Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police by Paul Lewis, Rob Evans Read Free Book Online

under the stencilled headline: ‘You are the Animal Liberation Front.’ ‘You wouldn’t leave it to others if your friend was being beaten up in the street,’ it said. ‘In the same way you can’t stand by as thousands of animals are slaughtered every day.’
    It was this uncompromising approach that led the ALF to wage a sustained campaign aimed at economically damaging companies that sold animal products and provided Lambert with an opportunity to make his name. The ALF was turning its attention to chains of department stores like House of Fraser, Debenhams and Allders, all of which sold fur. Over three yearsfrom 1984, activists had planted more than 40 incendiary devices to set fire to shops up and down the country. In one particular spree, there was a series of co-ordinated attacks on House of Fraser stores across northern England, from Altrincham in Cheshire through to Blackpool, Harrogate and Manchester.
    The media called the arson attacks ‘firebombs’, but in reality the homemade contraptions, designed to cause tiny ignitions, were rather basic. Devices the size of cigarettes boxes were placed under flammable objects such as an armchair or settee in the stores. The ALF insists that the devices were designed to go off at night so that people were not harmed – typically, they would be laid in the afternoon and timed to ignite just after midnight. The aim was to cause enough of a fire to set off the sprinkler system, avoiding a full-scale blaze but flooding the store extensively and ruining the stock. The top floor was favoured as all the floors underneath would be drenched.
    The ALF hoped the campaign would inspire copycat actions around the country. A step-by-step guide on how to make the devices was quietly circulated around cells of activists. Under the misleading rubric ‘Interviews with Animal Liberation Front activists’, the closely typed booklet contained intricate diagrams involving nails, batteries, nail varnish, tweezers, watches and washing-up liquid. The instructions could be mastered by a clever activist with enough time on their hands, while all the household ingredients were available in regular high-street shops.
    Sheppard recalls the moment in 1987 that a trio of ALF activists concocted a plan to set fire to three branches of Debenhams in an attempt to force the department store to abandon its fur products. ‘Myself, and Bob, and one other person got together and formulated a plan,’ he said. According to another confidential source who knew about the plot, the components for the attacks on branches of Debenhams in and around London wereassembled in an empty squatted property. After a period of experimentation , the trio believed they had improved the rudimentary design stipulated in the booklet.
    Lambert was in a prime position for a covert agent. He confided to one friend he was ‘deeply involved’ in the ALF and spent hours defending the ethics of its hard-line tactics. Another friend recalls Lambert telling her that he was going to set fire to the department store. She says she ‘spent ages trying to persuade him not to, that it was a bad idea’. Lambert was unmoved: he portrayed himself as being willing to undergo a heroic sacrifice, risking his own freedom to prevent the sale of fur. The question was: how far would the undercover police officer go?
    According to Sheppard, his friend Lambert was intimately involved in the conspiracy. Sheppard’s testimony about the attack on the Debenhams store – and the part he alleges Lambert played – was highlighted in a parliamentary speech by Caroline Lucas MP in June 2012. Lucas told the House that Sheppard had claimed that he, Lambert and a third activist were part of the plan to target three branches of Debenhams. The trio each collected two devices during the day on Saturday, July 11 and then headed off to their designated branch. One was in Luton, another in Romford. The third, which Sheppard said the police spy was going to