Hairies

[Bob Pitt <comradebobpitt@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2002 14:09:59 +0200
From: Ed George <edgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: 'Hairies'

Inside job

They were the 'hairies' - undercover cops who created
false identities
to infiltrate radical protest groups during the 60s,
70s and 80s. Until
now their existence has been secret. Now for the first
time, they are
talking. Peter Taylor reports.

Wednesday October 23, 2002

The Guardian

When Dan joined the Metropolitan police special branch
in 1964, he was
astonished when a senior officer warned that it was
"quite likely that
in 10 years Britain could become a Communist state".
The new police
recruits were being introduced to the subversive
agenda of the
Communist
party of Great Britain, the prototype "enemy within".
Its intention,
they were told, was to use the trade unions as a
revolutionary
instrument to undermine parliamentary democracy. "It
felt as if you
were
paddling in a pool of subversion," Dan says. Soon the
pool deepened as
the Vietnam war radicalised thousands of young people
and swelled the
ranks of Trotskyite organisations.

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,817133,00.html>




I particularly liked the account of how Dan "found the
strain too great" and was forced to retire from spying
on the left:

"He'd been tipped off as the result of a telephone tap
on the IMG warning that Dan had come under suspicion.
He was taken to a pub where he had to drink nine pints
of beer under intense questioning from his comrades.
Remarkably, his cover held. 'My thought processes
remained ice-cold', he says. The ordeal over, he
staggered off to meet his handler. 'That's when my
legs collapsed.'"

I mean, I might not be the stuff of which super-spies
are made, but surely the intelligent response to the
offer of nine pints of beer would be "Make mine a half
of lager shandy"?

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