Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (5 page)

ALF campaigners operated through a diffuse subterranean network of small activist cells. The ALF had no membership and no leaders. It encouraged the idea of autonomy; any activists could organise their own direct action and claim responsibility for it under the banner of the ALF. With no obvious structure, its followers worked in a fluid, loose way, coming together to
execute a direct action and then quickly dispersing. Often attacks were carried out by solitary individuals. Each disparate cell waxed and waned according to the enthusiasm of its members and the ability of police to detect what they were up to. By 1985, police felt they were losing the battle.

A special squad was set up to catch ALF campaigners, who were subjected to telephone taps and extensive surveillance. Special Branch recruited an ever-expanding team of informants from across the animal rights movement in a desperate bid to find out what was going on. By the 1990s, police were running around 100 informants in animal rights groups, according to Ken Day, a former Special Branch man. He says some were being paid as much as £10,000 a year for intelligence on the ALF and its associates.

A confidential Special Branch document reveals that the SDS first deployed one of their operatives to the animal rights
movement
in April 1983. ‘At this time, the major related policing problem was public disorder at large-scale demonstrations. Hence it was a relatively easy matter for him to infiltrate … and obtain useful intelligence concerning public order events,’ the document notes. It says of their spy: ‘Essentially, he was working amongst well-meaning, idealistic campaigners … Within their ranks was a small but growing number of militant activists prepared to take the law into their own hands.’ Not long after that first
deployment
, the SDS deemed it necessary to send in a second operative and chose Lambert, one of their brightest young recruits. The document contains Lambert’s own assessment of the task ahead, in which ‘hard-won credibility and trust are prerequisites to
high-grade
intelligence’.

After first establishing himself among more moderate activists, Lambert set about befriending campaigners suspected of being in the ALF. One was called Geoff Sheppard. ‘In my eyes he was
a totally credible activist,’ Sheppard says. ‘I felt no doubt
whatsoever
, you might say, that he was one of us.’ Sheppard recalls how Lambert drove protesters around the country to support fellow ALF activists who were being prosecuted. They travelled up to Sheffield when Ronnie Lee and others were put on trial for conspiracy to commit arson. Lee, a former trainee solicitor, was jailed for 10 years in January 1987. Sheppard, Lambert and others complained that the sentence was harsh, telling each other that the treatment of their comrade should spur them on to carry out further attacks.

Just as he had done with Charlotte, Lambert made Sheppard feel the pair had a special connection; they were locked together in the struggle. A photograph captures the two men together in Lambert’s van. The long-haired police spy is at the wheel of his battered vehicle, looking out the back toward his friend. ‘I believed in him, and I liked him, and I thought he was a friend of mine,’ says Sheppard. ‘I trusted in him 100 per cent.’ Both men were frequently seen at demonstrations and were involved in what Sheppard calls ‘the legal stuff’. But few knew that they were also committed ALF activists. According to Sheppard and Gravett, Lambert even produced a well-known ALF leaflet from the era which summed up the group’s philosophy under the stencilled headline: ‘You are the Animal Liberation Front.’ ‘You wouldn’t leave it to others if your friend was being beaten up in the street,’ it said. ‘In the same way you can’t stand by as
thousands
of animals are slaughtered every day.’

It was this uncompromising approach that led the ALF to wage a sustained campaign aimed at economically damaging companies that sold animal products and provided Lambert with an opportunity to make his name. The ALF was turning its attention to chains of department stores like House of Fraser, Debenhams and Allders, all of which sold fur. Over three years
from 1984, activists had planted more than 40 incendiary devices to set fire to shops up and down the country. In one
particular
spree, there was a series of co-ordinated attacks on House of Fraser stores across northern England, from Altrincham in Cheshire through to Blackpool, Harrogate and Manchester.

The media called the arson attacks ‘firebombs’, but in
reality
the homemade contraptions, designed to cause tiny ignitions, were rather basic. Devices the size of cigarettes boxes were placed under flammable objects such as an armchair or settee in the stores. The ALF insists that the devices were designed to go off at night so that people were not harmed – typically, they would be laid in the afternoon and timed to ignite just after midnight. The aim was to cause enough of a fire to set off the sprinkler system, avoiding a full-scale blaze but flooding the store extensively and ruining the stock. The top floor was favoured as all the floors underneath would be drenched.

The ALF hoped the campaign would inspire copycat actions around the country. A step-by-step guide on how to make the devices was quietly circulated around cells of activists. Under the misleading rubric ‘Interviews with Animal Liberation Front activists’, the closely typed booklet contained intricate diagrams involving nails, batteries, nail varnish, tweezers, watches and washing-up liquid. The instructions could be mastered by a clever activist with enough time on their hands, while all the household ingredients were available in regular high-street shops.

Sheppard recalls the moment in 1987 that a trio of ALF
activists
concocted a plan to set fire to three branches of Debenhams in an attempt to force the department store to abandon its fur products. ‘Myself, and Bob, and one other person got together and formulated a plan,’ he said. According to another
confidential
source who knew about the plot, the components for the attacks on branches of Debenhams in and around London were
assembled in an empty squatted property. After a period of
experimentation
, the trio believed they had improved the rudimentary design stipulated in the booklet.

Lambert was in a prime position for a covert agent. He confided to one friend he was ‘deeply involved’ in the ALF and spent hours defending the ethics of its hard-line tactics. Another friend recalls Lambert telling her that he was going to set fire to the department store. She says she ‘spent ages trying to persuade him not to, that it was a bad idea’. Lambert was unmoved: he portrayed himself as being willing to undergo a heroic sacrifice, risking his own freedom to prevent the sale of fur. The question was: how far would the undercover police officer go?

According to Sheppard, his friend Lambert was intimately involved in the conspiracy. Sheppard’s testimony about the attack on the Debenhams store – and the part he alleges Lambert played – was highlighted in a parliamentary speech by Caroline Lucas MP in June 2012. Lucas told the House that Sheppard had claimed that he, Lambert and a third activist were part of the plan to target three branches of Debenhams. The trio each collected two devices during the day on Saturday, July 11 and then headed off to their designated branch. One was in Luton, another in Romford. The third, which Sheppard said the police spy was going to target, was the Harrow branch in north-west London.

That night, Lucas reported, Sheppard says he returned from setting fire to his allotted store and turned on the radio to listen to the BBC World Service. The newsreader announced that three Debenhams stores had been subject to arson attacks – including the branch in Harrow. According to Lucas, Sheppard said in his testimony: ‘So obviously I straight away knew that Bob had carried out his part of the plan. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever that Bob Lambert placed the incendiary device at the Debenhams store in Harrow. I specifically remember him giving
an explanation to me about how he had been able to place one of the devices in that store, but how he had not been able to place the second device.’

Lambert has consistently denied planting the incendiary device in the Harrow store. Whatever the truth, the simultaneous strike that night had by far the biggest impact of the ALF’s campaign for all the wrong reasons. Although police would have had advance notice of the plan, through Lambert, the sprinkler system at the Debenhams store in Luton’s Arndale shopping centre had been turned off to be repaired. There was nothing to douse the small fire ignited by one of the incendiary devices in the
menswear
department. Firefighters discovered the fire at 1.50am on Sunday. It took 80 of them, pumping water from 10 engines, until 6.39am to bring the blaze under control. Four floors of the store were gutted, and the store was shut for weeks. A black-and-white photograph from the morning after shows a fireman hosing down a mass of smouldering debris that looked like the scrunched
aftermath
of an earthquake. Insurers later calculated that the damage, including loss of trading, amounted to £6.7m at the Luton store alone – far more than any of the other arson attacks in the ALF’s campaign against the sale of fur by high street stores.

The store at Harrow was also badly hit, costing Debenhams £340,000. The fire alarm went off just before 1am, alerting the police and the fire brigade. Police constable Simon Reynolds from Wealdstone police station arrived within minutes and found ‘a thick blanket of smoke’. With the help of a torch, PC Reynolds and a colleague discovered the sprinklers working in ‘an area badly damaged by fire and water’ in the section of the store selling luggage on the first floor. The carpets, clothing and goods were sodden.

John Horne, of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist branch, confirmed that ‘an improvised incendiary device had functioned against the wall in a display area’. He told the court: ‘Amongst
the debris I was able to identify the heavily charred remains of a small cardboard box, an alarm clock and what appeared to be the remains of a vehicle light bulb, and a dry cell battery.’

Police testified only one device was planted at the Harrow store. Two devices in the other Debenhams stores had failed to ignite and so police found them intact. Care had been taken to ensure no fingerprints were left on the small homemade devices, which had labels stuck to the side: ‘Warning – Do not touch, ring police, Animal Liberation Front.’ In Sheppard’s version of events, Lambert had again earned his spurs as an ALF activist during the attack on Debenhams. ‘I was already confident in him anyway but after that, I would have had absolutely no doubts whatsoever that he was a genuine ALF activist, because it simply would not have entered my mind that a police officer would carry out such an action.’

The attacks bore all of the characteristics of an ALF mission executed without a trace. If it were not for Lambert, detectives might never have worked out who planted the devices. Police made their arrests a couple of months later, bursting into the ground-floor bedsit of a corner house in Hillside Road in
Tottenham
in north London at 4.50pm on Wednesday September 9.

Sheppard and Andrew Clarke, the other ALF activist who would ultimately be convicted over the attacks on Debenhams, could not have been caught at a worse moment. They were in the middle of assembling a fresh round of incendiary devices for another wave of attacks. They were wearing rubber gloves, to keep their fingerprints off the devices, and sitting around a table in the tiny, spartan room. Spread out in front of them on pages of the
Guardian
newspaper was the paraphernalia for making four more devices – dismantled alarm clocks, copper wire, bulbs, batteries and nail varnish. The soldering iron being used by the pair to make the devices was still hot.

As Sheppard puts it: ‘There was a kick on the door at which point the door came swinging open very violently. At least four or five large suited men came through that door and we were caught red-handed.’ Lambert, however, was not with them. He seemed to have been the lucky member of the trio who had got away.

Months later, Sheppard and Clarke were sat side by side again, this time in the dock at the Old Bailey, listening as the
prosecution
laid out their case against them. ‘They were in the process of what was clearly a well-practised method of constructing
incendiary
devices similar in every significant respect to those used at Harrow, Luton and Romford,’ Victor Temple, for the
prosecution
, told the court. He explained how, after arresting Sheppard and Clarke, detectives seized a black woollen mask, ‘
incriminating
’ ALF literature, press cuttings of the previous attacks on Debenhams, and ‘lists of butchers, fur shops etc’.

Looking back, Sheppard says that the tip-off for the raid was so accurately timed that it ‘obviously came from Bob Lambert’. The police spy was one of the few people who knew that his friends Sheppard and Clarke would at that very moment be constructing more devices in the flat. But at the time, Sheppard never suspected Lambert. Indeed, for another quarter of a century, despite years languishing in jail trying to work out who the grass had been, Sheppard never once considered that his friend Bob Robinson had betrayed him.

In part, that can be explained by Lambert’s deceptive skill when his friend was put behind bars: feigning empathy for his comrade and supporting him at every step. In a letter to another activist in March 1988, Lambert explained how he was
desperate
to ensure that enough supporters were visiting Sheppard, who was on remand. ‘I just had a feeling that no one would be visiting him on the Sunday and I was getting very frustrated,’ he wrote.

Behind bars in Wandsworth jail, Sheppard felt grateful when Lambert visited him and gave him a gift – a book about
philosophy
. ‘I remember thinking, “Bob’s still there for me.” Actually he was the guy who put me there,’ says Sheppard. However, at the time, Sheppard and others had no reason to wonder why and how the third man in their cabal had got away. ‘For 24 years I have believed that my friend, what I thought was my friend Bob Robinson was on the run and had most likely gone to a different country and probably made a new life for himself,’ says Sheppard. ‘And I just thought – good for him, he was the lucky one that managed to get away.’