Operation Orchid

Operation Orchid was a Scotland Yard investigation into Sidney Cooke and his gang of pedophiles conducted during the 1980s. During the investigation it was learned that one of Cooke's accomplices named Lennie Smith had been a rent boy in the West End thought to have been linked to the Elm Guest House. When detectives checked the original case files in 2014 to see if any further links between Cooke's gang and the Elm Guest House had been discovered, they found the files pertaining to that aspect of the investigation were missing.¹

The Operation Orchid files were not the only ones to go missing. It was also learned that the dossier Geoffrey Dickens handed over to Leon Brittan in 1983 had since been either lost or destroyed by the Home Office. Because Leon Brittan had been the minister in charge of overseeing domestic intelligence agencies at that time, it was soon suspected that past investigations into an alleged VIP pedophile ring had been covered up by MI5. The loss of the Operation Orchid files, combined with the disappearance of the Dickens dossier, prevented investigators from establishing connections between Cooke's gang and the VIP network alleged to have operated through the Elm Guest House.¹