Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (16 page)

The friend agreed, and Black was told he could help out around the school, and receive free dyslexia lessons in return. The school authorities had no idea about his true role. ‘They didn’t know that I was an undercover police officer and they didn’t know that I didn’t have dyslexia either,’ he says. With regular access to the school, Black contrived a somewhat
different
explanation for his friends in left-wing campaigns. Instead of telling them he occasionally volunteered at the school, he
claimed to be its handyman. The two sides – the school
authorities
and his activist friends – had a different concept of what he was doing there.

‘As long as the two never met up for a longer interrogation, it worked,’ he says. ‘You need to have a job so that people don’t wonder why you have enough money to do things they might not be able to do. But it can’t be a regular job. Somehow you have to be flexible enough to be able to take time off at short notice whenever there is a demonstration or a meeting and that kind of thing. You need to be able to move things around.’

The SDS always stressed the importance of a watertight cover story. From its long experience in political espionage, the unit knew that campaigners had their own, often sophisticated, methods of counter-surveillance. Suspicious individuals would be followed home or subjected to minor interrogations. Some activists even had access to the tools of the state to research the backgrounds of newcomers who did not seem quite right. Many Militant campaigners, for example, worked in the public sector, and could quietly run checks on government databases to verify whether people were who they claimed to be.

Managers in the SDS arranged for fake national insurance numbers and tax records to be drawn up and inserted into the official bureaucracy for each of their undercover officers. ‘This is not Mickey Mouse cover,’ Black says. ‘You have perfect Inland Revenue records stretching back, usually involving some kind of manual labour so that there are no bank transfers and so on. If you were to look at it, you would not see anything wrong.’

And in this particular battle, police had the upper hand. Unbeknown to public-sector employees who were running
database
checks on the sly, there was a silent trigger on all official records belonging to SDS officers. It meant that the moment an activist pulled up a file belonging to an SDS officer, an automatic
alert was sent to the unit. This was how Black discovered that secret background checks were being conducted on him, around the time he was being considered for the post of a YRE branch secretary.

This particular incident was not too concerning. Campaign groups routinely looked into people they did not know too well, and Militant was especially paranoid. ‘They had infiltrated the Labour Party and expected to be infiltrated themselves,’ Black says. He also felt he had taken sufficient precautions. The rent for his flat, for example, was paid in cash, and later recouped from the police. His van was registered to the school, so nothing suspicious would pop up in a search of records at the Driving Vehicle Licensing Agency. Believing that activists could even get access to the Police National Computer, the SDS had ensured that its spies had fabricated files listing some past misbehaviour. A false criminal record was created on Black’s undercover
identity
and inserted into the national database. ‘You have to have a PNC record with some violence on it. Not too much, but a little bit,’ he says.

These safeguards were all useful, but Black knew what really mattered was his ability to make friends. He threw himself into socialising, determined to persuade them that his fake persona ‘was the real thing’. The social life was ‘pretty unrelenting’, Black says; often activists went to the pub after a meeting or demonstration and carried on drinking in one of their flats until the small hours.

‘I had a really good time with my targets and enjoyed their company enormously – there was a genuine bond,’ he says. ‘There’s a sense of comradeship in what you have done together, the battles you’ve had, your battle scars and what you have been through.’ But deep down, Black knew that these were not the sort of people he would associate with in his real life and he always
remembered his ‘overarching loyalty’ was to the SDS. ‘Would I have been friends with any of these people, would I wish to be friends with any of them? Not a single one of them.’ When Black felt himself becoming close to an activist, he tried to remind himself he was just ‘pretending’; that the bond, however strong, had a strictly utilitarian function.

But it was not always easy for Black to maintain his
ruthless
detachment. There were times when he realised his friends were genuinely good people. One day, Black needed to take some time off. His wife was giving birth to his child and so he needed an excuse to spend fewer days living undercover. In his real life, when he was a child, Black’s parents had divorced and his mother took to drinking heavily. In the end, his grandmother had helped bring him up as a sort of surrogate mother. Around a decade earlier she had fallen ill with cancer.

It was a biographical detail that Black integrated into his cover story – with a twist. In order to manufacture a reason for his time away from London, Black told friends that his mother in Germany had cancer. It was a lie, but it enabled Black to draw on the genuine emotions he felt when his grandmother had fallen ill. By resurrecting the illness that had ravaged his grandmother 10 years earlier, and pretending it was now affecting his mother, Black could speak convincingly about the physical and emotional toll the disease was taking on him.

Every time Black needed a break from undercover life, he reused the fabricated tale about his mother’s cancer. The fiction lasted around two years. His friends became more concerned for Black, who they believed was going through a hard time. He still has the sympathy cards, signed by more than a dozen activists, that he received whenever he told them he was off to Germany to visit his gravely ill mother. One of his friends wrote: ‘Peter, just a thought from the branch. We heard about your mum and
this is just a note to say we’re thinking about you and hope she’s doing OK.’

By the middle of his deployment in 1995, Black had settled into the weekly routine of an undercover SDS officer. Early on a Monday morning, he woke up in the Furlong Road flat and drove through rush-hour traffic to the home of his real family, outside London. Once there, he went into the study to write up a report into what the activists had been doing over the weekend. Once it was finished he drove back into London, made his way to one of the unit’s safe houses in the afternoon and hooked up with the rest of the squad for one of their regular weekly meetings.

‘The work of the day was to give a debriefing on the weekend,’ he says. After the meeting, Black often went for a drink with the squad and then returned home to be with his wife and kids. It was often a long journey; SDS officers took circuitous routes
everywhere
to ensure they were not being followed, a process known as ‘dry-cleaning’. Once home, he says, ‘you would be lucky if you could stay into Tuesday afternoon or evening’. It was the briefest of respites: a quick, sobering dip into his old identity – that of a police officer, father and husband – before driving back into town to reassume the identity of an unwavering Militant campaigner and bachelor.

Black liked to be back at his Furlong Road flat by the late afternoon, giving the impression he had spent a day doing odd jobs at the school. He was in the school for two days a week. ‘It’s a real role – if the activists came to the school, you would be there,’ he says. The rest of the week was spent with the activists, trying to pick up intelligence about forthcoming protests, either that weekend or in the future. On Thursday afternoons, Black attended the second regular SDS meeting of the week, at which the undercover officers were expected to brief their bosses on any protests coming up that weekend.

Black tried to be at his Furlong Road flat on Friday nights, too, in case activists came round. He spent the weekends involved in political activity, attending protests, selling Militant’s paper on street corners or socialising with campaigners. His boss Lambert placed great emphasis on making friends and going out. It made for more reliable cover. Of course Black also knew that SDS officers regularly slept with women activists to build the
credibility
of their persona.

Unlike the likes of Lambert and Chitty, he never developed any long-term relationships with women when undercover, but he did have sex with two activists. It is a subject he talks about in a matter-of-fact way. He argues it would have been virtually impossible to do his job without occasionally sleeping with women.

The unofficial motto of the SDS was ‘By Any Means
Necessary
’, and all operatives knew that sex was one tactic in their repertoire. ‘Basically it’s just regarded as part of the job,’ he says. ‘It’d be highly unlikely that you were not having sex.’ It was so widespread that out of the 10 SDS officers undercover when Black was deployed, only one did not sleep with campaigners. That included the small number of women in the squad, who had sex with male activists.

There was no specific rule against having sexual partners. It was so commonplace that, he says, it was barely remarked on. ‘Among fellow undercover officers, there is not really any kudos in the fact that you are shagging other people while deployed,’ he says. Having sex with campaigners was something that – either implicitly or explicitly – had the blessing of those running the SDS. They knew it was going on and did nothing to stop it. Indeed, Black says that while sex was considered acceptable, one unofficial rule was that operatives should ‘never fall in love’ with their targets.

‘When you are using the tool of sex to maintain your cover or maybe to glean more intelligence – because they certainly talk a lot more, pillow talk – you would be ready to move on if you felt an attachment growing,’ he says. ‘The best way of stopping any liaison getting too heavy was to shag somebody else,’ he says. ‘It’s amazing how women don’t like you going to bed with someone else.’

But there were occasions when the undercover officers strayed too far. When Black was undercover, he was not aware that anyone in the unit knew that Lambert had secretly fathered a child. However, they did know of another former SDS officer who fathered another child during a short-lived relationship. Like Lambert, he vanished from the lives of mother and child when his deployment ended. The mother brought up the child on her own, while the SDS officer continued his career in the Special Branch. The woman remained politically active, enabling the former SDS spy to periodically check up on her by reading confidential reports about her campaigning.

The spy watched from afar as the child grew up. He was reputed to have been agonised by the separation from his child. The story was recounted by Lambert to new recruits like Black without even hinting that he too had fathered a child undercover. Lambert even had the gall to criticise the officer for behaving unprofessionally. He told Black that the moral of the story was that he should always use contraception when sleeping with
political
campaigners.

Black’s wife knew that he was undercover, but was unaware of the details of his work and certainly had no idea he was sleeping with other women. His long absences and unforgiving schedule left virtually no time for his wife and two children. For more than four years, he was away for six days a week. Sometimes, during school holidays, he found a way to spend more time back at home
in the real world. But it was never enough. Black paid a personal price for ‘trying to be the best SDS officer I could ever be’. He admits his wife had a ‘very difficult time’. ‘The fact I was working so much eventually caused the break-up of my marriage,’ he says.

The top brass at the SDS, however, valued his dedication to the job. Lambert said in an early appraisal that Black was self-motivated and a hard worker who ‘demonstrated an innate professionalism’. The next year Lambert offered yet more praise: ‘Operating in a hostile environment where one slip can have
serious
implications for the officer and the team, [Black] has again demonstrated essential qualities of sound judgment and ingenuity. Combining, as he does, these qualities with a single-minded
determination
to succeed, it is a pleasure, and no real surprise, to report that his efforts have again been rewarded with excellent results.’

The results that Lambert was referring to included
regular
updates on what was going on in anti-racist groups across London, as well as the inner workings of the YRE and
Militant
. Black calculates that Special Branch was keeping files on around 100 members of the YRE, Militant and other anti-racist campaigners at the time. The files on individuals would contain reports of their activities at protests, other more general
intelligence
and information from sources such as newspaper articles. It would include, for instance, where they lived, where they worked, and whom they were friendly with in the campaign. Black himself opened up new files on around 25 campaigners he believed needed to be monitored.

Each file on an individual required an up-to-date photograph and Special Branch had an uncanny ability to acquire photographs when it needed them. Official images were available to the squad – from driving licences, passports and suspect mugshots taken inside police stations. Upon request, Special Branch could also deploy sniper-like photographers with long lenses. Black recalls
arranging for one such snapper to be hidden in a van outside Conway Hall in London to capture images of everyone who attended one of Militant’s conferences. The SDS also had access to the network of CCTV cameras that in the mid-1990s were proliferating across the capital. When Black travelled on the Tube with activists, Special Branch acquired footage from London Underground, enabling the officer to identify who he was with.

While Black’s job was primarily to hoover up intelligence, there were opportunities for him to broaden his mandate. On one occasion this enabled him to realise a schoolboy dream. For decades, surveillance of radical left-wing groups had been a staple feature of MI5’s work. Government ministers had, since the 1950s, ordained that the Security Service could spy on any individual who might undermine parliamentary democracy, national security or the economic wellbeing of the country.
Critics
complained that MI5 was effectively spying on individuals for having opinions that the government disliked, using a definition of subversion that was so loose that it included anyone who was exercising their democratic right to protest.