Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (18 page)

In the summer of 1997, Black started to draw together
various
threads from his cover story in order to weave together his excuse for leaving. Throughout his deployment, Black often talked about wanting to go travelling abroad, spreading the idea that he had always yearned to go wandering. Now, he told his friends, the time had come. He pretended that his mother had finally lost her long battle with cancer. He also claimed that this
had coincided with more bad news: he had been sacked from his job at the school. This did not come as a surprise to his friends. Preparing the ground, Black had spent months complaining about his work as a handyman, saying he was being paid pennies to work long hours.

To his friends, the confluence of events must have seemed like bad luck. In quick succession, his mother had died and he had lost his job. It was no wonder that he seemed to be going through a personal crisis and contemplating going abroad.

All Black needed now was a reason not to return. He confided in friends that he was so angry at his treatment by the school authorities that he had stolen the van, televisions, videos and other equipment from the grounds. Black was about to flee the country, avoiding any interview with the detectives who were investigating the theft at the school.

It was a stupid thing to have done, but in keeping with the headstrong activist his friends had come to know. What must have seemed to them to be the height of irrationality was, in fact, a meticulously planned deception, laid out in detail in a
confidential
Special Branch document headed ‘Withdrawal Strategy’. The 1997 report is written by Lambert, who clinically unravels what he calls Black’s ‘web of deception’. Lambert praised Black for ‘winning the complete confidence of senior activists at the very heart of a committed and insular group’. But now the ‘overriding objective’ was to ‘ensure the ongoing credibility of a departing activist who has formed close relationships within a security-
conscious
group.’

The plan, according to Lambert, needed to take into account the ‘close trust’ Black had built with his friends, ensuring that even after his departure ‘his political comrades have every reason to believe in the authenticity of his alter ego’. Lambert reflected on the work Black had put into convincing his friends that he
wanted a fresh start in life and concluded: ‘It appears entirely understandable to them that he should, notwithstanding his commitment to their shared revolutionary political ideals, be contemplating a dramatic change of lifestyle.’

Black sold the contents of his flat and gave the proceeds to Militant. He then went on a six-week trip on his own. He drove the stolen school van through Normandy, Brittany and along the French coast and then on to Barcelona. He slept in the van,
picking
up odd bits of bar work and manual labour for a few days at a time. Then he sold the van and flew to Greece. Although he was abroad, Black had to maintain the deception. He phoned the activists from call boxes and sent them postcards, with the all-important postmarks to show that he was abroad. To make the deception more persuasive, Black travelled back to Greece just before Christmas to post another set of postcards. The
correspondence
left hanging a suggestion that Black was unsure where he was going next, hinting they might not hear from him for some time.

By creating the illusion of constant movement, it made it far less likely his friends would suggest linking up with him on a holiday abroad. He wanted to leave a paper trail that could be used as proof of his foreign journey, using a credit card stolen from the school to pay for petrol and hotels. However
improbable
it might seem, Black felt it was not beyond the realms of possibility that activists would gain access to bank records to check where he had been. ‘It’s a golden rule – don’t
underestimate
your opponents,’ he says. Lambert was kept abreast of every move and the SDS quietly reimbursed the school for the stolen credit card, van and equipment.

The deception worked. Many years later, the activists Black infiltrated still remember the totally believable circumstances of his departure from London in search of a new life abroad. No
one questioned it. Sell says that no one in the YRE ‘remotely suspected him’ of being a policeman, during his deployment or in the years after.

For Black, the trip abroad was an opportunity to rediscover his former self. The weeks and months when SDS officers are made to travel to distant places abroad can be the most testing times. They are alone, without the visual prompts or surroundings to remind them which identity they are supposed to be adopting – police officer or political activist. They have time to reflect on the years they spent living as someone else and decide who they now want to be.

Black spent six weeks on his own, contemplating his past and future. He was frustrated that his deployment had come to a premature end. ‘I was not happy about coming off, not by a long fucking way,’ he says. ‘I wanted to get my head together. After what you have been through, you want to be alone. You need time to think of what you have been doing, what’s happened and what the activists mean to you.’ He repeated to himself the SDS mantra, drilled into spies to ensure they do not get too close to activists: ‘They are not your friends, they are your targets.’

Not long after his extended holiday under the Mediterranean sun, Black returned to London to say another set of goodbyes, this time to fellow ‘hairies’ in the 27 Club. Formally, Black left the SDS on September 27 1997, a valued member of the team.

As part of his au revoirs, the SDS went paintballing outside London, a typical day out for the SDS and a chance to – quite literally, in their case – let their hair down. He was given a leaving card, on the theme of
Star Wars
and Darth Vader. The card shows the esteem Black was held in and gives an insight into SDS
camaraderie
. Lambert, as befitting of the boss, used a football manager analogy to compliment Black’s professionalism: ‘Congratulations on a truly fantastic performance – Premier Division – no question,’
wrote Lambert, a keen Chelsea supporter. ‘Welcome to that early retirement feeling.’ Another SDS manager praised Black for a ‘job really well done … in your inimitable style’. A quiet, shy-looking colleague called Jim Boyling, who was in the middle of a
deployment
that would eventually prove as morally fraught as Lambert’s, wrote simply: ‘Can I have your van and regimental ponytail?’

Others made a play on Black’s reputation as an angry man. Squad member Chris joked ‘Calm down’, while another, Trevor, wrote: ‘To Mr Angry, well it’s all over, four years of blood guts and cheers.’ Another member, going by the name of ‘Sauce’, perhaps best summed up the attitude the squad had toward
political
activists, with a short poem: ‘Whenever the comrades see
Reservoir Dogs
/ They will think of you Pete and ask “Why was he such an angry sod?” / We know the reason, the answer why. They’re weary fuckers and they deserve to die.’

Life after the SDS was not easy for Black. After a six-month break, he was reassigned to other duties in Special Branch. It was far less exciting stuff. He was looking after covert recording devices used to pick up conversations and film suspects. His old boss
acknowledged
that Black was struggling to adjust.

In a note written in January 1998, after a debriefing over ‘a nice lunch at a nearby tandoori’, Lambert wrote that Black was ‘missing the activity or stimulation of the job … This is natural, particularly after such a consuming role or alter ego as the one he adopted.’ The truth was actually far worse for Black. In his words, he was ‘not a well teddy’.

The psychological damage from his undercover work took a while to manifest itself, but when it did, Black was in a bad mental state. Part of the problem was that his undercover life had placed a nerve-wracking strain on Black, who felt on edge throughout his four-year deployment. ‘It’s too much to be able to deal with,’
he says. ‘I never had any respite when I was back at home. I simply couldn’t relax. The respite for me was being back in my undercover flat because that was where I was supposed to be.’

His bosses admitted in an assessment in 1998 that Black had been ‘engaged for four years on dangerous and demanding specialist operational duties’, and ‘not unnaturally, such pressure took its toll, and he undoubtedly experienced extreme stress, which affected both him and his family’.

It was only looking back that Black realised the strain he was under during his undercover life. He was constantly worried he would be found out by his friends, or worse still targeted by any number of far-right groups who made a pastime out of
hunting
down lefties and beating them up. As a well-known face on anti-fascist demonstrations, Black had always worried he might be cornered one day by a group of Nazis. The SDS had ways of minimising the likelihood one of their own was attacked in this way. SDS officers who had infiltrated neo-Nazi groups could, for example, go through the photo collections that Nazis kept of prominent left-wingers they wanted to target, surreptitiously removing images of those who were fellow undercover police. But there was still a risk an SDS officer like Black could be targeted. In his Furlong Road flat, he had always slept with a heavy torch, baseball bat and a knife beside his bed.

‘I used to have a hell of a lot of nightmares, all the time I was undercover. Everything you were doing in your SDS life was perfect, but in your nightmares, you fuck it up constantly.’ Now these same nightmares were continuing, and would do for years: flashbacks to the orange smoke and cavalry charges at the Welling demonstration, his terrifying week in the Bavarian forest, or his fights with the Nazis or the police.

These anxiety-inducing memories only partly explained Black’s mental deterioration. He was also unable to cope with the
realisation that his deployment had changed him permanently. He was now irrevocably different to the keen young constable who had gone undercover years earlier.

When his deployment began, Black had a clear sense of who he actually was. Now he could not shake the feeling that part of his inner core was the person he had been pretending to be for four years. As he puts it: ‘I was a different person when I went in to what I came out. You have created an identity so well for the purpose of survival, you then end up getting rid of whatever else you had.’

When he tried to resume normal police work, he found it difficult, as he puts it, to get ‘out of his role’ as a revolutionary, hard-headed activist. He likens it to some of the Method actors such as Daniel Day-Lewis who immerse themselves so much in a character that they continue to live in that role, even off-stage or when the cameras are turned off.

‘I had spent years hating the police and then suddenly I was one of them again. I just couldn’t deal with it. You can be easily traumatised [when undercover] in the SDS because the police are chasing you with their horses and their sticks,’ he says. ‘It was a total head-bender. I was a police officer, but in my undercover role I hated the police with a vengeance. They were the enemy. I had been in too deep and for too long. I had real sympathy for the “black justice” campaigns. I also witnessed numerous acts of appalling police brutality on protesters. I genuinely became anti-police.’

Black had come close up to families who had lost loved ones at the hands of police, and personally had a series of bruising encounters with riot officers himself. Black is adamant that he did not develop ‘Stockholm syndrome’, the psychological
phenomenon
that Mike Chitty claimed to have been suffering a few years earlier. Instead, Black felt his changed state of mind was a rational response to what he saw as the routine misbehaviour by
his uniformed colleagues: ‘It was the simple reality that they were repeatedly in the wrong.’

After clashes with police management, and time off sick suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), his
managers
decided that Black was unfit to continue as a police officer. In April 2001, the Met retired him and gave him a pension. He was 36.

Black was angry at his treatment and not in the mood to ‘take any shit’. He contacted lawyers and launched legal action against the Met for damages, arguing that his mental health had been damaged as a direct result of his covert work. He is believed to have been the first SDS officer ever to sue the squad over a failure to look after its spies. A few years previously, Mike Chitty had threatened legal action, but had apparently dropped it. Many officers in the squad, according to Black, had suffered mental problems, but they had all coped on their own and not made a fuss.

Black insisted that the SDS was at fault and said he was not going to back down. He argued that police chiefs should have had safeguards in place to protect the mental welfare of their operatives and paid closer attention to the long-term
psychological
consequences of spending half a decade living a double life. It is a view privately supported by other SDS officers, including one who says that when he was deployed in the 1970s, operatives who complained were considered wimps and risked being thrown off the squad. The solution to mentally unwell officers was invariably a good drink with the lads down at the pub.

Two decades later, when Black was recruited, not much had changed. In the archives of Scotland Yard one document reveals how the SDS sought out advice on how to deal with long-term infiltration. The head of the squad flew to America to consult the FBI on how they handled prolonged espionage.

When he returned, the senior officer issued a guidance
document
, which essentially put the onus on undercover officers to monitor their levels of stress. The guidance listed some common symptoms of stress for spies, such as ‘development of a “short fuse” or uncharacteristic anger and resentment’ and ‘significant increase in alcohol consumption’. The guidance was greeted with amusement. SDS officers deployed at the time joked that, between them, the squad exhibited every symptom on the list.