Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police

by Lewis, Paul

  Black insisted that the SDS was at fault and said he was not going to back down. He argued that police chiefs should have had safeguards in place to protect the mental welfare of their operatives and paid closer attention to the long-term psychological consequences of spending half a decade living a double life. It is a view privately supported by other SDS officers, including one who says that when he was deployed in the 1970s, operatives who complained were considered wimps and risked being thrown off the squad. The solution to mentally unwell officers was invariably a good drink with the lads down at the pub.

  Two decades later, when Black was recruited, not much had changed. In the archives of Scotland Yard one document reveals how the SDS sought out advice on how to deal with long-term infiltration. The head of the squad flew to America to consult the FBI on how they handled prolonged espionage.

  When he returned, the senior officer issued a guidance document, which essentially put the onus on undercover officers to monitor their levels of stress. The guidance listed some common symptoms of stress for spies, such as ‘development of a “short fuse” or uncharacteristic anger and resentment’ and ‘significant increase in alcohol consumption’. The guidance was greeted with amusement. SDS officers deployed at the time joked that, between them, the squad exhibited every symptom on the list.

  In his legal action, Black argued that, with the exception of this flawed guidance for stress monitoring, the unit had no substantial procedures in place to care for their operatives. There was no profiling to check the psychological make-up of recruits, for example, before they were sent undercover, to see if they could handle the pressure. Black felt his headstrong personality was unsuited to undercover work. ‘I should never have done this work in the first place, because I can’t do anything half-arsed,’ he says.

  When word went around that Black was suing the SDS, he was joined by another former undercover officer, who had also developed PTSD. This second officer infiltrated the left wing slightly later than Black. Indeed, Black estimated that of the 10 SDS officers he served alongside, six experienced psychological issues. The SDS dismissed this claim, saying the fact that the other officers had returned to work after their deployment proved there was no wider problem. Not long after, three more former SDS officers left the Met. One retrained as a teacher, another emigrated to Canada to work as a lumberjack, while a third transferred to a force outside London, hoping for a quieter life.

  Black’s legal battle with police lasted five years. He accuses police of using dirty tricks to discourage him from pursuing his claim. He says he received anonymous calls asking to speak to his children, and he presumed it was the police attempting to frighten the family. The calls stopped, Black claims, after he told police that if anything happened to his children, he would publicly name every single SDS officer. As his dispute with police became more bitter, Black lost contact with other SDS officers. With the exception of his co-claimant, none of his former colleagues gave him any support.

  In June 2006, on the eve of the hearing in London’s high Court, Black and his SDS colleague accepted an offer from the Met to settle the case out of court. Black was characteristically reluctant to give in and wanted to turn down the offer so he could have his day in court. But his co-claimant was by then worn down and wanted the case to end.

  The Met police admitted that undercover work in the SDS had caused the pair psychiatric injury and paid them an undisclosed sum in compensation. Black says he wanted to force the Met to implement better care for future SDS spies. After his lawsuit, the SDS brought in new rules so that their undercover officers would be sent for compulsory examinations by a psychologist before, during and after their deployments.

  Even after reaching the legal settlement, Black felt he had unfinished business with his employers. One memory in particular rankled. Back in 1997, Lambert had decided that Black’s undercover mission deserved a commendation from the Special Branch for his ‘outstanding initiative and investigative skills in a prolonged sensitive operation over a four-year period’. Only a few SDS operatives were given such accolades. It was a tribute to the outstanding constable who took part in the squad’s very first overseas mission and succeeded in snuffing out a lacklustre MI5 agent. To Black’s frustration, the commendation had never actually been presented to him.

  On September 27 2007, exactly a decade after Black left the SDS, he visited Scotland Yard, passed his jacket through the airport-style security and was escorted in the lift to one of the top floors. Three men were waiting to present him with a certificate, a bottle of whisky and a Special Branch commemorative shield. One was the then head of the Yard’s counter-terrorism intelligence command. Another was the man who in many ways came to personify all that the SDS stood for: his former friend, Bob Lambert.

  Black took hold of his framed commendation. It congratulated the former spy for having ‘exhibited tradecraft of the highest order’. ‘There is little doubt that the stresses of the SDS work did disrupt his family life, almost inevitable in this kind of work, but he never relaxed his professionalism in favour of cutting corners – he is to be congratulated for this,’ it said.

  Lambert apologised to Black for not doing more to look after his mental welfare when he was undercover. It seemed old wounds were being healed. He was promised an invite to celebrate 40 years of the SDS, an anniversary that was going to be celebrated on October 27 2008.

  In the end, no invite arrived in the post. Black felt cheated again. He was told by Lambert that other members of the SDS had deemed Black too disloyal. In the grand tradition of the secret ballot in institutions such as the Freemasons, Lambert said the black balls had outweighed the white balls.

  Years after his own deployment, Lambert was, it seems, toying with Black’s feelings. After presenting Black with a formal tribute, praising his professionalism and apologising for not treating him well, Lambert had raised his hopes that he would once again be accepted in the club. Now he was telling Black that his perceived disloyalty meant that he would never truly be part of the 27 Club.

  For Black, it was the last straw. It was after that call that he decided to contact a journalist.

  CHAPTER 10

  Nothing But the Truth?

  When defendants and witnesses give evidence in a court in England or Wales, they are duty-bound to take an oath that dates back to Anglo-Saxon times. It is a promise to Almighty God that a person will speak only ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’. There is perhaps no commitment more important to the judicial process than honesty.

  For the men of the Special Demonstration Squad, this posed a problem. How could spies maintain their cover if they were called to give evidence in a trial? There was no apparent legal fix to this quandary, no get-out clause for undercover police. The solution the SDS came up with was unsurprising for a unit that had become accustomed to believing it had a licence to operate outside the normal rules. Rather than risk being found out, SDS officers would place their hands on a Bible and swear solemnly and sincerely that they would tell the truth. Then they would lie.

  The first known case of an SDS officer appearing to conceal his identity from a court involved Bob Lambert. When the spy was posing as an animal rights campaigner in London, he organised a demonstration outside a Brixton butcher, known as Murray’s Meat Market. He was joined by Steve Curtis, an activist who considered himself to be a close friend of Lambert. Their group designed what Curtis says was a provocative leaflet – two babies hanging from butchers’ hooks. When they arrived and started handing out the leaflets, the butcher’s staff were furious. Words were exchanged and amid the commotion police were called. Lambert was arrested – the only one in the group to be taken in by police, since he appeared to be the ringleader.

  Soon after, in January 1986, Lambert wrote to another campaigner, Martyn Lowe, and mentioned he was ‘backwards and forwards to Camberwell Green magistrates court for distributing “insulting” leaflets outside a butchers’ shop’. According to Curtis, Lamb
ert said he went to court once over the arrest, for what seems to have been a preliminary hearing to set the date and venue for a trial. If this was the case, Lambert would have used his fake identity of ‘Bob Robinson’. A few weeks afterwards, Lambert said the charges had been suddenly dropped.

  At the time, Curtis was surprised that prosecutors had not taken the chance to bring the case to court; protesters were often prosecuted over far more petty issues and Lambert was the kind of troublemaker police would want to see convicted. The reality is the charges were probably quietly dropped after whispered discussions between the SDS and prosecutors about the case.

  The second time Lambert appeared in court under his fictitious identity was as a witness. In the same year, Curtis was arrested on a demonstration to protest against the US president Ronald Reagan’s decision to send US jets to bomb Libya. Curtis was stood outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, talking casually to Lambert, when police suddenly swooped and arrested him for public disorder. He says he was not doing anything wrong and was astonished when magistrates sentenced him to 28 days in jail.

  Curtis lodged an appeal, which was held at Southwark Crown Court in July 1986. He recalls how Lambert appeared as a witness in court, swearing under oath that he was Bob Robinson, before he was cross-examined for 10 to 15 minutes. Lambert was one of a handful of witnesses who were called by defence lawyers to support Curtis’s version of events. The appeal failed, but the episode helped Lambert improve his standing among the activists, especially Curtis, a 21-year-old in need of legal support.

  The SDS believed that breaking the law was a kind of a rite of passage in some activist circles. It might only be trespass or vandalism, but those campaigners who were willing to undertake illegal activity were thought of as more serious players. ‘Being arrested increases your credibility among the wearies [protesters], going to court would increase your credibility,’ says Pete Black. There was always a risk. ‘The nightmare for us was being recognised by someone – you are sitting in the back of the van, surrounded by three rozzers, and one of them knows you and winks at you, then it’s over.’

  Every now and then senior Special Branch managers authorised the operatives to be prosecuted in court using their undercover aliases. There is of course a standard protocol that allows covert officers to give evidence in court during prosecutions of serious criminals. They will usually be granted anonymity by a judge and then appear behind a screen to protect their identity. The process is transparent – all sides are aware that the evidence is being provided by a covert officer. This was not an option the SDS was ever willing to contemplate for its long-term deployments.

  It would have meant prematurely ending operations each time a spy was charged or asked to give testimony in a criminal trial. And the moment one activist was exposed as a police operative, political campaigners would know the lengths police were going to gain intelligence, instantly compromising future surveillance.

  An unofficial rule of thumb therefore emerged for the SDS. Police could be prosecuted for relatively minor crimes if it was necessary for the continuation of their deployment. For example, conviction resulting in a fine or an order to do unpaid work for the community was acceptable. ‘It did not matter if you were arrested. It happened regularly. That was the easy bit. What you were worried about was what you would be charged with,’ says Black. Senior officers would not allow their spies to be prosecuted for anything serious enough to result in a jail term. ‘If there was any chance of the SDS officer going to prison, they would not go.’

  On the few occasions when SDS operatives were caught committing more serious crime, the matter was quickly escalated and dealt with behind the scenes. In such circumstances, police would lobby the Crown Prosecution Service to quietly drop the case against their spy. ‘Bob Lambert would ring up and say, “Look, we need a chat, he’s one of ours,”’ Black says. So as not to raise suspicions, that ordinarily meant charges were dropped against other protesters who might have been arrested around the same time. ‘I know of cases that were pulled because the SDS officer would have been charged with something serious,’ says Black.

  If that was not possible, the SDS had a final card it could play. Any SDS officer really worried about facing a stretch in jail could jump bail, tell their friends they were going on the run and then vanish for good. It was a deft solution: the SDS officer would have a perfect excuse to disappear at the end of their deployment. The court case against all the other activists, on the other hand, could continue.

  *

  The most well-documented case of an SDS officer misleading a court involved a doe-eyed, skinny police officer called Jim Boyling. He was one of Lambert’s juniors, working under the veteran SDS man when he was running the squad in the 1990s. Activists remember Boyling as a quiet, reticent man who seemed uncomfortable in the company of other people. His edgy demeanour was reinforced by a strange affliction that caused one of his hands to occasionally shake.

  ‘He was not a big conversationalist,’ one friend recalls. Another describes him as ‘nervous’. He had a tendency to become exasperated, even crabby, with fellow campaigners, earning the sobriquet ‘Grumpy Jim’ among friends. Activists say he was a voracious smoker of dope, smoking cannabis on a habitual, some say even daily basis. He would later dispute the claims, saying that he was ‘creating the appearance of regular drug use so as to preserve [his] undercover status.’

  His undercover alias Jim Sutton first appeared in 1995 among ‘hunt sabs’, protesters who disrupted – or ‘sabotaged’ – fox hunts. In the standard tradition of the SDS, Boyling grew a luxuriant, shaggy brown beard for the start of his covert duties. Within a year he shaved off his facial hair, making him look rather straight. The taciturn operative was then mainly tasked with infiltrating a raucous collective known as Reclaim the Streets, notorious for occupying roads and hosting impromptu street parties. It was an anti-capitalist, green movement against the dominance of cars. Its exuberant, rowdy street occupations became synonymous with the free party scene of the era.

  It was such a protest, the kind of demonstration that infuriated the capital’s taxi drivers, that Boyling joined on August 7 1996. On a cool, slightly cloudy morning, Boyling was among 500 activists who cycled slowly around Trafalgar Square in London, bringing the rush-hour traffic to a halt. Motorists sat helplessly in their cars as the shoal of cyclists pedalled from the historic square through Whitehall to Parliament Square and then back again.

  Car horns were honked and abuse shouted out of windows, to no avail. The cyclists, many wearing high-visibility jackets, waved, whooped and rang their tinny bells in defiance. Some precariously held up a banner across the road: ‘Don’t Squeeze the Tube’. They were on a solidarity protest, in support of workers on the London Underground who had gone on strike over pay and the length of their working week.

  As the demonstration wound down, a splinter group of around 20 cyclists separated off and headed to a building not far from Trafalgar Square where the managers of the Tube were based. They burst through the reception, evaded the security guards, rushed up to the seventh floor and made a beeline for the office of the chairman, Peter Ford.

  Not unusually for this kind of activist occupation, there was some light-hearted banter. ‘One of them started throwing my papers around. I asked them to leave my family photographs alone, which they did,’ Ford said. ‘I asked them what the problem was and one said they were in favour of bicycles, so I told them I was a keen cyclist.’

  Boyling hung a huge pink and white banner out of the window. In the words of one activist present that day, Sutton was ‘totally part of the crew’, one of the last two cyclists to be arrested by police and escorted from the chairman’s office.

  He was taken to Charing Cross police station where the custody sergeant locked him in a cell and inserted him into the bureaucracy as prisoner CX/5011/96 under the name of ‘Peter James Sutton’. He told police he was a cleaner living in Vicarage Road in Leyton, east London, and that he had been b
orn on April 24 1967. Six weeks later, Sutton and the other protesters were charged with threatening and abusing London Tube staff. Once again, he signed the official custody record to verify that he was ‘Peter James Sutton’.

  Over the next few months, on four separate occasions, Sutton and the other protesters made their way to Westminster magistrates court, near the River Thames. Once there, the activists stepped into one of the shabby courtrooms and waited while their lawyers and prosecutors discussed the arrangements for their trial. Throughout these months, Mike Schwarz, a lawyer at Bindmans solicitors, prepared the defence strategy for his clients, diligently scrutinising the police’s evidence as the trial approached. As would be expected, Boyling, still posing as Sutton, was part of those private discussions about the tactics.

  In January 1997, all the activists were back at the magistrates court in Horseferry Road for their three-day trial. Boyling’s evidence to the court was recorded in notes taken by the court clerk: after he swore under oath to tell the truth, the spy testified that he was ‘Peter James Sutton’ and, under questioning, supported the account of the arrests which had been given by fellow activists. He rebutted claims by prosecutors that protesters had been ‘shouting and screaming’. Boyling and his comrades must have come across as honest and sincere witnesses because by the end of the trial, the court sided with them and against the prosecution. Boyling and all but one of the protesters were cleared of the charges.