'We’re Going Up Against the State Here': The UK's Victims of Deep Undercover Policing Tell of Their
'We’re Going Up Against the State Here': The UK's Victims of Deep Undercover Policing Tell of Their Trauma
On a sunny Friday in the last week of March, a group of protesters gathered outside London's Metropolitan University. Noticeably older than the students who filtered in and out of the building's glass doors, the motley crew of assembled activists shouted slogans confidently and waved placards energetically. They had clearly done this before.
The 15-or-so men and women were calling for the resignation of Bob Lambert — a former undercover policeman and current university lecturer whose double life was discovered relatively recently. In October last year, the mother of the child he fathered while undercover was awarded 425,000 pounds ($663,000) by the London Metropolitan Police.
"Are you the pervert?" one of the protesters asked an amused policemen that stood nearby. "No, he's not," another replied.
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The scale of the operations carried out by undercover police on protest groups in the UK over the past half century is slowly coming to light, and many of the disclosures have been shocking to the extent that they seem implausible.
Undercover police officers who infiltrated animal rights, anti-fascist, anti-racist, and environmental groups have lived for years as activists, had long-term sexual relationships to provide cover, and adopted the identities of dead babies. Those believed to have been spied on include the parents of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence and the family of Asian student Ricky Reel, who went missing 18 years ago.
The most notorious undercover unit was the now inoperative Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), founded in 1968 and active for 40 years. The unit's members adopted more than 100 different identities. Its recently leaked tradecraft manual recommended that employees get tips on acquiring dead people's documents from Frederick Forsyth novel The Day of the Jackal and included suggestions on how to gain adequate cover: "If you have no other option… you should try to have fleeting, disastrous relationships with individuals who are not important to your sources of information."
Lambert, who went by the name Bob Robinson, was just one of an unknown number "deep swimmers" — as they called themselves. During his time undercover between 1984 and 1988, Lambert was arrested numerous times, co-authored the McLibel leaflet, had relationships with four women, and fathered a child that he left soon afterwards.
Protest groups targeted by undercover police claim the infiltrators would often act as agent provocateurs, encouraging illegal acts among peaceful protesters, and say that some participated in illegal actions themselves. As the details of the web of surveillance are revealed, at least 57 protesters have now had prison sentences quashed or prosecutions dropped as a result of evidence given by undercover police officers being inadmissible.
https://news.vice.com/article/were-going-up-against-the-state-here-the-uks-victims-of-deep-undercover-policing-tell-of-their-trauma
