UNDERCOVER: BRITAINS SECRET POLICE FORCE AND THE CRIMINLISATION OF DISSENT

Undercover The True Story of Britain's Secret Police. Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, Faber and Faber 2013

I.

In his novel ‘The Man Who Was Thursday,’ G K Chesterton has a character infiltrate an anarchist cell, only eventually to discover that everyone else in the cell is also a police spy or an infiltrator of some description. This novel is mentioned in the book in the context of the McLibel case, in which a tiny fringe protest group was flooded with private detectives hired by McDonald's  in addition to the already embedded police spies. It is also arguable that one anarchist group collapsed after the prime mover and shaker of the group, a police spy, was withdrawn. There is an old English expression, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.” However whilst it is true that some of the events described in this book verge on the farcical it is far from a fun read, indeed I felt deeply depressed on reading it.

II.

Espionage has always intrigued the reading public and is as old as mankind itself; whilst from the birth of the modern state the police spy has been a feature of the landscape. Though spying on your fellow citizens has never carried with it the glamour foreign intelligence has enjoyed. On the contrary it has, understandably, often carried a high degree of opprobrium, with thoughts of the Stasi, or KGB never far away.

Bob Lambert Police Spy

The attraction of espionage is the attraction of pretence, of pretending to be other than you are. As someone who has travelled a great deal on my own I think I have some understanding of this attraction. In a new country, an unfamiliar city you know who you are but nobody else does; if you so choose you can completely re-invent yourself. It is not necessary to actually do this to feel this sense of pretence. It is also possible that people actually gain some degree of pleasure and satisfaction from lying for its own sake, of getting one up on the other.

Deception though on the scale required to spend years being someone you are not, is a whole different order of things. It requires sustained duplicity, every day is a lie, every moment a pretence. Inevitably for any ‘normal’ human being undertaking, in the jargon, this ‘deep swimming,’ clear psychological damage is wrought; the exception being the sociopath.[1] 

The central figure in the book is Bob Lambert who having acted as a police spy went on to head the Special Demonstration Squad [SDS]. It is Clear Lambert is a sociopath, who, in the words of one of his colleagues, ‘lies as easily as most people breath.’ He seems to have experienced no ethical problems in entering into long term relationships and fathering a child purely on the basis that it better developed his ‘cover.’ Whilst Lambert’s case stands out he was not unique,- and here we have paraded before us a truly unsavoury group of individuals who seem to have lost all moral compass. Indeed entering into sexual relationships with ‘targets’ appears to have been the norm, though since these relationships were based upon a profound deception they can hardly be characterised as being consensual.[2] The character of these men, and it is invariably men, only one woman features in the book, is best described by Laura one of the women abused by a police spy.

“He just morphs for his own self interest with no moral basis or grounding…He has no loyalty to anyone or anything – not to the police, not to the activists, not to his own family. He finds out what people psychologically want and he gives it to them.  He’s exceptionally talented at portraying compassion in himself.”

The trail of damage left by the SDS is truly heart wrenching and appalling. I read the book increasingly outraged at the levels of cynicism and cruelty demonstrated.  I have met one or two unpleasant souls on the left in my time, none coming remotely close to the SDS operatives in sadistic cruelty and manipulation. And all for what, the amount of serious intelligence about disorder seems not to have been great and could in most cases be gleaned by other, ‘cleaner’ methods.[3]

Two things strike you about the story told here, first the disproportional nature of the spying, and secondly the nature of the majority of organisations targeted. The majority being fringe anti racist and anarchist groups, animal rights activists, small non hierarchical collectives and particularly, for some reason the green movement; the majority of these ‘organisations,’ even some of the far left anarchist outfits, believed in civil disobedience and eschewed violence as being counter productive.[4] What links these groups is a counter-cultural attitude toward property, a rejection of the current order of things and hostility to authority; in short dissent. What the SDS and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit [NPOIU], which it was created, at first to mirror then supplant it, has done is follow a long history dating well into the 19^th century of criminalising dissent.

III.

Unsurprisingly the Blair years saw a rise in the extent of police spying, particularly under never knowingly watchful eyes of the truly spineless phenomenon that is Jack Straw, Home Secretary during the turn of the century,- incidentally never was a man more aptly named. It was during this period that the NPOIU was created. Whilst the SDS was primarily a Metropolitan police affair, NPOIU was established to operate across the country, though the target groups stayed much the same. The remit for this unit was however no longer ‘subversion’ but the suitably amorphous ‘domestic extremism.’ Of course the unit, initially incorporated under the largely unaccountable Association of Chief Police Officers, [ACPO], and now under the Met, abrogated to itself the decision as to what constitutes domestic extremism.[5]

The choice of this terminology is interesting and has parallels elsewhere; on 8^th July 2006 The Russian Duma criminalised extremism. The definition of extremism proved, as with NPOIU, to be extraordinarily wide; ‘those causing mass disturbances, committing hooliganism or acts of vandalism…slandering the Russian state or its officials, creating and distributing ‘extremist’ material…humiliating national pride.’ Later developments of this law included ‘crimes driven by political, ideological or social hatred.’[6] The Russian state of course has centuries of criminalising dissent, we appear to want to catch up. ‘Domestic extremists under the NPOIU guidelines are ‘those who wanted to prevent something from happening, to change legislation or domestic policy…outside the normal democratic process.’[7] 

IV.

It is the women, the victims of what can only be described as state funded abuse, who come out of this narrative both extremely damaged and yet with considerable courage and nobility. It is they who stand for the human values trampled underfoot by the likes of Bob Lambert, Mike Chitty, John Dines, and Mark Kennedy; all who, for all their talk of the courage needed to go undercover, have singularly failed to display any courage of the moral variety.

Helen Steel in particular stands out for her extraordinary qualities. Having taken on the truculent, ruthless and arrogant McDonald's corporation in the courts, with little more than pro bona help from a friendly lawyer, she found she was spied on by the McDonald's and the Metropolitan police, -the police, it transpired, passing information gained through covert intelligence to McDonald's  Much later she was to discover, through persistent detective work, that the man she had thought was a loving partner during the period was in fact a police spy. At all stages the state in the form of the Metropolitan police conspired against her. Throughout she has demonstrated nothing but dignity and a passion for justice. Some award ought to be created in her honour, The Helen Steel Award for Civic Responsibility, or some such like.

The other stand out character is a police spy himself, Pete Black, who has been permanently damaged by his undercover spying. He also, alone it amongst the moral deficient operatives described in the pages here, retained a moral compass, which almost certainly explains the level of psychological damage that he has suffered. Although not engaged undercover in the kind of long term relationships that Lambert and Kennedy engaged in he had the courage to meet with some of the women whom were abused by other operatives. Without Black the book would not have been possible and now like all whistle-blowers he is facing a campaign by the Met and others to smear him and undermine his credibility. 

Though the damage wrought by the spying activities of the SDS and its successor NPOIU go much wider than that inflicted on individual human beings, by targeting dissent and political protest they were attacking civil society itself. Whilst the betrayal of trust involved in the kind of disgusting activities exposed here is an assault on human relationships, the next time someone protesting against austerity, or on behalf of a range of political causes and ideologies, is approached by someone stating “I want to help,” will they ever be believed in the same way again?

V.

I suppose anyone reading this book asks themselves are such spying activities ever justified? Well given that we live in a world in which some groups think blowing up commuters on the tube is an acceptable tactic some attempt at infiltration is justified. However people like Helen Steel and Laura were not Al Qaeda and by targeting people like them the Metropolitan police has done severe damage to the tactic in situations when it might be required.

This is, in the real sense of the word, an appalling book and ought to be read by anyone concerned with the health of civil society. I will be following up this blog by penning questions to the Home Secretary. I humbly suggest you might consider doing the same.

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[1] ‘Probably the most widely recognized personality disorder. A sociopath is often well liked because of their charm and high charisma, but they do not usually care about other people. They think mainly of themselves and often blame others for the things that they do. They have a complete disregard for rules and lie constantly.’ The Urban Dictionary.

[2] Of the 10 spies named in the book 9 slept with ‘targets.’ Hugh Orde, head of The Association of Chief Police Officers, misled viewers of Newsnight early in 2011 stating that such behaviour was an aberration.

[3] One of the claims made by the Police spy Pete Black was that intelligence provided by spying  included the intelligence that following the death of Stephen Lawrence there would be major trouble on upcoming march against the BNP headquarters. I remember this time well, and knew a number of Socialist workers Party activists attending the march. If the Chief Inspector of the Metropolitan police had called me I could have advised him that it was liable to end in a ruck.

[4] It is true that the Animal Infiltration Front  was involved in planting firebombs designed to go off when apartment stores were empty. Indeed Bob Lambert is credited with the prosecution of this cell; though as serious questions arise as to Lambert’s involvement with this action the question of whether he was acting as an agent provocateur arise. Indeed this question arises many times throughout the book.

[5] One particular example given in the book is of  Peter Harbour, a 69 yr old retired physicist, he found himself defined in NPOIU files as a domestic extremist for fighting to save a wildlife area from destruction by an energy company. For my self I find this definition of extremism somewhat, well how can I put it, extreme?

[6] See The New Cold War, Edward Lucas Bloomsbury Books, 2008, p.80.

[7] Undercover,’ p202.

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