In the first week of July 2024 the formal Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) will take evidence and submissions in public for the first time in over a year. From the start has inquiry  has been dogged and disrupted by the MPS’ and their undercover officers (UCOs’) demands for unnecessary secrecy and confidentiality.  They were unnecessary because throughout Tranche 1 the KGB knew better than the Police Commissioner or Home Secretaries not just how corrupt Scotland Yard was,  but who the Corrupt officers were.

The final details of police corruption in the capital had been passed to the KGB at the end of 1973 in a Bulgarian seaside villa on the Black Sea in  either Slanchev Bryag or probably Burgas closer to the Russian boarder. The source was John Alexander Symonds, a former Detective Sergeant in the Metropolitan Police, who was now a newly recruited KGB agent. Staying with him at the villa was a tall Blond Siberian man fluent in English who would be his handler for six years and who he knew as “Nick”, Later he found out his name Viktor Georgivitch Budanov, who at the end of his career would be Putin’s Boss.

Symonds was born near Peterborough in 1935, educated at a private school in Newport and joined  Royal Artillery when he was 18 in 1953. After three years he left and joined the Metropolitan police on what he said a fore runner of the fast-track  career path, recruiting from the forces. It the programme was not a success and ll left within a year.  He left a got a  job in the city ultimately selling automatic tills entertainment industry and working in many clubs in Soho, he married in 1959 and re-joined the MPS serving in Beckenham and then Croydon  before being promoted to Detective Sergeant and posted to Camberwell in around 1968. 

In 1969 he was due to be transferred to the elite Flying Squad when on Sat 29th November  he is one of three Met Officers named in the Times as having tape recorded by two journalists talking to criminals about taking bribes and threatening to plant evidence. The three officers were suspended, and Symonds  was investigated by  Detective Chief Superintendent Freddie Lambert.

Symonds claims that in March 1970 that he was about to be cleared by Lambert in when Commander Wally Virgo removed him from the inquiry and replaces  him with DCI Alfred “Bill” Moody from the Obscene Publications Squad. Virgo and Moody were later found guilty of corruption charges and jailed for twelve years each. 

It was a year after this change, in March 1971,  that  Symonds was committed to stand trial and his trial date was eventually set for April 1972, the month following that for  the two other officers named in the Times . He tells is us that, understandably perhaps,  with the delays and as he was preparing his defence his  health was suffering and he was advised to take a break abroad, His marriage had failed and he now had a girlfriend who’s father had died at Tobruk and had long wanted to visit his grave, so they planed monthlong trip by camper van to Morocco.

While in the Army he had, though still young,  he joined an Army masonic lodge and he had found this helpful in his career in the MPS  which figure prominently in organising the corruption in the force.  During the period leading up to his foreign break he became convinced that masonic officers in the service were hanging him out to dry. He compiled a early version of the dossier which he would recreate and presumably expand for the KGB. But it had been arranged for him to have a solicitor called Victor Lissak who worked regularly for Met officers. Before setting off he left a copy  with Lissak for safe keeping in the event of anything happening to him. He later believed it had been shared with Moody, and Virgo.

In Morocco they stayed at a resort called “Sundance Village” in Agadir which was owned and run by an unnamed  pilot who had been a mercenary, flying supplies into Biafra. Frustratingly I can find no reference Sundance Village in Morocco, though there is one in Burgas in Bulgaria or the identity of the owner.  It is unclear whether he intended to remain in Morocco  when he set off, but the Met believed that he and his girlfriend had sold off everything before leaving, they  claims that he had he had the idea while he was there and confirmed it when the two officers when the two other officers who had been charged following the Timers article and tried a month before him and received sentences of six  and seven years. However, in his autobiography he also tells us that  DCI Moody paid him £2000 pounds to leave the country permanently.

He obtained a new passport in the name of someone he knew did not have one and would not need one, claiming he got the idea from the “Day of the Jackal”. Through Sundance Village’s owner  had he got work as a mercenary training African Troops to use former British 25 pound artillery guns. Ian Harley, a serving detective  with whom he was still in touch  acted as a guarantor  for his international driving licence. This way he kept himself in Africa, without the support of the KGB, for the two years until his trip to the Black Sea. But his contact with them went back to his early days at the Sundance Village when he had been befriended by a Lebanese  Arab he knew as Marcel.

He had obviously shared a fair amount of information with Marcel about his background and his dossier because  he introduced Symonds to a supposed French Journalist using the name “Gold Tooth” – “who promised to study my dossier of police corruption and put me in touch with people who would be interested in pursuing my story”. He claims that he initially thought that  he was dealing with French Intelligence, and he only later discovered it was the KGB.

Nevertheless, the impact was the same, from early 1972 the KGB knew all the names of corrupt officers in the MPS known by Symonds and the methods they employed. This was particularly valuable intelligence, and it is interesting that when they successfully recruited him the first thing his handler did was to  revisit  the dossier with him for his prolonged stay in Burgas.

His first mercenary Job was in Zambia, but soon after  he took a job in Chad where he contracted malaria and this was when marcel had arranged for him to go to Bulgaria, all expenses paid, to recuperate, where he was finally recruited.  After they had extracted all he knew about the MPS they chose not throw him back on his resources in Bulgaria or Morocco but  sent him to Moscow trained him to become an KGB agent and acting as a “Romeo” spy in various places around the world. When Robert Mark’s clean-up of corruption in the MPS started to be reported with the prosecution of officers named by Symonds five years previously his reputation with his employers the KGB was at its peak. But in spite of being twice offered soviet citizenship. In 1981 he opted to return to Britain. He seems to have hoped that with the conviction of the two officers who had investigated his case the charges might be dropped, and that MI5 would have been interested in his story.

He was wrong on both counts. After a long and bad-tempered trial in which he defended himself  he was found guilty of receiving bribes and sentenced two years imprisonment on April 16 1981. This however only  came down to six weeks when his time on remand was taken into account. Soon after he had given a 262 page statement to another investigation into MPS corruption, Operation Countryman, in return for an exemption, endorsed by the DDP and Attorney General, from prosecution for any non-violent crime.

MI5 on the other hand dismissed him as a fantasist were not interested in anything he had to say. It was decision they would later regret, when following the dissolution of the USSR in 1992 a KGB archivist  called Vassili Mitrokhin travelled to Riga in Latvia taking with him, in a suitcase, an archive of handwritten notes he had made from documents he handled in over thirty years in the KGB’s foreign intelligence service. The CIA were not interested in his notes so he went to the British Embassy which was. MI6  kept the  defection secret, and later retrieves another 250,000 documents from his home in Moscow, some going back to the 1930s.

While it was intelligence were not the original documents and SIS commissioned  Christopher Andrew to edit and stich the revelations together is two books The Sword and the Shield (1999) and The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (2005). After the publication of the first of these books, which had identified Symonds as a highly valued Soviet asset,  the House of Commons’ Intelligence and Security Committee conducted an inquiry about how the material a]had been handled. It was particularly critical of a MI6’s  decision to not prosecute  the spies named in it, because that was a the job of the government’s law officers and specifically the decision not to question Symonds:

"The Committee believes that it was a serious failure of the Security Service not to refer Mr Symonds' case to the Law Officers in mid 1993. We are concerned that it took over 9 months to consult the Law Officers after he was identified in the draft book. We believe that the Service could have interviewed Mr Symonds, at least for the intelligence and historical record"

                   "Intelligence and Security Committee - The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report"

There was time for MI6 an/or MI5 to correct this mistake but in 2010 when the draft of his auto biography was prepared he still had not been interviewed. He died in 2017. Did he tell the Russians about the SDS and if he did, who did they tell? If you want an answer to those questions you might need to ask the KGB.

Footnote, Following and Further Reading

To read the report and find out more about tranches and hearings this link to the inquiry web site is a useful starting point: https://www.ucpi.org.uk/hearings/ .

The critical commentary on the hearings is superb  and should be you first stop> on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/groups/spycops/  and on  X (Twitter) at https://x.com/out_of_lives . 

Symons' autobiography seems not to have been published commercially but it is available on line

https://www.scribd.com/document/149689924/romeo-spy

He also published a blog which is still available online as you might expect from someone with his background contains some unpleasant  opinions.

At spiesatwork.org.uk  I (Mike H) am trying to provide some greater depth on some the stories revealed in the evidence based on what I know about the Economic League employment blacklisting and its clandestine relationships with the Police, MI5, Trade Unions and Politicians of all complexions. The first edition of creative commons “subversive guide to subversions cand be downloaded free from this web site. On July 5 I will be making the tidied up second edition available as a free download. I will also be publishing at as paperback along with two new full length companion volumes  for  “Spies and Work” - ‘Inside the Economic League’ and ‘Attlee’s Industrial Purge’. The companion volumes will at this stage only be available as paperbacks, (and I hope hardbacks  for libraries and cheap-as-chips Kindles for ordinary people).