On 17 July 1979, Christine Bott was escorted from her prison cell to London and appeared before the General Medical Council Disciplinary Committee. It proceeded to strike her off the medical register and remove her right to practise as a doctor for what the Committee called ‘reprehensible and irresponsible’ behaviour. The hearing was considered newsworthy by the press and The Belfast Telegraph observed that Bott’s hair was long and she was ‘wearing an orange floral dress and a black jacket’. The Daily Mirror went with the headline ‘Operation Julie Doc Struck Off’ and featured a picture of her in profile with the tagline ‘Christine Bott: On Her Way Back to Jail’. According to The Birmingham Post, her solicitor told the General Medical Council not to ‘write her off’ as she ‘hoped to apply to get back in the future and would be keeping up with medical developments while in prison’. Four years later, Bott was out on parole, living in York and working as a volunteer with people with learning disabilities. Desperate to get her medical licence back, she’d submitted her case for reconsideration. On 23 July 1983, The Liverpool Echo reported that Bott ‘sat impassively’ throughout the proceedings and ‘failed to have her name restored to the medical register’.
When Kemp was released from jail having served the bulk of his sentence, he and Bott were briefly reunited before going their separate ways. Too much time had elapsed. Too much distance had grown between them, cutting them adrift from their shared past as the ideals that had bound them together withered in the intervening years. Both were ready to move on and forget. Kemp idled for a while, travelled and spent some years in Goa, before a period in Spain, returning eventually to the world of regular office work. Bott ended up in Ireland, where she was able to put her medical training to use and to live a quiet and solitary existence. It’s believed she passed away in 2018.
David Solomon was released in 1983 and returned to New York and his beloved Greenwich Village. He frequented the city’s jazz clubs, wrote the occasional piece on the music he adored, and died aged 81 on 26 April 2007. The Villager printed a short obituary honouring Solomon’s achievements as an ‘editor, jazz critic’ and ‘psychedelic sage’ without mentioning the Microdot Gang, Operation Julie or his subsequent imprisonment. Solomon is best remembered for his anthologies on LSD and marijuana, which remain invaluable introductions to the drug culture of the 1960s.
Todd did seven and a half years inside. When he got out he embraced his one great passion – mountaineering. In 1988, he scaled Annapurna, and a year later he went up Everest for the first time with a team of Polish climbers. The experience left Todd dissatisfied. He thought the trip was badly run and expeditions like that ‘needed to be properly managed’. Never one to shy away from a challenge, Todd set up his own climbing firm – Himalayan Guides – and in 1995 he took his first party up Everest. Todd charged $29,000 per person, considerably less than his competitors. For that, his clients got their all-important climbing permit – which Todd sourced from the Nepalese authorities – their base-camp tents, a cook to make their meals and oxygen tanks, masks and regulators. From the start, Himalayan Guides gained a reputation for skimping on the essentials and using substandard oxygen equipment. Known to the Everest community as the ‘Toddfather’, the ‘mayor of base-camp’ or simply ‘the Governor’, Todd got into trouble when a 22-year-old British climber – who was kitted out with one of Todd’s oxygen rigs – went too far up the mountain too late in the day. He never returned. His death was reported in The Sunday Times along with questions about Todd’s safety procedures. Todd dismissed the accusation of negligence as ‘absolute nonsense’.
An American journalist wasn’t so sure. Installed in base-camp, he began investigating Todd’s business. The big Scotsman was not amused, punched him in the face and threatened to kill him if he didn’t ‘get the fuck out of camp’. The injured journalist went to the police, and on 18 July 2000 the Joint Secretary for Tourism informed Todd that he faced ‘serious penalties’. On 6 November, the Nepalese Ministry of Tourism banned him from the country for two years and issued a press statement which noted that they’d previously ‘warned Henry B. Todd several times to follow … norms and conditions’. Undeterred, Todd planned an expedition to Karakorum – a mountain in Pakistan – which went ahead in 2002. Ever the hustler, Todd continued to try and organise climbing excursions until age caught up with him and he retired to live in relative obscurity.
Over the years, many people have tried to get the key members of the Microdot Gang to talk about their LSD adventures, but they’ve never uttered a word. Every question rebuffed, every query rejected. The subject was completely off-limits. This decision reflected an understandable desire for anonymity, privacy and the chance to start again unencumbered by who they were and what they did in what must have seemed like a different universe. Yet Kemp, Bott, Solomon and Todd’s decision to maintain a stubborn silence might not have been entirely their own. At the National Archives in Kew, there currently sit twenty-two files relating to Operation Julie that concern the gang and eight others who stood in the dock with them. But none of the files are open to view. Some have been sealed until 2054. The majority are under lock and key until 2060.
In the autumn of 2019, a journalist made a Freedom of Information Act request to the National Archives to try and obtain access to the files. The National Archives rejected his request, citing section 40(2) of the Act, which covers the ‘personal data of third persons which it would be unlawful to disclose during the lifetime of the people involved’. In calculating what a ‘lifetime’ amounted to, the Act applied ‘the 100 year principle’; if somebody ‘named within the records were born under 100 years ago’ they were considered to be ‘still living’. The journalist was not convinced by the National Archives’ response and challenged it. On 6 February 2020, he wrote to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which had the power to reverse the National Archives’ judgement. The ‘complainant’ raised several legal technicalities and argued that disclosing the contents of the files was in the ‘public interest’ because Operation Julie had ‘involved expenditure of considerable sums of public money’ and unanswered questions remained about whether the Microdot Gang was ‘associated with a US based criminal organisation’.
However, the Commissioner decided that these concerns were not serious enough ‘to outweigh the subject’s fundamental rights and freedoms’ and dismissed the journalist’s complaint. As the files contained ‘personal data’ – financial records, family and medical history, and ‘political opinions’ – as well as ‘criminal defence data’, the Commissioner concluded that the ‘information remains sensitive’ and releasing it would be ‘unfair’ and ‘likely to cause damage and distress’.
Given this degree of secrecy, one can’t help but speculate about whether the confidential contents of these files explains the gang’s reluctance to speak. But, if so, why? And how could anybody involved in the investigation be under threat because of it? It’s possible that one of the dozen defendants was a police informer. But if that was the case, why did it prove so difficult and time consuming to bring the gang to justice? Equally well, one or more of them could have had dealings with corrupt officers that might rebound on those involved. But the fact that drug squad personnel were on the take during the 1970s is hardly a secret: it was common knowledge at the time and nobody today would be shocked to learn that even Operation Julie had its share of bent coppers.
This leaves the intelligence services – MI6, MI5 and Special Branch – who nurse an unhealthy fear of their past coming back to haunt them. During that era, while working in the context of the Cold War, they were coping with political terrorism – whether Republican Irish, left-wing European or allied to the Palestinian cause – an upsurge in youth radicalism and a drug culture that was synonymous with rebellion and frequently overlapped with organised crime. As a result, they made clandestine alliances with the strangest of bedfellows, recruited the most unlikely candidates and risked embarrassment if these dubious sources were ever revealed. Detective Inspector Dick Lee certainly thought that the security services had allowed the Microdot Gang to go about its business unmolested because they were interested in the types of people the gang associated with.
While there is no evidence that Kemp and Bott had anything to do with the intelligence services, Henry Barclay Todd is a different matter altogether. A cursory glance at his CV is enough to raise an eyebrow or two. There was his itinerant background, marked by his early childhood in Malaya and then an adolescence spent at a grammar school in Scotland. His lost years in Paris. His fraud conviction for passing bad cheques. His trip behind the Iron Curtain to Prague in late 1968. His mountaineering, which provided perfect cover for visits to geopolitically sensitive areas. His long-standing association with West German dealers who had links to the Second June Movement. His relaxed response to the news of Gerald Thomas’ arrest. The difficulties Dick Lee had locating him, despite his criminal record. The list goes on. Yet there is nothing resembling proof. Nothing but guesswork. The truth will have to wait until the government decides to open those files.
On 20 December 1995, The Reading Evening Post featured the headline ‘Fears Over LSD Buried in the 70s’ alongside an article about how the police had ‘recently found 90 of the black microdots similar to those seized during Operation Julie’, which they believed might be ‘part of a missing cache of acid hidden in the forest of Pangbourne’. The prospect of these microdots being ‘sold in Reading pubs and nightclubs’ was a worrying one and ‘medical experts’ warned that the 20-year-old LSD ‘could cause severe psychological problems, including paranoia or schizophrenia’. In the summer of 2017, one of the undercover hippy cops assigned to Smiles produced a memoir about his time as a member of the Operation Julie team. In it, he alleged that while in prison Kemp had told a fellow inmate that he’d hidden a million-pounds worth of his LSD in a wood close to the Carno manor house. The Sunday Express picked up the story and informed the local police. They acknowledged that there was now a risk that people would come looking for Kemp’s acid and told the Shropshire Star that they’d alerted the current owners of the manor and reassured them that they’d be increasing the number of patrols in the area.
Though the legends about the Microdot Gang’s missing LSD live on, their acid did not transform society in the way some of them hoped it would. An article in The New Musical Express – published almost immediately after their trial ended – bemoaned the fact that only ‘a few short years ago Kemp and co. would have been hailed as “psychedelic outlaws”. Now it seems most people are content to accept the official word on the subject and go back to their Bovril and bedroom slippers’.
By the late 1970s, the ideas that had inspired and animated acid culture were no longer considered relevant, dismissed as nothing more than fanciful pipe-dreams. Yet despite this, they have endured and still influence how we look at the world. As to whether or not the Microdot Gang were right to put so much faith in LSD, it’s probably too early to tell. Though their mission ended in failure, they achieved their main aim: to bring LSD to the masses. For hundreds of thousands of people who experienced the Summer of Love and the Swinging Sixties second-hand – removed by age or distance from the heart of things – and yearned to be part of it all and enter an alternative world, the Microdot Gang’s prolific output meant they had the chance to sample acid’s mind-bending potential for themselves.