Bob Lambert

Late October 2011, Bob Lambert was exposed as a police infiltrator in the activist movement. Using the name Bob Robinson he had had a longterm affair and a child with a woman who believed him to be a genuine campaigner.

London Greenpeace revealed that Lambert was also actively involved with many other protest activities including Molesworth Peace Camp and free festivals. Under his supervision other agents infiltrated groups such as Reclaim the Streets, along with anti fascist protests and actions against genetically modified crops.

Lambert infiltrated a cell of activists from the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), who detonated incendiary devices at two Debenhams branches in London and at one in Luton in July 1987 as part of a campaign against the sale of fur. Caroline Lucas, parliament's only Green MP, used a Westminster Hall debate on the rules governing undercover policing to raise the case under parliamentary privilege. Two activists, Geoff Sheppard and Andrew Clarke, were caught red-handed months later as they prepared for a second wave of arson attacks. They were convicted over the attacks on the stores. "Sheppard and Clarke were tried and found guilty – but the culprit who planted the incendiary device in the Harrow store was never caught," Lucas said. "Bob Lambert's exposure as an undercover police officer has prompted Geoff Sheppard to speak out about that Harrow attack. Sheppard alleges that Lambert was the one who planted the third device and was involved in the ALF's co-ordinated campaign."

After living undercover himself, Lambert went on to manage others spying on campaigners. On of them was Jim Boyling, who infiltrated environmental campaign groups and ended up marrying an activist he was sent to spy on and fathering two children with her.

Lambert and Boyling later worked for the Met's Muslim Contact Unit, which was created to improve relations with Muslims after the 11 September 2001 attacks. Now an outspoken critic of the government's counter-terrorism strategy, Lambert has strongly denied the suggestion that the unit he set up was involved in surveillance of the Muslim community, (see below).

Lambert Admitted the Spying...

Lambert acknowledged that in his 26 year career of with Special Branch, he infiltrated London Greenpeace for several years in the 1980s. For this he apologised, writing:

In the 1980s I was deployed as an undercover Met special branch officer to identify and prosecute members of Animal Liberation Front who were then engaged in incendiary device and explosive device campaigns against targets in the vivisection, meat and fur trades.
As part of my cover story so as to gain the necessary credibility to become involved in serious crime, I first built a reputation as a committed member of London Greenpeace, a peaceful campaigning group. I apologise unreservedly for the deception I therefore practiced on law abiding members of London Greenpeace.
I also apologise unreservedly for forming false friendships with law abiding ctizens and in particular forming a long term relationship with [Name of person removed] who had every reason to think I was a committed animal rights activist and a genuine London Greenpeace campaigner.

My deceptions in the 1980s were all premised on maintaining the fiction required to perform my undercover role.

=...But Denied Setting Fire as an Animal Rights Campaigner

, has previously spoken about his role in the police investigation of the ALF and his specific role in the operation against Sheppard and Clarke. opz

However, he firmly denies planting the incendiary device. Lambert told the Guardian: "It was necessary to create the false impression that I was a committed animal rights extremist to gain intelligence so as to disrupt serious criminal conspiracies. However, I did not commit serious crime such as 'planting an incendiary device at the [Debenhams] Harrow store'."

Official Reviews against Lambert

After his exposure, the Guardian wrote that Lambert was subject to a Metropolitan police review into whether he was prosecuted in a court using his false identity. He was reportedly prosecuted at Camberwell Green Magistrates Court for distributing ‘insulting’ leaflets outside a butchers shop. The force was considering whether to refer his case to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). A few days earlier, On Friday, the Met referred the case of another undercover officer, Jim Boyling, to the IPCC, after evidence emerged that he posed as a defendant using his false identity in another court case.

One of the many disciplinary and judicial inquiries into the controversy around undercover policing was due to be published just when Lambert was exposed and admitted to have had a sexual relationship as a spy. This review was conducted by Bernard Hogan-Howe before he took his post as Met Commissioner. The planned publication of his report was abandoned on 20 October 2011, hours after the Guardian and BBC Newsnight revealed evidence that undercover officers – including Lambert – may have been lying in court.

However, when the report was published three months later, it did not contain any new information on others than Mark Kennedy. The conclusions maintained that Kennedy had been 'a rogue agent' who had gone out of control. However, Lambert’s past with Special Branch helps to confirm that the police spies exposed over the passed few years were not 'rogue officers'. They were part of an unacceptable pattern of infiltration of environmental and other activist groups, which seems to have been condoned at the highest level.

Activities

Dr Bob Lambert is the co-director of the European Muslim Research Centre (EMRC) at the University of Exeter and a lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV) at the University of St. Andrews. In his September 2011 book Countering al-Qaeda in London: Police and Muslims in Partnership Lambert reflects on his experience as head of the Metropolitan Police Muslim Contact Unit (MCU) from January 2002 to December 2007 and on his subsequent PhD research examining the legitimacy and effectiveness of police and Muslim partnerships in London. In Competing Counter-Radicalisation Models in the UK a chapter in Rik Coolsaet’s Jihadi Terrorism and the Radicalisation Challenge: European and American Experiences (published by Ashgate in September 2011) he examines MCU experience in relation to UK Prevent strategy in 2011. As part of an ongoing EMRC research project Lambert examined the nature and extent of anti-Muslim or Islamophobic violence against Muslims in the UK.

Early September 2011, he was one of the speakers at a conference called: From 9/11 to the Arab Spring, The Norway killings and the English riots: What have we learned about political violence and terrorism? organised by David Miller then of the University of Glasgow, also co-founder and editor of Spinwatch and Powerbase. Other speakers where: Aamer Anwar, Scotland’s leading human rights lawyer, Helen Dexter, Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Manchester, and Christina Hellmich, Reading University, author of Al-Qaeda: From global network to local franchise (Zed 2011), examining the key sources that inform the present understanding of al-Qaeda.

History

October 2011, Bob Lambert was exposed as a police infiltrator having had a longterm affair and a child with a woman who believed him to be a genuine campaigner.

2011 8 September Speaker at Terrorism one-day conference at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

2011 September book Countering al-Qaeda in London: Police and Muslims in Partnership

2011 - ongoing: EMRC research project examining the nature and extent of anti-Muslim or Islamophobic violence against Muslims in the UK.

2007 PhD examining the legitimacy and effectiveness of police and Muslim partnerships in London

January 2002 to December 2007 head of the Metropolitan Police Muslim Contact Unit (MCU)

Contact

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Notes

Detective Inspector Robert Lambert is the former head of the Muslim Contact Unit in the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command (SO15).

In January 2002, Bob and a Special Branch colleague, set up the Muslim Contact Unit (MCU), with the purpose of establishing partnerships with Muslim community leaders to help tackle the spread of al-Qa'ida influence in London. Previously, Bob worked continuously as a Special Branch specialist counter-terrorist / counter-extremist intelligence officer from 1980, which involved dealing with all forms of violent political threats to the UK, from Irish republican to the many strands of International terrorism.

Bob Lambert is at the liberal end of the Special Branch, in its eight person Muslim Contact Unit. He promotes the idea of partnership working with muslim community organisations. He explicitly counterposes this to repressive policing and attacking the muslim commumity in politics, the press such as the assault unleashed by Jack Straw’s remarks about the veil or the ‘terror experts’ who suggest that universities are a hotbed of muslim ‘radicalisation’.

This means he is seen by some in government and the press – including some ‘left’ journalists such as those supporting the Euston Manifesto – as an appeaser of radical Islam. Lambert noted that he wasn’t bothered by the Chatham House rule since he had previously been the victim such rules when the existence of his unit was disclosed – he said – by a leak from the Foreign Office to the press.

On the Irish Troubles

Lambert has cited experience from the Northern Ireland conflict in support of his approach to the war on terror.

The MCU has taken a leaf from the book of former head of the Anti-Terrorist Branch, George Churchill-Coleman in challenging conventional counter terrorism thinking by highlighting the danger of unintentionally increasing support for terrorism by recourse to extra-judicial powers in tackling it. Internment in Northern Ireland, he recalls, was immediately followed by a substantial increase in violence, just as the government's unbending approach to Bobby Sands and fellow hunger strikers gave the IRA its biggest ever recruitment boost.

Yusuf al-Qaradawi

Lambert has spoken out against Gordon Brown's decision to ban Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi from visiting Britain.

One man who thinks that's not just bad for community relations but actually a threat to Britain's security, is Detective Inspector Bob Lambert, who retired six weeks ago as head of the Metropolitan police special branch's Muslim Contact Unit. With more than a quarter century at the sharp end of counter-terrorism operations, Lambert is scarcely a bleeding-heart liberal. But he has been unable to speak out publicly until now and is deeply frustrated by the Qaradawi ban. "Qaradawi is clearly useful in countering al-Qaida propaganda", Lambert told me this week. "He is held in high esteem: how can we think meaningfully about enlisting credible Muslim community support against al-Qaida if we're not prepared to engage constructively with the likes of Qaradawi?"

Neocon attacks

Lambert's approach has been heavily criticised by Neoconservatives.

David T of the Harry's Place blog has charged that 'Lambert's policy is premised upon a fundamental error. The Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami share the same "clash of civilisations" analysis as Al Qaeda.'

Hugh Fitzgerald of the New English Review has said that Lambert "does seem to be tailor-made as a figure of fun, the exemplar of all that is wrong, in some quarters, with those who have allowed themselves to be led by the nose, or perhaps are simply too stupid, all by themselves, to grasp the meaning, and full menace, and meretriciousness, of Islam."

Lambert has defended the Muslim Contact Unit against such criticisms:

Dean Godson expresses this concern eloquently when he suggests the MCU has worked so closely with its chosen Islamist partners as to be suffering from “ideological Stockholm syndrome” (Godson 2006a). In being labeled an “appeaser of extremists” by powerful lobbyists such as Godson, the MCU suffered the same stigmatization that awaited any public servant who offered partnership to any but the most quiescent Muslim community groups in the UK during the first six years of the war on terror (Godson 2006b, 2007; Gove 2006a, 2006b; Phillips 2006).