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dealt with the career of Kenneth Lennon - a police informer and provocateur in a Republican group. It raised essential issues for the labour movement.

Lennon was threatened by a Special Branch officer over his alleged involvement in fighting in Belfast.

Under pressure, then in return for money, participated, according to his later statement to the National Council for Civil Liberties, in planning a wages robbery and a jail-break with Republican supporters in Luton.

Those whom he encouraged in these plans were arrested on his information, and got heavy jail entences.

When Lennon appeared in court his "cover' was biown. A few days ater - after exposing the pressure put on him by the Special Branch -c was found shot in a Surrey litch. Who shot him remains to be explained.

Viewers who stayed to watch ne ponce public relations job which followed the documentary Irama may have been expecting a trious discussion of the questions raised in the film.

Lennon True, Luton's Labour MP Brian edgemoor wondered why the pecial Branch observes nurses' emonstrations, and went so far as • point out that the trial of one I his constituents hau been proved • be a farce. He also mentioned nat there was a secret police in ritian. : This was just too much. Tory IP Stephen Hastings was there to ill him that he couldn't say a ritish trial was a farce, and amplained that the film had thown the police in a bad light". : "It looks like putting the police a trial" he complained. • The former Assistant Commisoner of the Metropolitan Police is also there, no doubt to help ewers form an impartial view of blice behaviour.

He didn't like the term "secret Nice". • But conspicuously there as nobody on the programme who id they didn't like the secret blice!

The Labour MP thought there ould be an investigation (he dn't say by whom) to lay down rules of procedure" for the pecial Branch.

This was also Geoff Robertson's asition: a practicing barrister, he ants the law to be changed to potect the victims of agents lovocateurs.

His concern with the legal pects of the Lennon case is the in focus of his newly published pok Reluctant Judas. : Even so, he was able to correct ime of the misleading statements the former Assistant Comsioner and his book contains me important information on the prkings of the Special Branch.

Review of: Death Reluct Lenno thought to be at least 1000 strong.

Nobody can say for sure - as the Tory Home Secretary Henry Brook observed "The Security Service is, part of its essonce " service. That is Robertson quotes an article which appeared in the IV Times in 1969 on Britain's Secret Police:

"There are thousands of files on communists, fascists, the IRA and protest organisations right down to tenants associations. Any of the people named in these files would be startled if he could see the Special Branch files. They give a detailed picture of him - his favourite pub, where he takes his holidays and his wife's family (Robertson points out, however, that the Special Branch's record on the surveillance of fascists is less than enthusiastic).

He then reports that:

"Over two million of these files exist on politically suspect individuals, most of whom have never committed a criminal offence".

In 1966 Wilson agreed to end the tapping of MP's telephones by the police - a tiny fraction of the 12,000 taps which were then said to be in operation, before the expansion of Special Branch activities accompanying British Army intervention in Ireland.

Another important aspect of Special Branch activities is the close connection with the crime correspondents of the national press. This connection allows the secret police to plant false stories which the press then presents as scoops under banner headlines.

For example, after the trial and imprisonment of three men who planned a robbery with the encouragement of Kenneth Lennon, Detective Chief Superintendant Grant told Colin Pratt of the Daily Express: " ..we think it was one of the wives who turned them in"

The publication of this statement - a deliberate police lie - was bound to endanger the lives of those women. Indeed, a common secret police technique is to threaten to 'finger' someone as an informer unless he agrees to work for them.

Robertson's complaint in the Lennon affair is not against the use of police informers, but the use by the police of agents provocateurs. He writes:

"Punishing men for crimes they would never have contemplated without the enticement of police agents has startling constitutional implications for the rule of law. It means that the guardians of law are free to promote crime"

Under English law, that's way it is.

EXAMPLES

In fact, the promotion of crime by the police is now well documented. Some recent examples make the context of the Lennon affair clear. In 1969, for example, they assisted in the robbery of a post office to such an extent that the postmaster himself was part of the police set-up!

The three who were convicted appealed when they discovered that the fourth member of their gang was a police provocateur.

The case of Kenneth Littlejohn is now well-known. Apart from bank robberies, he let off bombs in Dublin, to ease the passage of fan Informer - by Be it Judas: The Life o - by Geoff Robertson Amie Cool er and Franci na Deati : of the Spec (Maurice Temple Smith All the time, he was for the British secret police.

The extent of Special Branch files, and police crime, is illustrated again by the Hackney arms trial which was stopped, mid-way, by the Attorney General "to protect the identity of certain persons".

The "certain person" was ponce provocateur, John Farker, former army sergeant.

Before the trial could begin, six of the jurors were objected to by the prosecution. The defending counsel cross-examined a Special Branch officer about his objections:

Officer: There was written information from records against a number of the jurors. Information from Special Branch and other police records.

Platts Mills: Do they include such things as belonging to the Labour Party?.....(to the officer) Your objection had nothing to do with Officer: I didn't say "nothing to do with politics". The word "object" that I put against these jurors signified doubt about their political activities and their criminal activities.

Platts Mills: It is the right of the defence to have a jury that is not picked by the Special Branch. Officer: I was asked to take these steps, sir.

The origin of the three pistols which Parker had offered to the defendants was discovered. They had last been seen at Birmingham Law Courts - in police custody!

Clearly they had been suppled to the defendants by the Special Branch! Parker, by the way, had been paid £500 by the police.

Of course, an official investigation was held. Two policemen held it in secret, the report was never published - but it recommended that no criminal charges should be brought against the police or their agents!

The police have tried to argue that they did not want to use Lennon as an agent provocateur.

All the evidence available belies this claim, and is well documented in Robertson's book.

Dwyer (with Ron Wickens, one of Lennon's Special Branch contacts) claimed: "Lennon's easons for contacting the police to offer information are purely selfish. He is unemployed and needs money desperately to take his wife on holiday when she leaves hospital....

But Lennon was given only £20 a month, a sum that would barely cover fares and expenses for his weekly meetings with Wickens.

There can be no doubt that the police had a more sinister hold on Lennon than mere money. Robertson's book documents further proof of this.

The police claim that Lennon was only an informer - not an agent provocateur - also sounds very hollow.

As Robertson points out: knew at the outset needed money ...a man whom the desperately' was promised payment on the results he achieved. What greater inducement to provide results could there be?"

As in the Hackney arms trial, the police were happy to help the people they were setting up to get arms. The youth that Lennon encouraged to participate in an a attempted prison break got a gun -and a licence far it Rahertean , ITV, Februar ch Informer, k 76, £2.25.)

'The issue of the firearms certificate is powerful evidence that the police were prepared to use Lennon as an agent provocateur. There can be no other explanation for arming a youth they knew to be an Irish extremist involved with the Luton Three".

Robertson produces other evidence to support the case that the police wanted Lennon to be a provocateur, and examines caretully other police statements. Just one example will have to suffice here.

The investigation of police involvement with Lennon was entrusted to Deputy Commissioner James Starrit. The son of an RUC constable, he has two brothers who are officers in the RUC.

Earlier in his career he had been exonerated by an enquiry into public criticisms of his conduct (be had been head of West End Police Station at the time when Detective Harry, Challenor • was regularly manufacturing false evidence against innocent defendants).

His report, Robertson writes, has the tone of a police public relations exercise. It is, in effect, a Special Branch press release.

Lord Carrington - Tory Minister responsible for backing Littlejohn None of the individuals concerned in the Lennon case, outside the senior ranks of the police, was seen by Starrit. The report was commissioned by Home Secretary Roy Jenkins.

The worthlessness of such reports is well known - but this is the only investigation into the Special Branch's role in this case which has been made.

"INACCURACIES"

It is riddled with "inaccuracies" At one point Robertson exclaims indignantly, after quoting part of it: "That makes four incorrect assertions in the space of seven lines of a report presented to Parliament and the public as an accurate account of the Lennon affair!"

He is forced to conclude:

«Lennon remains a mystery, and it would be idle to pretend that this book offers a definitive insight into his life or his death."

It would be quite wrong, however, to imagine that the part of the secret police force originally called the 'Special Irish Branch of the Metropolitan Police' is concerned only with Irish affairs.

The chairman of Plaid Cymru (the Welch Natinnaliet Partv) Magob: y 17th. ial Bran enneth Ltd, 19 of guns and explosives.

In early 1974 a Bristol Trades Council inquiry heard evidence that a Special Branch agent provocateur had inflitrated a demonstration against the crumbling Portuguese fascist regime and had urged demonstrators to knock down police barricades.

There have been allegations that the Special Branch has prepared a blacklist of 'political dissidents' for construction industry employers, and there is evidence, uncovered by the Sunday Times Business News in 1974, that a Special Branch officer had been "infiltrated' into Strachans (a Ford engineering contractor), in the guise of a commercial traveller, to collect information on leaders of a 'sit-in' that had prevented the factory from closing down.

FORDS

Apparently, Robertson notes, the Special Branch was operating to assist the management of Ford's to cope with their own internal problems. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. How many other cases are there?

Robertson's concern with the reform of English law overshadows the political questions which arise from the operations of the Special Branch.

It is clear, however, that the labour movement cannot tolerate the existence of a secret political Yet in the Lennon affair we see a Labour government presiding over a cover-up of one of the most blatant operations of the Special Branch.

This is in line with the consistently reactionary position of the Wilson government on "law and order" - strengthening at each point the powers and the repressions of imperialism and the state both in the North of Ireland and in Britain. with the so-called "Prevention of Terrorism Act" ", the continued jailJenkins Littlejohn ing of the Shrewsbury Two pickets, the trial of the Iranian 21 and a host of similar cases.

The police force is an armed body of men representing directly the requirements of capitalism to repress the workers' movement. The Special Branch is one of its most insidious wings.

The workers' movement must prepare a full workers inquiry into the Special Branch, alongside demands for the removal of Home Secretary Jenkins and Special Branch supporters from the Labour In the struggle to take power and establish socialism the police force and its entire corrupt apparatus must be disbanded and replaced by detachments of workers militia Anlu in this marr

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Wednesday 25th, 1976