Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (14 page)

As Black prepared to start his covert mission, senior officers in the SDS were deciding on his future undercover role. They were constantly working out which political groups needed infiltrating and which officers would make suitable spies. Initially, Black was lined up to become an anarchist. At least three SDS officers had already been embedded in anarchist groups in the early 1990s. One was in a small anarchist group called the Direct Action Movement (DAM), which had existed since 1979. Its associates believed capitalism should be abolished by workers organising themselves at the grassroots level, a political philosophy known as anarcho-syndicalism dating back to the late 1890s. One
confidential
Special Branch document states that a detective constable who worked as an SDS spy ‘successfully’ infiltrated DAM between 1990 and 1993.

Another group of interest to the SDS was the better-known Class War, which achieved some notoriety after it was set up in the 1980s. Anarchists linked with Class War produced a
newspaper
of the same name, styling it Britain’s most unruly tabloid. At its zenith, it was reputedly selling 15,000 copies per week. It provoked a lather of indignation from the right-wing tabloid
press, which was enraged by the publication’s tongue-in-cheek promotion of violence against the wealthy. One front-page
headline
suggested that the newly married Duke and Duchess of York were ‘Better Dead Than Wed’, while the birth of Prince William was greeted with ‘Another Fucking Royal Parasite’. A third showed the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher with a hatchet buried in her head.

A regular feature was the ‘hospitalised copper’ page – a
photograph
of a police officer being assaulted. ‘We loved that. But it was done with humour, so even though it was violent, it didn’t come across as psychotic violence,’ says Ian Bone, Class War’s loudest advocate. There was an element of pantomime about the group – in their ‘Bash the Rich’ demonstrations, supporters were invited to march into affluent areas of London such as
Kensington
and Hampstead.

Bone, a wiry sociology graduate with small round glasses who was once dubbed ‘Britain’s most dangerous man’ by the press, said later that no rich people were actually ‘bashed’ – ‘but it felt good walking down there. We gave a lot of abuse and shouts and they did cower, a few of them, behind their curtains.’ The SDS viewed Bone and his friends as considerably more sinister. The unit posted at least two undercover police into the group.

One was in place in February 1992 when he had a meeting in a London safe house with David Shayler, the MI5 officer later jailed for breaking the Official Secrets Act after leaking details of alleged incompetence in the secret services. Shayler had at that time been assigned to investigate whether Class War posed a threat to British democracy. The SDS officer supplied intelligence to the Security Service, and had become an official MI5
informant
, designated the code number M2589.

According to Shayler, the ‘peculiar arrangement’ in which the SDS officer lived the life of an anarchist for six days a week,
returning only occasionally to his friends and family, had ‘affected the agent psychologically’. Shayler recounts: ‘After around four years of pretending to be an anarchist, he had clearly become one. To use the service jargon, he had gone native. He drank about six cans of Special Brew during the debrief, and regaled us with stories about beating up uniformed officers as part of his “cover”. Partly as a result, he was “terminated” after the 1992 general election. Without his organisational skills, Class War fell apart.’

According to Black, the true story was a little different. He says the SDS officer in question was a ‘top end’ operative who served the unit well. During the encounter with the MI5 officer, he acted the part of a coarse anarchist because he had little time for Shayler, who was perceived to be a ‘desk wanker’ – though Black concedes that ‘some MI5 desk officers who came out to talk to us were superb and we had a very, very good relationship with them’. A second SDS officer was later sent into Class War, but it became apparent the group was fading out. Rather
ignominiously
for the anarchists who wanted to tear down the state, the SDS concluded they could no longer justify spending money to infiltrate them.

Hence, in 1993, when Black was due to begin his life as an anarchist protester, the plan was suddenly changed. Black was disappointed; he had spent months perfecting his persona as an anarchist. ‘It was all based around the fact that I was a
half-German
anarchist with tenuous connections to the
Baader-Meinhof
group. It sounds ridiculous when you say it and it’s hard to imagine that it would stand up to scrutiny, but it would have,’ he says. ‘I used lots of elements of my own life to ensure it came across realistically.’

Instead, weeks before he was due to be deployed, he was called into the office by the head of the SDS. ‘The boss pulled me in and said: “This anarchist work you’ve been doing, absolutely spot on.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody work so hard on their cover. First class. Now you can fucking forget all about it because you are not going into the anarchists. We’ve got something else in mind.”’

At short notice, Black was plunged into another world – the bitter and at times violent conflict between the far right and their adversaries in the anti-racist movement. The far right was
spreading
its neo-Nazi message across the country, leading to a surge in racially motivated attacks and murders. They were also attacking the left at demonstrations, using iron bars, hammers and bottles as weapons.

The anti-fascists could be similarly violent in their retaliation. Some felt they needed to crush the resurgent far-right
movement
, using force if necessary, before it had a chance to take hold. The approach had a historical tradition – famously, thousands of Jews, socialists, anarchists, Irish Catholic dockers and others successfully blocked fascists led by Oswald Mosley from marching through east London in 1936. Of course, there were many other anti-racist groups who did not agree with using violence, deriding the tactic of ‘bashing the fash’ as immature and unjustified.

Still, there had been a string of bruising encounters between neo-Nazis and their opponents in London. Some of the most ferocious clashes occurred one Saturday afternoon in
September
1992 when there were running battles between hundreds of anti-fascists and racists for hours in and around London’s
Waterloo
station. More than 40 were arrested during the fighting which closed the station for 45 minutes and trapped passengers on
platforms
, as fighting spilled onto the concourse. Sixteen people were injured as anti-fascists sought to stop the racists from assembling and then travelling to see a concert organised by a neo-Nazi group called Blood and Honour.

Inevitably, the clashes came under the scrutiny of the SDS, which felt it needed to get a hold on what was happening. Black
was redirected into the anti-racist movement. The detail of his mission was set out in a classified report, headed ‘Targeting Strategy’. It was produced by the head of the SDS in September 1993. ‘The continuing major threat to public order caused by the confrontations between right- and left-wing adherents continues to be a priority target for the SDS,’ he wrote. ‘Recent events show this is likely to be the dominant issue for street protests for the foreseeable future.’

The key group the SDS believed was involved in
confronting
the far right was called Anti-Fascist Action (AFA). Formed in the mid-1980s through a loose alliance of anarchists and
left-wingers
, the SDS said it was now subject to a political rift. In a trait painfully familiar to radical politics over the decades, there was an alphabet soup of competing organisations campaigning against racists. To make matters more complicated, each group was often just a front, controlled by another political faction.

Black was told he should penetrate Youth Against Racism in Europe, better known by its acronym YRE. It was a front for the revolutionary left-wing group, Militant. The head of the SDS believed there was a new anti-fascist alliance forming ‘within the loose confederation’ of the YRE, a second Trotskyist group and ‘sundry ad-hoc student and Asian youth groups’. The SDS boss identified an obscure anti-fascist group at a further education college in Camden, north London, as a possible stepping stone into the YRE.

The SDS technique was to identify a key individual within a political group and get close to them. In Black’s case, the target was an anti-fascist campaigner at Kingsway College. Black was instructed to attend the college and befriend this particular
individual
, who had connections with the YRE. ‘This allows an entry into the YRE and possibly AFA,’ his boss wrote. If this failed, there was a plan B: Black could penetrate ‘an autonomous group
of anarchists’ based in Hackney, east London who had been previously infiltrated by the SDS.

Tensions on the streets were rapidly rising. They were brought to the boil on September 16 1993, when the BNP won its first-ever council seat: Derek Beackon was elected on to Tower Hamlets council, a deprived working-class area in east London. His election followed a number of racist attacks in the area – the previous week, for instance, a gang of eight white men had beaten a 17-year-old Asian boy called Quddus Ali and left him in a four-month-long coma, resulting in permanent brain damage. The election triggered further demonstrations, some of them violent.

One flashpoint was Brick Lane, the heartland of the
Bangladeshi
community. For many years, the fascists had been selling their newspapers on the street on Sundays. Their anti-fascist adversaries made several attempts to physically drive them away.

The weekend after Beackon’s election, the anti-fascists pulled off what they believed was a small but important victory. As usual, the BNP were standing around selling their paper when they were joined by a group of 20 skinheads dressed in fascist uniform: bomber jackets, jeans and Dr Martens boots. They were chanting ‘Rule Britannia’ and giving Nazi salutes. The police allowed these apparent sympathisers to stand next to the BNP. Seconds later, the small group of skinheads turned on the BNP, attacking them and chasing them down the street.

The YRE activists who had disguised themselves as racists felt victorious. One told the
Guardian
newspaper: ‘The damage we did to the Nazis that day was very effective. They have been taken out of the streets and neutralised in the Brick Lane area. Our prime aim is to build a mass-based anti-racist movement, but we also believe in tackling the Nazis head on. It gives the community confidence and helps them to help themselves.’

That same month, Black started his undercover role in college, taking his first tentative steps en route to the YRE. He had few clues to guide him. Intelligence about the
Kingsway
group was virtually non-existent. ‘The SDS didn’t have a clue about exactly what the group was up to. Nothing at all,’ Black says. He recalls one superior telling him: ‘There is no
pre-intelligence
, but we know that you know how to look after yourself, so best of luck to you.’

The deployment did not start well. ‘The SDS did not realise that the Kingsway college was split across four different sites,’ Black says. ‘All I had was a name and a group so I enrolled at the college only to find that I had actually joined the wrong part. I wasn’t where I needed to be at all.’ Where he needed to be was at the college’s site in Gray’s Inn Road. Black was feeling
vulnerable
. The last-minute change to his deployment meant he did not have much time to ‘put together my new character’.

‘I knew the key to getting alongside my targets would be to not be too keen,’ he says. ‘You can’t get into a situation like that already believing whatever particular brand of politics it is that they are spouting. You need to let them convert you, or at least think they have converted you. My attitude at the beginning was “Fuck off with your poxy student politics” and letting them come and try to prove me wrong. You have to allow them to come to you. If you go in and you say, “Oh, I love the left wing, I think you are all wonderful,” then you might as well put a sign on your head.’

Within days Black had what he considered a lucky break, allowing him to get close to the Kingsway student he was told was a key figure. It happened in the college canteen. ‘I was in a queue for lunch and there was some sort of altercation between a couple of people in front of me and the lady who was serving,’ he says. ‘I didn’t hear the beginning of it but it actually then took on
a really racist undertone. I’ve never liked bullies or racism. It was nothing to do with being a police officer because at that moment the last thing I wanted to do was break my cover. I was just
intervening
because it was the kind of thing I would have done in my personal life. I barged forward and said to the person who was causing this trouble that this woman does not deserve this. She is just doing her job. It’s irrelevant if she’s fucking black or white or whatever, you shouldn’t be giving her a hard time. He then turned round and had a swing at me. And that was that, it was all over in a second and he was on the floor.’

The fracas was seen by a student who was friendly with Black’s target, the Kingsway anti-fascist campaigner. A few days later, the two of them tried to persuade Black to join a demonstration against the BNP.

‘I went into my full spiel: “I’m not going along to do anything with a bunch of student wankers”,’ he recalls. ‘“It’s a student wanker demonstration and I’m not interested.” He tried to explain that it wasn’t like that at all and that by going along I’d be making a stand against racism, something I clearly believed in because of the way I had reacted in the canteen. I told him that was
nothing
to do with racism; it was just a mouthy git who got what he deserved. He shook his head and told me that whether I realised it or not, I had been making a stand. I knew I couldn’t be seen to be keen and I thought that I seemed to have played it just right.’