Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (13 page)

Mornings were taken up with paperwork, but afternoons were generally more practical. The whole routine was part of an SDS ritual. The ‘back-office boy’ would always spend months doing menial work and preparing their alias, ready to replace one of the 10 when their mission ended. It was a revolving system, and each time a ‘back-office boy’ graduated, another was
recruited to start learning the ropes. ‘What I didn’t realise until I got there was that not everyone who goes into the back office actually makes it out into the field,’ he says. ‘About a fifth of the recruits never make it out of the back office at all. They get watched closely and it is decided that they simply don’t have what it takes to make it any further.’

The first challenge for all new recruits involved constructing their fake identity, or ‘legend’. It was not just a name they were searching for, but a whole life story that would provide a plausible explanation for their interest in activism. The SDS had protocol for the creation of these legends: they would search out the
identity
of a suitable dead child, steal it, and claim it as their own, without ever informing the parents.

The process of acquiring these dead children’s identities was as bizarre as it was gruesome. SDS officers would visit St
Catherine
’s House, a prosaic government building near Aldwych in central London, which until 1997 housed the lists of Britain’s births, marriages and deaths going back more than 150 years. For years, legions of amateur historians pored laboriously over the huge ledgers containing clues to their ancestors. But among their number were SDS men who, like Black, had a more
sinister
purpose.

‘You go to St Catherine’s House and you are looking for someone of a similar age to you who died, starting at age three or four and up to age 14 or 15,’ he explains. Wherever possible, spies were required to find someone who shared their first name. This was important: it was notoriously difficult to suddenly adopt a completely different first name. ‘It doesn’t matter how good you think you are,’ Black says. ‘If you are undercover as “David” and you’re walking down the road and someone behind you starts shouting out “David”, there’s no way in the world you’re ever going to turn around, so you don’t change your first name.’

He adds: ‘Surnames always have to be general. You don’t want something which is going to stand out too much or be too memorable, like Aardvark. You don’t want to draw any
unnecessary
attention to yourself. Green and Black are good. But you don’t want something like Smith. No matter what your first name is, that surname will always sound fake.’

Searching through death records for a child who had died years ago had a ghoulish quality. Black remembers a ‘real moment of discomfort’ when he came across the boy whose identity he was about to take. He was a four-year-old. ‘I looked and saw the little chap’s death certificate. It might have been to do with the age of my son at the time – a very similar age to the age this boy died. A part of me was thinking about how I would feel if someone was taking the name and details of my dead son for something like this. For me that was a little pang going on. And that was the first of many moments I ended up having. You have to use people. You end up using a lot of people.’

The strange ritual undergone by undercover police officers had a purpose. The idea was that by pretending to be a real person – albeit one who had died decades ago – the SDS officers were protecting themselves. If anyone they infiltrated became suspicious of them, and researched their background behind their back, they would most likely come across a real person’s birth certificate. ‘What you are always gearing up for is someone saying: “I’m suspicious. I don’t like him, I’m going down to St Catherine’s House in order to check him out.”’ By resurrecting the identities of real people, the SDS felt they had a stronger cover story.

It was not a technique that was unique to the SDS. The trick had been used by fraudsters and serious criminals for many years and was fictionalised in Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel
Day of the Jackal
; the professional assassin who was paid to kill French
president Charles de Gaulle resorted to the same ruse of
assuming
a dead person’s identity. In recognition of the book, the SDS came up with a nickname for the process of searching for suitable dead children: they called it ‘The Jackal Run’. Black was not the only SDS officer to feel a little uneasy about the morality of the identity fraud.

A second SDS officer, who chose an infant killed in a road accident, said he did so in the knowledge that his parents would ‘still be grief-stricken’. ‘I thought: what would his family think if their son’s name was being used for the greater good, how would they feel about it, and should they be consulted?’ he says. ‘There were dilemmas that went through my head.’ He adds: ‘Your choice of name was of fundamental importance because on that would rest your whole identity, sense of security, confidence and ability to do the job. You are feeling vulnerable right from the first day. All the work you did before you started the job you felt paid off because you felt more comfortable, more confident and stronger within that identity.’ He believed the tactic was probably justified ‘because we had this mission to accomplish and this was the only way of doing it’.

Black did not feel the same way. ‘For me that was the first marker,’ he says. ‘In many ways those first feelings of discomfort were a sign of the problems that I would end up having later on.’ The boy Black chose had a ‘totally English’ surname. His father served in the Royal Marines and was initially stationed in the Far East; his son had died around the age of four in his next posting in the Middle East. The birth certificate was therefore kept in a more obscure overseas registry and would have been almost impossible to find. ‘I made it so hard – I could only just about find myself afterwards.’

Choosing a child who had died overseas was the kind of ruse SDS officers liked to use. Undercover officers never wanted the
birth certificates of the dead children to be too easily located. The more hoops activists had to go through to find the birth certificate, the more time the SDS would have to respond. Black felt his difficult-to-find birth certificate might one day help him if he ever came under suspicion. He figured he would have time to accuse activists of not trusting him and act enraged, secure in the knowledge that he could eventually tell them he was born abroad. If they looked hard enough, activists would find evidence he really existed.

‘You want to prolong their pain and make as big a scene as possible,’ he says. Of course, if it ever got to the stage of activists hunting through the birth certificate registry to work out if he was a real person, Black knew his deployment would be over. ‘If someone has checked you out that much, you need to go anyway, your time is up,’ he says. ‘The operation is important, but not as important as my life.’

Another similar SDS trick was not to go for a precisely
matching
name, but to choose a child with a middle name they shared. That would also make it initially harder for activists to track down the documentation. John Dines, the SDS officer who posed as John Barker, for example, did not opt for a child whose first name was John. Instead he used the identity Philip John Barker, an eight-year-old boy who died of leukaemia in 1968.

The same ploy appears to have been used by Bob Lambert, whose undercover alias was Bob Robinson. He seems to have used the identity of Mark Robert Robinson, who was born in Plumstead, south-east London, on February 28 1952. SDS officers always looked for children who were born around the same time as them, and Lambert’s choice was ideal – born just 16 days before Lambert’s real date of birth. He died of acute congestive cardiac failure at the age of seven after being born with a malformed heart. The child’s headstone was a sculpture of the
boy stood guard above the grave in Branksome cemetery near Poole. The engraving said: ‘Safe in the arms of Jesus’.

It seems likely that Lambert visited the boy’s gravestone. SDS officers often did. They were not just using the names of deceased people – they were assuming their entire identities, so they made sure they familiarised themselves with the lives of the people they were pretending to be. That usually meant a visit to the house where the child was born and spent the first few years of their life, to get to know the surroundings. ‘It’s those little details that really matter – the weird smell coming out of the drain that’s been broken for years, the location of the corner Post Office, the number of the bus you get to go from one place to another,’ Black says.

SDS officers memorised the names of the dead child’s mother, father and siblings, as well as other relatives, and found ways to work small details into their own back-story. Black for
example
used his fake father’s job in the armed forces to integrate a ‘violent’ streak to his persona. ‘I actually built into my identity the fact that my father was a trained Royal Marine and he used to beat me up,’ he says. The fact he was pretending to be a dead person would always linger at the back of Black’s mind,
particularly
during the awkward moments of his deployment when he celebrated his acquired birthday. He knew that was a day when the boy’s parents were ‘thinking about their son and missing him’. ‘I used to get this really odd feeling – I wish I had not done it,’ he says. ‘It was almost like stomping on the grave.’

Aside from the ethical problem, there was also one very
obvious
risk to using a real person’s identity. There were flaws in the formula: activists could always get hold of the dead child’s birth certificate and then try to track down their real family. ‘They could go and find the mother listed in the birth certificate and turn up on their doorstep,’ Black says. ‘They could knock on her
door and say, “Where is your son, I want to hurt him because he is an infiltrator.” And all she will be able to say is, “What are you talking about? My son died.” These are the kind of things you start to imagine. You worry about all the random hurt being dished out to people who don’t deserve it, all because of what you are doing.’

The other risk the SDS ran was even more serious. There was always a possibility that activists would not stop looking after discovering the birth certificate. What if they somehow managed to root out the death certificate, too?

Black knew of one such case. It concerned an SDS officer who infiltrated a left-wing group in the 1970s. One day, the SDS officer was invited by some campaigners to a drinking session at a pub followed by what was supposed to be a party at a friend’s house. The spy realised something was not quite right as soon as he walked into the flat, located in a tower block. The atmosphere changed. His friends were looking at him strangely.

One activist blocked the door; others lined up around the room. Then the campaigners produced a piece of paper and handed it to the SDS officer. It was his death certificate,
suggesting
he had died, decades ago, as a young boy. So what was he doing, alive and well, attending their meetings?

Put on the spot, the SDS officer blustered. He began to panic. Fearing the situation was not going to end well, he glanced around the room for an escape route. His eyes settled on an open window and, acting on impulse, he ran and jumped through, forgetting he was two storeys up. The officer hit the ground, breaking a bone in his ankle, and was last seen hobbling away in agony. To this day, the former SDS spy still walks with a limp.

The activists were never able to work out he was a police officer, although they presumed he was some kind of imposter. By that point, the SDS decided it was too risky for him to continue
undercover
.
When he was released from hospital, the SDS operative’s managers told him his deployment was effectively terminated.

Many years later, Black was sitting around at a party with an old left-wing activist who began telling the very same story, from the perspective of the campaigners who had outed the
infiltrator
. The tale came out of the blue when the activist suddenly announced: ‘I caught a spy once.’ He went on to retell the story: the trip to the pub, the interrogation at the flat, the look on the man’s face when he realised the game was up and jumped out of the window.

As he heard the story, Black’s heart began racing. He wondered if the anecdote was a prelude to him being confronted. Were these activists about to produce his death certificate? ‘You never know,’ he said. ‘When you first go undercover, you start off being extremely paranoid. Lots of activists think that there are spies left, right and centre.’ As it turned out, it was an innocent, light-hearted conversation.

Black has never disclosed the full details of the dead boy whose identity he used. The name ‘Pete Black’ was one of several he used when he was undercover and it was not that of a dead child. Other times he called himself Pete Daley. It was not unusual for activists to have several different names. But the dead child’s name was the most important one. It was printed on the fake passport, driving licence, bank account and national insurance card he was issued by the SDS. Once he had those documents, his transformation was almost complete.

Undercover officers who are deployed to infiltrate serious criminal conspiracies are sent on formal training courses
beforehand
, but that was not the SDS way. Black was told he was to learn his spycraft through osmosis, taking his lead from more senior SDS spies, who were considered the real experts. ‘As the back-office person, you watch these people and that is how you
learn the way to behave in order to do the job,’ he says. ‘You realise that if you arrested a group of people from the BNP and then you sat them down in a room to watch them all and tried to work out which one the undercover policeman was, you would not be able to do it.’

The squad had an oral culture in which knowledge,
experience
and tricks were handed down to the new recruits by old hands. Black was assigned a mentor for his first year. A former SDS officer who had infiltrated the Anti-Nazi League and the Socialist Workers Party in the 1970s, he was ‘very professional and regarded with a lot of esteem’, Black says. To use the jargon of the squad, his mentor was ‘a very deep swimmer’.