Former undercover officer Peter Francis says department helped spies by providing false passports in dead children's names
A second police spy has said the Home Office was aware that undercover police officers stole the identities of dead children to infiltrate political groups.
Peter Francis, a former undercover officer who has become a whistleblower, said the Home Office helped the spies by providing false passports in the names of the dead children.
He made his claim as MPs are due on Tuesday to question Mick Creedon, the chief constable who is leading the police investigation into the deployment of undercover officers in protest groups over a 40-year period.
Creedon has already conceded that the theft of the children's identities was "common practice" within a covert special branch unit which operated between 1968 and 2008.
Earlier this month, Bob Lambert, one of the leading spies of the unit, claimed that the technique was "well known at the highest levels of the Home Office".
In a practice criticised by MPs as "ghoulish" and "heartless", undercover spies in the unit, the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), searched through birth and death certificates to find children who had died at an early age.
They then assumed the identity of the child and developed a persona based on that identity in order to make themselves appear to be a real person when they went undercover for five years or longer.
The spies were issued with fake documents such as passports, driving licences and national insurance numbers in the name of the child, to further bolster their credibility.
Francis, who infiltrated anti-racist groups between 1993 and 1997, discussed the technique with the head of the SDS as he had reservations about stealing the identity of a four-year-old boy who had died. He is not disclosing the name of the SDS head.
"We bounced it around – what were his thoughts, what were my thoughts. It was evident that it was standard practice," Francis said.
He added that the head of the SDS told him that the Home Office knew the undercover spies "were using the children", as the department gave fake passports to the spies knowing that they were in the name of the dead children.
The SDS was directly funded by the government, which received an annual report on its work for much of its existence.
Francis was a key source for the Guardian when the newspaper detailed the technique, dubbed the "Jackal Run" after Frederick Forsyth's novel The Day of the Jackal, in February.
Speaking then as Pete Black, one of his undercover identities, Francis said he felt he was "stomping on the grave" of the boy whose identity he stole.
"A part of me was thinking about how I would feel if someone was taking the names and details of my dead son for something like this," he said at the time.
Last month, he said his superiors had asked him to find "dirt" that could be used to smear the family of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager who was stabbed to death by a racist gang in 1993.
Lambert went undercover for four years in the 1980s to infiltrate environmental and animal rights campaigners. He adopted the persona of Bob Robinson, a seven-year-old boy who had died of a congenital heart defect.
Interviewed by Channel Four News this month, Lambert said that at the time he did not "really give pause for thought on the ethical considerations. It was, that's what was done. Let's be under no illusions about the extent to which that was an accepted practice that was well known at the highest levels of the Home Office." Lambert fathered a child with a campaigner while he was undercover.
On Tuesday, Creedon is expected to be questioned by the home affairs select committee about whether the police will apologise to the parents whose children's identities were taken. Creedon has said he has taken legal advice on whether the spies who stole the children's identities could be put on trial.