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Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police

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'Undercover lays bare the deceit, betrayal and cold-blooded violation practised again and again by undercover police officers - troubling, timely and brilliantly executed.' - Henry Porter

The gripping stories of a group of police spies - written by the award-winning investigative journalists who exposed the Mark Kennedy scandal - and the uncovering of forty years of state espionage.

This was an undercover operation so secret that some of our most senior police officers had no idea it existed. The job of the clandestine unit was to monitor British 'subversives' - environmental activists, anti-racist groups, animal rights campaigners.

Police stole the identities of dead people to create fake passports, driving licences and bank accounts. They then went deep undercover for years, inventing whole new lives so that they could live incognito among the people they were spying on.





They used sex, intimate relationships and drugs to build their credibility. They betrayed friends, deceived lovers, even fathered children. And their operations continue today.





Undercover reveals the truth about secret police operations - the emotional turmoil, the psychological challenges and the human cost of a lifetime of deception - and asks whether such tactics can ever be justified.

352 pages, ebook

First published June 25, 2013

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Rob Evans

29 books3 followers

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews
Profile Image for John Yunker.
Author 16 books79 followers
August 25, 2013
Let me first back up about five years. I was researching my novel The Tourist Trail, wondering to what extent law enforcement agencies had tried to infiltrate animal rights groups. I had heard firsthand of an attempt of the FBI to infiltrate The Sea Shepherd Society, and I had come across several documented cases of the FBI “flipping” activists to turn on one another. But I came across little concrete evidence of undercover agents working for extended periods of time as activists. I felt confident this sort of thing was indeed happening — so I ran with it in my book — but it was mostly “fiction.”

Across the pond, it appears that this sort of activity is all too real.

A few years ago, news broke about an undercover police officer who had not only infiltrated an animal rights group but had a child with one of the activists.

This story — and many others — is included in this troubling book: Undercover.

Journalists Rob Evans and Paul Lewis have written a book that is very much hot off the press. And, according to the authors, undercover agents are still embedded in activist groups.

In 1968, in response to growing concerns over anti-war protests, the Metropolitan Police created the Special Demonstration Squad — intended to send agents undercover for long periods of time. Targets included the animal rights movement, anti-racism movement, climate change protestors — anyone that fit under the “domestic extremism” category.

My focus is on those officers who infiltrated the animal rights groups.

In 1983, the SDS began targeting animal rights organizations. Much of this book is devoted to officer Bob Lambert, who for years portrayed an animal rights activist, going so far as to help write an anti-McDonald’s brochure that led to the longest civil libel trial in English history (McDonald’s lost). He also fathered a child with a fellow activist, only to disappear years later after the child was born and his assignment concluded.

The authors identify 10 undercover police officers and estimate that there have been more than 100 in action over the past four decades. Some of the stories are rich with irony. For example, at one point an activist group was close to disbanding due to attrition of members. However, the addition of an undercover agent and a few undercover investigators hired by McDonald’s (yes, McDonald’s) convinced the members to keep going because they were under the impression they were adding new members. I don’t know if this qualifies as entrapment, but there are more than a few stories that most certainly do. The undercover agents were helping to fund operations, offering activists rides to protest and action sites, and egging activists into getting more radical.

Interestingly, a few of the police officers, after their assignments ended, often struggled to leave their fellow activists behind. Mental breakdowns were a common problem, understandable since so many men were not only living double lives but were involved in multiple romantic relationships.

Also noted in the book was the growth of a database of named activists — a database that I’m sure has expanded exponentially as the intelligence community has tapped social networks and email providers.

Lines that I once believed the US or the UK wouldn’t cross I’ve since come to believe are crossed so frequently that they don’t really exist anymore.

There are so many tragedies in this book. The stories of women who were lied to by men paid to lie to them. The activists entrapped by undercover agents who literally urged them into direct action. The phenomenal waste of taxpayer money.

But more than that, it’s a tragedy for the animals. For the planet.

I’m not saying activists are all saints; they aren’t. But the surveillance industry has grown so pervasive, so well financed, and so aggressive that it has turned all activists into “terrorists,” and every protest is suddenly a cause for undercover activity. And it is ruining what makes democratic societies so vibrant — the freedom to protest, to speak out, to believe that individuals can make the world a better place.

Originally posted on EcoLit Books:
http://www.ecolitbooks.com/2013/07/bo...
Profile Image for Robin.
Author 5 books26 followers
September 26, 2013
'Just because you have no criminal record does not mean that you are not of interest to the police.'

That is what the senior officer in charge of 'domestic extremism' surveillance said in 2010, this book states, and there in a nutshell is what this dismaying account reveals. We are all suspects.

'Domestic extremists' can be people who campaign to protect the environment, for justice if their relatives have been killed in police custody, to stop their local lake being filled in, or who want animals to be protected.

The book, about undercover officers posing as campaigners and spying on activisits for years at a time, has already hit the headlines with its accounts of officers who fathered children with campaigners, consequently damaging the women emotionally, and for stealing the names of dead children and other scandals.

But even if you read all that, the whole disgusting business is still grotesquely shocking – and should be a monumental national scandal. Senior officers have just accrued and built a huge apparatus to spy on law-abiding people, and occasionally misuse it – for instance in trying to besmirch the Lawrence family by spying on their campaign for justice for their murdered son.

What is telling is the number of police spies who are damaged by their dirty work, many of whom actually start to side with their targets and see how appalling police behaviour can be.

Rob Evans and Paul Lewis have written a clear and powerfully sober account of a secret attack on law-abiding citizens.
Profile Image for Joan.
2,207 reviews
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August 24, 2015
Not rating. I bought this for research purposes and although it was a well-written account of the development of undercover work in the Police, I found it repetitive and also heavily biased in its accounts, which rather ruins the point of a book that calls itself a 'TRUE' story.

This was a paperback which brought its own difficulties - the print was small and difficult to read. Not recommended for people who like to read the whole truth.
Profile Image for Sistermagpie.
795 reviews8 followers
January 28, 2014
Well, this is a pretty fascinating story about what the police get up to when they give themselves license to spy on citizens for belonging to certain kinds of political situations.

While the question of whether this program--which gives police fake identities with which to infiltrate political movements--are clearly there through the book, the focus is more on the way certain individuals handled the job. It raises all sorts of interesting questions about the psychological effect of living undercover, but also demonstrates how it depends on the person. Some of the most fascinating characters in the book are those that take to it naturally--especially Bob Lambert, who seems to have been given a license to indulge in all his worst impulses.

It can't help but make you think about the line between truth and fiction, and what creates identity. It also suggests some interesting things about the compulsion to tell the truth and the way a lot of these agents give into it. Would that looked different if we focused on some of the police that weren't ever discovered or didn't out themselves? We'll never know...
45 reviews
July 8, 2025
Thought this was an absolutely incredible book on one of the most important policing scandals in British history. Obviously the subject matter lends itself to a gripping read, but I thought it was still particularly well written and paid a lot of attention to the psychology of its characters, both spycops and their victims. The range of spycops profiled were well chosen and varied - Bob Lambert, who was seen as a leading light of the Special Demonstration Squad and fathered a child on deployment, was unrepentant, devoted to his mission, and went on to mentor younger recruits. Mike Chitty, on the other hand, "went native", felt deep guilt about his mission, ended up admiring his activist friends and continued to reassume his old identity long after concerned handlers had pulled him off the job. The things that will really stay with me are the way women were systematically abused by public servants who were supposed to keep them safe - it was seen as helpful for spies to be in relationships with legitimate activists to lend authenticity to the identity - and the insane amount of public resources used to surveil tiny groups of 10-20 activists commiting very low level public disobedience.
Profile Image for Brittany.
26 reviews
February 10, 2021
Quite an interesting stories about the undercover police officers.
Profile Image for Grace Eliza Phillip.
74 reviews
February 8, 2021
Yeah not sure about this one. Feel conflicted about the whole exposing people thing, plus it’s literally a one sided account so not entirely the full story.
Profile Image for Mark.
Author 15 books79 followers
August 3, 2013
Before the name Mark Kennedy came to light when the lid was blown off a nasty little secret the Metropolitan Police would rather rather we didn't know, the kinds of activities outlined in this book would have been dismissed as a conspiracy theorist's fantasy.

As it turns out, forget the tinfoil hat: the conspiracy theory was very much the real deal. For the last 40 years, as the book recounts, the police have been engaged in operations that wouldn't be out of place in Stasi-era East Germany. But this is the UK, where the right to protest, to campaign for social and political causes, is supposedly a well-protected 'birthright'.

Well, tell it to the police, or at least the SDS and its successor.

This was more than just surveillance and intelligence-gathering; the spies wormed their way into key positions of trust, often becoming the lynchpins allowing activist networks to function. And in the case of some of the spies, such as Kennedy, it leaves no doubt that the man had moved from observer to an agent provocateur.

Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, the two journalists who broke the scandal, have produced an engaging, interesting, and frankly disturbing account of the activities of deep cover police spies. The authors have revealed a dirty little secret; in the process they have revealed what amounts to a cabal of officers whose operational principles involved not only contempt for civil liberties, but for the law and democracy too.

It makes you wonder what other nasty little surprises the hydra-headed beast that is the British state has on the go. But that would be a conspiracy theory, wouldn't it?
Profile Image for Phil.
2 reviews
March 15, 2014
Lays bare the astonishing moral vacuum that has developed at the heart of the UK police. The Metropolitan Police, already deemed "institutionally racist" in the Macpherson Report, now look like they can add "institutionally corrupt" and perhaps "institutionally sexist" to their roll of honours. The book is clear that the programme of state infiltration into civil society has only just begun to be exposed, but already, the evidence is damning. Undercover police were not only undermining crucial sections of our democracy, but sleeping with activists, and even going so far as to father children with them, with the consent of the police force to the highest level. Now we have the inquiry long fought for by journalist Paul Lewis, and Doreen Lawrence, mother to the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence. Perhaps there's now a chance for the British police to undergo wholesale reform, for those who ordered the programme to go to jail, and a likely dismantling of many cases against activists, as the agent provocateurs in their midst are revealed.
Profile Image for Kim Stallwood.
Author 13 books41 followers
January 5, 2014
Outstanding investigative reporting reveals the activities of Britain's police forces and such main street corporations as McDonald's employing private investigators, infiltrators and agents provocateurs to monitor and subvert the animal rights and environmental protection movements. Essential reading for anyone who cares about social justice and is engaged politically.
Profile Image for Lesbaxby.
75 reviews1 follower
March 4, 2015
I read the back and thought it sounded good but is basically a leftie apologist book. It's poorly written as well, it jumps from one person to another at random. Load of shit.
270 reviews3 followers
January 14, 2021
My rating doesn't reflect the importance of the investigative reporting -- that's worth 5 stars.
My rating reflects more of my enjoyment of the way that the story was told, and I'm probably being uber-critical and harsh. It's just the way that I feel while I write the review.

First, when I picked up the book, I thought it was going to be about international, James Bond-type spies. Not so, it's about officers in the British police/Scotland Yard who mainly infiltrated domestic protest groups in Great Britain. The book is a compilation and enhancement of the investigative reporting of two British journalists.

In 2021, I'm not surprised that police infiltrated activist groups. I was surprised, I suppose, about the means to accomplish that: adopting the identities of dead children, forsaking one's own families to embed, having intimate relationships with members of those activist groups to foster trust. Or is that so surprising? I didn't consider the long-term psychological impacts of the infiltration (e.g. paranoia, Stockholm Syndrome,...); but I should have.

As for my enjoyment of the book, the journalistic style inhibited me, as did the frequent sprinkling of British nomenclature that jarred my American reading sensibilities. I would have preferred an American editor to have smoothed out or replaced the British-isms. It would have benefited from an early chapter of the over-arching players rather than having them presented in dribs and drabs. There are multiple chapters for each spy and, while it's true that sometimes the spies did know other spies, it was more generally true that the spies worked independently of each other. I think it could have worked better for me if the book was separated into sections for each spy, and each section had multiple chapters as appropriate. When two spies interacted, start a new section. I dunno...clearly the spies were separate, but the way the book is organized, they sort of ran together.

Also, I started the book under incorrect pretenses, so the journalistic writing style caught me off-guard. It does read like a bunch of lengthy newspaper stories. That's fine, but it wasn't enjoyable for me.

Again, the topic is important and worthwhile. I may have been naive about who's keeping an eye on activist groups, and how this was/is being done.
Profile Image for Nevin Thompson.
33 reviews
October 23, 2017
This book is mind-blowing, especially if you were ever paranoid about the powers of the state in the first place. It's pure horror: secret police infiltrate protest groups in order to disrupt their activities.

What's most disturbing is the story of how an undercover policeman named Bob Robinson fathered a child with an animal-rights activist and then disappeared. Years later the woman learned of his true identity when reading about him in the paper. After breaking off their affair he was promoted, eventually occupying a high-profile post, giving lectures about counter-terrorism efforts.

The same story was told in the Guardian (by the Rob Evans) and in the New Yorker, and I have to say that unlike in the New Yorker piece (by a different author), the prose in this book is satisfactory, but not especially great.
Profile Image for Sian A.
70 reviews2 followers
March 31, 2020
Interesting, engaging, farcical and shocking. I would however have liked more details on the missions alluded to but never explored, of police infiltrating far-right groups, as well as anarchists, animal rights extremists (given an easy ride in this book in my opinion) and anti-racist campaigners. Inexcusable tactics aside, some of the targets chosen were clearly a waste of taxpayer money and it would be interesting to see more of the more justifiable targets and their work. I was glad to see a gender analysis of the sexist element of the total disregard for the lives and consent of the women the spies had relationships and even children with, by far the most appalling aspect of this book.
Profile Image for Sudarshana.
29 reviews
August 16, 2020
A nice mix of fiction and reality. The stories are real, yet so fascinating that one finds it extremely difficult to imagine them as real. Reality is stranger than fiction i suppose. The story is amazingly descriptive and this gives a reader so much more information to uncover when they are re-reading the book. The characters are laid out perfectly and I find the pacing to be, just right. The only few downsides i found in the book were the "glorification" of certain heinous acts. I am not comfortable with that. I also found sheer insensitivity sprinkled out in the book which made if quite difficult for me to finish the book.
Profile Image for Jonny.
380 reviews
February 1, 2022
A really good, barely believable, book about how two undercover policing units infiltrated…what by and large seem to have been reasonably innocuous protest organisations over a period of decades, wrecking the lives of both activists and their own officers in the process.

The scale of the mess that was made (and this was running into the 2010s - it’s not ancient history!) is shown by just how many inquiries have been set up into what happened, the most prominent of which is due to report next year. The authors tell a remarkable story of unaccountable policing, made even more pronounced by just how little benefit seems to have come out of it.
Profile Image for David Ross.
418 reviews1 follower
February 9, 2019
The quite remarkable true story of undercover policing in the U.K. and how they were willing to ruin the lives of innocents in order to maintain surveillance on peaceful protest groups. The sort of tactics you could almost understand being used to infiltrate dangerous terrorist cells are being used for groups protesting climate change. Instead of dangerous criminal targets with histories of violence, here we have students, doctors, PHDs and other protestors being monitored at huge public expenditure for what?
Profile Image for Gina Cheyne.
Author 6 books18 followers
November 5, 2022
Fascinating. I was researching books for my next novel in the SeeMs Detective Agency series (life is not always as it seems) and I came across this book. I’m so glad I did. It gave me a real insight into the working of the undercover part of the police and helped me think about what might actually be happening in this kind of work. It was often disturbing, not least in the callous way the police treated members of the public who they felt did not deserve to be protected.
Shocking but well worth reading.
Profile Image for Alan.
146 reviews5 followers
February 27, 2019
The disturbingly true story of just how out of control & beyond the law British Police are.
Over a 40 year period British Police targeted those with political views they simply disagreed with & thus did not like. This was not because anyone had done anything illegal, but because the Police could do it & because there was a budget available from paranoid politicians & politicians who wanted to protect their business friends.


841 reviews8 followers
September 24, 2020
powerful insight to undercover police work. Then the failings of gmp and how the Mason Lodge undermined the chain of command, affecting the career and mental health of one individual. Not that one person adversely affected is acceptable. His long and arduous battle against discrimination and bias. How it affects not just the individual but their wider family members. Corrupt silence is Just as bad as the original offence. I wish Gary and his family every happiness and success in the future.
Profile Image for Emma.
235 reviews
December 8, 2019
If this was fictional it’d be absurd. I kept thinking, surely this would never happen in the UK? Undercover cops infiltrating left-wing organisations (organisations that don’t even seem to be all that radical or dangerous) for years, and establishing long-term intimate relationships with their targets? To the extent of fathering children? It’s insane and genuinely terrifying.
Profile Image for Brendan.
7 reviews2 followers
May 5, 2021
Shocking in its telling of the lengths of police interference of people's lives for so long. This is the thin edge of the wedge which has now resulted in a Royal Commission in the UK. Brilliantly told through case studies and interviews I found it really interesting and shocked that it was so contemporary.
Profile Image for Janet Marsten.
51 reviews
May 29, 2022
I read this after having read Small Town Girl, which was great, if harrowing and disturbing. This book was a great overview of the whole Special Branch SDS calamity. A disaster and embarrassment for the UK police.
Profile Image for Olivia.
8 reviews
December 10, 2018
Truly eye-opening
It’s a bit scary what kind of power the state has, but it’s great to be informed about it. I couldn’t put it down, it was full of suspense and I couldn’t wait to see what was next.
Profile Image for Judith.
1,044 reviews5 followers
June 9, 2021
A real eye-opener of a read. 4.5 stars.
Profile Image for Matthew Harwood.
963 reviews3 followers
January 28, 2022
The history of Britain’s secret police is an interesting story. It took a while for me to get into this book but it was worth it in the end.
58 reviews1 follower
November 14, 2022
Well I never trusted the police anyway...
Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews

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