Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police

by Lewis, Paul

  The spy watched from afar as the child grew up. He was reputed to have been agonised by the separation from his child. The story was recounted by Lambert to new recruits like Black without even hinting that he too had fathered a child undercover. Lambert even had the gall to criticise the officer for behaving unprofessionally. He told Black that the moral of the story was that he should always use contraception when sleeping with political campaigners.

  Black’s wife knew that he was undercover, but was unaware of the details of his work and certainly had no idea he was sleeping with other women. His long absences and unforgiving schedule left virtually no time for his wife and two children. For more than four years, he was away for six days a week. Sometimes, during school holidays, he found a way to spend more time back at home in the real world. But it was never enough. Black paid a personal price for ‘trying to be the best SDS officer I could ever be’. He admits his wife had a ‘very difficult time’. ‘The fact I was working so much eventually caused the break-up of my marriage,’ he says.

  The top brass at the SDS, however, valued his dedication to the job. Lambert said in an early appraisal that Black was self-motivated and a hard worker who ‘demonstrated an innate professionalism’. The next year Lambert offered yet more praise: ‘Operating in a hostile environment where one slip can have serious implications for the officer and the team, [Black] has again demonstrated essential qualities of sound judgment and ingenuity. Combining, as he does, these qualities with a single-minded determination to succeed, it is a pleasure, and no real surprise, to report that his efforts have again been rewarded with excellent results.’

  The results that Lambert was referring to included regular updates on what was going on in anti-racist groups across London, as well as the inner workings of the YRE and Militant. Black calculates that Special Branch was keeping files on around 100 members of the YRE, Militant and other anti-racist campaigners at the time. The files on individuals would contain reports of their activities at protests, other more general intelligence and information from sources such as newspaper articles. It would include, for instance, where they lived, where they worked, and whom they were friendly with in the campaign. Black himself opened up new files on around 25 campaigners he believed needed to be monitored.

  Each file on an individual required an up-to-date photograph and Special Branch had an uncanny ability to acquire photographs when it needed them. Official images were available to the squad – from driving licences, passports and suspect mugshots taken inside police stations. Upon request, Special Branch could also deploy sniper-like photographers with long lenses. Black recalls arranging for one such snapper to be hidden in a van outside Conway Hall in London to capture images of everyone who attended one of Militant’s conferences. The SDS also had access to the network of CCTV cameras that in the mid-1990s were proliferating across the capital. When Black travelled on the Tube with activists, Special Branch acquired footage from London Underground, enabling the officer to identify who he was with.

  While Black’s job was primarily to hoover up intelligence, there were opportunities for him to broaden his mandate. On one occasion this enabled him to realise a schoolboy dream. For decades, surveillance of radical left-wing groups had been a staple feature of MI5’s work. Government ministers had, since the 1950s, ordained that the Security Service could spy on any individual who might undermine parliamentary democracy, national security or the economic wellbeing of the country. Critics complained that MI5 was effectively spying on individuals for having opinions that the government disliked, using a definition of subversion that was so loose that it included anyone who was exercising their democratic right to protest.

  The point is made by Annie Machon, a one-time MI5 officer who resigned in protest at its activities. She says that from 1952: ‘MI5 and subsequent governments used to argue that all members of certain parties – such as the Communist Party of Great Britain or later the bewildering array of Trotskyists, with names like the International Marxist Group, Workers Revolutionary Party, Revolutionary Communist Group, anarchists and the extreme left – were threats to the security of the state or our democratic system. This in itself is a contentious proposition. None of these Trotskyist groups was cultivating Eastern bloc finance or building bombs in smoky back rooms but were instead using legitimate democratic methods to make their case, such as standing in elections, organising demonstrations and “educating” the workers.’

  During the cold war, MI5 devoted huge resources to spying on left-wingers; tapping phones, opening mail and running agents within organisations. For a long time, Militant was a prime focus, because of the threat it posed to the Labour Party. But by the early 1990s, MI5 was becoming less interested in domestic political threats. It was becoming harder for the spooks to justify spying on groups that, by any objective view, posed little or no threat to the foundations of the state. Militant, whose membership was in any case beginning to dwindle, was operating as an open political party. According to Machon, MI5 began to downgrade its work spying on revolutionary left-wing groups around 1993. By late 1995, according to one account, MI5 was allocating only one of its officers to monitoring so-called subversives.

  Lambert and others in command of the SDS spotted an opportunity. As MI5 retreated, the SDS could occupy the ground the security services were vacating. In one confidential briefing memo, Lambert noted how MI5 was winding down its ‘active role in respect of domestic subversion’. The SDS offered to channel intelligence about Militant to MI5, keeping them abreast of what was going on in the group.

  The offer was accepted and, in 1995, Black began a dual role, working partly under the command of the SDS but also as an official informant for MI5, with his own code number: M2672. Lambert, who believed Militant was ‘one of the most insular groups ever penetrated by the SDS’, was impressed that one of his spies was providing intelligence for the Security Service. Black was raising the stock of the squad in official circles and allowing senior officers like Lambert to punch above their weight. When Black produced a report on a large number of Militant activists, and handed it over to MI5, Lambert complimented his efforts. ‘This performance, both in terms of content and presentation, was of the highest calibre and brought considerable kudos to the team,’ he wrote. In another Special Branch document, Lambert noted how the Security Service was ‘an appreciative consumer of the unique high-grade intelligence’ provided by Black.

  The spooks were genuinely grateful for SDS assistance. MI5 gleaned most of its intelligence not from undercover officers, but informants, many of them paid. These individuals, known as agents, were given a rudimentary instruction into espionage tradecraft by MI5, which then cultivated them as sources. According to one account, MI5 recruited around 30 Militant members to inform on their comrades over a 30-year period during the cold war, although by the early 1990s there were only a handful of snitches left. As with all informants, their reliability varied wildly.

  When Black noticed that MI5 was holding erroneous intelligence about Militant, he assumed the Security Service must have been fed by a dodgy agent. ‘I started to realise that there was a spy in our midst,’ he recalls. ‘I decided I was going to try and spot their agent. In the event, it did not take very long.’ Rather worryingly, Black says the MI5 agent stood out like a sore thumb.

  ‘He was doing things like only turning up to meetings when something really interesting was being talked about. Those sort of things made him stand out,’ he adds. Acting on his instincts, Black decided to confront MI5 and ask them: ‘Is he one of yours?’ The question sparked an immediate reaction from the MI5 officer in charge of running agents. The agent handler left Thames House, MI5’s imposing headquarters on the bank of the River Thames, for a hasty meeting with Black, Lambert and other Special Branch officers in the safe house in Beaumont Court, Chiswick.

  It felt like a showdown. At first, the MI5 officer refused to give anything away about the suspected agent. ‘They tried to bluff me and said they could not c
onfirm it, but they would take [my suspicions] on board,’ Black says. But the SDS officer was characteristically stubborn, insisting he had the right man. Eventually, Lambert and the other officers were asked to leave the room. Black and the man from MI5 remained, for a ‘frank discussion’ about the Militant activist identified as an agent.

  ‘I said to him that I knew it was him, and if he did not agree that the man was an agent, I would expose him at the next Militant meeting. The handler replied, “OK, he is ours – don’t blow him out of the water but we will get rid of him.”’ The MI5 agent was withdrawn a couple of months later. Black felt the move was long overdue; if he had managed to work out the informant’s true motives, then so too could other members of Militant. They might easily have fed the agent faulty information, knowing it would be passed on to MI5.

  ‘The biggest problem was that his intelligence reports were shit,’ Black says. ‘He was giving information that was inaccurate about people, which meant he might well have been giving out inaccurate information about me as well.’ Later, Black’s managers told him he was the first SDS officer in history to catch out an MI5 agent. ‘So it was big kudos for the team,’ he says. ‘The Security Service was grateful.’ Later M15 came over and presented Black with a shield on a wooden block. It was engraved with MI5’s crest, and the service’s motto – ‘Regnum Defende’, Latin for ‘Defend the Realm’ – at the bottom. Black was told he was the only SDS officer to receive such an accolade. It was a moment to remember, a standout episode that Black hoped would make it into the annals of SDS folklore – the kind of success that would have made Conrad Dixon proud.

  Sitting in the Chiswick safe house with Lambert and his other SDS colleagues, Black soaked up the convivial atmosphere. ‘I felt proud at the time. It was some sort of recognition because the Special Branch does not really recognise the work you do that much,’ he says. It was an especially satisfying moment for Black, who always wanted to work for MI5. The shield still hangs on his wall in his study at home.

  Things were going well for Black. His career was on a high and he should have been proud of his achievements. But in fact he had begun to experience deep misgivings about his deployment. His final mandate as a spy would leave the normally decisive officer grappling to discern right from wrong.

  CHAPTER 9

  Exit Mr Angry

  Towards the end of Black’s deployment, the tide changed. The focus of anti-racist campaigning in London was starting to shift, and police chiefs were worried. Large numbers of people in the movement were becoming animated by a series of perceived injustices. The names of the victims, and their stories, were well known. There was Joy Gardner, a 40-year-old Jamaican who was bound and gagged with 13ft of black tape in her flat in Crouch End, north London, in 1993. The following year, Shiji Lapite, a 34-year-old Nigerian asylum seeker, received 36 injuries, including a kick to the head, and was asphyxiated in a neck-hold in the back of a police van in east London. In 1995, Brian Douglas, a 33-year-old music and boxing promoter, died after his skull was fractured. In March 1996, Gambian asylum seeker Ibrahima Sey, aged 29, was forced to the ground, sprayed repeatedly with gas and then held face down for 15 minutes. He went totally limp and stopped breathing.

  All of the victims had two things in common. They were black. And they were believed to have died as a result of police brutality.

  For many in the ‘black justice’ campaigns, it was not only the disturbing circumstances of the deaths that caused concern, but also the apparent impunity that allowed police to escape punishment. In the case of Gardner, who was being deported, the police who wrapped her in tape, while her five-year-old son was in the flat, were acquitted of her manslaughter. The circumstances of Lapite’s death in 1994 were heard by an inquest, which concluded he had been unlawfully killed. However, prosecutors decided not to bring charges against the officers who caused his injuries in the back of a police van. Another inquest concluded that Sey had been unlawfully killed when he was restrained by police and sprayed with CS gas but, again, prosecutors decided not to charge the police officers responsible.

  These were just the more high-profile cases. In the first seven years of the 1990s, a total of 484 people died following some form of contact with police. Often these were categorised as deaths in ‘custody’, meaning the individuals died in prison cells or police vans. Figures showed that deaths of this kind were rapidly increasing, and disproportionately affected black people. Against this backdrop, anti-racist groups, which had long been focusing on combating the far right, now turned their attention to racism in the police.

  The campaigns revolved around supporting grieving families in their quest for truth and justice, attending silent vigils outside police stations or political rallies. Black found himself helping to organise these anti-police protests, while at the same time passing information back to his handlers at the SDS. He was finding it harder to justify his work. He was taking part in one of these protests, standing outside Kennington police station, when he started to doubt his actions.

  ‘I found myself questioning the morality of my actions for the first time. To some extent, these campaigns had been taken over by extremists, but at their heart were families who had lost their loved ones and simply wanted justice,’ he says. ‘By targeting the groups, I was convinced that I was robbing them of the chance to ever find that justice.’

  Black, via the YRE, was particularly involved in the protests over the death of Brian Douglas. It was a long-running campaign. In May 1995, a week after Douglas died, 400 people came out on to the streets to protest outside Vauxhall police station. His relatives and friends called for the two police officers involved in arresting him to be suspended. A year later, prosecutors announced that no police officers would be prosecuted. The inquest, which recorded a verdict of misadventure, heard that Douglas and a friend had been stopped near Clapham High Street by police who believed that they possessed a CS gas canister, a lock-knife and cannabis. His friend testified that police hit Douglas twice on the head with their batons. He died from his injuries five days later. Scotland Yard said its officers acted to ensure their own safety and decided against disciplining them.

  On a personal level, Black grew uncomfortable about what he believed was the failure to hold police to account and the attempts to stifle protests over the deaths. ‘I did not feel like a proud member of the Metropolitan police,’ he says. It was a view that Black – perhaps unwisely – expressed to Lambert and others in the SDS. He told them he was worried that unless the police took deaths in custody more seriously, and disciplined officers who were at fault, there would be an escalation of violent protests. In December 1995, the death in custody of a 25-year-old black man triggered a peaceful protest outside Brixton police station which suddenly descended into disorder. Several hundred youths rioted, ransacking shops and setting fire to cars. It was a flashback to the riots of the 1980s, and a warning of what might happen in the future if police did not get a hold of this issue.

  In the end it was not a death in custody, but the appalling failures by police to properly investigate a racist killing of a black teenager that became the darkest episode in the history of the Metropolitan police. Among anti-racist campaigners, there was no case more important than the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the 18-year-old stabbed by a gang of white youths as he waited for a bus in Eltham. His death in April 1993, and its long, drawn-out aftermath, shocked the nation and proved to be a seminal moment for British race relations.

  The campaign for justice over Lawrence’s death was led by his mother, Doreen, and father, Neville. In July 1997, the then home secretary Jack Straw bowed to mounting public pressure and announced he was setting up a judge-led inquiry into the police investigation of Lawrence’s murder. The inquiry would also examine the police’s handling of racist murders and attacks in general.

  Led by the high court judge Sir William Macpherson, the inquiry eventually concluded that, as the Lawrences had said during years of being disbelieved and ignored, po
lice had failed to catch his killers because of their own racial prejudice and incompetence. Macpherson’s famous conclusion, in 1999, that London’s police were ‘institutionally racist’ was a terrible indictment of Britain’s largest and most powerful force. It took 18 years, a failed private prosecution, and the emergence of new evidence before the Lawrence family finally had some justice, when two of Stephen’s suspected killers, Gary Dobson and David Norris, were convicted for his murder in 2012.

  Back in 1997, however, in the weeks following the announcement of a public inquiry, the Met was in a state of trepidation. The tide of public opinion was turning against the force, a shift represented by the decision by the Daily Mail, historically a reliable supporter of the establishment, to back the Lawrence campaign. Behind the scenes, police chiefs were consulting lawyers as they grappled with delicate questions about how much information they should disclose to the inquiry. Most of the evidence they were considering handing over related to the investigation into Lawrence’s death, but Macpherson had cast a wide net. Black felt strongly that this was the time for the force to admit it had been spying on the black justice campaigns. He even wanted his bosses to disclose the details of his personal deployment in the anti-racist movement.

  Black knew there were some disturbing skeletons in the SDS cupboard that should have had a direct bearing on Macpherson’s deliberations. Specifically, there had once been a secret order from the top of Scotland Yard, he says, requiring the SDS to place the Lawrence campaign under surveillance. The order was given at a time when the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Sir Paul Condon, was coming under persistent pressure from the Lawrences over the failures by the police to mount a proper investigation into the murder of their son. Black says that the controversy over the Lawrence murder ‘became a huge thing for Condon’. ‘It changed my deployment,’ he says. ‘I had to get any information on what was happening in the Stephen Lawrence campaign. There was huge pressure from the commissioner downwards.’