Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police

by Lewis, Paul

  The same ploy appears to have been used by Bob Lambert, whose undercover alias was Bob Robinson. He seems to have used the identity of Mark Robert Robinson, who was born in Plumstead, south-east London, on February 28 1952. SDS officers always looked for children who were born around the same time as them, and Lambert’s choice was ideal – born just 16 days before Lambert’s real date of birth. He died of acute congestive cardiac failure at the age of seven after being born with a malformed heart. The child’s headstone was a sculpture of the boy stood guard above the grave in Branksome cemetery near Poole. The engraving said: ‘Safe in the arms of Jesus’.

  It seems likely that Lambert visited the boy’s gravestone. SDS officers often did. They were not just using the names of deceased people – they were assuming their entire identities, so they made sure they familiarised themselves with the lives of the people they were pretending to be. That usually meant a visit to the house where the child was born and spent the first few years of their life, to get to know the surroundings. ‘It’s those little details that really matter – the weird smell coming out of the drain that’s been broken for years, the location of the corner Post Office, the number of the bus you get to go from one place to another,’ Black says.

  SDS officers memorised the names of the dead child’s mother, father and siblings, as well as other relatives, and found ways to work small details into their own back-story. Black for example used his fake father’s job in the armed forces to integrate a ‘violent’ streak to his persona. ‘I actually built into my identity the fact that my father was a trained Royal Marine and he used to beat me up,’ he says. The fact he was pretending to be a dead person would always linger at the back of Black’s mind, particularly during the awkward moments of his deployment when he celebrated his acquired birthday. He knew that was a day when the boy’s parents were ‘thinking about their son and missing him’. ‘I used to get this really odd feeling – I wish I had not done it,’ he says. ‘It was almost like stomping on the grave.’

  Aside from the ethical problem, there was also one very obvious risk to using a real person’s identity. There were flaws in the formula: activists could always get hold of the dead child’s birth certificate and then try to track down their real family. ‘They could go and find the mother listed in the birth certificate and turn up on their doorstep,’ Black says. ‘They could knock on her door and say, “Where is your son, I want to hurt him because he is an infiltrator.” And all she will be able to say is, “What are you talking about? My son died.” These are the kind of things you start to imagine. You worry about all the random hurt being dished out to people who don’t deserve it, all because of what you are doing.’

  The other risk the SDS ran was even more serious. There was always a possibility that activists would not stop looking after discovering the birth certificate. What if they somehow managed to root out the death certificate, too?

  Black knew of one such case. It concerned an SDS officer who infiltrated a left-wing group in the 1970s. One day, the SDS officer was invited by some campaigners to a drinking session at a pub followed by what was supposed to be a party at a friend’s house. The spy realised something was not quite right as soon as he walked into the flat, located in a tower block. The atmosphere changed. His friends were looking at him strangely.

  One activist blocked the door; others lined up around the room. Then the campaigners produced a piece of paper and handed it to the SDS officer. It was his death certificate, suggesting he had died, decades ago, as a young boy. So what was he doing, alive and well, attending their meetings?

  Put on the spot, the SDS officer blustered. He began to panic. Fearing the situation was not going to end well, he glanced around the room for an escape route. His eyes settled on an open window and, acting on impulse, he ran and jumped through, forgetting he was two storeys up. The officer hit the ground, breaking a bone in his ankle, and was last seen hobbling away in agony. To this day, the former SDS spy still walks with a limp.

  The activists were never able to work out he was a police officer, although they presumed he was some kind of imposter. By that point, the SDS decided it was too risky for him to continue undercover. When he was released from hospital, the SDS operative’s managers told him his deployment was effectively terminated.

  Many years later, Black was sitting around at a party with an old left-wing activist who began telling the very same story, from the perspective of the campaigners who had outed the infiltrator. The tale came out of the blue when the activist suddenly announced: ‘I caught a spy once.’ He went on to retell the story: the trip to the pub, the interrogation at the flat, the look on the man’s face when he realised the game was up and jumped out of the window.

  As he heard the story, Black’s heart began racing. He wondered if the anecdote was a prelude to him being confronted. Were these activists about to produce his death certificate? ‘You never know,’ he said. ‘When you first go undercover, you start off being extremely paranoid. Lots of activists think that there are spies left, right and centre.’ As it turned out, it was an innocent, light-hearted conversation.

  Black has never disclosed the full details of the dead boy whose identity he used. The name ‘Pete Black’ was one of several he used when he was undercover and it was not that of a dead child. Other times he called himself Pete Daley. It was not unusual for activists to have several different names. But the dead child’s name was the most important one. It was printed on the fake passport, driving licence, bank account and national insurance card he was issued by the SDS. Once he had those documents, his transformation was almost complete.

  Undercover officers who are deployed to infiltrate serious criminal conspiracies are sent on formal training courses beforehand, but that was not the SDS way. Black was told he was to learn his spycraft through osmosis, taking his lead from more senior SDS spies, who were considered the real experts. ‘As the back-office person, you watch these people and that is how you learn the way to behave in order to do the job,’ he says. ‘You realise that if you arrested a group of people from the BNP and then you sat them down in a room to watch them all and tried to work out which one the undercover policeman was, you would not be able to do it.’

  The squad had an oral culture in which knowledge, experience and tricks were handed down to the new recruits by old hands. Black was assigned a mentor for his first year. A former SDS officer who had infiltrated the Anti-Nazi League and the Socialist Workers Party in the 1970s, he was ‘very professional and regarded with a lot of esteem’, Black says. To use the jargon of the squad, his mentor was ‘a very deep swimmer’.

  As Black prepared to start his covert mission, senior officers in the SDS were deciding on his future undercover role. They were constantly working out which political groups needed infiltrating and which officers would make suitable spies. Initially, Black was lined up to become an anarchist. At least three SDS officers had already been embedded in anarchist groups in the early 1990s. One was in a small anarchist group called the Direct Action Movement (DAM), which had existed since 1979. Its associates believed capitalism should be abolished by workers organising themselves at the grassroots level, a political philosophy known as anarcho-syndicalism dating back to the late 1890s. One confidential Special Branch document states that a detective constable who worked as an SDS spy ‘successfully’ infiltrated DAM between 1990 and 1993.

  Another group of interest to the SDS was the better-known Class War, which achieved some notoriety after it was set up in the 1980s. Anarchists linked with Class War produced a newspaper of the same name, styling it Britain’s most unruly tabloid. At its zenith, it was reputedly selling 15,000 copies per week. It provoked a lather of indignation from the right-wing tabloid press, which was enraged by the publication’s tongue-in-cheek promotion of violence against the wealthy. One front-page headline suggested that the newly married Duke and Duchess of York were ‘Better Dead Than Wed’, while the birth of Prince William was greeted with ‘Another
Fucking Royal Parasite’. A third showed the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher with a hatchet buried in her head.

  A regular feature was the ‘hospitalised copper’ page – a photograph of a police officer being assaulted. ‘We loved that. But it was done with humour, so even though it was violent, it didn’t come across as psychotic violence,’ says Ian Bone, Class War’s loudest advocate. There was an element of pantomime about the group – in their ‘Bash the Rich’ demonstrations, supporters were invited to march into affluent areas of London such as Kensington and Hampstead.

  Bone, a wiry sociology graduate with small round glasses who was once dubbed ‘Britain’s most dangerous man’ by the press, said later that no rich people were actually ‘bashed’ – ‘but it felt good walking down there. We gave a lot of abuse and shouts and they did cower, a few of them, behind their curtains.’ The SDS viewed Bone and his friends as considerably more sinister. The unit posted at least two undercover police into the group.

  One was in place in February 1992 when he had a meeting in a London safe house with David Shayler, the MI5 officer later jailed for breaking the Official Secrets Act after leaking details of alleged incompetence in the secret services. Shayler had at that time been assigned to investigate whether Class War posed a threat to British democracy. The SDS officer supplied intelligence to the Security Service, and had become an official MI5 informant, designated the code number M2589.

  According to Shayler, the ‘peculiar arrangement’ in which the SDS officer lived the life of an anarchist for six days a week, returning only occasionally to his friends and family, had ‘affected the agent psychologically’. Shayler recounts: ‘After around four years of pretending to be an anarchist, he had clearly become one. To use the service jargon, he had gone native. He drank about six cans of Special Brew during the debrief, and regaled us with stories about beating up uniformed officers as part of his “cover”. Partly as a result, he was “terminated” after the 1992 general election. Without his organisational skills, Class War fell apart.’

  According to Black, the true story was a little different. He says the SDS officer in question was a ‘top end’ operative who served the unit well. During the encounter with the MI5 officer, he acted the part of a coarse anarchist because he had little time for Shayler, who was perceived to be a ‘desk wanker’ – though Black concedes that ‘some MI5 desk officers who came out to talk to us were superb and we had a very, very good relationship with them’. A second SDS officer was later sent into Class War, but it became apparent the group was fading out. Rather ignominiously for the anarchists who wanted to tear down the state, the SDS concluded they could no longer justify spending money to infiltrate them.

  Hence, in 1993, when Black was due to begin his life as an anarchist protester, the plan was suddenly changed. Black was disappointed; he had spent months perfecting his persona as an anarchist. ‘It was all based around the fact that I was a half-German anarchist with tenuous connections to the Baader-Meinhof group. It sounds ridiculous when you say it and it’s hard to imagine that it would stand up to scrutiny, but it would have,’ he says. ‘I used lots of elements of my own life to ensure it came across realistically.’

  Instead, weeks before he was due to be deployed, he was called into the office by the head of the SDS. ‘The boss pulled me in and said: “This anarchist work you’ve been doing, absolutely spot on. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody work so hard on their cover. First class. Now you can fucking forget all about it because you are not going into the anarchists. We’ve got something else in mind.”’

  At short notice, Black was plunged into another world – the bitter and at times violent conflict between the far right and their adversaries in the anti-racist movement. The far right was spreading its neo-Nazi message across the country, leading to a surge in racially motivated attacks and murders. They were also attacking the left at demonstrations, using iron bars, hammers and bottles as weapons.

  The anti-fascists could be similarly violent in their retaliation. Some felt they needed to crush the resurgent far-right movement, using force if necessary, before it had a chance to take hold. The approach had a historical tradition – famously, thousands of Jews, socialists, anarchists, Irish Catholic dockers and others successfully blocked fascists led by Oswald Mosley from marching through east London in 1936. Of course, there were many other anti-racist groups who did not agree with using violence, deriding the tactic of ‘bashing the fash’ as immature and unjustified.

  Still, there had been a string of bruising encounters between neo-Nazis and their opponents in London. Some of the most ferocious clashes occurred one Saturday afternoon in September 1992 when there were running battles between hundreds of anti-fascists and racists for hours in and around London’s Waterloo station. More than 40 were arrested during the fighting which closed the station for 45 minutes and trapped passengers on platforms, as fighting spilled onto the concourse. Sixteen people were injured as anti-fascists sought to stop the racists from assembling and then travelling to see a concert organised by a neo-Nazi group called Blood and Honour.

  Inevitably, the clashes came under the scrutiny of the SDS, which felt it needed to get a hold on what was happening. Black was redirected into the anti-racist movement. The detail of his mission was set out in a classified report, headed ‘Targeting Strategy’. It was produced by the head of the SDS in September 1993. ‘The continuing major threat to public order caused by the confrontations between right- and left-wing adherents continues to be a priority target for the SDS,’ he wrote. ‘Recent events show this is likely to be the dominant issue for street protests for the foreseeable future.’

  The key group the SDS believed was involved in confronting the far right was called Anti-Fascist Action (AFA). Formed in the mid-1980s through a loose alliance of anarchists and left-wingers, the SDS said it was now subject to a political rift. In a trait painfully familiar to radical politics over the decades, there was an alphabet soup of competing organisations campaigning against racists. To make matters more complicated, each group was often just a front, controlled by another political faction.

  Black was told he should penetrate Youth Against Racism in Europe, better known by its acronym YRE. It was a front for the revolutionary left-wing group, Militant. The head of the SDS believed there was a new anti-fascist alliance forming ‘within the loose confederation’ of the YRE, a second Trotskyist group and ‘sundry ad-hoc student and Asian youth groups’. The SDS boss identified an obscure anti-fascist group at a further education college in Camden, north London, as a possible stepping stone into the YRE.

  The SDS technique was to identify a key individual within a political group and get close to them. In Black’s case, the target was an anti-fascist campaigner at Kingsway College. Black was instructed to attend the college and befriend this particular individual, who had connections with the YRE. ‘This allows an entry into the YRE and possibly AFA,’ his boss wrote. If this failed, there was a plan B: Black could penetrate ‘an autonomous group of anarchists’ based in Hackney, east London who had been previously infiltrated by the SDS.

  Tensions on the streets were rapidly rising. They were brought to the boil on September 16 1993, when the BNP won its first-ever council seat: Derek Beackon was elected on to Tower Hamlets council, a deprived working-class area in east London. His election followed a number of racist attacks in the area – the previous week, for instance, a gang of eight white men had beaten a 17-year-old Asian boy called Quddus Ali and left him in a four-month-long coma, resulting in permanent brain damage. The election triggered further demonstrations, some of them violent.

  One flashpoint was Brick Lane, the heartland of the Bangladeshi community. For many years, the fascists had been selling their newspapers on the street on Sundays. Their anti-fascist adversaries made several attempts to physically drive them away.

  The weekend after Beackon’s election, the anti-fascists pulled off what they believed was a small but important victory. As u
sual, the BNP were standing around selling their paper when they were joined by a group of 20 skinheads dressed in fascist uniform: bomber jackets, jeans and Dr Martens boots. They were chanting ‘Rule Britannia’ and giving Nazi salutes. The police allowed these apparent sympathisers to stand next to the BNP. Seconds later, the small group of skinheads turned on the BNP, attacking them and chasing them down the street.

  The YRE activists who had disguised themselves as racists felt victorious. One told the Guardian newspaper: ‘The damage we did to the Nazis that day was very effective. They have been taken out of the streets and neutralised in the Brick Lane area. Our prime aim is to build a mass-based anti-racist movement, but we also believe in tackling the Nazis head on. It gives the community confidence and helps them to help themselves.’

  That same month, Black started his undercover role in college, taking his first tentative steps en route to the YRE. He had few clues to guide him. Intelligence about the Kingsway group was virtually non-existent. ‘The SDS didn’t have a clue about exactly what the group was up to. Nothing at all,’ Black says. He recalls one superior telling him: ‘There is no pre-intelligence, but we know that you know how to look after yourself, so best of luck to you.’

  The deployment did not start well. ‘The SDS did not realise that the Kingsway college was split across four different sites,’ Black says. ‘All I had was a name and a group so I enrolled at the college only to find that I had actually joined the wrong part. I wasn’t where I needed to be at all.’ Where he needed to be was at the college’s site in Gray’s Inn Road. Black was feeling vulnerable. The last-minute change to his deployment meant he did not have much time to ‘put together my new character’.