Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police

by Lewis, Paul

  That eventful day in Welling was a crowning moment for Black. He had proved to his superiors within the SDS that he could gain the trust of activists and gather intelligence ahead of a major protest. At the same time, he had established his credibility among protesters, whom he had been warned would be hostile to outsiders. Black felt he was being tested in battle, watched as he fought shoulder to shoulder with activists for hours in Welling. ‘My role on that day was to be a street activist and to show them that no matter how much bottle they have got, I would be with them,’ he says. He recalls ‘a lot of exchanges’ with police – ‘a lot of pushing with the shields, a hell of a lot of running … as soon as they ran a little bit forward, we would run back, then the horses came down’.

  Black wanted to be at the front of the demonstration, earning his spurs with other activists and getting a measure of how far these left-wing activists would go in their confrontations with riot officers. He was impressed. ‘I was pleasantly surprised by the balls they had, considering that some of them were injured. I thought our lot would run away as soon as the riot shields and horses came out. I thought it would be over,’ he says. ‘We were right where the clown let off the orange smoke bomb. The police horses went through it.’

  The undercover officer got whacked by a police baton in the mayhem, but escaped serious injury. He was fortunate. By the end of day, 41 demonstrators and 19 police officers were injured and 31 arrests had been made. Black knew that one way he could avoid getting hurt as a protester was to draw on his training as a cop.

  Riot police use long shields to protect themselves from head to toe, often forming defensive lines. Shorter, round shields, clasped to their left arms, have a different function: they tend to be used when police are about to go on the offensive against rioters. The smaller shields are easier to wield, enabling police to swing batons over the top. Police sometimes use the hard edge of the shield as a weapon, although it is officially discouraged.

  ‘Now I found myself on the other side of the shield,’ Black says. ‘The only advantage it gave me was that I could see the tactics being used whereas my targets [the protesters] could not. I knew that when the long shields were out, that was fine because all they could do was push. But when the short shields came out you knew that it was trouble. You can go right up to one of the long shields and all they can do is jab you from around the side. They can’t get you from over the top. With the short shields, you really have to get out of the way. That was the time to run. And if the dogs came out, it’s a bad day for mankind.’

  Of course, Black had to act on his inside knowledge with caution. If he suddenly warned fellow demonstrators about an imminent police charge, he might raise suspicions. ‘You end up trying to find a way to tell them [to run away] without making it sound like you’ve done this sort of thing before,’ he says.

  In the days after the Welling demonstration, Black joined the other SDS officers for the routine postmortem. The Special Branch officers sifted through police long-lens photographs of the protest, identifying known activists involved in the clashes. Flicking through hundreds of images, Black was suddenly taken aback by one particular photograph. It was an image of him, standing in the middle of the crowd. It was the first time he had seen a photograph of his alter ego surrounded by anti-racist campaigners.

  *

  On the surface, Black is a forbidding character – intense, blunt and hard. One of his police managers, with whom he clashed, described him as ‘one of most direct and forthright officers I have ever encountered’. Nowadays he is shaven-headed. He almost always dresses head to toe in black. He does not want to reveal his real name – doing so, he believes, could put him at risk of physical retribution.

  Black has deep-set, staring eyes and a thick jaw. At around 5ft 9in, he is short for a police officer, but stocky and strong with long arms. He admits to a ‘very aggressive’ dimension to his personality, one he kept suppressed ‘within the normal bounds of society’ for many years. However, his predilection for confrontation was unleashed when he went undercover. He confesses to enjoying the ‘totally feral environment’ of protests that turn violent. He is, he admits, a ‘natural fighter’.

  But beneath the bulldozer-like surface is a more complex character. For someone who claims to have a short temper, Black is often stone-cold calm. He can be adventurous, thoughtful and funny; when recounting the more absurd aspects of his deployment, his sombre stare usually gives way to a broad smile.

  Black also has something that some of his former police colleagues lack – the ability to form solid opinions about ethical issues, regardless of what his seniors in the SDS might believe. In some ways, he is unlike many other cops. An independent thinker, Black is unafraid to voice his views, even if that means a battle with the hierarchy. And once his mind is made up, he does not take kindly to anyone who attempts to persuade him he is wrong.

  That may be a trait acquired through childhood. Black was born in London in 1965 and moved to Norfolk, but by the time he was 12, his German mother and New Zealand father had divorced. His mother did not adapt well to life in a small village, and turned to drink. She struggled to bring up her three children. ‘It wasn’t the easiest of childhoods. I was angry a lot of the time, a lot of suppressed rage at the world,’ he says. ‘I did not stray too much and I realise there are plenty of people out there with far bigger problems. [But] I was pretty much the only kid in my school whose parents were divorced. Also the fact that my mother was German caused a few problems and issues,’ he says.

  A turning point came at the age of 13, when he confronted a school bully. He recalls the moment as a realisation that he had the ability to achieve what he wanted. He became head boy of his school – to the headmaster’s surprise – and secured nine O-levels and, later, three A-levels. Interested in the law and public affairs, he harboured an ambition to join the security services. It was an idea he dropped after an A-level teacher advised him that, realistically, MI5 ‘only recruited from the Oxbridge set, posh kids with public-school backgrounds’. But the teacher offered an alternative.

  ‘He said what I had a good chance of getting into was Special Branch,’ Black says. ‘He explained what it was and it sounded absolutely perfect. A chance to do some of the same work as the Security Service without having to be a part of it.’ Turning down a university place to study law, he enrolled in the police, determined to join the Metropolitan police’s elite squad of officers. He got there in 1990, after a short spell in uniform.

  Black’s first Special Branch posting was to Heathrow, monitoring suspected dissidents travelling to and from Ireland. He was then in B Squad, which was investigating Irish republican and loyalist terrorists. ‘It was a great time to be working in the field,’ he says. ‘It was such a small unit that everyone was involved in everything. I would say that between 1990 and 1993, I had a part in the case of every single terrorist arrested in London. I was either involved in interviewing them or following them or gathering other intelligence on them,’ he says. Later, Black began working in C Squad, the department that had the remit of monitoring ‘subversives’. ‘Interestingly, I didn’t really know what a subversive was until I started working for Special Branch,’ he adds.

  His route into the SDS, the ‘unit within a unit’ in Special Branch, was the result of what Black calls ‘several twists of fate’. One day he got a call from an officer in Bromley, south London, where he had worked while he was a uniformed constable. Local borough police had picked up a man who was found to be carrying ‘a vast amount of left-wing literature’.

  ‘They asked if I wanted to go down and have a look. It turned out he was a major activist with the Socialist Workers Party. I went down and looked through everything from his bags, copied the lot and cross-referenced every name that was mentioned in his papers and his diaries.’ Black then wrote a report that he says attracted ‘a huge amount of interest’ from the SDS, which already had the activist with the offending literature on its radar. An SDS manager met with
Black to thank him personally, but also, he later found out, to gauge whether he was suitable for a transfer to the unit.

  A few weeks later, Black got into a row with an inspector who he claims ‘lost control of an operation and was treating his men like shit and ordering them around’. He believes his dispute with his boss told the SDS something about his character. ‘That actually made me stand out a bit. The branch was looking for people to go into the SDS who were capable of making that kind of a stand. It was a little flash of individuality.’

  Soon afterwards, Black was partnered with a former SDS officer in a long surveillance operation. ‘We ended up giving each other our whole life stories during the course of the operation, although he never mentioned the SDS,’ he says. Looking back, Black believes this job was no coincidence either. ‘All the things I had been doing had, unbeknown to me, marked my card as someone who might be able to fit in with the unit.’

  Black eventually attended an interview at a secret SDS office. ‘I remember being there and saying that, until the day before, I had not even heard of them. They did not give much away during the interview. They told me that they worked for the Metropolitan police and also directly for the security services. That for me was all I needed to hear. I felt that I’d finally arrived and that after all this work I was on the cusp of my whole life’s dream of actually working for the Security Service.’

  The job was not initially as adventurous as Black might have expected. In January 1993, he arrived at the cramped headquarters of the SDS in Cundy Street, central London. There was nothing to give away it was the base for a fleet of police spies. It was just a converted flat, in Johnson House, a block usually used for newly married police officers. Black was made the ‘back-office boy’ to four superiors who ran the operation.

  Part of his job was to provide the administrative support to the squad’s 10 undercover operatives then ‘in the field’. At the time, three police officers were embedded in left-wing groups, two in the animal rights movement, two in right-wing groups and others in campaigns supporting causes such as Irish republicanism. Black’s main job involved handling the undercover officers’ ‘blue bags’, in which they delivered reports to the squad. These files also contained requests, from undercover operatives or their seniors, for specific pieces of information held elsewhere in Special Branch. ‘There might be a request to check a number plate or phone number or to identify a particular person in a photograph. As the back-office boy, you take that information and provide the answers,’ he says.

  Mornings were taken up with paperwork, but afternoons were generally more practical. The whole routine was part of an SDS ritual. The ‘back-office boy’ would always spend months doing menial work and preparing their alias, ready to replace one of the 10 when their mission ended. It was a revolving system, and each time a ‘back-office boy’ graduated, another was recruited to start learning the ropes. ‘What I didn’t realise until I got there was that not everyone who goes into the back office actually makes it out into the field,’ he says. ‘About a fifth of the recruits never make it out of the back office at all. They get watched closely and it is decided that they simply don’t have what it takes to make it any further.’

  The first challenge for all new recruits involved constructing their fake identity, or ‘legend’. It was not just a name they were searching for, but a whole life story that would provide a plausible explanation for their interest in activism. The SDS had protocol for the creation of these legends: they would search out the identity of a suitable dead child, steal it, and claim it as their own, without ever informing the parents.

  The process of acquiring these dead children’s identities was as bizarre as it was gruesome. SDS officers would visit St Catherine’s House, a prosaic government building near Aldwych in central London, which until 1997 housed the lists of Britain’s births, marriages and deaths going back more than 150 years. For years, legions of amateur historians pored laboriously over the huge ledgers containing clues to their ancestors. But among their number were SDS men who, like Black, had a more sinister purpose.

  ‘You go to St Catherine’s House and you are looking for someone of a similar age to you who died, starting at age three or four and up to age 14 or 15,’ he explains. Wherever possible, spies were required to find someone who shared their first name. This was important: it was notoriously difficult to suddenly adopt a completely different first name. ‘It doesn’t matter how good you think you are,’ Black says. ‘If you are undercover as “David” and you’re walking down the road and someone behind you starts shouting out “David”, there’s no way in the world you’re ever going to turn around, so you don’t change your first name.’

  He adds: ‘Surnames always have to be general. You don’t want something which is going to stand out too much or be too memorable, like Aardvark. You don’t want to draw any unnecessary attention to yourself. Green and Black are good. But you don’t want something like Smith. No matter what your first name is, that surname will always sound fake.’

  Searching through death records for a child who had died years ago had a ghoulish quality. Black remembers a ‘real moment of discomfort’ when he came across the boy whose identity he was about to take. He was a four-year-old. ‘I looked and saw the little chap’s death certificate. It might have been to do with the age of my son at the time – a very similar age to the age this boy died. A part of me was thinking about how I would feel if someone was taking the name and details of my dead son for something like this. For me that was a little pang going on. And that was the first of many moments I ended up having. You have to use people. You end up using a lot of people.’

  The strange ritual undergone by undercover police officers had a purpose. The idea was that by pretending to be a real person – albeit one who had died decades ago – the SDS officers were protecting themselves. If anyone they infiltrated became suspicious of them, and researched their background behind their back, they would most likely come across a real person’s birth certificate. ‘What you are always gearing up for is someone saying: “I’m suspicious. I don’t like him, I’m going down to St Catherine’s House in order to check him out.”’ By resurrecting the identities of real people, the SDS felt they had a stronger cover story.

  It was not a technique that was unique to the SDS. The trick had been used by fraudsters and serious criminals for many years and was fictionalised in Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel Day of the Jackal; the professional assassin who was paid to kill French president Charles de Gaulle resorted to the same ruse of assuming a dead person’s identity. In recognition of the book, the SDS came up with a nickname for the process of searching for suitable dead children: they called it ‘The Jackal Run’. Black was not the only SDS officer to feel a little uneasy about the morality of the identity fraud.

  A second SDS officer, who chose an infant killed in a road accident, said he did so in the knowledge that his parents would ‘still be grief-stricken’. ‘I thought: what would his family think if their son’s name was being used for the greater good, how would they feel about it, and should they be consulted?’ he says. ‘There were dilemmas that went through my head.’ He adds: ‘Your choice of name was of fundamental importance because on that would rest your whole identity, sense of security, confidence and ability to do the job. You are feeling vulnerable right from the first day. All the work you did before you started the job you felt paid off because you felt more comfortable, more confident and stronger within that identity.’ He believed the tactic was probably justified ‘because we had this mission to accomplish and this was the only way of doing it’.

  Black did not feel the same way. ‘For me that was the first marker,’ he says. ‘In many ways those first feelings of discomfort were a sign of the problems that I would end up having later on.’ The boy Black chose had a ‘totally English’ surname. His father served in the Royal Marines and was initially stationed in the Far East; his son had died around the age of four in his next posting in the
Middle East. The birth certificate was therefore kept in a more obscure overseas registry and would have been almost impossible to find. ‘I made it so hard – I could only just about find myself afterwards.’

  Choosing a child who had died overseas was the kind of ruse SDS officers liked to use. Undercover officers never wanted the birth certificates of the dead children to be too easily located. The more hoops activists had to go through to find the birth certificate, the more time the SDS would have to respond. Black felt his difficult-to-find birth certificate might one day help him if he ever came under suspicion. He figured he would have time to accuse activists of not trusting him and act enraged, secure in the knowledge that he could eventually tell them he was born abroad. If they looked hard enough, activists would find evidence he really existed.

  ‘You want to prolong their pain and make as big a scene as possible,’ he says. Of course, if it ever got to the stage of activists hunting through the birth certificate registry to work out if he was a real person, Black knew his deployment would be over. ‘If someone has checked you out that much, you need to go anyway, your time is up,’ he says. ‘The operation is important, but not as important as my life.’

  Another similar SDS trick was not to go for a precisely matching name, but to choose a child with a middle name they shared. That would also make it initially harder for activists to track down the documentation. John Dines, the SDS officer who posed as John Barker, for example, did not opt for a child whose first name was John. Instead he used the identity Philip John Barker, an eight-year-old boy who died of leukaemia in 1968.