Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (4 page)

Dixon’s young team-mates reflect the look of the era: long hair, moustaches, polo necks and big collars. The 48-year-old student stands out with his thinning black hair and bushy beard. His small eyes stare directly at the camera with the imposing air of someone who was not to be messed with. Dixon later lectured at maritime history conferences about the practices of foreign seamen and wrote a slew of books about yachting, one of which explained the intricacies of an electronic navigation system for boats. Each year, he spent a few months out on the open sea, sailing his boat off the coasts of Europe. He died in 1999, leaving behind a wife and four children. He was rewarded with a discreet obituary in
The Times
, the newspaper of record favoured by the establishment.

Prior to his death, Dixon did not disappear altogether from the SDS. He had chosen a new life but kept in touch with his old colleagues. Every five years, the spies, past and present, gathered to remember old times. In 1993, Dixon attended an SDS reunion to mark the 25th anniversary of the squad. Around 50 ex-spies and their managers came together at London’s Victory Club,
near Marble Arch, and heard a speech from their founder. One attendee recalls Dixon looked like ‘a shanty old seaman’.

Over dinner, feeling secure that they were within a trusted circle, the spies traded tales of derring-do from their covert days. Revered among their number was of course Dixon, the founder of the squad. But there was another man who had gained the special respect of his colleagues – Bob Lambert. Suave and
manipulative
, Lambert’s own tour of duty as a spy a few years earlier was considered one of the most impressive deployments in the history of the SDS.

The seasons were on the turn; Londoners were reaching for their jumpers beneath a cobalt blue sky. A little before lunchtime on September 19 2011, a debonair academic was preparing to give a scholarly talk on the fifth floor of a prestigious think-tank
overlooking
the River Thames. Around 50 people had come to hear the presentation at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, which styles itself as the world’s leading authority on political–military conflict. Nigel Inkster, a director of the institute, praised the academic’s ‘encouragingly youthful demeanour’ and paid
tribute
to his ‘long and distinguished career’ in the Special Branch.

Up to the podium stepped Dr Robert Lambert, a tall, composed man in his late 50s, wearing a well-tailored dark suit and tie. Lambert delivered his hour-long lecture, about
progressive
alternatives to combating the threat from al-Qaida terrorists, with the confidence of a practised public speaker. He spliced his thoughtful presentation with a few jokes, sending ripples of
appreciative
laughter through the audience, and waved his hand in the air as he expounded the arguments in his newly published book. This was a carefully written manuscript that charted selected parts of his 26-year career in Special Branch ‘countering threats of terrorism and political violence in Britain’, but made no mention of the darker periods of his past. There was nothing to puncture his image as a progressive academic, the recipient of an MBE for
‘services to policing’. When Lambert stepped off the podium, he contentedly absorbed the applause from the audience, just one of many that had been convened from Singapore to Aberystwyth as part of his book tour.

He might have felt he was reaching the pinnacle of his career. In fact, the opposite was true. Over the next few months Lambert’s reputation would be left in tatters.

Lambert began his career in the police in 1977, aged 25. He joined the Metropolitan police, following in the footsteps of his
grandfather
, Inspector Ernest Lambert, who spent a quarter of a century in the force. Within three years, Lambert was in the Special Branch and soon after recruited into the SDS, joining the ranks of Conrad Dixon’s secret unit. Time and again Lambert would prove himself a master in the art of deception, a risk-taker with flair.

His undercover persona was Mark ‘Bob’ Robinson, a
disarming
, intelligent radical with a taste for danger. In 1983 – the first year of his deployment – Lambert met Charlotte, a vulnerable 22-year-old woman at an animal rights demonstration outside Hackney town hall in east London. Around 100 campaigners were outside the 1930s Art Deco building to put pressure on the council to sign up to a charter pledging an end to animal cruelty.

Lambert wandered over and asked Charlotte why she was wearing a stewardess-style colourful uniform, scarf and hat. She replied that she had come straight from work. The second time they met was more memorable: a demonstration against
foxhunting
in the Essex countryside. Charlotte started to fall for the older man. Lambert began picking her up before protests and
dropping
her back at her flat in east London, where she lived alone. ‘He told me that he worked as a gardener in north London,’ she says. ‘He got involved in animal rights and made himself a useful member of the group by ferrying us around in his van.’

Looking back, Charlotte feels she was targeted by the man she knew as Bob Robinson. ‘He was always around,’ she says. ‘Wherever I turned he was there trying to make himself useful, trying to get my attention. I think he was about 12 years older than me. It now seems that he worked to build a relationship with me, which developed into an intimate friendship and which became sexual. I believed at the time that he shared my beliefs and principles.’ Lambert was Charlotte’s first serious boyfriend and before long she was besotted.

Lambert always gave the impression of being a committed political activist. He chided his girlfriend for not doing more to stop the abuse of animals and encouraged her to take a more radical stance. He said that lobbying MPs and town councils would never bring radical change, arguing that only revolution would end the oppression of animals and humans in a capitalist society. ‘He would tease me for not being committed enough,’ she said. ‘I was a vegetarian but he encouraged me to become a vegan and he got me to become more involved in “direct action”.’

The police spy liked to flirt with the radical end of protest – and gave the impression he would break the law to further his cause. At weekends he visited London markets to stop traders selling and slaughtering chickens on the street, or stood outside butchers harassing customers. A friend of Charlotte says Lambert’s persona was seductive: ‘It was really an aphrodisiac that you had someone who wanted to do everything with you, who kind of took the risks that he took, and so it was a real rollercoaster in her life.’ After a few months, Lambert and Charlotte appeared
inseparable
at demonstrations; friends commented they had an air of Bonnie and Clyde. Lambert was often protective of his younger partner too. He once rushed to help her when some foxhunters threw her into a lake.

Within a few months, the pair were an established couple among radical protesters in London. Rather than sitting in the back of the van, Charlotte was now in the front seat, beside the charismatic driver. ‘Although Bob had a bedsit, he would stay with me. We set up home together. He would sometimes go off for a short while saying he had to visit his dad with dementia in Cumbria and sometimes he went off saying that he had a
gardening
job. Most the time while we were together he lived with me.’ It was of course a double life. Lambert’s father did not have dementia and did not live in Cumbria. His periods away from Charlotte were instead spent living a more conventional life with his wife and children in suburban Herefordshire. For at least five days a week, however, Lambert was with Charlotte.

Many SDS officers struggled to maintain their double lives. Not Lambert. He appeared to relish his duplicity, switching effortlessly between two worlds that were poles apart. Lambert was an ambitious man. He knew that a successful deployment – one in which he accessed the furtive underground networks of animal rights campaigners – could propel him up the ladder at Special Branch, and Charlotte was a key part of his equation. One of the hardest challenges for covert officers is turning up out of the blue without friends or family to vouch for them. They arrive in their late 20s or early 30s with sometimes feeble excuses for their sudden interest in politics.

Acquiring a girlfriend was an easy way to fill the gap, making an undercover police officer seem like a real person. Having Charlotte by his side helped Lambert to douse any questions about who he really was. Although she was not the most radical campaigner, she was a recognisable face, and had been interested in animal rights issues for around two years. Lambert exploited the credibility his girlfriend had already earned. ‘One day, Bob wasn’t there,’ recalls a friend of the couple. ‘And then Bob was
there. He was everywhere.’ There seemed no protest Lambert was not interested in. Unlike some of his more highly strung comrades, he had a relaxed charm about him.

‘Bob was not extreme in his language,’ says Martyn Lowe, a radical librarian. ‘He was calm, reasonable, smiling. In politics you get nutters who sort of rant and rave – he was the complete opposite to that.’ Paul Gravett, another activist, recalls Lambert as ‘an affable, nice, fun guy who knew a lot about things. He was not a cardboard activist, he had real depth to him.’ He
remembers
Lambert as ‘very convincing as a sort of alternative person’ who rejected the greedy individualism associated with
Thatcherism
, claiming instead to embrace a non-materialist lifestyle. He claimed to be into music – attending Glastonbury Festival and sharing Van Morrison albums with friends – and showed a keen interest in the left-wing literature stocked at Housmans, the
radical
bookshop near King’s Cross station.

Lambert was well versed in political theory, and, according to one of his friends from the time, was ‘pretty well organised
intellectually
’, able to debate the finer points of anarchist philosophy. The spy quickly developed the right patter. Adopting the doctrines of the animal rights movement, he condemned speciesism – the idea that humans have more moral rights than animals – and claimed he did not believe in keeping pets because he rejected the idea he should control an animal. In a letter he sent to a campaigner in 1986, Lambert wrote about a campaign to stop trains carrying nuclear waste through London. He called them ‘nukiller trains’ – the favoured term of derision among anti-nuclear campaigners. One another occasion, when scuffles broke out between
protesters
and police at a demonstration, Lambert immediately took out his camera to record what he called ‘police repression’.

Soon Lambert was throwing himself into several different strands of political activity, becoming involved in squatting, free
festivals and anti-nuclear weapon camps. The mid-1980s were a tumultuous time in British politics as Margaret Thatcher sought to impose her will on the British people. Lambert and Charlotte were among those who resisted. ‘They were like warriors trying to fight against it all,’ recalls a friend of the couple. ‘It was a really unjust time, a really divisive time. You either made loads of money or you were living in real poverty.’ One of the big clashes took place in Wapping, east London, where the newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch took on the print unions by sacking 6,000 workers. There were regular confrontations between police and supporters of the strike – more than 1,200 people were arrested. Lambert and
Charlotte
were often at the heart of the protests. The group Lambert seemed most interested in was a small, environmental group called London Greenpeace, which bore no relation to the larger campaign with the same name. London Greenpeace was a radical anti-capitalist group and Lambert quickly found his niche,
speaking
eloquently at meetings and writing the group’s propaganda.

Although he made a convincing activist, Lambert was never dour. His friends considered him a great drinking companion who liked to socialise at pubs like the Rising Sun in Euston Road. In the summer of 1986 he hosted a party at his flat on Talbot Road in Highgate when he moved out. He claimed to be earning a cash-in-hand income as a gardener in well-heeled properties in nearby Hampstead and elsewhere. A photograph from the era shows a lean, topless Lambert in white jeans and dirty trainers mowing a lawn. One day, to bolster his cover story, he hired two fellow activists to help him clear a garden in Surrey. He also told friends he had a side job driving mini-cabs, touting illegally for customers. True to his non-conformist lifestyle, he claimed he didn’t have a bank account and preferred working in the black economy to stay off the government’s radar and avoid paying tax.

Tracing the development of Lambert’s undercover deployment shows a master at work. He began on the fringes of radical protest, made friends, persuaded activists that he was useful, and then began the gradual process of working his way into the heart of the action. In the early part of his time in the field, Lambert just turned up at the kinds of publicly advertised demonstrations that rarely attracted more than a handful of uniformed police. One – a protest against food manufacturers Unigate – took place outside central London’s Dorchester Hotel in September 1984. Photographs show Lambert among a smattering of campaigners passing out handwritten leaflets and berating company
shareholders
en route to an annual meeting. He had even penned the leaflet that called on activists to make a stand against Unigate’s directors. ‘Let them know that there is no place for callous meat production in a caring society,’ the leaflet said. ‘Animals would prefer not to end up as Bowyers Pork Sausages.’ Lambert ended the leaflet with the popular animal rights slogan: ‘Meat is murder.’

However, from the outset Lambert was adept at cultivating the impression that his moderate exterior belied a more radical edge. ‘Bob gave off the impression he was doing a lot of direct action but one could never put one’s finger on it,’ says Lowe. ‘One always had the suspicion he was into something heavier. He never talked about it directly.’ Gravett remembers that soon after he met him, Lambert ‘let it be known’ that he dabbled in illegal protest. He said that Lambert even told him he had once dressed up as a jogger and poured paint-stripper over the car of a director of an animal-testing laboratory. Truth or fiction, the story helped Lambert portray himself as a secret firebrand. It was the persona he needed to fulfil what had become the main objective of his mission – penetrating the intensely furtive, hard-core wing of the animal rights movement: the Animal Liberation Front.

Since 1976, the ALF has carried out thousands of unlawful protests to stop what it perceived to be the abuse of animals. It has a reputation for extreme acts of sabotage that have caused millions of pounds of damage. Police view the group as an
underground
terrorist network. ALF activists have targeted laboratories, abattoirs, butchers’ shops, fast-food restaurants and factory farms. Their more radical tactics have included arson, break-ins, destruction of equipment, harassment of scientists, death threats and hoaxes. Campaigners in the ALF have been best known for the photographs in which they were disguised in black
balaclavas
and camouflage jackets triumphantly posing with rabbits or dogs they claimed to have ‘liberated’ from laboratories. For many years, the group was personified by its figurehead: the diminutive Ronnie Lee, a man widely recognised by his round glasses, beard and flat cap.

In the 1980s, the ALF was growing and its attacks were becoming more destructive. The ALF claimed it only attacked property and made sure that people were not harmed, but conceded its approach was combative. Keith Mann, an ALF activist jailed in 1994 for 14 years for sabotage, told the BBC: ‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Call us violent, call us terrorists, call us anarchists, they’re all used
regularly
. All we’re asking for is change. We want people to stop using violence against animals.’ The ALF was an obvious target for the SDS – one of the most important political groups the unit had to monitor. But the group presented a headache for senior officers.