I—JUNE 14, 2012
It was four o’clock on a Thursday afternoon, and Jacqui had just got home from work. She made a pot of coffee and took it out to the garden with the Daily Mail. It was the start of her weekend. The sun was out. She sat down at a patio table and poured the coffee, taking a minute to enjoy the scent of the wisteria that was blooming on her trellis.
She opened the paper: the Queen in Nottingham for her Golden Jubilee; bankers under scrutiny; wives and girlfriends of the England football team. Absent-mindedly, she continued to read. She barely glanced at an article titled “How Absence of a Loving Father Can Wreck a Child’s Life.” A few pages later, she came to a photograph of a smiling young man with bouffy brown curls that parted like curtains around his eyes. Even after twenty-five years, she knew the face’s every freckle and line.
She subsequently told a parliamentary committee:
Bob Robinson was Jacqui’s first love and the father of her eldest child. He had disappeared from their lives in 1987, when their son was two. (To protect her son’s privacy, Jacqui asked me not to use her last name.) Over the years, Jacqui had tried many times to track Bob down, but she had never been able to find him. Neither had any of the government agencies she had enlisted to help in the search. Bob had seemingly vaporized. Now there he was, staring back at her from the pages of a tabloid.
Jacqui tried to focus. “An undercover policeman planted a bomb in a department store to prove his commitment to animal rights extremists, an MP claimed yesterday,” the article that the picture accompanied began. “Bob Lambert is accused of leaving an incendiary device in a Debenhams in London—one of three set off in a coordinated attack in 1987.” (No one was hurt in the attacks, which caused millions of dollars’ worth of damage to the stores, targeted because they sold fur products.) It went on to explain that Caroline Lucas, an M.P. for the Green Party, had invoked parliamentary privilege to make the accusation. She was calling for “a far-reaching public inquiry into police infiltrators and informers.” Jacqui read on. The officer, the article said, had insinuated himself into animal-rights groups in the nineteen-eighties, creating an alter ego under which, for several years, he led a double life. Bob Robinson was Bob Lambert, and Bob Lambert was a spy.
II—1984-87
Bob and Jacqui met in early 1984, at an animal-rights protest outside Hackney Town Hall, in East London. Jacqui, who was twenty-two, was wearing a red uniform, with a nametag and a knotted scarf. “Why are you dressed like that?” Bob said, approaching her. She replied that she’d come straight from her job, at Avis Rent-a-Car. Gangly and polite, Bob struck Jacqui as slightly awkward. He was clearly in his thirties—old, to her mind. She found him nice-looking, but didn’t dwell on their encounter. “I didn’t go home and think about him,” she told me recently. “It wasn’t, like, ‘Wow!’ ”
A month or so later, Bob showed up at another demonstration, in the English countryside. A hunt club was holding a fox hunt, which Jacqui and her fellow-“sabs”—saboteurs—were doing their best to disrupt. “They had their little drink before the hunt—it’s got a special name—they were all wearing their gear,” Jacqui recalled recently. As the tweed-jacketed field trotted by, the activists, their faces masked by balaclavas, blew horns (to distract the hounds) and sprayed eucalyptus oil (to dull the scent of the quarry). The skirmishing was a form of class warfare as well as a clash of ideals. “What it really turned into was hunt supporters hunting us,” Jacqui said. “The hunt master, he didn’t care about killing foxes—it was hunting sabs. He would, like, whip us with his whip, and the police would just be standing around watching.”
The protesters finished the day muddy and elated. Bob asked Jacqui if she wanted a ride home. “It was a dirty old Escort van,” Jacqui recalled. “But if you had a van you didn’t have to get the train back to London, and also you could get quite a lot of people in the back.” Bob offered to chauffeur Jacqui’s friends; when they got back to London he dropped the friends off first. Outside her flat, Bob and Jacqui sat in the van and talked. Jacqui recalled, “That happened a couple of times, and, eventually, I invited him in.”
Soon Bob and Jacqui were a couple. The age difference wasn’t an issue. Bob, who said he was an odd-job gardener, seemed no more settled than Jacqui and her peers. Moreover, his tastes and values chimed perfectly with hers. He took her to see the Pretenders at the Hammersmith Odeon and haunted Housman’s, the radical bookstore. Unconcerned about possessions, he rented a tiny bed-sit. His clothes often had a musty smell, as though he had trouble getting them to dry.
As Rob Evans and Paul Lewis write in “Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police,” Lambert “was well versed in political theory.” A former acquaintance told them, of Bob, “He was not a cardboard activist, he had real depth to him.” (Evans and Lewis exposed many of the events in this story in a series of articles in the Guardian, for which they won a 2014 British Press Award, and in “Undercover,” which is the definitive account of the excesses of undercover policing in Britain.) He urged Jacqui, a vegetarian, to become a vegan. With his long hair and off-the-grid life style, he seemed the embodiment of the anti-consumerist ethos of the British far left in the Thatcher age.
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Jacqui was gregarious and beautiful, with dark witchy curls and a heart-shaped face. She had grown up in a housing development in East London, as part of a “big East End family that lived off their wits.” Her father was a television engineer. Her mother was a medical receptionist. As a child, she excelled in school—“They were talking about me being Oxbridge material”—but by the time she was a teen-ager she had become “a handful,” talking back to teachers and riding around in cars with older boys. “She was a bright pupil, but she mucked about and she didn’t really put her mind to things,” her mother told me. At seventeen, eager for excitement, she dropped out of school and moved out of her parents’ house. She picked up what work she could—typing, temping at a shoe importer’s office, tending bar. On their nights off, she and her best friend would spend hours getting ready to go out to the Blitz Club, in Covent Garden, where the coat-check attendant was Boy George.
Jacqui had loved animals since she was a child. She became a vegetarian in 1982, after Channel 4 broadcast “The Animals Film,” a documentary that detailed the horrors of such practices as factory farming and vivisection, galvanizing a generation of animal-rights activists. She began taking part in Sunday protests to dissuade shoppers at the livestock market on Petticoat Lane. “People just gave up, really. They were, like, ‘It’s probably not worth getting my chicken from there, because I’m going to get loads of aggro.’ ” Eventually, the market closed.
In the early eighties, some factions of the British animal-rights movement—particularly those aligned with the Animal Liberation Front—veered into violence. Their tactics included harassment, death threats, arson, larceny, and sabotage. Jacqui limited herself to nonviolent means, but by the time she met Bob she was a credible regular at protests around London. “I wasn’t floating around making cupcakes,” she told me.
As Bob and Jacqui grew closer, he began spending most of his time at her apartment, a council flat in Hackney. He brought Leonard Cohen and Doors records. His curly hair reminded her of Jim Morrison. “I think a lot of people were surprised that I’d settled with him, because, apart from the animal rights, we were very different,” Jacqui said.
She recalled, “Once, we went to a family do. There was a hall hired and everything, and I pleaded with him—because he used to wear the same clothes all the time—to get something decent. So he got this suit from a charity shop that didn’t fit him properly. He looked awful. I thought he should have made a bit of an effort.” Jacqui’s love of glamour meant that, despite the camaraderie of the movement, socially she remained something of an outsider. In her way, she was as alone as Bob was. “I was attracted to him because of the animals,” she recalled. “I also just think that I wanted somebody to care for me, because I’d been on my own since I was seventeen. It seemed like he was besotted.”
They got a cat together, naming it Winnie-Woo. Every night before they went to bed, Jacqui sent Bob out to wander Hackney Downs in search of the cat, afraid that someone would steal him if they didn’t bring him in. Jacqui was buoyed by their domesticity. Soon, she had bought Bob cologne, and his clothes, which she washed at the local launderette, smelled like fabric softener. “He told me he loved me all the time,” Jacqui said. “I always felt that he was scared of losing me, and, in some ways, that felt quite powerful.”
With the flat, the pet, and the committed partner she’d always wanted, a baby seemed to Jacqui a natural step. (Bob claimed to be philosophically opposed to marriage; Jacqui was fine with that.) At first, Bob said that he didn’t want to have children with her. “He said that he had had a child with a previous girlfriend, and she’d gone off to live in either Australia or New Zealand,” she recalled. “He said that he couldn’t go through losing another child.” Bob even gave the absent daughter a name—Rachel.
Jacqui was not on the Pill, and Bob didn’t use condoms. In any case, according to Jacqui, Bob eventually came around to the idea of starting a family. “I kept on and on about it, and he said no, and then I sort of said, ‘Well, then, I don’t think we can have a future, because I really want a baby.’ And he said, ‘All right, then.’ ” One night, Jacqui and Bob went out for a meal with Denise Bennett, a fellow-activist, at a Chinese vegan restaurant in North London. Bennett was not a tremendous fan of Bob’s—a group administrator, she found him creepily keen to volunteer. Still, she recalled, “It was pleasant company, chatting away, and then Jacqui said she wanted a baby. He didn’t say a word.”
After the conversation with Bob, over Christmas of 1984, Jacqui got pregnant almost immediately. She remembers Bob as a doting father-to-be—accompanying her to doctor’s appointments, fretting over her comfort, shopping for baby clothes and a crib. They spent long afternoons strolling past the furniture workshops on Hackney Road, where Jacqui fell in love with a big pine bed. Bob bought it for them. He insisted on rehearsing the drive to the hospital. “Our happiest time together was when I was pregnant,” she said.
Jacqui’s due date—in late September of 1985—came and went. She recalled, “Then Bob announces to me that he’s got to go and see his dad in Cumbria. I was a bit pissed off with him, but he said he had to go away, so what he would do was see if my mum could come over, which she did.” All of Saturday, Jacqui felt funny—“flu-y, or whatever”—but the baby didn’t budge. “So on the Sunday night, when my dad came to pick up my mum, she said, ‘Are you sure you’re going to be all right?’ I said, ‘Well, Bob’ll be back soon.’ Then, about an hour later, I was just rolling about in agony. There was this woman who lived up the road from us—she used to rescue cats, and she was a bit mad—and I run up to her, and I can remember her going, ‘Don’t worry, I’ve helped my cats give birth many times!’ ”
Bob returned just as Jacqui’s contractions became unbearable. He rode with her to the hospital in an ambulance and was by her side through more than fourteen hours of labor. When the baby, a boy, was born, they named him after Jacqui’s father. (I will call him Francis.) Bob cried.
“I was at work, and he phoned me and told me that Jacqui had had a son,” Jacqui’s mother recalled. “They had wanted to surprise me, so that was lovely, because we’d had all girls in our family.” Jacqui’s mother went to stay at her apartment to help care for the baby. She recalled, “Bob would be there and he was very good—he’d change him and do it all quite expertly.”
A picture from the time, taken by Jacqui’s mother, shows Bob staring adoringly at the baby, cradling him in the crook of his arm. The day after Francis was born, Bob gave Jacqui a card printed with a sentimental drawing—Jessie Willcox Smith’s “First the Infant in Its Mother’s Arms.” Inside, it read “Well done Jac. Love, Bob.”
Bob was a steady presence in the early months of Francis’s life. He took him on outings, changed his diapers, and babysat so that Jacqui could go out with friends. (He somehow avoided going to the registry office to sign forms identifying him as Francis’s father.) Another picture from the time shows Bob in mud boots and a barn jacket at some sort of work site. As his friends haul two-by-fours, he leans against a wall, holding the baby, who, in a powder-blue playsuit, paws at his neck. The young family spent Christmas together at Jacqui’s parents’ house. Bob was there on Christmas Day. Jacqui recalled, “He was a normal, loving father.”
Jacqui and Bob’s relationship, however, was beginning to falter. Overwhelmed by motherhood, Jacqui drifted away from the animal-rights crowd. While she was entering a more practical phase of her life, Bob was acquiring a new set of friends, who were involved in increasingly radical factions of the movement. “He wanted me to go to London Greenpeace meetings with him,” Jacqui recalled. (London Greenpeace, which was not affiliated with Greenpeace, was an anarchist environmental collective best known for battling McDonald’s in a libel suit.) “I went to one meeting with him, and there was this plastic cup they were passing around, and you put in what you could afford. There wasn’t enough money in it to get the bus fare home, much less start the revolution.”
Bob’s lack of ambition, which had initially seemed so noble, began to irritate Jacqui. “Everybody else in the animal-rights movement was growing up, starting to settle down, moving out of the squats and all that,” she recalled. “He was already a lot older, and he was not progressing.” While Bob was in the pub, plotting direct actions, Jacqui was at home, worrying about money. Her feelings toward him fluctuated: she would nag him to contribute more to the household and then feel bad about herself for having been a nag. Occasionally, Bob would come through in surprising ways. One day, Winnie-Woo got hit by a car. The vet told Jacqui that the surgery required to save him would cost three hundred pounds. “There’s no way I had that sort of money,” Jacqui said. “So I called Bob, and I was really upset, and he went, ‘I’ll pay for it.’ And I was still going on, and he said, ‘I’ll pay for it. Jacqui, I’ve just told you I’ll pay for it.’ ” When she asked how he planned to come up with the money, he said he was due a payment from a gardening job.
Despite the tension between them, the couple rarely fought. According to Jacqui, it was nearly impossible to provoke Bob, who, when confronted with anything unpleasant, became robotically calm. Jacqui recalled, “He’d go, ‘I think you need to calm down,’ and he’d leave and come back later. I can remember chasing him down the street.” Bob’s detachment exasperated Jacqui. She recalled, “If I started shouting, he would just wring his hands and say, ‘Jacqui, but you know I love you.’ ”
“I had just had a baby and everything, and I was tired,” Jacqui said. “He wasn’t getting the sort of sex he was getting before, and I was blaming myself. I thought, I’ve been grumpy, snapping at him, going on about money, going on about getting a proper job. He was such a loving father, and I thought, He’s sweet, he’s kind, he loves his child, he loves me. I’m really, really going to give it a try.”
The relationship persisted, but by 1986 the two were spending much of their time apart. Jacqui moved to the suburbs, further distancing herself from the London scene. Still, she and Bob continued to see each other and to raise Francis on good terms.
One evening in the fall of 1987, Bob had agreed to watch Francis at Jacqui’s flat. “He rung me up as usual in the morning and said, ‘Don’t go out tonight—I need to talk to you,’ ” Jacqui recalled. “I thought he was going to tell me that he’d met somebody else. So I waited until he came back and straightaway said, ‘Yep, what is it?’ ” Bob told Jacqui that he wanted to put the baby to bed before they talked. He went upstairs and laid Francis in his crib.
Jacqui recalled, “I could hear him on the baby alarm, which I’d deliberately switched on, and he was saying goodbye to him and telling him that he loved him, and that he’d be back as soon as he could.” Bob came downstairs and, according to Jacqui, said that he had to leave because of the investigation into the Debenhams bombing. He was going abroad, and, for a while, it might be difficult to communicate. As soon as it was safe, he said, he would write. Jacqui could bring their son to visit him in Spain.
III—JUNE 15, 2012
As soon as the hour seemed decent, at 9 a.m. sharp, Jacqui picked up the telephone and dialled the switchboard at the University of St. Andrews, in Fife, Scotland.
“May I have the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence?”
The operator put her through. A woman answered the phone.
“Could I speak to Bob Lambert, please?”
“Who’s calling?”
Jacqui, in spite of herself, burst into tears.
“I’m the mother of his child!”
Jacqui had barely slept. After confirming with her parents that the man in the paper was indeed Bob, she had gone inside and typed “Bob Lambert father child” into Google. Pages of pictures of Bob had popped up, showing him both as a youthful, shaggy Bob Robinson and, now, as a thin, gray-haired man with a beard and the same startled eyes. He looked like the sort of person who would wear a windbreaker and comfortable shoes. He could have been, maybe, a retired geologist. In one of the older pictures that had circulated on the Web after the disclosure of Bob’s identity, Bob held Francis’s hand as he sat on a Shetland pony. Jacqui recalled, “It could have been a doll that he was holding—you couldn’t see his face—but I knew that was my son, and that was, like, really, really shocking.”
Jacqui had stayed on the computer late into the night, trying to navigate the thicket of information. Eventually, she made her way to the Web site of the Guardian, where she found the series of articles by Rob Evans and Paul Lewis about the state-sponsored espionage of British citizens. Evans and Lewis, following up on a lead from former activists, had unmasked Bob Lambert as a spy in a front-page article in October, 2011, but Jacqui had missed it. “I don’t read the Guardian—nobody I know reads the Guardian,” she said. Bob had been back for eight months, and she was only now hearing about it. (She would later recall their courtship for Evans and Lewis’s book.)
Bob had been a member of the Special Demonstrations Squad, the domestic-intelligence-gathering arm of the Metropolitan Police. The S.D.S. was established in 1968, after the Grosvenor Square protests against the Vietnam War. Conrad Hepworth Dixon, the squad’s first chief, when ordered by his superiors to do something about the protests, is said to have replied, “Give me a million pounds and ten men, and I can deal with the problem for you.”
The unit’s mission—to provide “sufficient and accurate intelligence to enable the police to maintain public order,” according to an internal document obtained by Evans and Lewis—was as broad as its techniques were particular. Officers, known as “deep swimmers,” transformed themselves into facsimiles of their targets, taking on new identities that they inhabited for years. They got perms and new passports; they acquired tattoos, accents, and, if necessary, drug habits. “For the whole time they were undercover they would never wear a uniform or set foot in a police station, unless, of course, they were dragged in, kicking, screaming, and handcuffed,” Evans and Lewis write. “They would find flats or bed-sits, preferring those at the back of houses in case fellow activists went past at night and noticed the lights were off and no one was in. They would take up jobs with flexible working hours and travel, such as laborers or delivery van drivers, so they could disappear for, say, a day with their family without arousing suspicion.”
The information overwhelmed Jacqui. Bob had disappeared, and now he was resurrected. Trying to figure out who he was, or who he had been, was like trying to read a biography backward from the last page. According to the articles, he had, at some point during his deployment, nurtured a long-term relationship with another woman, a non-activist—she worked at the electric company—who, like Jacqui, had been oblivious of his real identity. “I was cruelly tricked and it has made me very angry,” the woman, Belinda Harvey, told Evans and Lewis. “I am actually quite damaged by the whole thing. I am still not over it.”
Bob, under pressure from the reporters, issued a statement:
Even as he purported to come clean about his past, he made no mention of Jacqui or the son they had together. (He declined to comment publicly for this account.)
Clicking on links, Jacqui tried to fill in the blanks of decades. After Bob’s undercover stint ended, in 1988, he worked on a squad that investigated terrorist threats. By 1994, he had become the S.D.S.’s second-in-command. After stepping down from the S.D.S., he set up a group called the Muslim Contact Unit, an organization ostensibly dedicated to building relations between the police and London’s Muslims. In 2007, he retired from the Metropolitan Police; in 2008, he was awarded an M.B.E. for services to police work. Jacqui struggled most to digest the fact of his proximity. While Bob Robinson was on the lam in Spain, Bob Lambert, for the past thirty years, had been several miles away, sitting behind a desk.
He hadn’t even tried especially hard to maintain his cover. In his most recent incarnation—as Dr. Robert Lambert, a progressive academic—he had earned a B.A. in “inter-disciplinary European cultural history” and, then, a Ph.D. in politics. Now he was a lecturer in terrorism studies at St. Andrews. His bio on the university’s Web site read:
In 2011, he had published a book called “Countering Al-Qaeda in London: Police and Muslims in Partnership.” He blogged on the Huffington Post.
In October, 2011, Bob was a speaker at a conference organized by anti-racist groups in London. In front of an audience of four hundred people, he delivered a lecture on extremist political violence. During the question-and-answer session, a man stood up and raised his hand. When called upon, he spoke:
The lecture’s moderator tried to quell the mutiny. Morris, who had come with a group of activists, continued to shout from the floor, pressing Bob to apologize. He added, “We want to ensure that you are not informing on groups that are here today.” According to “Undercover,” “Lambert sat impassively, giving nothing away. He sipped from a glass of water.”
When Lambert left the building, the activists followed him onto the street, trailing him with a video camera.
“Bob, we’d like to talk to you about your infiltration of London Greenpeace and your abuse of female campaigners,” a woman said.
“What are you ashamed of?” someone else yelled.
Lambert, wearing a blue shirt and a dark blazer and carrying a backpack, walked faster and faster, saying nothing. As the activists continued to harangue him, he turned into the street and, picking his way through traffic, broke into a run.
Jacqui’s mind spiralled: Were we real? Did Bob love me? Was our son wanted? She was particularly haunted by the mechanics of her selection. “The thing I wanted to know most was, Why me?” she recalled. “Was he given a load of photographs and he said, ‘I want that one?’ Or did he just get in there and mix, and I stood out because of the red uniform?” The knowledge that she had been seduced—and, perhaps, surrendered—by script did not relieve her of the insecurities that attend the demise of romantic relationships, particularly those that end in abandonment. Even within painfully revised parameters, she wanted, somehow, to have been wanted.
Jacqui’s orientation toward Bob, despite his betrayal, remained intimate. Her first instinct, rather than calling a lawyer, was just to dial Bob up and try to talk to him. At St. Andrews, the woman who answered the phone was initially cagey about letting a stranger through to his office. But after Jacqui burst into tears she opened up.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” the woman said. “He’s not actually here, but I’ll ring him, and I’ll come back to you if there’s any message for you.”
“Come back to me anyway,” Jacqui implored her. “Please, don’t leave me hanging.”
They hung up. Several minutes later, Jacqui’s phone rang. It was Bob.
He sounded the same as she remembered, with an Estuary accent and a gentle voice.
“How many children did you father while you were undercover?” Jacqui asked.
“Only our son,” Bob replied.
“Well, has he got any brothers or sisters?”
A woman came on the line, and introduced herself as Bob’s wife. I will call her Katharine. “The reason why I’ve taken the phone is that Bob’s upset,” she said. “Both of his children have died. His daughter died when she was seventeen, and his son died in February of last year.”
“Oh, God,” Jacqui said. “I’m so sorry.”
Katharine explained that she was Bob’s second wife, and that they didn’t have any children together. Bob’s children were by his first wife, from whom he was divorced. Jacqui paused—she had assumed that Bob’s children, if he had any, would be younger than Francis. Instead, they had been born in the mid-seventies. Bob had been married, he acknowledged—raising a family of his own in suburban Herefordshire—throughout the time that they were together.
Jacqui tried to digest the news. Having a skeptical view of male fidelity, and having learned what she already had about Bob, she was less shocked by his admission of romantic duplicity than by the fact of his offspring. All along, her son had had an older half brother and half sister. Now they were dead before he’d even known they were alive.
“So our son is his only remaining child?”
“Yes.”
IV—1988-2012
At a pub in February of the year after Bob left, Jacqui met Kevin, a former professional soccer player. Five months later, they married. Because Kevin came into their life while Francis was young, the family blended easily. In 1990, Jacqui gave birth to a second son, and the four formed a close unit. Jacqui rarely mentioned Bob outside of the family, for the sake of discretion and because, after a while, it simply seemed easier not to; she was happy to let people assume that Kevin, who worked as an engineer for British Gas, was the father of both her children. But, despite Bob’s abrupt departure, Jacqui never questioned his loyalty. “Apparently there were rumors that he had been a spy, when he disappeared just after the Debenhams bombing,” she recalled. “But by then I was living in suburbia with my husband, so I didn’t hear them.”
In the summer of 1993, Kevin woke up with a swollen leg. He assumed it was due to an old soccer injury, but his symptoms worsened, and he was eventually admitted to the hospital. “He said, ‘Jac, I feel funny,’ and he just started fittin’,” Jacqui recalled. “He was a healthy thirty-six years old, and he dropped down dead in front of me.” (The official cause of his death was a heart attack with an underlying malignant teratoma.)
At thirty-one, Jacqui was a widow. It was a difficult time. Her younger son struggled with health problems. Francis, who had now lost two fathers, became angry and disruptive. In September, 1994, Jacqui decided to go back to school. Quickly, she fell in love with one of her professors. “It was a typical thing of trying to replace what I’d lost,” she recalled. Several months later, she found herself pregnant again. In her second trimester, she suffered a breakdown and voluntarily committed herself to a psychiatric hospital. The baby was born there, premature. (She and the professor remained a couple until 2001 and are still close.) For a time, her older children went to live with her parents.
Slowly, she got herself back together. “It was very gradual,” she said. “One day, you find yourself laughing at something on television when, before, there’d been such a black cloud.” Her studies offered the structure and sense of purpose that had eluded her in the past, and with time her life stabilized. In 1998, she earned a bachelor of laws, making her the first person in her family to graduate from college.
When Francis was about ten, he announced that he wanted to try to find his father. Jacqui had remained a vegan, and Francis was a vegetarian. She had always spoken of Bob as a man of principle, explaining to Francis, as he grew older, that his father had been a hero in the animal-rights movement. “I believe that as many people as possible that love the child is best, so I never slagged Bob off,” Jacqui recalled. With Francis longing for paternal affection, she pursued every means she could come up with of trying to locate Bob. “We tried tracing agents,” she said. “Child services tried to contact Bob. We got nowhere.”
Jacqui’s elder sons thrived, went to college, got jobs, and moved out of the house. Her youngest son lived with her and visited his father on weekends. Jacqui went on to obtain an LL.M., researching female prisoners with personality disorders. She earned a postgraduate certificate in education. She became a teacher at a secondary school. There was money. She travelled with friends to places like Spain and San Francisco. She took spin classes. She watched boxed sets. “Life was boring, but it was quite nice,” she said. Her thoughts turned only occasionally to what had become of Bob. When she earned her bachelor’s degree, Jacqui had dedicated her thesis to him: “Wishing on a star to find out where you are. Hope you’re safe and happy and your dreams have come true.”
V—JUNE 28-AUGUST 3, 2012
On June 28th, Jacqui received an e-mail from Katharine Lambert:
Attached was a letter from Bob to his son:
Bob wrote that he was “probably more comfortable expressing my thoughts and feelings on paper than in person” and that he didn’t “want to get too heavy!” He talked about running (“Saturday morning at 9 a.m. I sometimes do a 5K Parkrun locally”). His tone was tender and, given the sensitivity of the situation, surprisingly forthright. He hoped, he wrote, that they could meet soon. “In the meantime, take care,” he wrote. “Love, Bob.”
Jacqui was reeling. “Basically, all my pieces were glued together, and then this wrecking ball happened,” she said. Transiting between the bed and the couch, she trawled the murkiest depths of her memory in search of some moment that would illuminate everything that had come after. Events whose causes and consequences had been fixed in her mind for decades mutated in the half-light of Bob’s revelations. “I went through things he said to me, things I said to him, this, that,” she recalled. “He says to my son, as if he’s been in pain all these years, that he wants to see him, so I don’t know, is that true? On the other hand, if it hadn’t all come out, he would’ve taken this to his grave, wouldn’t he?” Walking her dogs in the park with a friend one day, she was overcome with guilt. “I had to sit down on a bench, because I couldn’t stop crying,” she said. “I told my friend, ‘I blame myself. I’ve messed my life up, I’ve messed my kids up. I picked him, didn’t I? I gave my son the terrible childhood he had because I picked Bob—and he picked me.’ ”
Jacqui struggled to sort out her contradictory impulses. “I didn’t know what to do,” she recalled. “Whatever my feelings were, this is Francis’s dad.” It happened that Francis was in Thailand for a month, travelling around after having graduated from college. “So I had a bit of breathing room,” Jacqui recalled. She sat down at her computer and poured out her emotions:
Jacqui believed that Bob, with the resources of the Metropolitan Police at his disposal, had been keeping tabs on her over the years; it enraged her to think that he had stayed at a self-preserving remove, valuing his career over Francis’s well-being, when Francis had needed him after Kevin’s death. She was especially upset that Bob had not been moved to contact them in the wake of the deaths of his children—both had suffered from sudden arrhythmic death syndromes, a set of genetic conditions with which Francis could have unknowingly been afflicted. (He has since been tested and does not carry the gene.)
Jacqui described their son’s difficult boyhood and the hurt that Bob’s desertion had caused. Of Bob, she wrote, “If he had made contact then or at some time during Francis’s childhood revealing his true identity and trusting me, he could have had a relationship with his son.” Still, from time to time her tone toward Bob softened, her anger at his deception mingling with her hope that Francis stood, perhaps, to regain a father.
Even as Jacqui attempted to extract redress from Bob, she could not afford to alienate him. Francis “is very politically aware and has tons of compassion about injustice both to animals and humans,” she wrote. “In fact I describe him as his father’s son, meaning the Bob Robinson that I knew. He looks like Bob, and speaking to Bob on Friday, he sounds like him, too.” At the close of the letter, she agreed to encourage Francis to meet Bob:
In late June, Francis came home from Thailand. Jacqui explained to him what had happened in his absence. He was eager to meet his father, and, on July 8th, he and Bob got together at Bob’s house. They had an easy affinity, discussing their favorite soccer team. They watched Andy Murray play in that day’s Wimbledon final. They discovered that they walked the same way, with their toes pointing in.
Afterward, Bob wrote to Jacqui, thanking her for “how much you have done to bring him up over the years to become the fine young man that he is.” He said that he was looking forward to renewing their relationship, writing, “I have a lot of work to do to prove that I can be trusted and be a worthy father for Francis. I promise that I will be. But actions speak louder than words, and I will let my actions prove my words in the weeks, months, and years ahead.”
If Bob’s promises were legitimate, Jacqui was happy for her son, but she was still not faring well. Bob continued to call frequently, saying that he wanted to explain as much as he could about what had happened between them. Finally, Jacqui agreed to meet with him.
Bob and Katharine rang Jacqui’s doorbell at 3 p.m. on August 3rd. Jacqui had been extremely nervous about their arrival, but she was relieved by Bob’s mild appearance. “He just looked like an old man,” she said. They hugged. They sat down in her living room and began to talk. Jacqui had assumed that Bob would hold the definitive answer key to her questions, but he, too, was ambivalent about the origins and intentions of much of what had passed between them. He apologized for having deserted her and her son, but he argued that he had been bound, both morally and legally, to maintain the secrecy of his mission. At one point, Jacqui brought up a long-ago afternoon when she, Bob, and Francis had gone over to her parents’ house for Sunday lunch.
“Remember, they wanted new fencing put up?” Jacqui said.
Bob, being a gardener, had been charged with the task.
“He’s useless at D.I.Y.!” Katharine said.
Jacqui continued, “And then my sister and her boyfriend asked you to do theirs, and I’m looking at you like, ‘You’re not gonna charge them, you can’t!’ ”
Jacqui recalled, “And then he ended up sort of having to cut back trees for the whole street. So now, in 2012, we’re talking about this, and me and him are laughing like old exes, through all the tears and everything that’s happened.” Despite the occasional flash of humor, the meeting didn’t assuage Jacqui’s agitation. As Bob spoke, he let drop that he and his wife and children had also had a cat. It was a particularly sickening detail, conjuring a mirror-image family life: two women, two houses, two sofas covered in cat hair. Had Winnie-Woo—and, by extension, all the dear mess of their life together—been a punctiliously drawn insurance policy against detection?
“When he talked about ‘I buried two of my three children’ or ‘my other son,’ even at the beginning, the language that he used was very clever,” Jacqui recalled. “It’s as if Francis was no different, as if he had always had his third child.”
The paradox of Bob’s character was impossible to crack: the kinder he was, the more he raised Jacqui’s suspicion that she was, once again, being manipulated. She vacillated between wariness and wanting to believe—she even worried that her skepticism of Bob’s motives would hurt his feelings. It was almost as if the knowledge of Bob’s alter ego had cleaved her own consciousness, giving birth to an alternate persona that could accept the Bob of the present without having to resolve the implications of his past deeds. Bob, whether by temperament or design, seemed typically dissociated. He wrote to Jacqui at one point, “Probably only a psychiatrist stands a chance of unravelling and explaining all of my thinking and my behaviour during and after my time as Bob Robinson.”
VI—2014
The revelation of the extent of the British police’s spying, and the dubiousness of some of their tactics, caused a scandal that has yet to be resolved. Reporters and activists have confirmed that at least nine police officers—including one woman—conducted sexual relationships with unsuspecting citizens during their undercover deployments. At least twelve women, including Jacqui, are suing the Metropolitan Police for deceit, assault, misfeasance in public office, and negligence. Those whose relationships began after 2000 are also bringing suit under the Human Rights Act, arguing that the Met’s “systemic abuse of female political activists” breached Articles 3 and 8, which forbid inhumane treatment and guarantee the right to private life. Jacqui has said that she feels as though she were “raped by the state.”
It is true that the officers violated their partners in the most intimate of ways, grooming them, courting them, becoming part of their lives, and then leaving them, as though by template. When the relationships are taken in the aggregate, the sad individual twists of fate that endeared the impostors to their lovers become cynical commonplaces: deceased parents, estranged siblings, urgent errands, rushed goodbyes, dozens of fictitious children and exes and old friends killed off or dispatched to the far corners of the Commonwealth. In a report for Operation Herne—one of a number of ongoing inquiries into undercover policing—Mick Creedon, the chief constable of Derbyshire, concluded that “no evidence has been found of sexual activity ever being explicitly authorized,” yet he acknowledged the existence of a “ ‘tradecraft’ document which provides informal tacit authority and guidance for officers faced with the prospect of a sexual relationship.” Creedon wrote, “There are and never have been any circumstances where it would be appropriate for such covertly deployed officers to engage in intimate sexual relationships with those they are employed to infiltrate and target. Such an activity can only be seen as an abject failure of the deployment, a gross abuse of their role and their position as a police officer and an individual and organisational failing.” (One policeman is also suing the Met, alleging that his time undercover resulted in traumatic psychological consequences for him.)
When I asked the Metropolitan Police Service to comment on Lambert’s role, a spokesman would only acknowledge by e-mail that Lambert had been an undercover police officer. Because of the civil cases, the spokesperson wrote, “it would be inappropriate for us to comment in any further detail.” The e-mail concluded, “The MPS position, which we have repeated a number of times, is that long term sexual relationships between an undercover officer and a member of the public is not an authorised tactic.”
James Olson, a former Chief of Counterintelligence at the C.I.A., who was involved in clandestine operations overseas for many years, described undercover sexual involvements as “something that we should not do in the C.I.A., absolutely not.” He went on, “Our liaison friends in other services think that we Americans are ridiculously puritanical and that we avoid using something that works.” The masters were the East Germans—particularly Markus Wolf, whose Romeo agents seduced government secretaries in the West. As for Bob Robinson, Olson said, “It’s very easy to fall into that trap—the righteousness trap. Some people are so convinced that what they’re doing is for the good of the country that they’re willing to excuse what would ordinarily be gross misconduct on their parts. They lose sight of ethical constraints.”
The S.D.S.’s transgressions were not confined to the romantic realm. As Evans and Lewis have reported, officers testified in court under their false identities, perjuring themselves rather than break cover. In order to make their backstories as realistic as possible, they plundered the public records, assuming the names and birth dates of dead children. Bob Robinson took his alias from Mark Robert Charles Robinson, who was born February 28, 1952—Bob’s real birthday is sixteen days earlier—and died in 1959, of a congenital heart defect. There is also the claim that Lambert participated in a crime during his stint as Bob Robinson. Geoff Sheppard, who, along with Andrew Clark, was jailed for the attacks on Debenhams—the third suspect has never been found—has alleged that Bob was their co-conspirator. (This was the allegation that Caroline Lucas repeated in Parliament.) Lambert has acknowledged that his intelligence contributed to the convictions of Clark and Sheppard, but has repeatedly denied being involved in the bombing himself.
The emotional compasses of many of the women have been permanently disoriented by the knowledge that they were unwittingly drawn to undercover spies. While the Met commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe has acknowledged that sexual relationships between undercover officers and citizens are inappropriate, the department has fought in court to have the tactic upheld as legal. Even as individual officers like Bob Lambert have confirmed their identities and admitted their wrongdoing, the Met, citing operational concerns, has maintained a policy of “Neither Confirm Nor Deny.” (In July, a court ruled that the Met could no longer resort to N.C.N.D. in its handling of the Bob Lambert case and others.) Given the evasions of truth that attended the original injury, many of the victims have found this a particularly cruel stance.
Last year, after several of the women spoke publicly of their experiences, Bob gave a televised interview to Britain’s Channel 4. He admitted to having slept with a total of four women while undercover. He answered questions in a calm, didactic tone. His affectlessness was confounding—it was difficult to tell whether it sprang from remorse and a desire to accept whatever punishment was due or from a profound lack of empathy. He said, of Jacqui and Belinda Harvey, “They were both fine, upstanding citizens who had the misfortune to meet me. I can only apologize to them. I think it was just a case of falling in love, I guess, and I should not have allowed that to happen.”
Bob and Francis have developed a close relationship. They watch soccer together and run 5Ks. Francis has a bedroom in Bob and Katharine’s house. Some afternoons, Bob visits him at work to bring him a drink from his favorite coffee shop.
Sitting in her living room one day not long ago, Jacqui tried and failed to deliver a neat summation. Sometimes, she said, she wondered if she had been too hard on Bob. But lots of people she knew thought that she had cut him too much slack. “Bob Lambert is going to be in my life for the rest of my life,” she said. “When this is all over and done with, and everyone else is getting on with their lives, they’re not going to have to face their cop or anything. I am. I’m going to share grandchildren with him at some point. So I can’t help it.” ♦
Video: Lauren Collins comments on the moment Bob Lambert was unmasked, in 2011.
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