Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (11 page)

But Lambert was sceptical. He concluded that Chitty had kept the driving licence ‘for future use’ and therefore apparently planned to return to his undercover life all along. He noted how Chitty later went on to acquire a home address in the name of Mike Blake. Lambert said that obtaining the use of a house in his fake name was ‘no doubt the most difficult’ part of Chitty’s
deception
. Chitty seems to have elicited the help of a friend who allowed him to use a house in Hampshire. If he needed letters sent to Mike Blake, they would be posted there. Elliptically, Lambert wrote that Chitty ‘appears to have been able to take advantage of one of the bedsit rooms for entertaining purposes’.

However, even equipped with ID documents, a car and an address, Chitty still needed a new cover story to explain to his
activist friends how he could afford to live a ‘comfortable and highly mobile lifestyle’. Lambert noted how his former colleague told activists that he was making a living as a racing driver. It is true that Chitty was an accomplished driver and a handy mechanic.

Chitty appeared to have pulled the wool over the eyes of his bosses in the SDS and was soon enjoying his double life. But he began to run into difficulty in 1990. Recalled from his assignment in Putney, which was relatively close to where his activist friends lived, Chitty was placed on more routine duties at Scotland Yard in central London.

Colleagues in Special Branch recall how much Chitty resisted being moved away from south London. ‘One can see how, for example, a three-month stint as reserve room controller must have cramped Chitty’s style!’ Lambert wrote. ‘He was notable for his poor work return and frequent absences from the office “on enquiries”.’ Not long after, Chitty secured his job
protecting
VIPs, a move that Lambert said must have made him feel ‘a mixture of relief and anticipation’.

Lambert continued: ‘Here again, was a posting that would allow him unlimited time away from home, and if he was clever, scope to give free rein to his alter ego’s lifestyle. Another
important
factor which the officer would not have overlooked was that the posting was likely to boost his overtime earnings – an essential ingredient in his activities.’

It was a job which did indeed give Chitty more room for manoeuvre. Perhaps too much. It was the conspicuous 100-mile journeys from Wiltshire, where he was supposed to be protecting a VIP, to his home in Surrey that were Chitty’s undoing in 1992. Chitty had become ‘too clever and careless’, according to Lambert.

By that time, Lambert calculated that the former spy ‘had enjoyed leading a secret double life without being found out by his employers or his wife’ for more than two years. Remarkably,
Chitty had been able to do his official police work without it being hindered by his second secret life. By February 1994, the
Metropolitan
Police’s internal investigators had separately decided that Chitty should face a disciplinary hearing. They had interviewed hotel managers in Wiltshire and petrol station staff in Surrey. They had no idea precisely why the officer was claiming expenses in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it didn’t smell right.

Chitty took the pressure badly. Soon afterwards, he vanished from his home for a week. For at least some of that period, Chitty was suspected to have travelled to Scotland to seek advice from another former SDS officer who had fallen out with the squad – a man who was much despised by Lambert, who described him in his report as ‘selfish, arrogant, disloyal’. The reality is probably rather different. Not much is known about the SDS man, other than he left the unit for a life as a successful hotelier.

The trip to Scotland to seek advice from this exiled SDS officer was, in Lambert’s view, another sign that Chitty was going off the rails. He confronted Chitty about his decision to ask for help from the former SDS man and recorded his reaction in the report. ‘When challenged as to the propriety of seeking such counsel, he countered colourfully: “Who the hell else am I supposed to talk to when the whole fucking organisation is out to screw my arse to the floor?”’

A month later, the alarm was raised when Chitty’s Ford Sierra crashed by the promenade in Worthing. Chitty was missing. Despite the considerable operation to find him, there was no sign of him on the beach or in the sea. He was found, alive and well, later that night, in the town.

Lambert was left with a vivid memory of Chitty sitting in an interview room in Worthing police station: ‘Distracted, almost haunted, a broken man obsessed by persecution and his own professional guilt (not the guilt of betrayal of animal activists but
of letting down the SDS). As the wise old duty officer observed, “He’s not a well man, is he?”’

Chitty had undoubtedly reached a low point, but it is
important
to remember that Lambert had a stake in the rival spy’s tragedy. Lambert must have known that if Chitty went over the edge, and talked to the newspapers, the future of his own career was in doubt. And for all his vulnerability, Chitty still conjured the strength to take on his bosses at Special Branch.

Facing disciplinary action, and with a dawning realisation that Lambert and others now knew about his second life, Chitty threatened to press the nuclear button. He wrote a letter to Sir Paul Condon, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, complaining about his treatment by the SDS and threatening to spill the beans on the whole operation.

The contents of his five-page letter were read by Lambert and later summarised in his report. ‘His letter to the Commissioner is well written and, in parts, persuasive in its agenda,’ Lambert said. The thrust of Chitty’s argument was that he received no psychological counselling at the end of his deployment and was unable to deal with feelings of guilt at having betrayed the animal rights activists.

Chitty argued he should be diagnosed as being mentally unfit to continue in the police force, paving the way for his departure with a pension to compensate for his ill-health. Lambert, who would not have wanted to annoy senior managers at the SDS by suggesting they were culpable, showed little tolerance for that view. However, he did concede a small amount of ground. ‘Yes, he is right,’ Lambert noted at one point. ‘SDS managers do need to encourage a healthy environment in which field officers feel safe to talk about inevitable emotional ties to their target groups.’ Reading between the lines of Chitty’s letter to the commissioner, Lambert was alive to the potential threat of the rogue officer
going public. ‘Implicit is the message: does Special Branch really want my secret, dirty washing aired in an open forum?’ Lambert wrote. ‘Equally, the letter contains a barely veiled threat along the lines: if I go down, I’ll take as many people as possible with me, SDS in particular.’

For a squad cloaked in absolute secrecy, the spectre of public scrutiny was a terrifying menace. Lambert was at pains to spell out quite how catastrophic it would be for the SDS programme of long-term infiltration if it was ever discovered by the public: ‘It would put at risk the safety of former (and possibly current) field officers and their families.’ He estimated that it would take no more than 10 minutes to prove that ‘certain former highly regarded activists had in fact been undercover police officers who were responsible for the imprisonment of close comrades and the disruption of large-scale [animal rights] criminal activity’. Those spies and their families could expect at ‘the very least’ postal bombs at their homes, Lambert claimed.

This warning should also be read with caution. It was in Lambert’s interest to exaggerate the danger of Chitty going public. Lambert, more than many other SDS officers, had a huge amount to lose if there was a series of revelations about the SDS and its activities, particularly if they related to his own conduct undercover.

In one telling section, Lambert warns there was one ‘true story’ that Chitty could make public that would ‘answer a lot of questions the [animal rights] hierarchy has been asking about infiltration for several years’. Exactly what that true story was is not explained, but it would seem likely that Lambert was
referring
to his own role in the arson attacks on Debenhams. There was of course another ‘true story’ that he was desperate to keep quiet: by then the son he had fathered with the activist named Charlotte was nine years old. Lambert had not seen the child
since he vanished from his life years earlier and probably hoped he would never have to.

Lambert was careful not to make his reasoning appear too personal. He wrote in his report that ‘there are of course a hundred and one facts’ about SDS operations that ‘sympathetic lawyers and friendly investigative journalists would be delighted to hear about’. Lambert believed everything had to be done to ensure those uncomfortable truths were concealed from the public. ‘Such disclosure would be seriously damaging to the safe and secure running of the current operation,’ he said. Revelations in the newspapers would place a burden on the fleet of spies who were currently deployed and had ‘enough to worry about
without
the fear of a rogue former SDS officer queering their pitch’.

The risks were high, but Lambert calibrated that the chances of Chitty following through with his threats were relatively low. He believed that Chitty lacked the courage to bring down the squad by going public. A more likely, but no less worrying, scenario painted by Lambert was that Chitty might ‘inadvertently open his heart out’ to the woman he once wanted to marry ‘over several bottles of Stella and under the added influence of cannabis’.

April 1994 was not a good month for Chitty. He had been on sick leave for nearly two years. It was just weeks after the dramatic crash in Worthing and he was still facing an internal disciplinary inquiry over his expenses. What was going on in his mind at that point was difficult to discern. Lambert suggested that Chitty was becoming increasingly unstable, his behaviour ‘confrontational, highly volatile’. Some evidence about his mental state comes from a visit he made to a doctor.

Lambert, who was either present during the consultation or had access to Chitty’s medical notes, said he offered the doctor ‘a slightly sanitised view of his secret double life’. It seems Chitty
was advised he was suffering from a psychological phenomenon evident when hostages develop feelings of loyalty toward their captors. By the tone of his report, it did not seem Lambert thought much of Chitty’s claims about his psychological well being. ‘Disarmingly, he told the doctor, “My psychiatrist tells me I’m not mentally ill, I know I’m not, I’ve just got a syndrome, Stockholm syndrome.”’

Whether he was suffering from a psychological condition or not, Chitty continued to socialise with his old friends in the animal rights movement. Perhaps he had given up hope of
extricating
himself from the mess and was reaching out to people he believed cared for him. Maybe his loyalties had shifted entirely, from the SDS to the ‘wearies’.

Lambert on the other hand believed that there was an element of calculation in Chitty’s behaviour. If senior officers believed he might defect, they could be more likely to meet his demands, drop the disciplinary action and pay out in
compensation
. Indeed, Lambert even suggested that Chitty had rekindled one particular friendship – based ‘on a common interest in
illegal
herbal substances and heavy metal music’ – because he knew the activist in question would be under heavy surveillance. If Chitty was deliberately trying to get spotted among his activists, it worked. Reports were quickly relayed back to Special Branch that a former SDS man on sick leave was in contact with a
well-known
campaigner.

One afternoon that month, Chitty joined a group of friends who attended a leaving party for an activist who was returning to Canada. It was a boozy affair, and Chitty, after seeming
somewhat
tense, appeared to relax as the drink flowed. He was spotted flirting with one woman, asking her if she fancied going on a date with a racing driver. She laughed indulgently, encouraging his approach. By the end of the meal, Chitty was in such a good
mood he offered to pay half of the bill for all 10 of the diners. The group then retired to a nearby house to smoke some dope.

It was by pure chance that, unbeknown to Chitty, the party was witnessed by a serving SDS officer. The following Monday, at one of the squad’s regular meetings, he retold the whole, incredible story to astonished colleagues. The SDS spy said ‘it was clear that no one present had any idea’ of Chitty’s real
identity
. To the activists, he was still Mike Blake, the jovial animal rights campaigner who had been around, on and off, for more than a decade.

Four days later, Chitty’s predicament took a turn for the worse. He was en route to another doctor’s appointment when he used an invalid travel pass at Victoria Station. An altercation with guards escalated and police were called, arresting Chitty on the platform. He did not have his warrant card on him. But he told officers that he was an undercover police officer on a mission and gave the names of colleagues who could back up his claim.

Chitty was eventually released, but was abusive towards the transport police, who lodged a formal complaint with the Special Branch. Lambert, silver-tongued as ever, was called in to smooth things over. He explained that Chitty was on sick leave and ‘
probably
not intentionally rude’. Apology accepted, the transport police dropped the complaint. But the episode underscored how precarious Chitty’s situation was – he was still an officer in the Special Branch, but seemingly out of their control.

The police officer’s confrontation with his managers was descending into something of a Mexican standoff. In 1995, he began legal action against Scotland Yard on the grounds that he had suffered psychiatric damage from the stress of his covert work. Claiming damages totalling £50,000, he accused the police of negligence and failing to ‘monitor, support, counsel, and care for him’ between 1982 and 1994.

Shortly afterwards, he seems to have dropped the lawsuit, and was awarded an ill-health pension. There is no information about how the dispute was reconciled, but it seems likely that the rogue officer won out. Chitty has never spoken about his undercover life. Not long after the legal action was suspended, he disappeared. He is currently living in South Africa and has not responded to requests to comment.