Undercover pp82-101: Met spycop Mike Chitty AKA ‘Mike Blake’

It was Lambert, not Chitty, who ultimately succeeded in jailing two animal rights activists for setting fire to department stores. At the end of their deployments, the two men seemed on different career trajectories. Lambert was soon made a detective inspector and tapped up for senior roles; Chitty was still only a detective sergeant.

Of course, other thoughts may have been playing in Lambert’s mind. Chitty was swimming in the same circles as Lambert at the same time. How much did Chitty know about the lengths Lambert went to in order to establish his cover identity? Was he aware of Lambert’s secret child and the way in which he had infiltrated the arson attacks on Debenhams? From Lambert’s perspective, Chitty may have been a spy who knew too much. He had an incentive to work out Chitty’s motivations in order to preserve his own secrets.
Rarely, if ever, have details of these hushed, internal Special Branch inquiries been made public. Lambert’s investigation into Chitty is laid bare in a highly confidential 45-page report stored under lock and key in a Scotland Yard archive. It is a top-secret report, headed with a stern warning that the document ‘must be passed by hand under secure cover at all stages and retained in the SDS office’. It makes for compelling reading.

Written by Lambert in May 1994, the report contains the detail of his 18-month investigation into Chitty, leading up to an incredible discovery. It shows another side of Lambert; carefully, methodically and with some panache, he dissects Chitty’s psychology, gradually unravelling the mystery of the former SDS officer’s strange car journeys.

It is a document that should be interpreted with caution. Very possibly, Lambert’s report is little more than the jaundiced opinion of a manipulative SDS spy with his own secrets to hide. It certainly reveals much about the cunning of Lambert, who spent several months gaining the trust of Chitty, under the guise of a caring friend.

Setting the context of his report, Lambert strikes a philosophical, even whimsical, note. He writes like an old sage. ‘Like all families, the SDS has, over the years, rejoiced spontaneously in the successes of its members,’ he said. The majority of the ‘ex-hairies’ had returned to Special Branch ‘without fuss or favour; enlightened if not necessarily enriched by the undercover experience’.

A ‘significant minority’ had left the police for successful jobs elsewhere; one had recently become a lawyer and another a psychoanalyst. But the SDS had also ‘no doubt, quite typically’ struggled at times, Lambert said. It was important to face up and come to terms with those failures. ‘If we accept, as Ray Davies put it in “Celluloid Heroes” (The Kinks, 1971, RCA Victor), that success walks hand in hand with failure, then perhaps we have a duty to tend to our casualties as well as fête our heroes.’

Clearly, Lambert was casting himself not as ruthless spycatcher, but a charitable and understanding colleague who had the interests of the SDS at heart. ‘Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families … and if the family doesn’t care for the victim, who else will?’ he observed. ‘And if the casualty is embittered; rejected by the family that once nurtured him, should anyone be surprised if he, with apparent malice, seeks to bring the old family home crashing to the ground?’

Lambert appreciated the danger presented by dissident, unhappy spies. They needed to be mollified. State secrets were theoretically protected, but the controversy over the publication, in the late 1980s, of Spycatcher, written by the ex-MI5 officer Peter Wright, highlighted the threat of rogue operatives. Nearly every spy had enough knowledge in their head to harm or even destroy the SDS if they chose to go public. That went for Chitty too. Like a true servant of the secret state, Lambert makes clear that ‘the security of the SDS operation must take precedence over other less crucial considerations’.

At the time Lambert began his investigation, Chitty was on sick leave and in an unco-operative mood. Lambert knew he needed to get close to the ex-spy without inflaming the situation or isolating him further. Lambert wrote he was ‘a strong believer’ in a particular approach to dealing with runaway spies. It was an extension of the old adage about keeping your friends close but your enemies closer: sidling up to rogue operatives to offer them friendship and support.

‘At best it helps inhibit further unprofessional behaviour and at the very least it provides access to their schemes and disruptive activity,’ he said. Feigning empathy for Chitty was never going to be hard for Lambert. Duplicity was what Lambert was brilliant at. One Special Branch colleague who worked alongside Lambert around that time says he was ‘able to lie as easily as he breathes’.

For more than a year and a half, Lambert befriended Chitty, pretending to be a sympathetic and loyal colleague. Lambert calculated that perhaps the ‘old SDS bond still counted for something’ in his dealings with the unrepentant officer. During his many encounters with Chitty, Lambert says he was met with ‘a never-ending stream of ranting against persecution’. The visits to Chitty’s home to check on his welfare he describes as ‘a hazardous affair’.

On one occasion when Lambert and another ex-SDS spy went to visit Chitty, they ended up having to escort him from a ‘saloon bar in a public house in Redhill when the licensee could no longer tolerate [his] loud profanities’. Chitty was expressing his fury for the senior officer who had confronted him over his expenses claims. Lambert believed the falling-out between Chitty and his senior officer had turned into something of a vendetta by the former SDS spy.

In his report, Lambert portrayed Chitty as aggressive and ready to snap. He said the Police Federation, which represents officers when they are in dispute with their employers, ‘received short shrift’ from Chitty. He was even angry toward colleagues in the VIP bodyguard unit, whom he accused of treachery, telling Lambert that they ‘dared not go within a mile’ of his home in Surrey. According to Lambert, Chitty had developed a ‘remarkable fixation with a conspiracy theory’ and said he was worried that Special Branch wanted to get him on a trumped-up charge of expenses fraud.

At first, Lambert did not realise that Chitty had secretly returned to his old friends, unable to relinquish his second life as Mike Blake. But over time Lambert began to piece together the jigsaw.
Chitty’s appearance and behaviour seemed to be reverting to that of his alter ego. Once, during their long meetings, Lambert picked up a newsletter for a rock band left lying around at Chitty’s home. Formed in south Wales in the late 1960s, Man played a mixture of progressive rock and psychedelia. Lambert knew that the band’s small fanbase included a woman who Chitty had slept with while undercover. When Chitty said that he was going to go to a Man concert, Lambert warned him that he ran the risk of bumping into activists from the 1980s. Chitty replied truculently: ‘So what?’

Later, Lambert would concede ruefully that the significance of this statement was lost on him at the time. ‘Perhaps a better clue was to be found in his frequent references to his preparedness to go back to his former undercover associates,’ Lambert wrote. ‘This involved a simple but subtle shift from reality. He was keen to make the threat but at the same time to obscure the truth that he had already gone back.’
In search of clues, Lambert delved back into the past, revisiting Chitty’s undercover deployment. Lambert’s verdict on his rival’s performance infiltrating animal rights activists was scathing. He described the intelligence Chitty obtained as ‘reliable, if largely irrelevant’. Chitty’s intelligence assessments about the ‘ineffectual’ meetings of the SLAM were ‘filed briefly in Special Branch records’. Lambert pulled no punches. He noted how Chitty ‘contributed wholeheartedly to the social and legitimate campaigning activities’ of the animal rights movement ‘without ever once providing intelligence that led to the arrest of any of their activists or the disruption of any of their activities’.

The intelligence procured by Chitty ‘shed little light’ on the ALF protesters, Lambert added, and ‘certainly had no adverse impact on their criminal activities’. In Lambert’s view, his fellow spy had been so ineffective that, had the activists he was spying on ‘then or now’ been told he was a police officer, they would be ‘inclined to dismiss the claim as absurd’. In another cutting observation, Lambert said his rival’s cover had been ‘entirely sound’, but only because no one would have suspected that someone so inactive was an infiltrator.

Lambert was not shy in pointing out that his colleague’s apparently lacklustre performance undercover paled in comparison to his own penetration of the ‘more security-conscious’ ranks of the animal rights movement. He believed Chitty had spurned the opportunity to follow his lead. ‘In fairness, Chitty was not unique amongst field officers at the time, in wishing to avoid the risks and hassle inherent in criminal participation.’
Lambert did have some positive things to say about his former colleague. He conceded for example that Chitty was regarded as being ‘consistently shrewd in maintaining cover’, at a time when paranoia about police surveillance was rife among activists. Lambert also described his colleague as an ‘ideal officer to manage – reliable, punctual, co-operative, never rocking the boat like some of his more outspoken field colleagues’.

Yet, all told, Lambert’s assessment of Chitty’s deployment was harsh and condescending. From his own knowledge of the animal rights scene, Lambert believed that ALF activists ‘would remember Chitty, vaguely, as one of the many middle-of-the-road campaigners who just didn’t have the “bottle” or the inclination to get involved in direct action, and, thus, by their standards, was of no use whatsoever. Quite simply, he was never aware of their clandestine, criminal activities because they had no reason to tell him and he had no inclination to find out.’

However, it was when Lambert scrutinised Chitty’s life after his deployment that he came to realise what had happened. Lambert showed no reservation about sifting through Chitty’s personal letters, a search that yielded intimate correspondence with a woman from his days as an animal rights activist.

Lambert does not say in his report exactly how he came to inspect the ‘pile of long-hidden, treasured love letters’ between Chitty and the woman. He states only that they were secreted inside a padlocked toolbox in Chitty’s garage. Either Lambert persuaded his colleague to let him read the cache of letters, or he broke into the box and read them without permission.

Either way, the correspondence contained incontrovertible evidence that Chitty was fraternising with the enemy. It turned out that Chitty was socialising with activists long after he was supposed to have resumed life as an ordinary Special Branch officer. One occasion was the 40th birthday party of a campaigner in 1991. Posing as Blake, the ex-spy partied with old friends. Lambert observed how the party was low risk for Chitty. ‘No danger here of Chitty bumping into current SDS operatives who, he might rightly have guessed, were more gainfully employed infiltrating elusive cells [of ALF activists].’
Using the letters as a trail of evidence, Lambert documented the ebb and flow of Chitty’s relationship with his girlfriend. She was ‘best described as an old hippy whose life is built around trendy causes, cannabis, alcohol and sex’. Lambert added that the woman had a ‘sharp intuition’, not least about Chitty, who she thought was prone to ‘mercurial behaviour and mental instability’.

Locked in the box beside the letters, Lambert found a collection of 30 photographs which contained further evidence of Chitty’s double life. One recorded what Lambert describes as ‘a dirty weekend’ when the couple’s relationship ‘was very clearly on a high’. What exactly the photographs revealed is not stated, but Lambert said one image showed Chitty’s girlfriend ‘holding up a newspaper in which Margaret Thatcher’s downfall as Prime Minister is headlined’. That was November 1990, three years after he was supposed to have ended his deployment.

Once Lambert had established that his former colleague had returned to his activist friends and gone native, the next question was why. When Chitty’s deployment had ended in 1987, he was ordered to tell activist friends he was leaving for good. In keeping with SDS policy, it was imperative that he made a clean break with his undercover romances. Instead, Chitty appears to have given the impression that he might one day return.

‘Perhaps she thought he was gone for good or perhaps, as now seems likely, he gave her cause to believe he might return to England if his “business plans” in the States did not work out,’ Lambert said. When Chitty reappeared in August 1989, two years after disappearing, his girlfriend was ‘surprised and bewildered’. She had moved on in her life and, according to Lambert, had got Mike Blake ‘out of her system after a passionate affair’.

Upset, she confided her intimate feelings in a private letter to Chitty. Of course, she had no idea that he was a police officer – or that her emotional outpouring would later be scrutinised by a rising star in the Special Branch. Lambert analysed her words scrupulously. ‘It is a letter that testifies to a serious romantic liaison,’ he wrote. Chitty and the woman had evidently had a relationship of considerable meaning. Chitty had even asked the woman to marry him.

The implications of Chitty’s proposal are hard to fathom. He could never have married using his fake ID. As it turned out, there was never any need to commit identity fraud in a marriage registry office. ‘She pondered,’ Lambert noted wryly, ‘before declining.’ Following that rejection, the pair had a ‘slowly cooling’ relationship, Lambert said, but an ‘abiding friendship’ until at least November 1991. Lambert’s conclusion was that Chitty returned to his former life ‘prompted by romantic and social considerations, rather than an ideological attachment to the cause of animal rights’.

But how exactly had Chitty pulled off such a stunning act of heresy without Special Branch finding out? In returning to his undercover role, Chitty had committed a serious breach of security. In Lambert’s judgment, the SDS officer’s behaviour was ‘totally unacceptable’ and showed a ‘reckless disregard for the safe running of the SDS operation’, but he concluded that the blame should not be placed entirely on his shoulders.

Lambert felt there had been mistakes in the handling of Chitty, from the moment he was removed from his undercover duties. For a start, he was placed behind a desk doing mundane intelligence analysis – ‘such an enclosed, covert environment is none too healthy for an ex-SDS officer; certainly not for one who is hankering after his old lifestyle,’ Lambert said.

When he was given a less pressured assignment at a section of the Special Branch in Putney, south-west London, Chitty suddenly had more room to manoeuvre. In Lambert’s view, Chitty had the ‘freedom he was searching for’ and was able to prepare the ‘documentation and logistical backup required to return convincingly to the field’. Lambert added: ‘Suffice to say he appears to have had sufficient “down time” between operations to devote ample time to his “second” life’.

As Lambert discovered, there was considerable work and perhaps even some premeditation involved in reviving the identity of Mike Blake. When SDS officers completed their undercover tour, they relinquished all the fake documents in the name of their alias. Chitty handed back to managers the passport and birth certificate bearing the name of Mike Blake when his undercover tour ended in 1987.

However, he had never returned Mike Blake’s driving licence, claiming he had lost it. Then, between 1989 and 1990, he somehow managed to get hold of a new passport and birth certificate in Mike Blake’s name. Once his time undercover had drawn to a close, Chitty appears to have bought a car at an auction and then registered it in the same fake name. Chitty said that the car was not registered in his real name because it was used for official covert duties, an arrangement he said had been approved by his superiors.

But Lambert was sceptical. He concluded that Chitty had kept the driving licence ‘for future use’ and therefore apparently planned to return to his undercover life all along. He noted how Chitty later went on to acquire a home address in the name of Mike Blake. Lambert said that obtaining the use of a house in his fake name was ‘no doubt the most difficult’ part of Chitty’s deception. Chitty seems to have elicited the help of a friend who allowed him to use a house in Hampshire. If he needed letters sent to Mike Blake, they would be posted there. Elliptically, Lambert wrote that Chitty ‘appears to have been able to take advantage of one of the bedsit rooms for entertaining purposes’.

However, even equipped with ID documents, a car and an address, Chitty still needed a new cover story to explain to his activist friends how he could afford to live a ‘comfortable and highly mobile lifestyle’. Lambert noted how his former colleague told activists that he was making a living as a racing driver. It is true that Chitty was an accomplished driver and a handy mechanic.

Chitty appeared to have pulled the wool over the eyes of his bosses in the SDS and was soon enjoying his double life. But he began to run into difficulty in 1990. Recalled from his assignment in Putney, which was relatively close to where his activist friends lived, Chitty was placed on more routine duties at Scotland Yard in central London.
Colleagues in Special Branch recall how much Chitty resisted being moved away from south London. ‘One can see how, for example, a three-month stint as reserve room controller must have cramped Chitty’s style!’ Lambert wrote. ‘He was notable for his poor work return and frequent absences from the office “on enquiries”.’ Not long after, Chitty secured his job protecting VIPs, a move that Lambert said must have made him feel ‘a mixture of relief and anticipation’.
Lambert continued: ‘Here again, was a posting that would allow him unlimited time away from home, and if he was clever, scope to give free rein to his alter ego’s lifestyle. Another important factor which the officer would not have overlooked was that the posting was likely to boost his overtime earnings – an essential ingredient in his activities.’
It was a job which did indeed give Chitty more room for manoeuvre. Perhaps too much. It was the conspicuous 100-mile journeys from Wiltshire, where he was supposed to be protecting a VIP, to his home in Surrey that were Chitty’s undoing in 1992. Chitty had become ‘too clever and careless’, according to Lambert.
By that time, Lambert calculated that the former spy ‘had enjoyed leading a secret double life without being found out by his employers or his wife’ for more than two years. Remarkably, Chitty had been able to do his official police work without it being hindered by his second secret life. By February 1994, the Metropolitan Police’s internal investigators had separately decided that Chitty should face a disciplinary hearing. They had interviewed hotel managers in Wiltshire and petrol station staff in Surrey. They had no idea precisely why the officer was claiming expenses in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it didn’t smell right.
Chitty took the pressure badly. Soon afterwards, he vanished from his home for a week. For at least some of that period, Chitty was suspected to have travelled to Scotland to seek advice from another former SDS officer who had fallen out with the squad – a man who was much despised by Lambert, who described him in his report as ‘selfish, arrogant, disloyal’. The reality is probably rather different. Not much is known about the SDS man, other than he left the unit for a life as a successful hotelier.

The trip to Scotland to seek advice from this exiled SDS officer was, in Lambert’s view, another sign that Chitty was going off the rails. He confronted Chitty about his decision to ask for help from the former SDS man and recorded his reaction in the report. ‘When challenged as to the propriety of seeking such counsel, he countered colourfully: “Who the hell else am I supposed to talk to when the whole fucking organisation is out to screw my arse to the floor?”’

A month later, the alarm was raised when Chitty’s Ford Sierra crashed by the promenade in Worthing. Chitty was missing. Despite the considerable operation to find him, there was no sign of him on the beach or in the sea. He was found, alive and well, later that night, in the town.

Lambert was left with a vivid memory of Chitty sitting in an interview room in Worthing police station: ‘Distracted, almost haunted, a broken man obsessed by persecution and his own professional guilt (not the guilt of betrayal of animal activists but of letting down the SDS). As the wise old duty officer observed, “He’s not a well man, is he?”’

Chitty had undoubtedly reached a low point, but it is important to remember that Lambert had a stake in the rival spy’s tragedy. Lambert must have known that if Chitty went over the edge, and talked to the newspapers, the future of his own career was in doubt. And for all his vulnerability, Chitty still conjured the strength to take on his bosses at Special Branch.

Facing disciplinary action, and with a dawning realisation that Lambert and others now knew about his second life, Chitty threatened to press the nuclear button. He wrote a letter to Sir Paul Condon, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, complaining about his treatment by the SDS and threatening to spill the beans on the whole operation.

The contents of his five-page letter were read by Lambert and later summarised in his report. ‘His letter to the Commissioner is well written and, in parts, persuasive in its agenda,’ Lambert said. The thrust of Chitty’s argument was that he received no psychological counselling at the end of his deployment and was unable to deal with feelings of guilt at having betrayed the animal rights activists.

Chitty argued he should be diagnosed as being mentally unfit to continue in the police force, paving the way for his departure with a pension to compensate for his ill-health. Lambert, who would not have wanted to annoy senior managers at the SDS by suggesting they were culpable, showed little tolerance for that view. However, he did concede a small amount of ground. ‘Yes, he is right,’ Lambert noted at one point. ‘SDS managers do need to encourage a healthy environment in which field officers feel safe to talk about inevitable emotional ties to their target groups.’ Reading between the lines of Chitty’s letter to the commissioner, Lambert was alive to the potential threat of the rogue officer going public. ‘Implicit is the message: does Special Branch really want my secret, dirty washing aired in an open forum?’ Lambert wrote. ‘Equally, the letter contains a barely veiled threat along the lines: if I go down, I’ll take as many people as possible with me, SDS in particular.’

For a squad cloaked in absolute secrecy, the spectre of public scrutiny was a terrifying menace. Lambert was at pains to spell out quite how catastrophic it would be for the SDS programme of long-term infiltration if it was ever discovered by the public: ‘It would put at risk the safety of former (and possibly current) field officers and their families.’ He estimated that it would take no more than 10 minutes to prove that ‘certain former highly regarded activists had in fact been undercover police officers who were responsible for the imprisonment of close comrades and the disruption of large-scale [animal rights] criminal activity’. Those spies and their families could expect at ‘the very least’ postal bombs at their homes, Lambert claimed.

This warning should also be read with caution. It was in Lambert’s interest to exaggerate the danger of Chitty going public. Lambert, more than many other SDS officers, had a huge amount to lose if there was a series of revelations about the SDS and its activities, particularly if they related to his own conduct undercover.

In one telling section, Lambert warns there was one ‘true story’ that Chitty could make public that would ‘answer a lot of questions the [animal rights] hierarchy has been asking about infiltration for several years’. Exactly what that true story was is not explained, but it would seem likely that Lambert was referring to his own role in the arson attacks on Debenhams. There was of course another ‘true story’ that he was desperate to keep quiet: by then the son he had fathered with the activist named Charlotte was nine years old. Lambert had not seen the child since he vanished from his life years earlier and probably hoped he would never have to.

Lambert was careful not to make his reasoning appear too personal. He wrote in his report that ‘there are of course a hundred and one facts’ about SDS operations that ‘sympathetic lawyers and friendly investigative journalists would be delighted to hear about’. Lambert believed everything had to be done to ensure those uncomfortable truths were concealed from the public. ‘Such disclosure would be seriously damaging to the safe and secure running of the current operation,’ he said. Revelations in the newspapers would place a burden on the fleet of spies who were currently deployed and had ‘enough to worry about without the fear of a rogue former SDS officer queering their pitch’.

The risks were high, but Lambert calibrated that the chances of Chitty following through with his threats were relatively low. He believed that Chitty lacked the courage to bring down the squad by going public. A more likely, but no less worrying, scenario painted by Lambert was that Chitty might ‘inadvertently open his heart out’ to the woman he once wanted to marry ‘over several bottles of Stella and under the added influence of cannabis’.

*

April 1994 was not a good month for Chitty. He had been on sick leave for nearly two years. It was just weeks after the dramatic crash in Worthing and he was still facing an internal disciplinary inquiry over his expenses. What was going on in his mind at that point was difficult to discern. Lambert suggested that Chitty was becoming increasingly unstable, his behaviour ‘confrontational, highly volatile’. Some evidence about his mental state comes from a visit he made to a doctor.

Lambert, who was either present during the consultation or had access to Chitty’s medical notes, said he offered the doctor ‘a slightly sanitised view of his secret double life’. It seems Chitty was advised he was suffering from a psychological phenomenon evident when hostages develop feelings of loyalty toward their captors. By the tone of his report, it did not seem Lambert thought much of Chitty’s claims about his psychological well being. ‘Disarmingly, he told the doctor, “My psychiatrist tells me I’m not mentally ill, I know I’m not, I’ve just got a syndrome, Stockholm syndrome.”’

Whether he was suffering from a psychological condition or not, Chitty continued to socialise with his old friends in the animal rights movement. Perhaps he had given up hope of extricating himself from the mess and was reaching out to people he believed cared for him. Maybe his loyalties had shifted entirely, from the SDS to the ‘wearies’.

Lambert on the other hand believed that there was an element of calculation in Chitty’s behaviour. If senior officers believed he might defect, they could be more likely to meet his demands, drop the disciplinary action and pay out in compensation. Indeed, Lambert even suggested that Chitty had rekindled one particular friendship – based ‘on a common interest in illegal herbal substances and heavy metal music’ – because he knew the activist in question would be under heavy surveillance. If Chitty was deliberately trying to get spotted among his activists, it worked. Reports were quickly relayed back to Special Branch that a former SDS man on sick leave was in contact with a well-known campaigner.

One afternoon that month, Chitty joined a group of friends who attended a leaving party for an activist who was returning to Canada. It was a boozy affair, and Chitty, after seeming somewhat tense, appeared to relax as the drink flowed. He was spotted flirting with one woman, asking her if she fancied going on a date with a racing driver. She laughed indulgently, encouraging his approach. By the end of the meal, Chitty was in such a good mood he offered to pay half of the bill for all 10 of the diners. The group then retired to a nearby house to smoke some dope.

It was by pure chance that, unbeknown to Chitty, the party was witnessed by a serving SDS officer. The following Monday, at one of the squad’s regular meetings, he retold the whole, incredible story to astonished colleagues. The SDS spy said ‘it was clear that no one present had any idea’ of Chitty’s real identity. To the activists, he was still Mike Blake, the jovial animal rights campaigner who had been around, on and off, for more than a decade.

Four days later, Chitty’s predicament took a turn for the worse. He was en route to another doctor’s appointment when he used an invalid travel pass at Victoria Station. An altercation with guards escalated and police were called, arresting Chitty on the platform. He did not have his warrant card on him. But he told officers that he was an undercover police officer on a mission and gave the names of colleagues who could back up his claim.

Chitty was eventually released, but was abusive towards the transport police, who lodged a formal complaint with the Special Branch. Lambert, silver-tongued as ever, was called in to smooth things over. He explained that Chitty was on sick leave and ‘probably not intentionally rude’. Apology accepted, the transport police dropped the complaint. But the episode underscored how precarious Chitty’s situation was – he was still an officer in the Special Branch, but seemingly out of their control.

The police officer’s confrontation with his managers was descending into something of a Mexican standoff. In 1995, he began legal action against Scotland Yard on the grounds that he had suffered psychiatric damage from the stress of his covert work. Claiming damages totalling £50,000, he accused the police of negligence and failing to ‘monitor, support, counsel, and care for him’ between 1982 and 1994.

Shortly afterwards, he seems to have dropped the lawsuit, and was awarded an ill-health pension. There is no information about how the dispute was reconciled, but it seems likely that the rogue officer won out. Chitty has never spoken about his undercover life. Not long after the legal action was suspended, he disappeared. He is currently living in South Africa and has not responded to requests to comment.

Chitty was probably never given the contents of the SDS report into his conduct, nor informed about the lengths the unit was going to, behind his back, to try to work out the reason for his discontent. It is reasonable to assume that he would be particularly shocked if he knew the role played by Lambert, who was pretending to be on his side while he was on sick leave. It was a clever move by Lambert, who helped dissuade Chitty from going public, which would have been a disaster for the SDS.

*

It was a close shave for the close-knit squad of ‘hairies’. Crisis had been averted, but the Chitty episode underlined how quickly unpopular members of the unit could be isolated and become a liability. Even Lambert perceived danger in this collective lack of empathy for SDS men who went off the rails. ‘There seems to be a prevailing attitude within Special Branch that association with colleagues under investigation is some sort of contamination,’ he wrote in his report. ‘Such an unenlightened view ill becomes an intelligent and sophisticated workforce.’

Lambert had good reason to want to improve pastoral care in the SDS. Chitty was not the only colleague who had gone wayward and fallen out with his police spymasters, and he would not be the last. The exploits of the more erratic and sometimes even uncontrollable undercover police officers were well known in the SDS. Some of the behaviour counted as low-level misdemeanour. Two SDS officers, for example, were arrested for driving while under the influence of alcohol while on covert duties. Both were taken to a police station, where they volunteered they were undercover cops. One even had on him official documents revealing his true identity. Colleagues ‘were appalled at this seemingly wanton disregard for professionalism, and in consequence, team morale suffered, and the officers lost their “street” credibility,’ Lambert noted.

Other cases were more serious. The first SDS deployment to go seriously awry involved an operative who, just like Chitty, appears to have enjoyed the company of his undercover friends more than his colleagues. According to a Special Branch officer, when this particular spy was told in the early days of the squad that his deployment needed to come to an end, he refused to come out of the field, quitting the police and returning to his life as a radical leftist campaigner. Astonishingly, this SDS officer seems to have turned completely ‘native’, making a permanent transition from cop to activist. He may well still be living the life of a protester, albeit now a pensioner, using the same fake identity given to him by the SDS many years ago.

A second, mutinous spy infuriated the command of the SDS for a different reason. He completed his undercover tour in 1983, but was dismissed from the Met police two years later over an alleged assault. Like Chitty, he wrote a letter to senior officers, threatening to run to the papers and expose the squad’s dirty secrets unless his dismissal was reversed. He too said he suffered psychological difficulties as a result of the covert work. His appeal over the disciplinary inquiry for assault was upheld. This was the officer who relocated to Scotland, and who had consoled Chitty during his breakdown, much to the annoyance of Lambert.

A third spy was recruited to the SDS despite suffering from some kind of personality disorder. Needless to say, his operation did not go well and was abruptly terminated in 1988. His handlers judged the mission to be ‘unsound’, although the details of what went wrong are not widely known. But when SDS managers looked into his history they realised that their vetting procedures had failed badly. Years earlier, when he joined the police, the officer had used a false identity on his application form.

When the detective constable was removed from SDS duties he reacted badly. Missing for some time from his home, he was later found wandering around York. He was put into the care of a police psychiatrist. Yet again, this SDS man threatened to expose the secrets of the unit to the media. This time police chiefs played hardball, threatening him with a prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. The tactic worked. The officer never went through with his threat of public disclosure. He retired from the Met with an ill-health pension for the same disorder he suffered from when he joined the SDS.

In the history of the SDS, the history of closely averted calamities is surprisingly long. It was as though the unit was constantly on the edge, just one crisis away from its operations being subject to the unseemly glare of publicity. A fourth ex-SDS spy, for example, was arrested for gross indecency in St James’s Park, near Buckingham Palace. When he was approached by police in a public toilet, he ran away, trying to evade arrest, but was caught.

The officer had not worked for the SDS for around 10 years, but when he was brought before a disciplinary board in 1991, he argued that his attempt to evade the police was a ‘reflex response’ linked to his past undercover work. Medical evidence, supported by at least one former colleague, corroborated his argument that he had been psychologically scarred by his years working as a covert agent. The officer, who had by then risen to the senior rank of detective superintendent, also left the police with an ill-health pension.

Unlike the others, he refrained from making a direct threat to expose the SDS operation. But Lambert and the other senior men at the SDS were well aware of quite how potent a weapon the threat of exposure was. An SDS officer who fell out with the unit had the power to bring it crashing down. They could call the shots in the knowledge that the squad had enough embarrassing secrets that it could never risk the British public finding out what it was up to. Within the walled garden of the SDS, there was even a name given to the technique of threatening to blow the whistle unless one demand or another was met: ‘playing the SDS card’.

Somehow, those in charge of the SDS managed to negotiate their way out of a crisis each time the card was played. Either by agreeing to the demands of their wayward employees, or threatening to make their life a misery, they always avoided the very worst-case scenario: the truth coming out.

But the inevitable was always going to happen. By the late 1990s, SDS managers were contemplating how to handle one particularly headstrong spy. They would, initially, manage to keep his mouth shut. But he would eventually break ranks completely, spilling more secrets than any other officer in the history of the SDS. He became the whistleblower who shone a light on almost half a century of clandestine police espionage. His name was Pete Black.