by Lewis, Paul
Facing disciplinary action, and with a dawning realisation that Lambert and others now knew about his second life, Chitty threatened to press the nuclear button. He wrote a letter to Sir Paul Condon, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, complaining about his treatment by the SDS and threatening to spill the beans on the whole operation.
The contents of his five-page letter were read by Lambert and later summarised in his report. ‘His letter to the Commissioner is well written and, in parts, persuasive in its agenda,’ Lambert said. The thrust of Chitty’s argument was that he received no psychological counselling at the end of his deployment and was unable to deal with feelings of guilt at having betrayed the animal rights activists.
Chitty argued he should be diagnosed as being mentally unfit to continue in the police force, paving the way for his departure with a pension to compensate for his ill-health. Lambert, who would not have wanted to annoy senior managers at the SDS by suggesting they were culpable, showed little tolerance for that view. However, he did concede a small amount of ground. ‘Yes, he is right,’ Lambert noted at one point. ‘SDS managers do need to encourage a healthy environment in which field officers feel safe to talk about inevitable emotional ties to their target groups.’ Reading between the lines of Chitty’s letter to the commissioner, Lambert was alive to the potential threat of the rogue officer going public. ‘Implicit is the message: does Special Branch really want my secret, dirty washing aired in an open forum?’ Lambert wrote. ‘Equally, the letter contains a barely veiled threat along the lines: if I go down, I’ll take as many people as possible with me, SDS in particular.’
For a squad cloaked in absolute secrecy, the spectre of public scrutiny was a terrifying menace. Lambert was at pains to spell out quite how catastrophic it would be for the SDS programme of long-term infiltration if it was ever discovered by the public: ‘It would put at risk the safety of former (and possibly current) field officers and their families.’ He estimated that it would take no more than 10 minutes to prove that ‘certain former highly regarded activists had in fact been undercover police officers who were responsible for the imprisonment of close comrades and the disruption of large-scale [animal rights] criminal activity’. Those spies and their families could expect at ‘the very least’ postal bombs at their homes, Lambert claimed.
This warning should also be read with caution. It was in Lambert’s interest to exaggerate the danger of Chitty going public. Lambert, more than many other SDS officers, had a huge amount to lose if there was a series of revelations about the SDS and its activities, particularly if they related to his own conduct undercover.
In one telling section, Lambert warns there was one ‘true story’ that Chitty could make public that would ‘answer a lot of questions the [animal rights] hierarchy has been asking about infiltration for several years’. Exactly what that true story was is not explained, but it would seem likely that Lambert was referring to his own role in the arson attacks on Debenhams. There was of course another ‘true story’ that he was desperate to keep quiet: by then the son he had fathered with the activist named Charlotte was nine years old. Lambert had not seen the child since he vanished from his life years earlier and probably hoped he would never have to.
Lambert was careful not to make his reasoning appear too personal. He wrote in his report that ‘there are of course a hundred and one facts’ about SDS operations that ‘sympathetic lawyers and friendly investigative journalists would be delighted to hear about’. Lambert believed everything had to be done to ensure those uncomfortable truths were concealed from the public. ‘Such disclosure would be seriously damaging to the safe and secure running of the current operation,’ he said. Revelations in the newspapers would place a burden on the fleet of spies who were currently deployed and had ‘enough to worry about without the fear of a rogue former SDS officer queering their pitch’.
The risks were high, but Lambert calibrated that the chances of Chitty following through with his threats were relatively low. He believed that Chitty lacked the courage to bring down the squad by going public. A more likely, but no less worrying, scenario painted by Lambert was that Chitty might ‘inadvertently open his heart out’ to the woman he once wanted to marry ‘over several bottles of Stella and under the added influence of cannabis’.
*
April 1994 was not a good month for Chitty. He had been on sick leave for nearly two years. It was just weeks after the dramatic crash in Worthing and he was still facing an internal disciplinary inquiry over his expenses. What was going on in his mind at that point was difficult to discern. Lambert suggested that Chitty was becoming increasingly unstable, his behaviour ‘confrontational, highly volatile’. Some evidence about his mental state comes from a visit he made to a doctor.
Lambert, who was either present during the consultation or had access to Chitty’s medical notes, said he offered the doctor ‘a slightly sanitised view of his secret double life’. It seems Chitty was advised he was suffering from a psychological phenomenon evident when hostages develop feelings of loyalty toward their captors. By the tone of his report, it did not seem Lambert thought much of Chitty’s claims about his psychological well being. ‘Disarmingly, he told the doctor, “My psychiatrist tells me I’m not mentally ill, I know I’m not, I’ve just got a syndrome, Stockholm syndrome.”’
Whether he was suffering from a psychological condition or not, Chitty continued to socialise with his old friends in the animal rights movement. Perhaps he had given up hope of extricating himself from the mess and was reaching out to people he believed cared for him. Maybe his loyalties had shifted entirely, from the SDS to the ‘wearies’.
Lambert on the other hand believed that there was an element of calculation in Chitty’s behaviour. If senior officers believed he might defect, they could be more likely to meet his demands, drop the disciplinary action and pay out in compensation. Indeed, Lambert even suggested that Chitty had rekindled one particular friendship – based ‘on a common interest in illegal herbal substances and heavy metal music’ – because he knew the activist in question would be under heavy surveillance. If Chitty was deliberately trying to get spotted among his activists, it worked. Reports were quickly relayed back to Special Branch that a former SDS man on sick leave was in contact with a well-known campaigner.
One afternoon that month, Chitty joined a group of friends who attended a leaving party for an activist who was returning to Canada. It was a boozy affair, and Chitty, after seeming somewhat tense, appeared to relax as the drink flowed. He was spotted flirting with one woman, asking her if she fancied going on a date with a racing driver. She laughed indulgently, encouraging his approach. By the end of the meal, Chitty was in such a good mood he offered to pay half of the bill for all 10 of the diners. The group then retired to a nearby house to smoke some dope.
It was by pure chance that, unbeknown to Chitty, the party was witnessed by a serving SDS officer. The following Monday, at one of the squad’s regular meetings, he retold the whole, incredible story to astonished colleagues. The SDS spy said ‘it was clear that no one present had any idea’ of Chitty’s real identity. To the activists, he was still Mike Blake, the jovial animal rights campaigner who had been around, on and off, for more than a decade.
Four days later, Chitty’s predicament took a turn for the worse. He was en route to another doctor’s appointment when he used an invalid travel pass at Victoria Station. An altercation with guards escalated and police were called, arresting Chitty on the platform. He did not have his warrant card on him. But he told officers that he was an undercover police officer on a mission and gave the names of colleagues who could back up his claim.
Chitty was eventually released, but was abusive towards the transport police, who lodged a formal complaint with the Special Branch. Lambert, silver-tongued as ever, was called in to smooth things over. He explained that Chitty was on sick leave and ‘probably not intentionally rude’. Apology accepted, the transport police dropped the comp
laint. But the episode underscored how precarious Chitty’s situation was – he was still an officer in the Special Branch, but seemingly out of their control.
The police officer’s confrontation with his managers was descending into something of a Mexican standoff. In 1995, he began legal action against Scotland Yard on the grounds that he had suffered psychiatric damage from the stress of his covert work. Claiming damages totalling £50,000, he accused the police of negligence and failing to ‘monitor, support, counsel, and care for him’ between 1982 and 1994.
Shortly afterwards, he seems to have dropped the lawsuit, and was awarded an ill-health pension. There is no information about how the dispute was reconciled, but it seems likely that the rogue officer won out. Chitty has never spoken about his undercover life. Not long after the legal action was suspended, he disappeared. He is currently living in South Africa and has not responded to requests to comment.
Chitty was probably never given the contents of the SDS report into his conduct, nor informed about the lengths the unit was going to, behind his back, to try to work out the reason for his discontent. It is reasonable to assume that he would be particularly shocked if he knew the role played by Lambert, who was pretending to be on his side while he was on sick leave. It was a clever move by Lambert, who helped dissuade Chitty from going public, which would have been a disaster for the SDS.
*
It was a close shave for the close-knit squad of ‘hairies’. Crisis had been averted, but the Chitty episode underlined how quickly unpopular members of the unit could be isolated and become a liability. Even Lambert perceived danger in this collective lack of empathy for SDS men who went off the rails. ‘There seems to be a prevailing attitude within Special Branch that association with colleagues under investigation is some sort of contamination,’ he wrote in his report. ‘Such an unenlightened view ill becomes an intelligent and sophisticated workforce.’
Lambert had good reason to want to improve pastoral care in the SDS. Chitty was not the only colleague who had gone wayward and fallen out with his police spymasters, and he would not be the last. The exploits of the more erratic and sometimes even uncontrollable undercover police officers were well known in the SDS. Some of the behaviour counted as low-level misdemeanour. Two SDS officers, for example, were arrested for driving while under the influence of alcohol while on covert duties. Both were taken to a police station, where they volunteered they were undercover cops. One even had on him official documents revealing his true identity. Colleagues ‘were appalled at this seemingly wanton disregard for professionalism, and in consequence, team morale suffered, and the officers lost their “street” credibility,’ Lambert noted.
Other cases were more serious. The first SDS deployment to go seriously awry involved an operative who, just like Chitty, appears to have enjoyed the company of his undercover friends more than his colleagues. According to a Special Branch officer, when this particular spy was told in the early days of the squad that his deployment needed to come to an end, he refused to come out of the field, quitting the police and returning to his life as a radical leftist campaigner. Astonishingly, this SDS officer seems to have turned completely ‘native’, making a permanent transition from cop to activist. He may well still be living the life of a protester, albeit now a pensioner, using the same fake identity given to him by the SDS many years ago.
A second, mutinous spy infuriated the command of the SDS for a different reason. He completed his undercover tour in 1983, but was dismissed from the Met police two years later over an alleged assault. Like Chitty, he wrote a letter to senior officers, threatening to run to the papers and expose the squad’s dirty secrets unless his dismissal was reversed. He too said he suffered psychological difficulties as a result of the covert work. His appeal over the disciplinary inquiry for assault was upheld. This was the officer who relocated to Scotland, and who had consoled Chitty during his breakdown, much to the annoyance of Lambert.
A third spy was recruited to the SDS despite suffering from some kind of personality disorder. Needless to say, his operation did not go well and was abruptly terminated in 1988. His handlers judged the mission to be ‘unsound’, although the details of what went wrong are not widely known. But when SDS managers looked into his history they realised that their vetting procedures had failed badly. Years earlier, when he joined the police, the officer had used a false identity on his application form.
When the detective constable was removed from SDS duties he reacted badly. Missing for some time from his home, he was later found wandering around York. He was put into the care of a police psychiatrist. Yet again, this SDS man threatened to expose the secrets of the unit to the media. This time police chiefs played hardball, threatening him with a prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. The tactic worked. The officer never went through with his threat of public disclosure. He retired from the Met with an ill-health pension for the same disorder he suffered from when he joined the SDS.
In the history of the SDS, the history of closely averted calamities is surprisingly long. It was as though the unit was constantly on the edge, just one crisis away from its operations being subject to the unseemly glare of publicity. A fourth ex-SDS spy, for example, was arrested for gross indecency in St James’s Park, near Buckingham Palace. When he was approached by police in a public toilet, he ran away, trying to evade arrest, but was caught.
The officer had not worked for the SDS for around 10 years, but when he was brought before a disciplinary board in 1991, he argued that his attempt to evade the police was a ‘reflex response’ linked to his past undercover work. Medical evidence, supported by at least one former colleague, corroborated his argument that he had been psychologically scarred by his years working as a covert agent. The officer, who had by then risen to the senior rank of detective superintendent, also left the police with an ill-health pension.
Unlike the others, he refrained from making a direct threat to expose the SDS operation. But Lambert and the other senior men at the SDS were well aware of quite how potent a weapon the threat of exposure was. An SDS officer who fell out with the unit had the power to bring it crashing down. They could call the shots in the knowledge that the squad had enough embarrassing secrets that it could never risk the British public finding out what it was up to. Within the walled garden of the SDS, there was even a name given to the technique of threatening to blow the whistle unless one demand or another was met: ‘playing the SDS card’.
Somehow, those in charge of the SDS managed to negotiate their way out of a crisis each time the card was played. Either by agreeing to the demands of their wayward employees, or threatening to make their life a misery, they always avoided the very worst-case scenario: the truth coming out.
But the inevitable was always going to happen. By the late 1990s, SDS managers were contemplating how to handle one particularly headstrong spy. They would, initially, manage to keep his mouth shut. But he would eventually break ranks completely, spilling more secrets than any other officer in the history of the SDS. He became the whistleblower who shone a light on almost half a century of clandestine police espionage. His name was Pete Black.
CHAPTER 7
Enter Mr Black
Orange smoke swirled around thousands of protesters and police. Bottles, sticks and bricks hurtled in every direction while the crowd roared. For a few brief moments, the silhouettes of police on horseback appeared out of the clouds of coloured smoke. The confrontation in suburban Welling, beneath blue autumnal skies, had a dramatic, almost revolutionary air. There was a crush of bodies, pressing against lines of police shields as they tried to force their way to the headquarters of the far-right British National Party.
Among the swirling ruck of bodies trying to push through the police barrier was a determined-looking man with a long brown ponytail called Pete Black. Barely weeks after he had been sent to infiltrate the anti-racism movement, this SDS officer was already on the frontline of his first big operation. Sooner than anyone
could have anticipated, Black had been transformed into a hard-core street-fighting activist, and he was relishing the brutal excitement of it all. It was like a part of his personality that had remained hidden for all of his adult life was set free. Now this dimension of his character was shouting and punching its way into the middle of a riotous battle with the cops. ‘It is a high, an adrenaline high, you can’t even begin to get there,’ he says. ‘It was a very intense thing within such a short time of being deployed.’
It was not just the intoxicating spell of the violent crowd that was making Black’s veins pulsate. He was ‘already on a high’ after penetrating the group he had been tasked with spying on faster than he thought was feasible. And the novelty of his undercover deployment had still not worn off – he was still excited by the thrill of knowing he was pretending to be another person. As he muscled his way through the crowd, dodging missiles and baton swipes, he was conscious that one small error could blow his cover.
Black had another reason to feel pleased with himself. This was the first major protest he had been asked to forecast for SDS managers, and his predictions had proved spot on. Black was among seven SDS undercover operatives at the demonstration that day. All were asked for their thoughts ahead of the demonstration, to allow senior commanders to prepare a suitable response. Despite his limited experience, Black told his superiors there would be a massive turnout of activists, determined to get to the BNP building. As he put it, ‘all shit was going to kick off’. Having pushed himself to the front of the march, Black watched the protest descend into ‘exactly’ the kind of sustained clashes he and his fellow SDS colleagues had anticipated.
From his point of view, the violence in south-east London was turning into an unmitigated success. Even if police were overrun by the crowd, Black would be safe in the knowledge he had warned his senior officers to prepare for the worst. ‘I could not give a shit – if they get through and burn the fucking building down, I am totally covered because I told them it was going to happen,’ he says. The crowd was large and angry, but Black knew there would be reinforced lines of police ready to stop them from getting through. He remembers looking at the police barricade and thinking: ‘As long as [the protestors] have a hole in their arse, they are not going to get through this. I know that there are waves and waves of rozzers behind it.’ Black was an SDS man now. He had the privilege of that unique vantage point: a glimpse behind the scenes of two opposing worlds.