Michael Hartley died at 18, leaving his family devastated and driving his mother into an early grave. Then an undercover police officer stole his identity

On Sunday 27 April, Honor Robson received a hand-delivered letter from a public inquiry. It was examining how undercover police officers infiltrated political groups over more than four decades. The letter revealed that her dead brother’s identity had been stolen by a police officer who had penetrated two leftwing organisations. Using this false identity, the police spy had deceived a woman into a sexual relationship and had been prosecuted during his deployment.

Robson could not believe it. Her mind went back to another Sunday, 50 years previously, when police came to the family home to tell them that her 18-year-old brother, a trawlerman, was missing at sea, believed dead.

Robson believes that the loss of her brother, Michael Hartley, led to her mother’s depression and subsequent suicide. She and her family had known nothing about the police spy or the public inquiry.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Hartley, when he was in the army. Photograph: Courtesy of the Hartley family

“We had fond memories of him and the police have made them dirty. The things that this guy went on to do have made Michael’s memory sordid, because there was not a nicer man walking. We can’t look back on Michael and think of happy memories any more,” she says. “They have taken a precious memory from us and soiled it.”

Her family is one of 18 that have been told by the public inquiry that police spies stole the identities of their dead relatives, without their consent or knowledge.

The real Michael Hartley was born on 9 June 1950 in Bradford. He was the eldest of five, with three sisters and a half-brother, Frank Bennett. His father, Ernest, had poor health and died of tuberculosis in 1955 at the age of 32. His mother, a nurse who was also called Honor, remarried.

Bennett remembers his half-brother as “a superhero and a gentle giant”. Michael used to do handstands with Bennett balancing on his back, and was a fitness fanatic who ran regularly.

“He was the sort of person that everybody loved. He would do anything for anybody,” says Robson.

At the age of 17, Hartley joined the army but left the following year. He headed to Hull, where he became an assistant cook on a fishing trawler, the James Barrie. In August 1968, a few days into his first trip out, he was believed to have been washed overboard a few miles off the Scottish coast. It is not known how the accident happened.

The family had just returned from church when the police arrived to break the news. Bennett was outside in the garden playing, and Robson and her two sisters were sent out of the room. “In those days you were kept out of it. I remember my mum screaming,” she says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Hartley (front left). Photograph: Mark Waugh/The Guardian

“I wanted to attack the police for upsetting my mum,” says Bennett. Until that day, they were a happy family. But afterwards there were “dark days, and everything seemed to change”.

His mother had a good job and was bringing up her children on her own after separating from her second husband who had had an affair. But after her eldest son’s death, “my mother went downhill”, says Bennett. “She withdrew into herself – everything just seemed to get on top of her after that.”

She became reclusive, and started drinking and taking pills. Although her Catholicism had been important to her, she never went to church again. “She lost a lot of faith,” says Bennett.

As her son’s body was never found, she never accepted that he had died. “She believed that he had swum ashore,” says Robson. “I remember her saying: ‘When they show me his body, I will believe he has died.’ If they had found a body, things would have been different. She could not mourn for him because there was nothing there to mourn for.”

In 1977, she killed herself. Robson believes “1,000%” that it was the torment of Michael’s death that led to her suicide. The rest of the family were also devastated.

They did not know that in 1982 Michael would, in effect, be resurrected.

Stealing the identities of dead children was a common practice for one of the British police’s most covert units. The Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) had been set up in 1968 to infiltrate and disrupt political groups. Undercover officers were tasked with finding out what protests the groups were planning, and feeding these details back to their superiors.

They pretended to be committed members of the groups they were infiltrating. As their deployments typically lasted four or five years, they needed to construct fake identities that would stand the test of time.

When an officer joined the SDS, their first major task was to spend hours leafing through death certificates looking for a suitable match – a child who would have been roughly their age, if they had lived. They preferred children with fairly anodyne names – anything too unusual would stick out in the minds of the activists, while something too common would be suspicious.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Honor Hartley, Michael’s mother. Photograph: Courtesy of the Hartley family

The spy was required to research the family’s background – where they lived, where the dead child had grown up and gone to school. They needed a working knowledge of these localities and their landmarks, in case – by chance – one of the activists they were spying on came from the same place. An officer who did not know a well-known pub in the town where he claimed to have grown up would arouse suspicion.

The SDS had a manual that described the techniques used by its undercover officers. Kept secret for years, it concluded: “If all was suitably obscure and there was little chance of the SDS officer or, more importantly, one of the wearies running into the dead person’s parents/siblings etc, the SDS officer would assume squatters’ rights over the unfortunate’s identity for the next four years.”

In the jargon of the undercover officers, “wearies” meant activists, who were said to drone on about their political cause in a wearisome way. Stealing the identity of a dead child was known as “doing the Jackal run”, as the technique had been publicised in Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal.

It was a ruse that had been used by criminals for many years. The SDS, according to police, adopted it in the 1970s. The most recent known use was by an undercover officer from a second police squad that infiltrated political groups, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, between 1999-2003. According to a key undercover officer, the practice was “well known at the highest levels of the Home Office”.

How many identities of dead children were stolen is yet to be established – police have admitted to at least 43. It is estimated that since 1968, police have sent at least 140 undercover officers on long-term missions to embed themselves in political groups. According to the public inquiry, these spies collected information on more than 1,000 groups. Most appear to be leftwing movements, environmentalists, anti-racists and (in a few cases) far-right organisations.

In the case of the police spy who stole the name of Michael Hartley, he was sent to infiltrate the Socialist Workers party and the Revolutionary Communist Group between 1982 and 1985. Little has been disclosed about his covert mission by either the police or the public inquiry, which is headed by retired judge Sir John Mitting. The spy’s deployment was cut short when his disguise was rumbled, although the circumstances of that have yet to be revealed.

Many of the undercover officers deceived women into sexual relationships; the fake Michael Hartley was no different. Attempts by the inquiry to trace the woman involved have so far been unsuccessful.

During his deployment, the police officer was prosecuted under his fake name and fined for what the inquiry says was a minor offence. The details of his crime are also currently unknown. What is known is that the police spy who stole Michael Hartley’s identity died in March. His real name is being concealed by the public inquiry, as Mitting ruled its disclosure would breach the privacy of his seriously ill widow.

The family of the real Michael Hartley are furious about this “sick” practice of stealing dead children’s identities. “If we had done it and stolen someone’s identity, we would have gone to prison,” Robson says. “What gives this man the right to steal my brother’s identity and then go and offend in my brother’s name? What gives him the right – knowing that his name was not his – to have a relationship with a girl who quite innocently thought he was Michael Hartley?” Her brother had no criminal record.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘It is going to affect us for the rest of our lives’: Honor Robson and Frank Bennett. Photograph: Mark Waugh/The Guardian

They have heard nothing from the police. In 2013, Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Metropolitan police commissioner at the time, issued a general apology for stealing the identities of dead children after MPs condemned the practice as “cruel and ghoulish”. But the police refused to contact individual families to apologise. To do so, they argued, would expose the undercover officers, who had to be protected.

“There’s nothing that the police could say to me to make me feel anything but disgust and contempt for them,” says Robson. “I would not even want them to apologise to me, to be honest. I feel like they have just picked him out, dirtied his name and then thrown him away when he was no longer any good to them.”

The much-delayed public inquiry is due to examine an array of controversies surrounding the conduct of the police spies, including the deception of women into intimate relationships. But Mitting’s stewardship has been severely criticised by those who were spied upon. He has been accused of granting too many of the police’s demands to conceal the names of their spies, although the inquiry says the identities of a large number of undercover officers will be disclosed.

“I don’t have a lot of faith in the inquiry because there’s that much getting covered up. What’s the point of having it if they are not going to make it public?” asks Robson.

The revelation of the theft of their brother’s identity has deeply upset the family, she says. “I think it is going to affect us for the rest of our lives. It is as if we have lost Michael all over again.”