Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police

by Lewis, Paul

  There was a reason for Lambert to maintain ties with both women: they would be useful when he was manufacturing the end of his deployment. Every SDS officer needed a plausible excuse to drop everything and disappear – and it was important that there were people close enough to them to vouch for their vanishing act.

  Following the arrests of Geoff Sheppard and Andrew Clarke over the Debenhams attacks, Lambert began to arrange his departure. He told Karen, Charlotte and other friends that he could be next in line to be arrested and he believed that Special Branch were hot on his trail. He told Karen about a ‘big crisis’ in the ALF; there was talk of an infiltrator in their midst who was providing police with detailed information about the group’s activities. Lambert said he feared he would be arrested and charged with some kind of conspiracy, meaning a jail term as long as 10 years.

  Lambert was considered something of an expert when it came to smoking out informants. A few times before he had made accusations about other ALF campaigners, accusing them of facilitating police. He had even written a guide for animal rights activists to work out how to spot infiltrators. Now he was telling friends that he believed their clandestine group had been so successfully penetrated that the law was closing in around them.

  In 1988, the SDS pulled off a clever ruse to convince Lambert’s friends that his anxieties were justified. By then Karen had moved into a flat in a high-rise block on the Nightingale Estate in Hackney with two of Lambert’s friends.

  Early one morning, detectives raided the flat, letting slip that they were ‘looking for Bob’. He was not there, and neither was Karen, but the news quickly filtered out that Special Branch were hunting for Lambert. The fake raid was, according to one former Special Branch officer, ‘done for maximum effect’ to add credibility to Lambert’s cover story. It was a trick the Special Branch was to orchestrate on other occasions.

  Over the last few months of 1988, Lambert and Karen discussed what to do. It appeared obvious that Lambert had to make himself scarce for a few years. Karen said she wanted to join him on the run, but he insisted he would have to go alone. He said that she should not waste her life as a fugitive, constantly looking over her shoulder. He said she deserved better: the rewarding career and family that she wanted so badly. Karen remembers her boyfriend saying: ‘I am not good enough for you.’

  Lambert abandoned his flat and stayed for a couple of weeks in what he called a ‘safe house’ with one of Karen’s friends. She remembers meeting him once. ‘There was still a lot of electricity between us,’ she says.

  In December 1988, Lambert and Karen spent a week alone together in another friend’s house in Dorset to say goodbye. ‘I was heartbroken,’ she says. ‘Even when he left, I could not imagine that it had finished because we loved each other so much. I wanted to go on the run with him. I was prepared to do that for him.’ Lambert’s apparent sacrifice in not taking Karen with him made her admire him even more. He said he was going to Spain. In early 1989, Karen received a long letter from Lambert postmarked Valencia, saying he was not coming back but raising the possibility that she could join him out there. It was the cruellest of false hopes, but Lambert knew it would make his disappearance seem more genuine.

  Earlier he had been having similar discussions with Charlotte. On one visit to her flat, he entered his son’s bedroom, leaned over his cot and told him that he loved him, whispering goodbye. ‘He said he had to “go on the run” to Spain, owing to him being involved in the firebombing at the Debenhams store in Harrow,’ Charlotte recalls. ‘He promised he would never abandon his son and said that as soon as it was safe I could bring our baby to Spain to see him.’

  Lambert knew that was never going to happen. Charlotte too received a letter from Lambert from Spain. It was the last she, or her son or Karen ever heard from Bob Robinson. He was gone.

  *

  Life for Charlotte as a single mum was never easy. With Lambert suddenly out of contact, she felt emotionally bruised and vulnerable. Later, she began a relationship with another man and married him. Her new husband treated his stepson as his biological son and to some degree was like a substitute father in Lambert’s absence. For a few years they had a happy family life. But just five years into the marriage, Charlotte’s husband tragically died. She was grief-stricken, but particularly worried for her son, who was then aged just eight. The boy had now effectively lost two fathers.

  Distraught, Charlotte became desperate to find Lambert, believing that he could help their son get through the mourning process. Lambert had always promised he would return to look after his son; now they were in dire need of his assistance. One of Charlotte’s friends recalls how the young woman was sure that Lambert would return, reuniting the family. ‘She needed him so much in her life, she was so devastated,’ the friend says. ‘She was so damaged that she just wanted Bob to help her with her son.’

  Charlotte enlisted the help of social services and the Child Support Agency, the government department responsible for tracking down absent fathers and making them pay their share of child maintenance costs. Time and again, official state records drew a blank. It was as if Bob Robinson didn’t exist. Charlotte’s only remaining hope was that Lambert would keep his promise and get in touch. Although she had moved house, her parents lived in the same property, and she knew it would be easy for Lambert to quietly return from Spain to track the family down.

  When she realised Lambert was not coming back, Charlotte felt she was at fault. ‘I felt guilty,’ she says. ‘At that time I blamed myself a lot for the break-up and for the fact that my son had lost his father.’

  By then of course Lambert was not in Spain, but just a few miles away, behind a desk at Scotland Yard. Following his SDS deployment, Lambert was transferred to a Special Branch department known as E Squad, which investigated terrorist threats from around the world. By the time Charlotte had lost her husband, and begun searching in vain for Lambert, he was back at the SDS in a senior position. Lambert’s infiltration of the ALF and London Greenpeace was considered a stellar performance and he was recalled to work as an SDS manager around 1994. The titular head of the SDS was by then a detective chief inspector, Keith Edmondson. But it was Lambert – controller of operations – who had the respect and the day-to-day control of the squad.

  Lambert was now a spymaster, using wisdom gleaned from his years undercover to guide the next generation of SDS spies. He was adamant that other spies should follow his example in disappearing abroad at the end of their deployment. One classified SDS report written by Lambert once he was in the post stressed the importance of managing ‘carefully crafted withdrawal plans’ to convince ‘increasingly security-conscious target groups of the authenticity of a manufactured departure’. He added: ‘Inevitably this entails travel to a foreign country. Given our collective experience of problems which can arise when less careful attention is given to withdrawal strategy this policy appears manifestly justified.’

  To many of the new SDS officers, Lambert was a patriarchal figure, whose reputation was an inspiration for those who served under him. He took to the role with ease, giving his men practical and philosophical advice about espionage. He informed his squad that ‘with experience and expertise comes legitimacy and credibility’. Lambert was the gaffer, deciding when, where and how SDS operatives should be deployed. He was pulling the strings like a puppet-master.

  One undercover officer who looked up to Lambert was a young, headstrong recruit with a ponytail who used the alias Pete Black. At the time he was full of praise for the man he describes as the ‘operational governor’ of the SDS. ‘I chatted to Bob about everything, everything,’ he says. ‘You used to go in with any sort of problem, and if he could not work out how to get you out of the shit, then you were fucked.’

  Lambert stepped down from the SDS in the late 1990s, after managing dozens of undercover officers. His career, like that of the Special Branch, took a dramatic twist in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. Law enforcement
on both sides of the Atlantic believed they had been caught off guard by the attacks and there was a major shake-up of counter-terrorism policing.

  Lambert claimed to believe that the ‘war on terror’ developed by US president George Bush, and supported by Tony Blair, was a misguided approach. He publicly advocated that police should develop an outreach approach, engaging with Muslim groups to isolate the more fundamentalist elements that advocated terrorism.

  He and two other former SDS spies were given the resources to set up the Muslim Contact Unit, which was ostensibly designed to build relations with Islamic groups in London. Lambert ran the unit between 2002 and 2007, publicly arguing that policing of Muslim communities should be based on trust, transparency and voluntary civic duty. He claimed to want to empower Muslims and reduce the influence of al-Qaida propagandists in mosques.

  It was a decidedly liberal position for Lambert to take, and a far cry from the culture of intrusive surveillance he had perfected during his many years in the SDS. Indeed, some have asked whether the Muslim Contact Unit was in fact a front for a more sinister intelligence-gathering exercise – an accusation Lambert denies.

  After his retirement from Special Branch, Lambert made an extraordinary decision that would sow the seeds of his downfall. For many years he impressed on his men that discretion was absolutely key to intelligence work. Under Lambert, SDS officers were reminded of the importance of keeping a low profile, even years after their deployment had ended. Lambert made clear this was an obligation for all of his men. He wrote in one Special Branch document that the continuation of cover, even after a deployment is completed, was ‘the golden rule’ of SDS tradecraft.

  The message, in Lambert’s words, was clear: SDS officers had to ‘maintain cover in all situations and at all costs, and later, when returned to normal duties, do nothing to compromise the integrity of the operation’.

  It was with some astonishment then that fellow SDS officers noticed Lambert take on such a public profile after leaving the Met police. It was as though he could not help shuffling himself into the limelight. Building on his professed theories about the policing of Muslim communities, Lambert became an academic. He took on postings at St Andrews and Exeter universities. He became a regular fixture on the speakers’ circuit, giving passionate talks at conferences. He even appeared on television.

  Lambert grew into his latest incarnation as a progressive academic. He now had a grey beard and liked to wear jackets with a shirt and no tie. He spoke at public rallies, joining campaigns against racism and Islamophobia. It was like a small part of him was becoming Bob Robinson again.

  Of course Lambert never concealed the fact he was a former detective inspector from Special Branch. His policing career provided him a certain cachet. Lambert wrote a book, Countering Al-Qaeda in London, which airbrushed his SDS years from his long career as a police officer. He began touring the country to promote his book. He was becoming a public face.

  Lambert’s golden rule about never compromising the integrity of the SDS, repeated to spies over the years like a mantra, was going out the window as he basked in the attention of his newfound career as an academic.

  Every time he made a public appearance, the veteran spy was playing with fire. Many SDS officers had murky secrets they hoped would never see the light of day. But few had as many skeletons in the cupboard as Lambert.

  *

  Almost a quarter of a century after Bob Robinson disappeared, pretending he was going on the run to Spain, Charlotte had moved on in life. Her son was now a strapping 25-year-old man. She was proud of what he had achieved, despite his difficult childhood. After those postcards, Lambert had ceased contact altogether. There were not even any child maintenance payments to support Charlotte. ‘He abandoned me to support our son alone and to explain to him the disappearance of his father,’ she says. ‘I tried to track Bob down countless times over the years but those efforts were doomed to failure as I did not even know his real name.’ Both Charlotte and her son had been searching for Bob Robinson, a man who no longer existed. They presumed he had started a new life somewhere in Spain, still fearing arrest by Special Branch. They realised that Lambert might be anywhere, if, that was, he was still alive.

  Thursday, June 14 2012 had been an ordinary day for Charlotte. ‘I came home from work at about 4pm. As I don’t work Fridays, Thursdays are the start of my weekend. I made a pot of coffee and because the weather was good, I took the Daily Mail and the coffee out to the garden. As I flicked through the paper I saw the picture of Bob Robinson in the 80s – it was “my” Bob, my son’s dad. I had not had news of him for approximately 24 years and there was his face staring back at me from the paper. I went into shock, I felt like I couldn’t breathe and I started shaking. I did not even read the story which appeared with the picture.’

  In the end, it was veteran activists from the now-defunct London Greenpeace who had joined the dots and realised Bob Robinson was not a fugitive still hiding in Spain, but an academic touring lecture theatres in Britain. It was not hard for them to find Lambert’s photograph on the internet toward the end of 2011. The world had changed immeasurably since the days when Lambert and his comrades used old printing machines to produce political leaflets. Now they were staring in amazement at YouTube videos. The man they knew as Bob Robinson was thinner than the middle-aged academic on the screen. His hair was shorter and greyer, and he now had a beard. But it was his mannerisms that gave Lambert away. His disarming smile, his smooth voice, the inimitable way he held the attention of an audience.

  Some of the veteran campaigners were out of practice. They had not taken part in direct action protests for years. One afternoon in October 2011, they had a good reason to come out of retirement.

  Lambert was giving a speech in London alongside an impressive line-up of MPs, writers and musicians at a conference organised by two anti-racist groups, Unite Against Fascism and One Society Many Cultures. It was the kind of event Lambert was getting used to – a rally to ‘celebrate diversity, defend multiculturalism, oppose Islamophobia and racism’.

  That morning, five former London Greenpeace members met in a café near the rally to plan their confrontation. At lunchtime, two of them, Helen Steel and Martyn Lowe, came out of the sandwich shop, and walked directly into Lambert. For a moment, they thought he might look at them in horror, realising they were the activists he infiltrated years ago. But there was not even a flicker of recognition in his face as he strode confidently past.

  Shortly after, Lambert took his familiar position behind the podium and looked out at the 400-strong crowd at the Trades Union Congress building. Lowe, Steel and three other campaigners took seats dotted around the audience. Lambert gave a short, pugnacious speech castigating David Cameron, Tony Blair and other politicians for alienating Muslims. He walked a few metres back to the top table of speakers. Before the applause could die down, a man in the audience rose to his feet.

  ‘I have one question from the floor. Dave Morris, London Greenpeace. Is he going to apologise for organising disgusting undercover police infiltration of campaign groups including anti-fascists and my own group, London Greenpeace, for five years as Bob Robinson?’ There was confused whispering in the audience.

  The chairwoman tried unsuccessfully to quieten Morris down. But he was not going to stop – he had been chosen by the group to speak out because he had the strongest voice.

  ‘We are publicly outing you today because you were involved in this activity and we want to ensure that you are not informing on groups that are here today,’ he says. ‘OK, will you apologise for infiltrating London Greenpeace for five years and, as an inspector, overseeing other police officers infiltrating environmental groups and other campaign groups?’

  Lambert sat impassively, giving nothing away. He sipped from a glass of water. His old comrades looked older now, but he must have known these were the former associates he had infiltrated in another life.

  The chairwoman interjected: ‘Apologies for the
disruption to the conference. Our next speaker is…’ Lambert left the building.

  A few days later, aware that the Guardian was about to run a story on his past, Lambert released a statement, admitting he had once been an SDS officer. ‘As part of my cover story, so as to gain the necessary credibility to become involved in serious crime, I first built a reputation as a committed member of London Greenpeace, a peaceful campaigning group. I apologise unreservedly for the deception I therefore practised on law-abiding members of London Greenpeace.’ He added: ‘I also apologise unreservedly for forming false friendships with law-abiding citizens and in particular forming a long-term relationship with Karen, who had every reason to think I was a committed animal rights activist and a genuine London Greenpeace campaigner.’

  Lambert made no mention of Charlotte, their son or the murkier aspects of his deployment as an animal rights activist. Neither was there any mention of the many other SDS officers who, as their commanding officer, Lambert knew had behaved in much the same way as he had. Presumably, these were secrets that Lambert was hoping would remain intact.

  ‘I should point out here that the vast majority of Met Special Branch undercover officers never made the mistakes I made, have no need to apologise for anything, and I deeply regret having tarnished their illustrious, professional reputation.’ He later added: ‘I always knew that if details of my earlier role as an undercover police officer became public my own credibility and integrity would come under close scrutiny. I fully appreciate that many dedicated anti-racism campaigners who know me will find revelations about my prior undercover police work anathema and disturbing. I can only hope to regain the credibility and trust I have lost in the fullness of time and on the basis of what I do as well as what I say.’