Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (17 page)

The point is made by Annie Machon, a one-time MI5 officer who resigned in protest at its activities. She says that from 1952: ‘MI5 and subsequent governments used to argue that all members of certain parties – such as the Communist Party of Great
Britain
or later the bewildering array of Trotskyists, with names like the International Marxist Group, Workers Revolutionary Party, Revolutionary Communist Group, anarchists and the extreme left – were threats to the security of the state or our democratic system. This in itself is a contentious proposition. None of these Trotskyist groups was cultivating Eastern bloc finance or building bombs in smoky back rooms but were instead using legitimate democratic methods to make their case, such as standing in
elections
, organising demonstrations and “educating” the workers.’

During the cold war, MI5 devoted huge resources to spying on left-wingers; tapping phones, opening mail and running agents within organisations. For a long time, Militant was a prime focus, because of the threat it posed to the Labour Party. But by the early 1990s, MI5 was becoming less interested in domestic
political
threats. It was becoming harder for the spooks to justify spying on groups that, by any objective view, posed little or no threat to the foundations of the state. Militant, whose membership was in any case beginning to dwindle, was operating as an open political party. According to Machon, MI5 began to downgrade its work spying on revolutionary left-wing groups around 1993. By late 1995, according to one account, MI5 was allocating only one of its officers to monitoring so-called subversives.

Lambert and others in command of the SDS spotted an opportunity. As MI5 retreated, the SDS could occupy the ground the security services were vacating. In one confidential briefing memo, Lambert noted how MI5 was winding down its ‘active role in respect of domestic subversion’. The SDS offered to
channel
intelligence about Militant to MI5, keeping them abreast of what was going on in the group.

The offer was accepted and, in 1995, Black began a dual role, working partly under the command of the SDS but also as an official informant for MI5, with his own code number: M2672. Lambert, who believed Militant was ‘one of the most insular groups ever penetrated by the SDS’, was impressed that one of his spies was providing intelligence for the Security Service. Black was raising the stock of the squad in official circles and allowing senior officers like Lambert to punch above their weight. When Black produced a report on a large number of Militant activists, and handed it over to MI5, Lambert complimented his efforts. ‘This performance, both in terms of content and presentation, was of the highest calibre and brought considerable kudos to the
team,’ he wrote. In another Special Branch document, Lambert noted how the Security Service was ‘an appreciative consumer of the unique high-grade intelligence’ provided by Black.

The spooks were genuinely grateful for SDS assistance. MI5 gleaned most of its intelligence not from undercover officers, but informants, many of them paid. These individuals, known as agents, were given a rudimentary instruction into
espionage
tradecraft by MI5, which then cultivated them as sources. According to one account, MI5 recruited around 30 Militant members to inform on their comrades over a 30-year period during the cold war, although by the early 1990s there were only a handful of snitches left. As with all informants, their
reliability
varied wildly.

When Black noticed that MI5 was holding erroneous
intelligence
about Militant, he assumed the Security Service must have been fed by a dodgy agent. ‘I started to realise that there was a spy in our midst,’ he recalls. ‘I decided I was going to try and spot their agent. In the event, it did not take very long.’ Rather worryingly, Black says the MI5 agent stood out like a sore thumb.

‘He was doing things like only turning up to meetings when something really interesting was being talked about. Those sort of things made him stand out,’ he adds. Acting on his instincts, Black decided to confront MI5 and ask them: ‘Is he one of yours?’ The question sparked an immediate reaction from the MI5 officer in charge of running agents. The agent handler left Thames House, MI5’s imposing headquarters on the bank of the River Thames, for a hasty meeting with Black, Lambert and other Special Branch officers in the safe house in Beaumont Court, Chiswick.

It felt like a showdown. At first, the MI5 officer refused to give anything away about the suspected agent. ‘They tried to bluff me and said they could not confirm it, but they would take [my suspicions] on board,’ Black says. But the SDS officer
was characteristically stubborn, insisting he had the right man. Eventually, Lambert and the other officers were asked to leave the room. Black and the man from MI5 remained, for a ‘frank discussion’ about the Militant activist identified as an agent.

‘I said to him that I knew it was him, and if he did not agree that the man was an agent, I would expose him at the next
Militant
meeting. The handler replied, “OK, he is ours – don’t blow him out of the water but we will get rid of him.”’ The MI5 agent was withdrawn a couple of months later. Black felt the move was long overdue; if he had managed to work out the informant’s true motives, then so too could other members of Militant. They might easily have fed the agent faulty information, knowing it would be passed on to MI5.

‘The biggest problem was that his intelligence reports were shit,’ Black says. ‘He was giving information that was inaccurate about people, which meant he might well have been giving out inaccurate information about me as well.’ Later, Black’s managers told him he was the first SDS officer in history to catch out an MI5 agent. ‘So it was big kudos for the team,’ he says. ‘The
Security
Service was grateful.’ Later M15 came over and presented Black with a shield on a wooden block. It was engraved with MI5’s crest, and the service’s motto – ‘Regnum Defende’, Latin for ‘Defend the Realm’ – at the bottom. Black was told he was the only SDS officer to receive such an accolade. It was a moment to remember, a standout episode that Black hoped would make it into the annals of SDS folklore – the kind of success that would have made Conrad Dixon proud.

Sitting in the Chiswick safe house with Lambert and his other SDS colleagues, Black soaked up the convivial atmosphere. ‘I felt proud at the time. It was some sort of recognition because the Special Branch does not really recognise the work you do that much,’ he says. It was an especially satisfying moment for Black,
who always wanted to work for MI5. The shield still hangs on his wall in his study at home.

Things were going well for Black. His career was on a high and he should have been proud of his achievements. But in fact he had begun to experience deep misgivings about his
deployment
. His final mandate as a spy would leave the normally decisive officer grappling to discern right from wrong.

Towards the end of Black’s deployment, the tide changed. The focus of anti-racist campaigning in London was starting to shift, and police chiefs were worried. Large numbers of people in the movement were becoming animated by a series of perceived
injustices
. The names of the victims, and their stories, were well known. There was Joy Gardner, a 40-year-old Jamaican who was bound and gagged with 13ft of black tape in her flat in Crouch End, north London, in 1993. The following year, Shiji Lapite, a 34-year-old Nigerian asylum seeker, received 36 injuries, including a kick to the head, and was asphyxiated in a neck-hold in the back of a police van in east London. In 1995, Brian Douglas, a 33-year-old music and boxing promoter, died after his skull was fractured. In March 1996, Gambian asylum seeker Ibrahima Sey, aged 29, was forced to the ground, sprayed repeatedly with gas and then held face down for 15 minutes. He went totally limp and stopped breathing.

All of the victims had two things in common. They were black. And they were believed to have died as a result of police brutality.

For many in the ‘black justice’ campaigns, it was not only the disturbing circumstances of the deaths that caused concern, but also the apparent impunity that allowed police to escape punishment. In the case of Gardner, who was being deported, the police who wrapped her in tape, while her five-year-old son was in the flat, were acquitted of her manslaughter. The
circumstances
of Lapite’s death in 1994 were heard by an inquest, which concluded he had been unlawfully killed. However, prosecutors decided not to bring charges against the officers who caused his injuries in the back of a police van. Another inquest concluded that Sey had been unlawfully killed when he was restrained by police and sprayed with CS gas but, again, prosecutors decided not to charge the police officers responsible.

These were just the more high-profile cases. In the first seven years of the 1990s, a total of 484 people died following some form of contact with police. Often these were categorised as deaths in ‘custody’, meaning the individuals died in prison cells or police vans. Figures showed that deaths of this kind were rapidly increasing, and disproportionately affected black people. Against this backdrop, anti-racist groups, which had long been focusing on combating the far right, now turned their attention to racism in the police.

The campaigns revolved around supporting grieving families in their quest for truth and justice, attending silent vigils outside police stations or political rallies. Black found himself helping to organise these anti-police protests, while at the same time
passing
information back to his handlers at the SDS. He was finding it harder to justify his work. He was taking part in one of these protests, standing outside Kennington police station, when he started to doubt his actions.

‘I found myself questioning the morality of my actions for the first time. To some extent, these campaigns had been taken over by extremists, but at their heart were families who had lost their loved ones and simply wanted justice,’ he says. ‘By targeting the groups, I was convinced that I was robbing them of the chance to ever find that justice.’

Black, via the YRE, was particularly involved in the protests over the death of Brian Douglas. It was a long-running campaign.
In May 1995, a week after Douglas died, 400 people came out on to the streets to protest outside Vauxhall police station. His relatives and friends called for the two police officers involved in arresting him to be suspended. A year later, prosecutors announced that no police officers would be prosecuted. The inquest, which recorded a verdict of misadventure, heard that Douglas and a friend had been stopped near Clapham High Street by police who believed that they possessed a CS gas canister, a lock-knife and cannabis. His friend testified that police hit Douglas twice on the head with their batons. He died from his injuries five days later. Scotland Yard said its officers acted to ensure their own safety and decided against disciplining them.

On a personal level, Black grew uncomfortable about what he believed was the failure to hold police to account and the attempts to stifle protests over the deaths. ‘I did not feel like a proud member of the Metropolitan police,’ he says. It was a view that Black – perhaps unwisely – expressed to Lambert and others in the SDS. He told them he was worried that unless the police took deaths in custody more seriously, and disciplined officers who were at fault, there would be an escalation of violent protests. In December 1995, the death in custody of a 25-year-old black man triggered a peaceful protest outside Brixton police station which suddenly descended into disorder. Several hundred youths rioted, ransacking shops and setting fire to cars. It was a flashback to the riots of the 1980s, and a warning of what might happen in the future if police did not get a hold of this issue.

In the end it was not a death in custody, but the appalling failures by police to properly investigate a racist killing of a black teenager that became the darkest episode in the history of the Metropolitan police. Among anti-racist campaigners, there was no case more important than the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the 18-year-old stabbed by a gang of white youths as he waited
for a bus in Eltham. His death in April 1993, and its long,
drawn-out
aftermath, shocked the nation and proved to be a seminal moment for British race relations.

The campaign for justice over Lawrence’s death was led by his mother, Doreen, and father, Neville. In July 1997, the then home secretary Jack Straw bowed to mounting public pressure and announced he was setting up a judge-led inquiry into the police investigation of Lawrence’s murder. The inquiry would also
examine
the police’s handling of racist murders and attacks in general.

Led by the high court judge Sir William Macpherson, the inquiry eventually concluded that, as the Lawrences had said during years of being disbelieved and ignored, police had failed to catch his killers because of their own racial prejudice and incompetence. Macpherson’s famous conclusion, in 1999, that London’s police were ‘institutionally racist’ was a terrible
indictment
of Britain’s largest and most powerful force. It took 18 years, a failed private prosecution, and the emergence of new evidence before the Lawrence family finally had some justice, when two of Stephen’s suspected killers, Gary Dobson and David Norris, were convicted for his murder in 2012.

Back in 1997, however, in the weeks following the
announcement
of a public inquiry, the Met was in a state of trepidation. The tide of public opinion was turning against the force, a shift
represented
by the decision by the
Daily Mail
, historically a reliable supporter of the establishment, to back the Lawrence campaign. Behind the scenes, police chiefs were consulting lawyers as they grappled with delicate questions about how much information they should disclose to the inquiry. Most of the evidence they were considering handing over related to the investigation into Lawrence’s death, but Macpherson had cast a wide net. Black felt strongly that this was the time for the force to admit it had been spying on the black justice campaigns. He even wanted his
bosses to disclose the details of his personal deployment in the anti-racist movement.

Black knew there were some disturbing skeletons in the SDS cupboard that should have had a direct bearing on Macpherson’s deliberations. Specifically, there had once been a secret order from the top of Scotland Yard, he says, requiring the SDS to place the Lawrence campaign under surveillance. The order was given at a time when the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Sir Paul Condon, was coming under persistent pressure from the Lawrences over the failures by the police to mount a proper investigation into the murder of their son. Black says that the controversy over the Lawrence murder ‘became a huge thing for Condon’. ‘It changed my deployment,’ he says. ‘I had to get any information on what was happening in the Stephen Lawrence campaign. There was huge pressure from the commissioner downwards.’

The former spy compares the pressure to obtain intelligence about the Lawrence campaign with ‘a bomb going off’. He says commanders were concerned public anger would spiral into disorder on the streets and had ‘visions of Rodney King’, whose beating at the hands of police eventually led to the LA riots in 1991. ‘It was huge, monumental,’ he says. ‘They wanted the campaign to stop. It was felt it was going to turn into an elephant.’ Black says there were three SDS officers tasked with obtaining intelligence about the Lawrence family and their campaign for justice. But with his access to anti-racist groups, Black was considered to be in a key position. ‘Lawrence was a constant pressure.
Throughout
my deployment there was an almost constant pressure on me personally to find out anything I could that would discredit these campaigns.’ He adds: ‘I didn’t feel qualms about that. It was a public order giant and our responsibility was to quell it.’

Finding out inside information about the Lawrence campaign was not easy. The grieving family were focused on getting
justice for their son and distanced themselves from the assorted campaigns of the anti-racist movement. Much of their campaign work was co-ordinated by the moderate Anti-Racist Alliance and they showed little interest in the patchwork of
campaigning
groups that, according to Lawrence’s mother, Doreen, ‘were tearing each other apart and were in danger of destroying our campaign’. None of the groups that Black or the other SDS officers were infiltrating were close enough to the family to find out much useful information.

However, they did, according to Black, resort to some
appalling
dirty tricks to undermine the Lawrence family. Black says he reported back any snippets of rumour that might discredit the Lawrences. ‘It wasn’t for me to work out what someone else might be able to do with the intelligence,’ he says. He and other SDS officers were ‘hunting for disinformation’ about the family that could be used against them, at a time when the Met should have been concentrating on catching the killers of their son. ‘Anything you could get. I put total conjecture into reports,’ he says. Black says that part of the problem for police was that the murdered teenager did not conform to stereotype. ‘Stephen Lawrence wanted to be an architect and he was totally clean,’ the spy adds. ‘He was almost like white, middle-class. He was not your usual black kid, he had never been in trouble.’

As Lawrence and his family could not be undermined, Black says police found a way to discredit him by association. On the night Lawrence was killed, he was with Duwayne Brooks, a friend, who was also the main witness to the murder. Black recalls a concerted effort to find dirt on Brooks, who was
becoming
involved in anti-racist campaigning. When Brooks visited Kingsway College, Black paid close attention. ‘I remember I was watching him all the time,’ he says. ‘Because if you watch
somebody
really carefully, you get a feel for somebody.’

Later, Black and another SDS officer embedded in the anti-racist movement trawled through ‘hours upon hours’ of footage from one of the protests against the BNP which had turned unruly. The police were desperate to find any evidence that Brooks himself participated in the violence. Senior officers, Black says, wanted to ‘smear’ the Lawrence family’s campaign. ‘They were trying to tar Stephen Lawrence,’ he adds. ‘If we could come up with anything like that, that was genius. We were trying to stop the campaign in its tracks.’

Duwayne Brooks was captured on video in the mêlée at a demonstration in Welling in May and later admitted to being caught up in the frenzied anger over the death of Lawrence, who had been murdered just weeks before. Brooks was pictured holding a stick, and was part of a crowd of youths who pushed over a car, although he did not himself damage the vehicle. He was arrested in October that year, after the Lawrence suspects were released, and charged with criminal damage. The Crown Prosecution Service appeared desperate to prosecute him, despite protestations from a judge, who eventually stayed the
proceedings
. Brooks has repeatedly asked why he was targeted by the authorities during the failed prosecution, saying he feared they had a vendetta against him.

When the Macpherson inquiry was eventually announced, Black says he argued strongly that the role played by the SDS in
obtaining
intelligence about the Lawrence campaign should be disclosed. ‘I was convinced that the SDS should come clean,’ he says. ‘The inquiry was an investigation into all aspects of the police, to reassure the public. I was overruled.’ He believes the decision to keep the spying operation secret from Macpherson was taken at the top of Special Branch. ‘The remit of the SDS was to prevent disorder. The overall consensus was that if my role had been made public, the streets of London would have erupted all over again,’ he says.

By then, a decision had been taken to remove Black from the field, bringing a premature end to what should have been a five-year tour. Black wanted to remain undercover, believing that he was well placed to monitor the impact the Macpherson inquiry would have on the anti-racist movement. But his
managers
insisted he should come out, to be replaced by another SDS officer at a later date.

Black began preparing his exit. In one sense, it was the worst time for someone to say that they were leaving
anti-racist
campaigns out of disillusionment. They were reaching a high point: a public inquiry into endemic racism in the police. There was a buzz of excitement, a sense that objectives were being achieved. Still, Black was told by his bosses it was time to go. He put into place an elaborate subterfuge for what the SDS called an ‘off-plan’ – the process through which he planned to disappear quietly, without raising alarm bells.

Every undercover officer will have a different explanation for their disappearance, although the SDS had a few set pieces. Most commonly its officers pretended to have a mental breakdown or go on the run from police. But there will always be slight
differences
– personalised adaptations that suit each officer. Black says that a good undercover operative starts planting the idea of their eventual exit among activists almost as soon as their deployment begins. They will then have a ready-made excuse, which can be used at short notice whenever they need to leave.