Bed of Lies: What goes on inside the mind of an undercover police officer?
“Undercover work is the nuclear option of policing. People don’t realise how good at it we are,” says Neil Woods. “I can lie and manipulate. I can get a whole social group to do exactly what I want.”
Woods is a former undercover police officer with the drugs squad, who has since turned whistleblower. He spent 13 years posing as an addict and gathering evidence on dealers and gangs. But when we talk over Zoom, for the Bed of Lies podcast (listen on the audio player above), the 50-year-old is softly spoken and unassuming - with no apparent trace of the ruthless liar he describes. This is part of his skill.
“The best undercover cops have tended to be introverts like me,” he says. “People who are thoughtful.”
His work has given Woods a unique perspective on one of the biggest scandals in recent British history, in which at least 21 undercover officers had intimate relationships with their targets – some even fathering children with the women they were spying on. Their conduct is currently being scrutinised by the Undercover Policing Inquiry.
It's a web of deceit which has torn through hundreds of lives, including a number of bereaved families who discovered that the identities of their deceased children had been assumed by the officers. This week, four of those distraught families have joined the ranks of the women already suing the Metropolitan Police over the behaviour of its agents.
One of the children, Kevin Crossland, had died alongside his mother and sister in a plane crash in 1966. The officer who used his identity is known to have had relationships with two women while undercover. Kevin’s father has since passed away, but his widow, Liisa, says her husband would have been devastated. “How can someone stoop so low?” she asks.
Jules Carey of Bindmans, lawyer for the families, says the relatives are desperate for answers. “They feel the memories of their loved ones have been forever tarnished by undercover officers using their identities in this way; so that now the images of the police officers are mingled with the images of their dead relatives. And they feel the reputations of their dead relatives have been sullied by the conduct of these officers,” he says.
“They want the malpractices and criminality that now is seen as characteristic of undercover policing on political and environmental groups to be recognised and properly accounted for, and to know that measures are put in place so that these abuses will not happen again,” he continues. “The Met Police committed to investigating this practice in 2013 at the Home Affairs Select Committee, for over seven years now there has been no meaningful disclosure from the Met that would help to explain how this practice came about, why it was used and what it means for each family in terms of intrusion.”
The inquiry started last month, but isn’t due to report its findings until around 2026. It could be “many years”, according to Carey, before it tackles the concerns of the bereaved families: why undercover officers were given squatter rights over the names of their dead children and how they used those false identities to have sexual relationships with the women they were surveilling.
Neil Woods wasn’t involved in the specific undercover work under scrutiny – that of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) and National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), which spied on Left-wing political groups for 40 years, and are known to have monitored the relatives of Stephen Lawrence.
But he was approached by a senior SDS officer and asked if he would join the unit - and paints an alarming picture of a world driven by deceit; the subject of the Telegraph’s podcast Bed of Lies.
“When I would go into a community, the first thing I would do is look for the vulnerable people,” he explains. “The most vulnerable person is the easiest to manipulate. It sounds horrible, but that’s what undercover policing is about - finding opportunities to manipulate.”
A tradecraft manual for the SDS, written in the Nineties, outlined how new recruits must spend their first months scouring the national archives at Somerset House “in search of a name he could call his own.” It advised officers to avoid children who had died as babies and to check the “respiratory status” of their parents (whether they were still alive). The practice was discontinued in 1995, by which time at least 42 officers had used dead children’s names as cover.
When Woods went undercover in 1993, he built a fake identity using elements of his real life, including his own first name. “The bigger your legend, the bigger your falsehood and the harder it is to maintain,” he says.
Unlike other officers, undercover cops must live like the people they are infiltrating. That could mean taking drugs themselves or committing minor criminal offences to “prove” their legitimacy. They are bound by rules that dictate they can’t be an agent provocateur, or incite someone else to commit a crime.
Woods had a red line – and that was having sexual relationships with the people he was targeting. So when the girlfriend of an amphetamine dealer took a shine to him, he went to his handler and the detective running the operation for advice.
“Their approach was, ‘Go for it, lad’,” recalls Woods. “The idea I would use this position and deceive someone into a relationship just absolutely horrified me.”
He now sees this as an example of a toxic culture. “That kind of misogyny really is – or at least was – a part of policing,” he says.
David Tucker, head of crime at the College of Policing, which trains undercover officers, admits that some from the SDS and NPOIU “went off-script”.
“When you look back at these stories and the things that went on, anybody senior would spot the risks and understand this was completely unacceptable behaviour,” he says. “There are two explanations - either they knew and felt it wasn’t something they should stop. Or they didn’t know.”
The practices that govern undercover policing have since changed, but sexual relationships are still allowed if an officer’s cover is deemed to be at risk.
“The challenge for us now is to make sure those types of behaviour are spotted earlier,” says Tucker. “And if that means they’ve got to be withdrawn, then they’ve got to be withdrawn.”
Woods is concerned that the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill – which authorises criminal conduct for spies and informants and is entering its final stage this week in the House of Lords – will give undercover officers carte blanche. He describes it as “sinister” and says it will remove the few legal protections that currently exist. Many have questioned its place in modern policing, and whether it undermines the current inquiry.
“It gives police spies immunity from prosecution,” Woods insists. “I was extremely ruthless as an undercover cop and you don’t want to give immunity to that kind of person. No other western democracies have that.”
The bill could make it harder to see justice in cases like that of the bereaved families who had their children’s identities cloned, he adds.
Woods, now an advocate for drug regulation and UK chair for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, still suffers from PTSD. During his career he was stripped at gunpoint and had a knife held to his throat, but the biggest psychological burden comes from the guilt he feels over the people he was monitoring. “If you do have any ethics it’s an extraordinary strain on your sense of who you are,” he says.
In 2011, he left the police and started talking about his secretive work, blowing the whistle on undercover tactics and revealing his identity. Since then, he’s been ostracised. Old friends and colleagues have stopped speaking to him and others have treated him as the enemy.
Looking back on his undercover work, Woods now considers its impact as negligible, if not detrimental, to the goal of stopping crime. As an example, he mentions one of his biggest “achievements” – the mass arrest of 96 people in Northampton, involving police from five countries in a major drugs sweep.
A few weeks later, he asked someone in intelligence what the result had been. “He kept his eyes to the ground and said, ‘We managed to interrupt the heroin and crack cocaine supply for two full hours’,” says Woods.
“It took four years before the penny dropped: this wasn’t just a waste of time, it was causing harm. It’s ruining society.”
Subscribe to Bed of Lies for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts to hear the seven-part series.
