Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (10 page)

Setting the context of his report, Lambert strikes a
philosophical
, even whimsical, note. He writes like an old sage. ‘Like all families, the SDS has, over the years, rejoiced spontaneously in the successes of its members,’ he said. The majority of the ‘ex-hairies’ had returned to Special Branch ‘without fuss or favour;
enlightened
if not necessarily enriched by the undercover experience’.

A ‘significant minority’ had left the police for successful jobs elsewhere; one had recently become a lawyer and another a psychoanalyst. But the SDS had also ‘no doubt, quite typically’ struggled at times, Lambert said. It was important to face up and come to terms with those failures. ‘If we accept, as Ray Davies put it in “Celluloid Heroes” (The Kinks, 1971, RCA Victor), that success walks hand in hand with failure, then perhaps we have a duty to tend to our casualties as well as fête our heroes.’

Clearly, Lambert was casting himself not as ruthless spycatcher, but a charitable and understanding colleague who had the
interests
of the SDS at heart. ‘Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families … and if the family doesn’t care for the victim, who else will?’ he observed. ‘And if the casualty is embittered; rejected by the family that once nurtured him, should anyone be surprised if he, with apparent malice, seeks to bring the old family home crashing to the ground?’

Lambert appreciated the danger presented by dissident, unhappy spies. They needed to be mollified. State secrets were theoretically protected, but the controversy over the publication, in the late 1980s, of
Spycatcher
, written by the ex-MI5 officer Peter Wright, highlighted the threat of rogue operatives. Nearly every spy had enough knowledge in their head to harm or even destroy the SDS if they chose to go public. That went for Chitty too. Like a true servant of the secret state, Lambert makes clear
that ‘the security of the SDS operation must take precedence over other less crucial considerations’.

At the time Lambert began his investigation, Chitty was on sick leave and in an unco-operative mood. Lambert knew he needed to get close to the ex-spy without inflaming the situation or isolating him further. Lambert wrote he was ‘a strong believer’ in a particular approach to dealing with runaway spies. It was an extension of the old adage about keeping your friends close but your enemies closer: sidling up to rogue operatives to offer them friendship and support.

‘At best it helps inhibit further unprofessional behaviour and at the very least it provides access to their schemes and disruptive activity,’ he said. Feigning empathy for Chitty was never going to be hard for Lambert. Duplicity was what Lambert was brilliant at. One Special Branch colleague who worked alongside Lambert around that time says he was ‘able to lie as easily as he breathes’.

For more than a year and a half, Lambert befriended Chitty, pretending to be a sympathetic and loyal colleague. Lambert calculated that perhaps the ‘old SDS bond still counted for
something
’ in his dealings with the unrepentant officer. During his many encounters with Chitty, Lambert says he was met with ‘a never-ending stream of ranting against persecution’. The visits to Chitty’s home to check on his welfare he describes as ‘a
hazardous
affair’.

On one occasion when Lambert and another ex-SDS spy went to visit Chitty, they ended up having to escort him from a ‘saloon bar in a public house in Redhill when the licensee could no longer tolerate [his] loud profanities’. Chitty was expressing his fury for the senior officer who had confronted him over his expenses claims. Lambert believed the falling-out between Chitty and his senior officer had turned into something of a vendetta by the former SDS spy.

In his report, Lambert portrayed Chitty as aggressive and ready to snap. He said the Police Federation, which represents officers when they are in dispute with their employers, ‘received short shrift’ from Chitty. He was even angry toward colleagues in the VIP bodyguard unit, whom he accused of treachery, telling Lambert that they ‘dared not go within a mile’ of his home in Surrey. According to Lambert, Chitty had developed a ‘
remarkable
fixation with a conspiracy theory’ and said he was worried that Special Branch wanted to get him on a trumped-up charge of expenses fraud.

At first, Lambert did not realise that Chitty had secretly returned to his old friends, unable to relinquish his second life as Mike Blake. But over time Lambert began to piece together the jigsaw.

Chitty’s appearance and behaviour seemed to be reverting to that of his alter ego. Once, during their long meetings, Lambert picked up a newsletter for a rock band left lying around at
Chitty
’s home. Formed in south Wales in the late 1960s, Man played a mixture of progressive rock and psychedelia. Lambert knew that the band’s small fanbase included a woman who Chitty had slept with while undercover. When Chitty said that he was going to go to a Man concert, Lambert warned him that he ran the risk of bumping into activists from the 1980s. Chitty replied
truculently
: ‘So what?’

Later, Lambert would concede ruefully that the significance of this statement was lost on him at the time. ‘Perhaps a better clue was to be found in his frequent references to his
preparedness
to go back to his former undercover associates,’ Lambert wrote. ‘This involved a simple but subtle shift from reality. He was keen to make the threat but at the same time to obscure the truth that he had already gone back.’

In search of clues, Lambert delved back into the past,
revisiting
Chitty’s undercover deployment. Lambert’s verdict on his
rival’s performance infiltrating animal rights activists was
scathing
. He described the intelligence Chitty obtained as ‘reliable, if largely irrelevant’. Chitty’s intelligence assessments about the ‘ineffectual’ meetings of the SLAM were ‘filed briefly in Special Branch records’. Lambert pulled no punches. He noted how Chitty ‘contributed wholeheartedly to the social and legitimate campaigning activities’ of the animal rights movement ‘without ever once providing intelligence that led to the arrest of any of their activists or the disruption of any of their activities’.

The intelligence procured by Chitty ‘shed little light’ on the ALF protesters, Lambert added, and ‘certainly had no adverse impact on their criminal activities’. In Lambert’s view, his fellow spy had been so ineffective that, had the activists he was spying on ‘then or now’ been told he was a police officer, they would be ‘inclined to dismiss the claim as absurd’. In another cutting
observation
, Lambert said his rival’s cover had been ‘entirely sound’, but only because no one would have suspected that someone so inactive was an infiltrator.

Lambert was not shy in pointing out that his colleague’s apparently lacklustre performance undercover paled in
comparison
to his own penetration of the ‘more security-conscious’ ranks of the animal rights movement. He believed Chitty had spurned the opportunity to follow his lead. ‘In fairness, Chitty was not unique amongst field officers at the time, in wishing to avoid the risks and hassle inherent in criminal participation.’

Lambert did have some positive things to say about his former colleague. He conceded for example that Chitty was regarded as being ‘consistently shrewd in maintaining cover’, at a time when paranoia about police surveillance was rife among
activists
. Lambert also described his colleague as an ‘ideal officer to manage – reliable, punctual, co-operative, never rocking the boat like some of his more outspoken field colleagues’.

Yet, all told, Lambert’s assessment of Chitty’s deployment was harsh and condescending. From his own knowledge of the animal rights scene, Lambert believed that ALF activists ‘would remember Chitty, vaguely, as one of the many middle-of-the-road campaigners who just didn’t have the “bottle” or the inclination to get involved in direct action, and, thus, by their standards, was of no use whatsoever. Quite simply, he was never aware of their clandestine, criminal activities because they had no reason to tell him and he had no inclination to find out.’

However, it was when Lambert scrutinised Chitty’s life after his deployment that he came to realise what had happened. Lambert showed no reservation about sifting through Chitty’s personal letters, a search that yielded intimate correspondence with a woman from his days as an animal rights activist.

Lambert does not say in his report exactly how he came to inspect the ‘pile of long-hidden, treasured love letters’ between Chitty and the woman. He states only that they were secreted inside a padlocked toolbox in Chitty’s garage. Either Lambert persuaded his colleague to let him read the cache of letters, or he broke into the box and read them without permission.

Either way, the correspondence contained incontrovertible evidence that Chitty was fraternising with the enemy. It turned out that Chitty was socialising with activists long after he was supposed to have resumed life as an ordinary Special Branch officer. One occasion was the 40th birthday party of a campaigner in 1991. Posing as Blake, the ex-spy partied with old friends. Lambert observed how the party was low risk for Chitty. ‘No danger here of Chitty bumping into current SDS operatives who, he might rightly have guessed, were more gainfully employed infiltrating elusive cells [of ALF activists].’

Using the letters as a trail of evidence, Lambert documented
the ebb and flow of Chitty’s relationship with his girlfriend. She was ‘best described as an old hippy whose life is built around trendy causes, cannabis, alcohol and sex’. Lambert added that the woman had a ‘sharp intuition’, not least about Chitty, who she thought was prone to ‘mercurial behaviour and mental instability’.

Locked in the box beside the letters, Lambert found a
collection
of 30 photographs which contained further evidence of Chitty’s double life. One recorded what Lambert describes as ‘a dirty weekend’ when the couple’s relationship ‘was very clearly on a high’. What exactly the photographs revealed is not stated, but Lambert said one image showed Chitty’s girlfriend ‘holding up a newspaper in which Margaret Thatcher’s downfall as Prime Minister is headlined’. That was November 1990, three years after he was supposed to have ended his deployment.

Once Lambert had established that his former colleague had returned to his activist friends and gone native, the next question was why. When Chitty’s deployment had ended in 1987, he was ordered to tell activist friends he was leaving for good. In keeping with SDS policy, it was imperative that he made a clean break with his undercover romances. Instead, Chitty appears to have given the impression that he might one day return.

‘Perhaps she thought he was gone for good or perhaps, as now seems likely, he gave her cause to believe he might return to England if his “business plans” in the States did not work out,’ Lambert said. When Chitty reappeared in August 1989, two years after disappearing, his girlfriend was ‘surprised and bewildered’. She had moved on in her life and, according to Lambert, had got Mike Blake ‘out of her system after a passionate affair’.

Upset, she confided her intimate feelings in a private letter to Chitty. Of course, she had no idea that he was a police officer – or that her emotional outpouring would later be scrutinised by a rising star in the Special Branch. Lambert analysed her words
scrupulously. ‘It is a letter that testifies to a serious romantic liaison,’ he wrote. Chitty and the woman had evidently had a relationship of considerable meaning. Chitty had even asked the woman to marry him.

The implications of Chitty’s proposal are hard to fathom. He could never have married using his fake ID. As it turned out, there was never any need to commit identity fraud in a marriage registry office. ‘She pondered,’ Lambert noted wryly, ‘before declining.’ Following that rejection, the pair had a ‘slowly
cooling
’ relationship, Lambert said, but an ‘abiding friendship’ until at least November 1991. Lambert’s conclusion was that Chitty returned to his former life ‘prompted by romantic and social considerations, rather than an ideological attachment to the cause of animal rights’.

But how exactly had Chitty pulled off such a stunning act of heresy without Special Branch finding out? In returning to his undercover role, Chitty had committed a serious breach of security. In Lambert’s judgment, the SDS officer’s behaviour was ‘totally unacceptable’ and showed a ‘reckless disregard for the safe running of the SDS operation’, but he concluded that the blame should not be placed entirely on his shoulders.

Lambert felt there had been mistakes in the handling of Chitty, from the moment he was removed from his undercover duties. For a start, he was placed behind a desk doing mundane intelligence analysis – ‘such an enclosed, covert environment is none too healthy for an ex-SDS officer; certainly not for one who is hankering after his old lifestyle,’ Lambert said.

When he was given a less pressured assignment at a section of the Special Branch in Putney, south-west London, Chitty suddenly had more room to manoeuvre. In Lambert’s view, Chitty had the ‘freedom he was searching for’ and was able to prepare the ‘documentation and logistical backup required to
return convincingly to the field’. Lambert added: ‘Suffice to say he appears to have had sufficient “down time” between
operations
to devote ample time to his “second” life’.

As Lambert discovered, there was considerable work and perhaps even some premeditation involved in reviving the identity of Mike Blake. When SDS officers completed their undercover tour, they relinquished all the fake documents in the name of their alias. Chitty handed back to managers the passport and birth certificate bearing the name of Mike Blake when his undercover tour ended in 1987.

However, he had never returned Mike Blake’s driving licence, claiming he had lost it. Then, between 1989 and 1990, he somehow managed to get hold of a new passport and birth certificate in Mike Blake’s name. Once his time undercover had drawn to a close, Chitty appears to have bought a car at an auction and then registered it in the same fake name. Chitty said that the car was not registered in his real name because it was used for official covert duties, an arrangement he said had been approved by his superiors.