by ANDREW O’HAGAN
The practice of using dead children’s identities began in the Metropolitan Police Force in the 1960s. Until very recently, it was thought, in-house, to be a legitimate part of an undercover officer’s tradecraft. It involved taking a child’s name from a gravestone or a register and building what the police called a ‘legend’ around it. When I first heard about it, I wondered if the officers involved in this activity were not in fact covert novelists, giving their ‘characters’ a hinterland that suited the purpose of their present investigations, as well as a false passport and a new face. The Met officers, without informing the families of the children, and using their original birth certificates, built a profile for themselves that would pass for an actual person. And as such – as actual people – these policemen infiltrated left-wing groups posing as activists. In 2013 several officers who had worked for the Met’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), including a Sergeant John Dines, admitted using the identities of dead children to conceal their own identity. Dines took the name of John Barker, who died of leukaemia in 1968, at the age of eight. In several of the cases, officers kept their fake identities for more than ten years and exploited them in sexual situations. To strengthen their ‘backstory’, they would visit the places of their ‘childhood’, walking around the houses they had lived in before they died, all the better to implant the legend of their second life.
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