Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (12 page)

Chitty was probably never given the contents of the SDS report into his conduct, nor informed about the lengths the unit was going to, behind his back, to try to work out the reason for his discontent. It is reasonable to assume that he would be particularly shocked if he knew the role played by Lambert, who was pretending to be on his side while he was on sick leave. It was a clever move by Lambert, who helped dissuade Chitty from going public, which would have been a disaster for the SDS.

It was a close shave for the close-knit squad of ‘hairies’. Crisis had been averted, but the Chitty episode underlined how quickly unpopular members of the unit could be isolated and become a liability. Even Lambert perceived danger in this collective lack of empathy for SDS men who went off the rails. ‘There seems to be a prevailing attitude within Special Branch that association with colleagues under investigation is some sort of contamination,’ he wrote in his report. ‘Such an unenlightened view ill becomes an intelligent and sophisticated workforce.’

Lambert had good reason to want to improve pastoral care in the SDS. Chitty was not the only colleague who had gone wayward and fallen out with his police spymasters, and he would not be the last. The exploits of the more erratic and sometimes even uncontrollable undercover police officers were well known in the SDS. Some of the behaviour counted as low-level
misdemeanour
. Two SDS officers, for example, were arrested for driving
while under the influence of alcohol while on covert duties. Both were taken to a police station, where they volunteered they were undercover cops. One even had on him official documents
revealing
his true identity. Colleagues ‘were appalled at this seemingly wanton disregard for professionalism, and in consequence, team morale suffered, and the officers lost their “street” credibility,’ Lambert noted.

Other cases were more serious. The first SDS deployment to go seriously awry involved an operative who, just like Chitty, appears to have enjoyed the company of his undercover friends more than his colleagues. According to a Special Branch officer, when this particular spy was told in the early days of the squad that his deployment needed to come to an end, he refused to come out of the field, quitting the police and returning to his life as a radical leftist campaigner. Astonishingly, this SDS officer seems to have turned completely ‘native’, making a permanent transition from cop to activist. He may well still be living the life of a protester, albeit now a pensioner, using the same fake identity given to him by the SDS many years ago.

A second, mutinous spy infuriated the command of the SDS for a different reason. He completed his undercover tour in 1983, but was dismissed from the Met police two years later over an alleged assault. Like Chitty, he wrote a letter to senior officers, threatening to run to the papers and expose the squad’s dirty secrets unless his dismissal was reversed. He too said he suffered psychological difficulties as a result of the covert work. His appeal over the disciplinary inquiry for assault was upheld. This was the officer who relocated to Scotland, and who had consoled Chitty during his breakdown, much to the annoyance of Lambert.

A third spy was recruited to the SDS despite suffering from some kind of personality disorder. Needless to say, his operation did not go well and was abruptly terminated in 1988. His handlers
judged the mission to be ‘unsound’, although the details of what went wrong are not widely known. But when SDS managers looked into his history they realised that their vetting procedures had failed badly. Years earlier, when he joined the police, the officer had used a false identity on his application form.

When the detective constable was removed from SDS duties he reacted badly. Missing for some time from his home, he was later found wandering around York. He was put into the care of a police psychiatrist. Yet again, this SDS man threatened to expose the secrets of the unit to the media. This time police chiefs played hardball, threatening him with a prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. The tactic worked. The officer never went through with his threat of public disclosure. He retired from the Met with an ill-health pension for the same disorder he suffered from when he joined the SDS.

In the history of the SDS, the history of closely averted
calamities
is surprisingly long. It was as though the unit was constantly on the edge, just one crisis away from its operations being subject to the unseemly glare of publicity. A fourth ex-SDS spy, for example, was arrested for gross indecency in St James’s Park, near Buckingham Palace. When he was approached by police in a public toilet, he ran away, trying to evade arrest, but was caught.

The officer had not worked for the SDS for around 10 years, but when he was brought before a disciplinary board in 1991, he argued that his attempt to evade the police was a ‘reflex response’ linked to his past undercover work. Medical evidence, supported by at least one former colleague, corroborated his argument that he had been psychologically scarred by his years working as a covert agent. The officer, who had by then risen to the senior rank of detective superintendent, also left the police with an ill-health pension.

Unlike the others, he refrained from making a direct threat
to expose the SDS operation. But Lambert and the other senior men at the SDS were well aware of quite how potent a weapon the threat of exposure was. An SDS officer who fell out with the unit had the power to bring it crashing down. They could call the shots in the knowledge that the squad had enough embarrassing secrets that it could never risk the British public finding out what it was up to. Within the walled garden of the SDS, there was even a name given to the technique of threatening to blow the whistle unless one demand or another was met: ‘playing the SDS card’.

Somehow, those in charge of the SDS managed to negotiate their way out of a crisis each time the card was played. Either by agreeing to the demands of their wayward employees, or
threatening
to make their life a misery, they always avoided the very worst-case scenario: the truth coming out.

But the inevitable was always going to happen. By the late 1990s, SDS managers were contemplating how to handle one particularly headstrong spy. They would, initially, manage to keep his mouth shut. But he would eventually break ranks completely, spilling more secrets than any other officer in the history of the SDS. He became the whistleblower who shone a light on almost half a century of clandestine police espionage. His name was Pete Black.

Orange smoke swirled around thousands of protesters and police. Bottles, sticks and bricks hurtled in every direction while the crowd roared. For a few brief moments, the silhouettes of police on horseback appeared out of the clouds of coloured smoke. The confrontation in suburban Welling, beneath blue
autumnal
skies, had a dramatic, almost revolutionary air. There was a crush of bodies, pressing against lines of police shields as they tried to force their way to the headquarters of the far-right British National Party.

Among the swirling ruck of bodies trying to push through the police barrier was a determined-looking man with a long brown ponytail called Pete Black. Barely weeks after he had been sent to infiltrate the anti-racism movement, this SDS officer was already on the frontline of his first big operation. Sooner than anyone could have anticipated, Black had been transformed into a hard-core street-fighting activist, and he was relishing the brutal excitement of it all. It was like a part of his personality that had remained hidden for all of his adult life was set free. Now this dimension of his character was shouting and punching its way into the middle of a riotous battle with the cops. ‘It is a high, an adrenaline high, you can’t even begin to get there,’ he says. ‘It was a very intense thing within such a short time of being deployed.’

It was not just the intoxicating spell of the violent crowd that was making Black’s veins pulsate. He was ‘already on a high’ after penetrating the group he had been tasked with spying on faster than he thought was feasible. And the novelty of his undercover deployment had still not worn off – he was still excited by the thrill of knowing he was pretending to be another person. As he muscled his way through the crowd, dodging missiles and baton swipes, he was conscious that one small error could blow his cover.

Black had another reason to feel pleased with himself. This was the first major protest he had been asked to forecast for SDS managers, and his predictions had proved spot on. Black was among seven SDS undercover operatives at the
demonstration
that day. All were asked for their thoughts ahead of the demonstration, to allow senior commanders to prepare a suitable response. Despite his limited experience, Black told his superiors there would be a massive turnout of activists, determined to get to the BNP building. As he put it, ‘all shit was going to kick off’. Having pushed himself to the front of the march, Black watched the protest descend into ‘exactly’ the kind of sustained clashes he and his fellow SDS colleagues had anticipated.

From his point of view, the violence in south-east London was turning into an unmitigated success. Even if police were overrun by the crowd, Black would be safe in the knowledge he had warned his senior officers to prepare for the worst. ‘I could not give a shit – if they get through and burn the fucking building down, I am totally covered because I told them it was going to happen,’ he says. The crowd was large and angry, but Black knew there would be reinforced lines of police ready to stop them from getting through. He remembers looking at the police barricade and thinking: ‘As long as [the protestors] have a hole in their arse, they are not going to get through this. I know that there are waves and waves of rozzers behind it.’ Black was an SDS man
now. He had the privilege of that unique vantage point: a glimpse behind the scenes of two opposing worlds.

That eventful day in Welling was a crowning moment for Black. He had proved to his superiors within the SDS that he could gain the trust of activists and gather intelligence ahead of a major protest. At the same time, he had established his credibility among protesters, whom he had been warned would be hostile to outsiders. Black felt he was being tested in battle, watched as he fought shoulder to shoulder with activists for hours in Welling. ‘My role on that day was to be a street activist and to show them that no matter how much bottle they have got, I would be with them,’ he says. He recalls ‘a lot of exchanges’ with police – ‘a lot of pushing with the shields, a hell of a lot of running … as soon as they ran a little bit forward, we would run back, then the horses came down’.

Black wanted to be at the front of the demonstration, earning his spurs with other activists and getting a measure of how far these left-wing activists would go in their confrontations with riot officers. He was impressed. ‘I was pleasantly surprised by the balls they had, considering that some of them were injured. I thought our lot would run away as soon as the riot shields and horses came out. I thought it would be over,’ he says. ‘We were right where the clown let off the orange smoke bomb. The police horses went through it.’

The undercover officer got whacked by a police baton in the mayhem, but escaped serious injury. He was fortunate. By the end of day, 41 demonstrators and 19 police officers were injured and 31 arrests had been made. Black knew that one way he could avoid getting hurt as a protester was to draw on his training as a cop.

Riot police use long shields to protect themselves from head to toe, often forming defensive lines. Shorter, round shields,
clasped to their left arms, have a different function: they tend to be used when police are about to go on the offensive against rioters. The smaller shields are easier to wield, enabling police to swing batons over the top. Police sometimes use the hard edge of the shield as a weapon, although it is officially discouraged.

‘Now I found myself on the other side of the shield,’ Black says. ‘The only advantage it gave me was that I could see the tactics being used whereas my targets [the protesters] could not. I knew that when the long shields were out, that was fine because all they could do was push. But when the short shields came out you knew that it was trouble. You can go right up to one of the long shields and all they can do is jab you from around the side. They can’t get you from over the top. With the short shields, you really have to get out of the way. That was the time to run. And if the dogs came out, it’s a bad day for mankind.’

Of course, Black had to act on his inside knowledge with caution. If he suddenly warned fellow demonstrators about an imminent police charge, he might raise suspicions. ‘You end up trying to find a way to tell them [to run away] without making it sound like you’ve done this sort of thing before,’ he says.

In the days after the Welling demonstration, Black joined the other SDS officers for the routine postmortem. The Special Branch officers sifted through police long-lens photographs of the protest, identifying known activists involved in the clashes.
Flicking
through hundreds of images, Black was suddenly taken aback by one particular photograph. It was an image of him, standing in the middle of the crowd. It was the first time he had seen a
photograph
of his alter ego surrounded by anti-racist campaigners.

On the surface, Black is a forbidding character – intense, blunt and hard. One of his police managers, with whom he clashed, described him as ‘one of most direct and forthright officers I have
ever encountered’. Nowadays he is shaven-headed. He almost always dresses head to toe in black. He does not want to reveal his real name – doing so, he believes, could put him at risk of physical retribution.

Black has deep-set, staring eyes and a thick jaw. At around 5ft 9in, he is short for a police officer, but stocky and strong with long arms. He admits to a ‘very aggressive’ dimension to his personality, one he kept suppressed ‘within the normal bounds of society’ for many years. However, his predilection for confrontation was unleashed when he went undercover. He confesses to enjoying the ‘totally feral environment’ of protests that turn violent. He is, he admits, a ‘natural fighter’.

But beneath the bulldozer-like surface is a more complex character. For someone who claims to have a short temper, Black is often stone-cold calm. He can be adventurous, thoughtful and funny; when recounting the more absurd aspects of his
deployment
, his sombre stare usually gives way to a broad smile.

Black also has something that some of his former police colleagues lack – the ability to form solid opinions about ethical issues, regardless of what his seniors in the SDS might believe. In some ways, he is unlike many other cops. An independent thinker, Black is unafraid to voice his views, even if that means a battle with the hierarchy. And once his mind is made up, he does not take kindly to anyone who attempts to persuade him he is wrong.

That may be a trait acquired through childhood. Black was born in London in 1965 and moved to Norfolk, but by the time he was 12, his German mother and New Zealand father had divorced. His mother did not adapt well to life in a small village, and turned to drink. She struggled to bring up her three children. ‘It wasn’t the easiest of childhoods. I was angry a lot of the time, a lot of suppressed rage at the world,’ he says. ‘I did not stray too much and I realise there are plenty of people out there with
far bigger problems. [But] I was pretty much the only kid in my school whose parents were divorced. Also the fact that my mother was German caused a few problems and issues,’ he says.

A turning point came at the age of 13, when he confronted a school bully. He recalls the moment as a realisation that he had the ability to achieve what he wanted. He became head boy of his school – to the headmaster’s surprise – and secured nine O-levels and, later, three A-levels. Interested in the law and public affairs, he harboured an ambition to join the security services. It was an idea he dropped after an A-level teacher advised him that, realistically, MI5 ‘only recruited from the Oxbridge set, posh kids with public-school backgrounds’. But the teacher offered an alternative.

‘He said what I had a good chance of getting into was Special Branch,’ Black says. ‘He explained what it was and it sounded absolutely perfect. A chance to do some of the same work as the Security Service without having to be a part of it.’ Turning down a university place to study law, he enrolled in the police,
determined
to join the Metropolitan police’s elite squad of officers. He got there in 1990, after a short spell in uniform.

Black’s first Special Branch posting was to Heathrow,
monitoring
suspected dissidents travelling to and from Ireland. He was then in B Squad, which was investigating Irish republican and loyalist terrorists. ‘It was a great time to be working in the field,’ he says. ‘It was such a small unit that everyone was involved in everything. I would say that between 1990 and 1993, I had a part in the case of every single terrorist arrested in London. I was either involved in interviewing them or following them or gathering other intelligence on them,’ he says. Later, Black began working in C Squad, the department that had the remit of monitoring ‘subversives’. ‘Interestingly, I didn’t really know what a subversive was until I started working for Special Branch,’ he adds.

His route into the SDS, the ‘unit within a unit’ in Special Branch, was the result of what Black calls ‘several twists of fate’. One day he got a call from an officer in Bromley, south London, where he had worked while he was a uniformed constable. Local borough police had picked up a man who was found to be
carrying
‘a vast amount of left-wing literature’.

‘They asked if I wanted to go down and have a look. It turned out he was a major activist with the Socialist Workers Party. I went down and looked through everything from his bags, copied the lot and cross-referenced every name that was mentioned in his papers and his diaries.’ Black then wrote a report that he says attracted ‘a huge amount of interest’ from the SDS, which already had the activist with the offending literature on its radar. An SDS manager met with Black to thank him personally, but also, he later found out, to gauge whether he was suitable for a transfer to the unit.

A few weeks later, Black got into a row with an inspector who he claims ‘lost control of an operation and was treating his men like shit and ordering them around’. He believes his dispute with his boss told the SDS something about his character. ‘That
actually
made me stand out a bit. The branch was looking for people to go into the SDS who were capable of making that kind of a stand. It was a little flash of individuality.’

Soon afterwards, Black was partnered with a former SDS officer in a long surveillance operation. ‘We ended up giving each other our whole life stories during the course of the operation, although he never mentioned the SDS,’ he says. Looking back, Black believes this job was no coincidence either. ‘All the things I had been doing had, unbeknown to me, marked my card as someone who might be able to fit in with the unit.’

Black eventually attended an interview at a secret SDS office. ‘I remember being there and saying that, until the day before, I
had not even heard of them. They did not give much away during the interview. They told me that they worked for the
Metropolitan
police and also directly for the security services. That for me was all I needed to hear. I felt that I’d finally arrived and that after all this work I was on the cusp of my whole life’s dream of actually working for the Security Service.’

The job was not initially as adventurous as Black might have expected. In January 1993, he arrived at the cramped
headquarters
of the SDS in Cundy Street, central London. There was nothing to give away it was the base for a fleet of police spies. It was just a converted flat, in Johnson House, a block usually used for newly married police officers. Black was made the ‘back-office boy’ to four superiors who ran the operation.

Part of his job was to provide the administrative support to the squad’s 10 undercover operatives then ‘in the field’. At the time, three police officers were embedded in left-wing groups, two in the animal rights movement, two in right-wing groups and others in campaigns supporting causes such as Irish
republicanism
. Black’s main job involved handling the undercover officers’ ‘blue bags’, in which they delivered reports to the squad. These files also contained requests, from undercover operatives or their seniors, for specific pieces of information held elsewhere in Special Branch. ‘There might be a request to check a number plate or phone number or to identify a particular person in a photograph. As the back-office boy, you take that information and provide the answers,’ he says.