A family has described their “unbearable” distress and pain after discovering that an undercover police officer stole the identity of their brother who had died at the age of 18.
The undercover officer used the identity of the dead brother as the basis of his fake persona while he spent three years spying on leftwing campaigners.
On Thursday, Frank Bennett told a public inquiry that he and his sister Honor Robson were horrified and disgusted after they found out that the identity of their brother had been used in such an “underhanded” way.
Michael Hartley died in 1968 when he disappeared from a trawler. His body was never found.
Bennett said his mother’s grief at the death of her son had caused her to kill herself in 1977. “Michael was so precious to her, and the loss of him destroyed her life.”
Bennett gave evidence at the judge-led public inquiry that is scrutinising the conduct of about 139 undercover officers who spied on more than 1,000 political groups between 1968 and at least 2010.
One of the issues that is being examined is how undercover officers routinely stole the identities of children. Before they started their infiltration, the spies trawled through national birth and death certificates to find a suitable match.
The officers created fake identities based on the details of the dead children and were issued with official documents such as driving licences and national insurance numbers. This practice was authorised by police chiefs between the 1970s and early 2000s.
The undercover officer who adopted Hartley’s identity infiltrated the Revolutionary Communist Group and the Socialist Workers party between 1982 and 1985.
While using this identity, the officer, whose real name has been kept secret by the inquiry, said he had a “brief” sexual relationship with an activist. The officer was also convicted of flyposting after pleading guilty under his fake name.
On Thursday, Bennett said he “loved and respected” his “brilliant” older half-brother. He described how his family was “devastated” after he disappeared from the trawler off the Scottish coast in 1968. His death certificate recorded that he was “missing at sea, presumed killed or drowned”.
Bennett said: “We never had a funeral for Michael because they never found his body. Never having a funeral or a body to bury made it even more difficult for our mum to move on … She did not believe he was gone and could not accept she would not see him again.”
He added: “It feels that Michael has been overshadowed, and when I think of Michael, there is this big dark image looking over his shoulder; an adult man pretending to be Michael, doing all sorts of nasty things.”
“It was unbearable to think of the police allowing someone to take Michael’s identity and then tarnish it, after everything we had been through.” He added that it had caused his health to deteriorate.
At the conclusion of Bennett’s evidence, Sir John Mitting, the judge leading the inquiry, said many families whose children’s identities had been stolen had found that the practice had undermined their trust in the police.
The undercover officer who stole Hartley’s name worked for the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), a Metropolitan police unit that infiltrated mainly leftwing and progressive groups over four decades.
The officer, who has since died, told the inquiry: “As the SDS was always meant to be covert, we did not expect the families to have ever found out.”
The officer was apparently rumbled twice by activists during his deployment. He said the intense stress of his undercover work caused him to suffer alcoholism and depression afterwards, damaging his life and police career.
The Metropolitan police have apologised unreservedly for the theft of the children’s identities, accepting that the practice caused the families hurt and distress, especially as some of the undercover spies misbehaved in their relatives’ names.
