Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police

by Lewis, Paul

  The former spy compares the pressure to obtain intelligence about the Lawrence campaign with ‘a bomb going off’. He says commanders were concerned public anger would spiral into disorder on the streets and had ‘visions of Rodney King’, whose beating at the hands of police eventually led to the LA riots in 1991. ‘It was huge, monumental,’ he says. ‘They wanted the campaign to stop. It was felt it was going to turn into an elephant.’ Black says there were three SDS officers tasked with obtaining intelligence about the Lawrence family and their campaign for justice. But with his access to anti-racist groups, Black was considered to be in a key position. ‘Lawrence was a constant pressure. Throughout my deployment there was an almost constant pressure on me personally to find out anything I could that would discredit these campaigns.’ He adds: ‘I didn’t feel qualms about that. It was a public order giant and our responsibility was to quell it.’

  Finding out inside information about the Lawrence campaign was not easy. The grieving family were focused on getting justice for their son and distanced themselves from the assorted campaigns of the anti-racist movement. Much of their campaign work was co-ordinated by the moderate Anti-Racist Alliance and they showed little interest in the patchwork of campaigning groups that, according to Lawrence’s mother, Doreen, ‘were tearing each other apart and were in danger of destroying our campaign’. None of the groups that Black or the other SDS officers were infiltrating were close enough to the family to find out much useful information.

  However, they did, according to Black, resort to some appalling dirty tricks to undermine the Lawrence family. Black says he reported back any snippets of rumour that might discredit the Lawrences. ‘It wasn’t for me to work out what someone else might be able to do with the intelligence,’ he says. He and other SDS officers were ‘hunting for disinformation’ about the family that could be used against them, at a time when the Met should have been concentrating on catching the killers of their son. ‘Anything you could get. I put total conjecture into reports,’ he says. Black says that part of the problem for police was that the murdered teenager did not conform to stereotype. ‘Stephen Lawrence wanted to be an architect and he was totally clean,’ the spy adds. ‘He was almost like white, middle-class. He was not your usual black kid, he had never been in trouble.’

  As Lawrence and his family could not be undermined, Black says police found a way to discredit him by association. On the night Lawrence was killed, he was with Duwayne Brooks, a friend, who was also the main witness to the murder. Black recalls a concerted effort to find dirt on Brooks, who was becoming involved in anti-racist campaigning. When Brooks visited Kingsway College, Black paid close attention. ‘I remember I was watching him all the time,’ he says. ‘Because if you watch somebody really carefully, you get a feel for somebody.’

  Later, Black and another SDS officer embedded in the anti-racist movement trawled through ‘hours upon hours’ of footage from one of the protests against the BNP which had turned unruly. The police were desperate to find any evidence that Brooks himself participated in the violence. Senior officers, Black says, wanted to ‘smear’ the Lawrence family’s campaign. ‘They were trying to tar Stephen Lawrence,’ he adds. ‘If we could come up with anything like that, that was genius. We were trying to stop the campaign in its tracks.’

  Duwayne Brooks was captured on video in the mêlée at a demonstration in Welling in May and later admitted to being caught up in the frenzied anger over the death of Lawrence, who had been murdered just weeks before. Brooks was pictured holding a stick, and was part of a crowd of youths who pushed over a car, although he did not himself damage the vehicle. He was arrested in October that year, after the Lawrence suspects were released, and charged with criminal damage. The Crown Prosecution Service appeared desperate to prosecute him, despite protestations from a judge, who eventually stayed the proceedings. Brooks has repeatedly asked why he was targeted by the authorities during the failed prosecution, saying he feared they had a vendetta against him.

  When the Macpherson inquiry was eventually announced, Black says he argued strongly that the role played by the SDS in obtaining intelligence about the Lawrence campaign should be disclosed. ‘I was convinced that the SDS should come clean,’ he says. ‘The inquiry was an investigation into all aspects of the police, to reassure the public. I was overruled.’ He believes the decision to keep the spying operation secret from Macpherson was taken at the top of Special Branch. ‘The remit of the SDS was to prevent disorder. The overall consensus was that if my role had been made public, the streets of London would have erupted all over again,’ he says.

  By then, a decision had been taken to remove Black from the field, bringing a premature end to what should have been a five-year tour. Black wanted to remain undercover, believing that he was well placed to monitor the impact the Macpherson inquiry would have on the anti-racist movement. But his managers insisted he should come out, to be replaced by another SDS officer at a later date.

  Black began preparing his exit. In one sense, it was the worst time for someone to say that they were leaving anti-racist campaigns out of disillusionment. They were reaching a high point: a public inquiry into endemic racism in the police. There was a buzz of excitement, a sense that objectives were being achieved. Still, Black was told by his bosses it was time to go. He put into place an elaborate subterfuge for what the SDS called an ‘off-plan’ – the process through which he planned to disappear quietly, without raising alarm bells.

  Every undercover officer will have a different explanation for their disappearance, although the SDS had a few set pieces. Most commonly its officers pretended to have a mental breakdown or go on the run from police. But there will always be slight differences – personalised adaptations that suit each officer. Black says that a good undercover operative starts planting the idea of their eventual exit among activists almost as soon as their deployment begins. They will then have a ready-made excuse, which can be used at short notice whenever they need to leave.

  In the summer of 1997, Black started to draw together various threads from his cover story in order to weave together his excuse for leaving. Throughout his deployment, Black often talked about wanting to go travelling abroad, spreading the idea that he had always yearned to go wandering. Now, he told his friends, the time had come. He pretended that his mother had finally lost her long battle with cancer. He also claimed that this had coincided with more bad news: he had been sacked from his job at the school. This did not come as a surprise to his friends. Preparing the ground, Black had spent months complaining about his work as a handyman, saying he was being paid pennies to work long hours.

  To his friends, the confluence of events must have seemed like bad luck. In quick succession, his mother had died and he had lost his job. It was no wonder that he seemed to be going through a personal crisis and contemplating going abroad.

  All Black needed now was a reason not to return. He confided in friends that he was so angry at his treatment by the school authorities that he had stolen the van, televisions, videos and other equipment from the grounds. Black was about to flee the country, avoiding any interview with the detectives who were investigating the theft at the school.

  It was a stupid thing to have done, but in keeping with the headstrong activist his friends had come to know. What must have seemed to them to be the height of irrationality was, in fact, a meticulously planned deception, laid out in detail in a confidential Special Branch document headed ‘Withdrawal Strategy’. The 1997 report is written by Lambert, who clinically unravels what he calls Black’s ‘web of deception’. Lambert praised Black for ‘winning the complete confidence of senior activists at the very heart of a committed and insular group’. But now the ‘overriding objective’ was to ‘ensure the ongoing credibility of a departing activist who has formed close relationships within a security-conscious group.’

  The plan, according to Lambert, needed to take into account the ‘close trust’ Black had built with his friends, en
suring that even after his departure ‘his political comrades have every reason to believe in the authenticity of his alter ego’. Lambert reflected on the work Black had put into convincing his friends that he wanted a fresh start in life and concluded: ‘It appears entirely understandable to them that he should, notwithstanding his commitment to their shared revolutionary political ideals, be contemplating a dramatic change of lifestyle.’

  Black sold the contents of his flat and gave the proceeds to Militant. He then went on a six-week trip on his own. He drove the stolen school van through Normandy, Brittany and along the French coast and then on to Barcelona. He slept in the van, picking up odd bits of bar work and manual labour for a few days at a time. Then he sold the van and flew to Greece. Although he was abroad, Black had to maintain the deception. He phoned the activists from call boxes and sent them postcards, with the all-important postmarks to show that he was abroad. To make the deception more persuasive, Black travelled back to Greece just before Christmas to post another set of postcards. The correspondence left hanging a suggestion that Black was unsure where he was going next, hinting they might not hear from him for some time.

  By creating the illusion of constant movement, it made it far less likely his friends would suggest linking up with him on a holiday abroad. He wanted to leave a paper trail that could be used as proof of his foreign journey, using a credit card stolen from the school to pay for petrol and hotels. However improbable it might seem, Black felt it was not beyond the realms of possibility that activists would gain access to bank records to check where he had been. ‘It’s a golden rule – don’t underestimate your opponents,’ he says. Lambert was kept abreast of every move and the SDS quietly reimbursed the school for the stolen credit card, van and equipment.

  The deception worked. Many years later, the activists Black infiltrated still remember the totally believable circumstances of his departure from London in search of a new life abroad. No one questioned it. Sell says that no one in the YRE ‘remotely suspected him’ of being a policeman, during his deployment or in the years after.

  For Black, the trip abroad was an opportunity to rediscover his former self. The weeks and months when SDS officers are made to travel to distant places abroad can be the most testing times. They are alone, without the visual prompts or surroundings to remind them which identity they are supposed to be adopting – police officer or political activist. They have time to reflect on the years they spent living as someone else and decide who they now want to be.

  Black spent six weeks on his own, contemplating his past and future. He was frustrated that his deployment had come to a premature end. ‘I was not happy about coming off, not by a long fucking way,’ he says. ‘I wanted to get my head together. After what you have been through, you want to be alone. You need time to think of what you have been doing, what’s happened and what the activists mean to you.’ He repeated to himself the SDS mantra, drilled into spies to ensure they do not get too close to activists: ‘They are not your friends, they are your targets.’

  Not long after his extended holiday under the Mediterranean sun, Black returned to London to say another set of goodbyes, this time to fellow ‘hairies’ in the 27 Club. Formally, Black left the SDS on September 27 1997, a valued member of the team.

  As part of his au revoirs, the SDS went paintballing outside London, a typical day out for the SDS and a chance to – quite literally, in their case – let their hair down. He was given a leaving card, on the theme of Star Wars and Darth Vader. The card shows the esteem Black was held in and gives an insight into SDS camaraderie. Lambert, as befitting of the boss, used a football manager analogy to compliment Black’s professionalism: ‘Congratulations on a truly fantastic performance – Premier Division – no question,’ wrote Lambert, a keen Chelsea supporter. ‘Welcome to that early retirement feeling.’ Another SDS manager praised Black for a ‘job really well done … in your inimitable style’. A quiet, shy-looking colleague called Jim Boyling, who was in the middle of a deployment that would eventually prove as morally fraught as Lambert’s, wrote simply: ‘Can I have your van and regimental ponytail?’

  Others made a play on Black’s reputation as an angry man. Squad member Chris joked ‘Calm down’, while another, Trevor, wrote: ‘To Mr Angry, well it’s all over, four years of blood guts and cheers.’ Another member, going by the name of ‘Sauce’, perhaps best summed up the attitude the squad had toward political activists, with a short poem: ‘Whenever the comrades see Reservoir Dogs / They will think of you Pete and ask “Why was he such an angry sod?” / We know the reason, the answer why. They’re weary fuckers and they deserve to die.’

  *

  Life after the SDS was not easy for Black. After a six-month break, he was reassigned to other duties in Special Branch. It was far less exciting stuff. He was looking after covert recording devices used to pick up conversations and film suspects. His old boss acknowledged that Black was struggling to adjust.

  In a note written in January 1998, after a debriefing over ‘a nice lunch at a nearby tandoori’, Lambert wrote that Black was ‘missing the activity or stimulation of the job … This is natural, particularly after such a consuming role or alter ego as the one he adopted.’ The truth was actually far worse for Black. In his words, he was ‘not a well teddy’.

  The psychological damage from his undercover work took a while to manifest itself, but when it did, Black was in a bad mental state. Part of the problem was that his undercover life had placed a nerve-wracking strain on Black, who felt on edge throughout his four-year deployment. ‘It’s too much to be able to deal with,’ he says. ‘I never had any respite when I was back at home. I simply couldn’t relax. The respite for me was being back in my undercover flat because that was where I was supposed to be.’

  His bosses admitted in an assessment in 1998 that Black had been ‘engaged for four years on dangerous and demanding specialist operational duties’, and ‘not unnaturally, such pressure took its toll, and he undoubtedly experienced extreme stress, which affected both him and his family’.

  It was only looking back that Black realised the strain he was under during his undercover life. He was constantly worried he would be found out by his friends, or worse still targeted by any number of far-right groups who made a pastime out of hunting down lefties and beating them up. As a well-known face on anti-fascist demonstrations, Black had always worried he might be cornered one day by a group of Nazis. The SDS had ways of minimising the likelihood one of their own was attacked in this way. SDS officers who had infiltrated neo-Nazi groups could, for example, go through the photo collections that Nazis kept of prominent left-wingers they wanted to target, surreptitiously removing images of those who were fellow undercover police. But there was still a risk an SDS officer like Black could be targeted. In his Furlong Road flat, he had always slept with a heavy torch, baseball bat and a knife beside his bed.

  ‘I used to have a hell of a lot of nightmares, all the time I was undercover. Everything you were doing in your SDS life was perfect, but in your nightmares, you fuck it up constantly.’ Now these same nightmares were continuing, and would do for years: flashbacks to the orange smoke and cavalry charges at the Welling demonstration, his terrifying week in the Bavarian forest, or his fights with the Nazis or the police.

  These anxiety-inducing memories only partly explained Black’s mental deterioration. He was also unable to cope with the realisation that his deployment had changed him permanently. He was now irrevocably different to the keen young constable who had gone undercover years earlier.

  When his deployment began, Black had a clear sense of who he actually was. Now he could not shake the feeling that part of his inner core was the person he had been pretending to be for four years. As he puts it: ‘I was a different person when I went in to what I came out. You have created an identity so well for the purpose of survival, you then end up getting rid of whatever else you had.’

  When he tried to resume normal police work, he found
it difficult, as he puts it, to get ‘out of his role’ as a revolutionary, hard-headed activist. He likens it to some of the Method actors such as Daniel Day-Lewis who immerse themselves so much in a character that they continue to live in that role, even off-stage or when the cameras are turned off.

  ‘I had spent years hating the police and then suddenly I was one of them again. I just couldn’t deal with it. You can be easily traumatised [when undercover] in the SDS because the police are chasing you with their horses and their sticks,’ he says. ‘It was a total head-bender. I was a police officer, but in my undercover role I hated the police with a vengeance. They were the enemy. I had been in too deep and for too long. I had real sympathy for the “black justice” campaigns. I also witnessed numerous acts of appalling police brutality on protesters. I genuinely became anti-police.’

  Black had come close up to families who had lost loved ones at the hands of police, and personally had a series of bruising encounters with riot officers himself. Black is adamant that he did not develop ‘Stockholm syndrome’, the psychological phenomenon that Mike Chitty claimed to have been suffering a few years earlier. Instead, Black felt his changed state of mind was a rational response to what he saw as the routine misbehaviour by his uniformed colleagues: ‘It was the simple reality that they were repeatedly in the wrong.’

  After clashes with police management, and time off sick suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), his managers decided that Black was unfit to continue as a police officer. In April 2001, the Met retired him and gave him a pension. He was 36.

  Black was angry at his treatment and not in the mood to ‘take any shit’. He contacted lawyers and launched legal action against the Met for damages, arguing that his mental health had been damaged as a direct result of his covert work. He is believed to have been the first SDS officer ever to sue the squad over a failure to look after its spies. A few years previously, Mike Chitty had threatened legal action, but had apparently dropped it. Many officers in the squad, according to Black, had suffered mental problems, but they had all coped on their own and not made a fuss.