Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (15 page)

After initially appearing reluctant, Black agreed to take part in the demo that weekend. The following day, he reported everything back to the head of the SDS. His boss commended Black for befriending his target so quickly, but warned him not to seem too hungry. ‘If I got burned, they explained, then my tour was going to be the shortest in the history of the SDS,’ he says.

As it transpired, the Kingsway anti-fascist students never suspected that their new recruit was a police spy. Why would
they? They had no reason to believe police would plant a spy in their ranks; they were students, in a tiny, mundane group which was barely noticed in the wider anti-racist movement. However, it was common practice in the SDS to first target marginal groups such as the Kingsway anti-fascists, so that the spies could
gradually
build up their credibility and wheedle their way into the centre of a movement.

Within weeks, Black was gathering intelligence on a large demonstration that was planned to take place to protest against the BNP at Welling on October 16. The presence of the BNP in Welling had been a febrile political issue for some time. The extreme right-wing party occupied a building that was ostensibly a bookshop. On the outside, 154 Upper Wickham Lane looked innocuous. But behind the locked and bolted doors, the building was the headquarters of the party.

The location of the BNP building was considered incendiary. South-east London had become notorious for racial attacks and murders. In the previous two years, there had been three racist killings in the area, including the shocking murder of 18-
year-old
Stephen Lawrence in April 1993. Anti-racist campaigners said that racial attacks there had sharply increased after the BNP arrived in 1989, a statement backed up by Home Office figures which record that the number of racial attacks increased from 292 in 1988 to 811 in 1992. Richard Edmonds, the BNP’s national activities organiser, and a convicted criminal, openly said that the party was ‘100 per cent racist’.

Campaigners had persistently called on the local council, police and government ministers to close down the building. But the BNP headquarters remained open, and campaigners resorted to increasingly confrontational tactics. There were angry
demonstrations
outside the building in May that year, including one attended by Duwayne Brooks, Stephen Lawrence’s friend who
was with him on the night he was murdered just a few weeks earlier. Declassified Home Office documents show that the prime minister John Major was personally briefed on the disorder, as Sir Paul Condon, the Met commissioner, came under pressure to stop the escalating confrontations.

By the autumn, it became clear protesters were planning a major demonstration at Welling. The date was set for October 16. This was going to be the big one. Organisers informed police that up to 50,000 campaigners were going to march, one of the biggest protests against fascism since the 1930s. It fell to the SDS to work out whether that prediction was accurate and, if so, whether the march would turn violent.

It was at times such as these that the SDS was under
pressure
to justify its existence. Their forecasts would inform senior commanders, enabling them to deploy the right police resources on the streets. Ever since the days of Conrad Dixon, this was considered to be the main purpose of the SDS, and it was
essential
that its spies delivered the goods. If the undercover officers failed to anticipate the level of conflict, police might be overrun. Then again, if they exaggerated the threat, police might waste resources preparing for a damp squib of a demo. ‘At the end of the day, that was what the SDS was there for – when Condon or the Met commissioner really does get the big cheque book out, it’s not wasted,’ says Black. ‘If he has to spend so many millions, it’s totally justifiable.’

The SDS was fortunate that seven out of the 10 spies in the squad were sufficiently embedded in the right political groups to supply intelligence in advance of the demonstration. Some of them of course were only on the periphery. But one SDS officer was masquerading as an activist in the Anti-Nazi League, one of the main groups organising the march. The ANL, which was
previously
infiltrated by the SDS in the 1970s, had been relaunched
after a decade’s dormancy. It was supported by trade unions and some Labour MPs, but widely viewed as a ‘front’ for the Socialist Workers Party, the Trotskyite revolutionary group.

Another well-placed spy was Black, newly enrolled at Kingsway College and quickly making the right friends. He and the other operatives formally submitted their predictions for the October 16 demonstration. The collective wisdom among the spies was that the march would be bigger than previous protests and that serious disorder was likely to break out.
Scotland
Yard responded with a huge show of force. Police leave was cancelled and more than 5,000 riot officers and 84 horses were deployed to control the demonstration along the narrow streets of Welling.

On the eve of the march, Condon told the public to stay away, warning of ‘mob violence’. He said his
commanders
would allow the march to go ahead but had banned it going past the BNP headquarters, which he feared would be the scene of violent attacks. Organisers of the demonstration accused Condon of making inflammatory remarks. They said they planned a ‘peaceful but determined’ march and knew of no plans for violence, insisting they wanted to walk past the BNP headquarters because it was a symbol of racism. It was a delicate, potentially explosive mix.

On October 16, Black was on one of 550 coaches that
transported
campaigners down to Welling for the demonstration. He was preparing himself for ‘biggest ruck since the poll tax riots’ three years earlier. He says he readied himself to behave with ‘the same dumbshit mentality’ as campaigners, during any tough, physical confrontations with police.

The very idea of trying to take on lines of riot police struck Black as futile. ‘How are you going to fight the rozzers with
all their shields and everything else? You are dumb as a fucking loo-brush. But if this lot want to give it a go, my role is to be as dumb as a loo-brush with them as well.’

The likely flashpoint had been obvious to many for some time. It was a fork in the road: to the left was the police-designated route the demonstrators were being ordered to follow; the right side was the road that took them directly to the BNP bookshop.

That route was blocked by row upon row of police in riot gear, with instructions to corral marchers away. After a standoff, the inevitable fighting broke out. Black recalls seeing his SDS colleague in the fray who was trying to dissuade others from heading toward the BNP building. ‘There was a moment when I am an SDS officer going forward with my group, and there’s another SDS officer in the Anti-Nazi League running backwards, calling on the crowds to go with him away, trying to get people to follow him.’ The ANL did not have the same reputation for street confrontations. It would have been out of character – and frowned upon – for Black’s SDS colleague to do anything other than try to lead his friends away from the violence.

They were not the only police spies on duty that day. On the other side of the police line, an SDS officer infiltrating a vicious right-wing group called Combat 18 was patrolling the outskirts of the demonstration, in the company of hard-core Nazis. They were beating up any anti-racists unlucky enough to stray from the march and find themselves isolated.

A fourth SDS spy was actually inside the BNP bookshop. For some time, he had been a trusted member of the party. He and others were expected to defend their headquarters in the event the crowd broke through the police lines and started attacking the building. ‘He was bricking it,’ Black says. ‘We had to protect the bookshop that day as Condon knew that there was an
undercover
police officer in there.’

True to predictions, Welling was the worst public disorder since the poll tax demonstrations, although the police lines held together. Afterwards, away from the public row about who was at fault for the violent clashes, Britain’s most senior police officer paid a visit to a quiet residential flat in Balcombe Street in
Marylebone
. As commissioner of the Met, Condon felt indebted to the intelligence the men of the SDS had provided and he had gone to the squad’s safe house to thank them in person.

It was a rare visit from Condon. Every commissioner since 1968 had known about the work of the SDS, but its existence was barely mentioned, and of course never admitted, outside of a close circle of top cops and Whitehall mandarins. Black recalls the visit from the VIP as a ‘good moment’ for him and the rest of the unit. Condon gave them a bottle of whisky. ‘We had done what we were there for,’ he says.

For his troubles, Black was rewarded with a smaller, private meeting with the commissioner, who asked him about his undercover work and what happened on the day of the
demonstration
. But Black detected a slight discomfort on the part of the police chief.

The sight that confronted Condon that afternoon was a world away from the police control rooms and borough stations he routinely visited. In the flat in the Georgian block of Brunswick House were 10 scruffily dressed people who looked nothing like police officers. They were in ripped jeans and bomber jackets, many sporting beards and long hair. With his earrings and long, bushy ponytail, draped over his shoulder, Black could not look less like a cop if he tried.

But as he burrowed deeper into the anti-racist movement, Black realised that it was not just his appearance that had changed. He would soon find himself questioning the ethics of his entire mission.

For the seventh night in a row, Pete Black felt alone and isolated in the middle of the Bavarian forest. It was the summer of 1995, and one of the most stressful experiences of his life. Normally his nerves were pretty resilient. But camping in a giant, thick spruce forest, surrounded by more than 1,500 anti-racist activists from 18 different countries, he was gripped by a fear that he would be found out. Part of the reason for his paranoia was the knowledge that if anything were to go wrong, there was no effective back-up for miles around. He had no mobile telephone or tracking
technology
. He was on his own and the fear of what might happen if he attracted suspicion was terrifying.

Black was in Germany for a summer camp organised by the YRE. By now, he was heavily involved in their campaign, a key London organiser. The camp, in a big clearing in the forest, was designed partly to be a holiday for European anti-racist
campaigners
, a place they could meet each other, socialise and let their hair down. There was a disco tent, a chill-out area and a marquee where attendees could be entertained by some German rock bands.

But this was also a political gathering, a meeting of minds where ideas could be swapped between anti-racist activists from across the continent. The location of the camp deep in this particular forest was no coincidence. It was a two-fingered salute to neo-Nazis, who claimed this part of Germany as their
heartland. The camp was protected around the clock against attacks from fascists, with regular patrols around the perimeter. ‘I had to do night-time patrols as well,’ Black recalls.

One corner of the campsite was taken over by the Black Bloc, hard-core anarchists who, Black says, had brought firearms with them. They were notoriously frosty to outsiders. One night, the activists were woken by gunshots. The next day, the anarchists insisted it must have been hunters shooting wild boar – or Nazis firing bullets into the night sky to scare the campers. Whoever was responsible for the shots, they only added to the anxiety
gripping
the undercover police officer.

‘It was scary, an absolute nightmare – I can’t begin to explain it,’ he says. Black’s fear was compounded because he had made a crucial error that made it far more likely he would be exposed as a police infiltrator. He had failed to anticipate that he and the other activists would be sleeping beside each other in a large tent. Black feared he would talk in his sleep, and he was terrified he would inadvertently mutter something about being a police officer when dreaming.

Back in England, when campaigners stayed at his flat, Black had a technique to stop himself from blurting out something incriminating in his sleep. ‘No matter how many bedrooms you had they would always – bar the occasional female – camp in the lounge, so when I went into the bedroom, I could slam a chair under the door handle and sleep.’ In the depths of the Bavarian forest, that was not an option.

‘I could not sleep properly for a week,’ he says. ‘Your
weakness
is always when you’re asleep. With the benefit of hindsight, I should have brought my own tent. But I had never built into my cover story anything about a tent. If you brought your own tent, but did not know how to use it, it would have looked like you had deliberately brought a tent to be by yourself.’ He had no
choice but to bed down with five other activists, bury his head in his sleeping bag and hope for the best. ‘I thought, “Fuck it, go with the flow,”’ he says.

Black says that week in Bavaria ‘was the most intense pressure’ over a sustained period of time he had experienced on the job. ‘You are undercover trying to pretend you are enjoying yourself, in this huge drinking environment,’ he says. If activists had been harbouring suspicions about Black, he knew the remote camp was the ideal opportunity to confront him. The camp
organisers
had taken and photocopied everyone’s identity documents. ‘I thought: if it really did go tits up, my identity had to be perfect. I could not get out of the camp as they had my passport.’

Underneath his calm exterior, Black was riddled with paranoia. He worried about the most improbable of scenarios. For
example
, when he was much younger, Black spent a few years living in a German village. Now he was worried that someone from his younger days might by sheer coincidence attend the camp and recognise him. He kept rehearsing this and other unlikely
scenarios
in his head, preparing himself for the unexpected. ‘What you do in the SDS is you hope, if not pray for the best,’ he says. ‘But you always plan for the worst.’

Black had himself to blame for finding himself in the German forest. He had insisted the SDS should let him travel to the camp, even though the squad had until then never dispatched one of its spies abroad. He had gone through ‘a world of pain’ to get special approval from Special Branch and the German police authorities. By then he had risen to become the secretary of a branch in the YRE and he thought it would have been deeply suspicious not to attend the camp.

‘Everyone knew that I had German connections, with my mother being German,’ he says. ‘It was beyond belief that I would not go.’ For the SDS, the experiment in foreign espionage was a
gamble. Special Branch bosses stipulated that another officer had to travel with Black and meet with him regularly, but it turned out to be too risky for Black to slip out to speak with his handler.

‘We had no contact during the week,’ he says. Instead, Black’s handler spent the week relaxing on the SDS expense account in a nearby hotel.

Given this was the first foreign mission for the SDS, the unit decided Black should be accompanied by a particularly senior officer – a man who had recently rejoined the squad. And so it was that as Black was sleeping fitfully through the night, terrified at the prospect of being exposed, Bob Lambert was taking in the scenery at a safe distance. ‘I was – I kid you not – in the middle of an isolated Bavarian forest; he was holed up in a hotel a few miles away enjoying himself,’ says Black. Even though Lambert was some distance away, he was a reassuring presence for Black. The older man’s reputation preceded him. ‘He did what is hands down regarded as the best SDS tour of duty ever,’ Black says.

Under the deal Lambert struck with German authorities, Black was required to provide an extensive report on the country’s home-grown activists – in addition to his routine work for the SDS. He was under pressure to record everything that was happening around him but felt unable to resort to writing down notes.

‘Where are going to hide them – in your underpants or
something
?’ he says. ‘You can’t stick a report in your underpants, you are in a tent sharing it with people. You do it from memory, you remember absolutely everything. That’s old tradecraft – you never write things down. They would rather you lose intelligence.’

Once his adventure in the forest was over, Black spent days downloading everything he could recollect from the camp. He compiled and delivered a series of reports on the YRE campaign and their connections on the continent. He says that because he spoke German, and could converse with native activists, he
managed to provide the host country with high-grade intelligence. The Germans felt the SDS had done them a ‘huge favour’, he says.

Lambert and the rest of the senior command felt the trip was a success. It paved the way for other undercover officers to travel abroad. One went to France with the Anti-Nazi League, while the following year Black travelled to another summer camp (this time, with his own tent) in Greece. It was the start of a trend. Within a decade, there would be an almost constant exchange of undercover police officers across Europe posing as activists.

Back in London, Black had moved on from the small Kingsway anti-fascist group. He was now secretary of the Hackney and Islington branch in London of the YRE, with access to much of the group’s paperwork and the revolutionary party that pulled its strings. For Black, membership of Militant Labour, which controlled the anti-racist group, was crucial.

‘There is no way on God’s earth that I could become a branch secretary of the YRE without becoming a member of Militant,’ said Black. Militant’s heyday had been in the 1980s, when it was a household name. Its Trotskyist supporters infiltrated the Labour Party, running a covert ‘party within a party’ as part of a strategy to radicalise Labour. Then known as the Militant Tendency, it was most well known for taking control of Liverpool Council and making a defiant stance against Margaret Thatcher’s policy of cutting public funding. During the course of the decade, Labour leaders gradually expelled Militant operatives from the party until, in the early 1990s, they were forced to come out into the open to establish an overt political group, Militant Labour. By then its influence was fading. When in 1997 it changed its name to the Socialist Party, Black remained embedded.

Once inside Militant, Black turned himself into an ‘
intelligence-gathering
machine’ for the SDS. He continuously cultivated his
activist fake persona, which he rightly believed would be crucial to his success. Black’s alias was a mixture of ‘Mr Angry’ and ‘Mr Hard’, a tough guy who could handle himself in a fight. He wanted to be known as a character who ‘was angry with the whole world’. ‘I could bristle with anger,’ he says. Hannah Sell, a YRE leader, remembers Black as ‘a bit hot-headed and macho’. She says the newcomer ‘tended to argue for brawling’ with the far right. ‘We explained that defeating racist and fascist groups is a political task which required patient campaigning in
working
-class communities, rather than street fighting.’

Like all SDS officers, Black tried to anchor his constructed personality in life experiences from before he was deployed. ‘You use things from your real life to incorporate into your fake life, but you don’t use something that hurts or is too personal,’ he says. ‘The only thing I found all too close to home was the idea of making my mum an alcoholic. Instead I made my fake dad an alcoholic and gave that as the reason he had been beating me up. I needed that because I knew that at some point I was going to have to explain how it was that I could fight so well. The answer was a simple one. I told people that if they had a father who beat them up every day, they would learn to fight pretty quickly too.’

Every aspect of an SDS officer’s legend had a purpose. For example, Black pretended to be dyslexic, even though he was perfectly capable of reading and writing. He even made sure to deliberately skew a test before his deployment, to give the impression that he had the disability. ‘It’s something you can teach yourself,’ he says. ‘In about half an hour I can turn it on.’ The main reason for the faked dyslexia was that Black needed an excuse to attend Kingsway College as a mature student. ‘My story was that I was going back in order to get my first ever GCSE and to make my German mother proud,’ he says. ‘That gave my cover
a real emotional pull to it. I said I’d grown up thinking I was stupid and not doing very well at school, but had come to realise that this wasn’t the case.’

Black’s purported dyslexia had other advantages, too. SDS officers liked to emphasise their vulnerabilities, generating
sympathy
from people they met. Black wanted activists to be taken in by the sad story of a man held back by his disability, despite an innate intelligence. He wanted to come across as a frustrated soul who needed nurturing politically. He was soon being invited to workshops to be taught about Trotskyism.

‘I used to go to educational classes every second Sunday unless there was a demo,’ he says. ‘These were one-on-one sessions where you would be taught by people, sometimes from the top of Militant. You would go round to their houses and talk about Marx or Engels. It was a complete nightmare because I was not interested in that stuff at all, yet I still had to learn it and show that I was willing to be educated to some degree. That was important in order to gain their trust and respect.’

He adds: ‘But for me the dyslexia was a huge bonus. It meant I could refuse to be given the large books on theory. It meant that I had a good reason to stay at the level where I was. They’d asked me how I was getting on with a book and I’d say that I had only made it up to page three so far and there was not a lot they could say about it. It was a very effective way of fending people off.’

Black also took care to maintain the appearance of a
revolutionary
leftist. To activists, the combination of a ponytail down his back and balding patch made Black stand out – one would go as far as to say he looked ‘like a loser’. There was a sense in Militant circles that Black was eager to please – a reputation the operative wanted. He knew that his best chance of gaining the trust of the group was to do many of the boring jobs other campaigners always wriggled out of.

Sell remembers how Black did a ‘lot of the donkey work’ and never turned down a request for a favour. Like almost all SDS officers, Black owned a van – it was the signature prop for the squad, allowing its operatives to make themselves useful by
ferrying
activists around. ‘The van was good cover,’ Black says. ‘I did a lot of photocopying for the campaigners and I carried things around in the van. All the groups we targeted were poor and never had any transport so having a van made me instantly valuable.’

The SDS had provided Black with a basement flat in Furlong Road, a quiet residential street in Islington. He chose that
location
– rather than an apartment in Hackney, where Militant’s headquarters were located – to minimise the likelihood
activists
would pop around unannounced. During the two years he lived there, Black tried to keep the place ‘clean and tidy’ and fill it with sufficient furniture to avoid it looking empty. The
leftist
campaigners appear to have been unimpressed. One activist recalls Black’s flat as being ‘a bit tacky, like a student flat’, while another, Greg Randall, says it looked ‘grotty’.

For a job, Black called in a favour from someone he knew who worked in a local school for children with special needs. ‘I said to her that I would like to volunteer to work at the school. I said I didn’t want to lie to her, and that I would be using it as cover of sorts.’ The woman knew Black was a police officer, but not much else.