http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/25/world/europe/british-undercover-officer-settlement.html 2014-10-24 14:57:59 Woman Who Had Child With British Undercover Officer Will Receive Settlement The payment is part of tangle of a dozen cases relating to a unit whose members posed as activists to gather intelligence on militant political and environmental groups. === LONDON — She was a 22-year-old campaigner for animal rights. He was an undercover police officer sent to spy on her. But the relationship went far beyond what might be deemed the norm between snooper and snooped. In the mid-1980s, the woman, identified only as Jacqui, formed a relationship with the officer she thought was a fellow activist, a longhaired leftist who said his name was Bob Robinson. In 1985, they had a son. Only in 2012 did the activist discover that Bob the left-winger was in fact Bob Lambert, a married police officer with children of his own, who had been assigned to infiltrate the militant Animal Liberation Front. On Friday, in an extraordinary coda to this story of passion, parenthood and betrayal, British news reports said the police would pay the woman 425,000 pounds – equivalent to about $680,000 – as part of a settlement to head off a formal lawsuit. The payment was said to be the first of its kind. The police declined to confirm the amount involved. But in a statement, Scotland Yard said it “unreservedly apologizes for any pain and suffering that the relationship with Bob Lambert, an undercover officer, has had on this woman.” “We recognize the impact that the revelation that he was an undercover police officer must have had both on her and her son,” it said. The statement said that Scotland Yard “has never had a policy that officers can use sexual relations for the purposes of policing.” To which Peter Francis, another former undercover officer, said in an interview with the BBC, there was “no policy saying that you couldn’t, either.” The payment is part of tangle of a dozen cases relating to an undercover police unit called the Special Demonstration Squad, whose members posed as activists to gather intelligence on militant political and environmental groups. The revelations about the squad’s activities have stunned many people, not least those who were its targets. “I had a spy who was being paid by the government to spy on me to the extent that he watched me give birth, so he saw every intimate part of me,” said Jacqui, who has declined to divulge her identity, in an interview with the BBC and The Guardian, which both reported news of the police payment. “He was 14 hours with me, giving birth. How did he report that back?” The uproar over the undercover officers’ conduct has prompted a fierce debate between defenders of civil liberties and those who support what Scotland Yard called “a vital policing tactic” undertaken by officers who face “very real risks” in “this difficult and dangerous work.” Undercover deployments continue to this day, the police acknowledged. “Whilst Lambert has himself confirmed that he was an undercover officer,” the statement said, “that does nothing to dilute our duty to protect our staff currently working undercover.” The timing of the announcement could play into a broader unease about the extent of secret official scrutiny reaching back decades into those perceived as the enemies of the day — from fascists in the 1930s to Communists in the Cold War to jihadists in a newer confrontation. These days, the role is filled by what police officers have described as a surge in operations to track those associated with or drawn to the Islamic State militant group, also known as ISIS and ISIL. The disclosure of the police payoff came on the same day as files declassified by the National Archives showed that MI5, the domestic security service, placed two prominent Marxist historians, Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill, under surveillance for many years. The agency opened their mail, bugged their phones and monitored their wives and associates. The documents, heavily redacted in parts, showed that the security service opened dossiers on associates including the historian A. J. P. Taylor, the author Iris Murdoch and the philosopher Mary Warnock. “I am completely taken aback,”