on television, told the investigation that the book was one of a dozen he had written on world history and politics.
In 1984, the police sent a report to MI5 about a public meeting organized by anti-racist activists to prevent racist attacks in London, he said. Ali had been invited to attend.
He told the investigation: “What was the Special Squad doing at the time to help end the racist killings? Spying on those of us who tried to stop him. “
Another police report to MI5 recorded a 1982 gathering of 70 people in Hounslow, west London, that had been organized by the Anti-Nazi League, he said. Ali said police noted that he was the keynote speaker and “made an eloquent speech” linking racism to unemployment.
The most recent police report dates from 2003, when he was elected to the national committee of the Stop the War Coalition that seeks to prevent the invasion of Iraq. He said undercover SDS officers were deployed to infiltrate this coalition, just as they had done for the campaign against the Vietnam War. “It is incredible to think that after 35 years, in 2003, under the Labor government of Tony Blair, the Special Branch was still engaging in the same anti-democratic activity that it had been in the beginning,” he said.
