Yahoo Finance Secrets and lies: untangling the UK 'spy cops' scandal
The public inquiry into undercover policing might never have happened were it not for a chance discovery in a van in Italy. Lisa Jones was having a “blissful holiday” in July 2010 touring the mountains with her boyfriend, an environmental activist who went by the name Mark Stone.
Searching for her sunglasses in the glove compartment, her hand pressed against the leather cover of a British passport. Inside, she saw her boyfriend’s photo beside a stranger’s name: Mark Kennedy. She then found a mobile phone containing emails from two children, calling her boyfriend “Dad”.
“I remember feeling that the world was suddenly a really long way away,” she said. “I just remember that the mountains were pulsating and swimming around me.”
The personal trauma of that discovery set in train a series of events that began to unravel what many regard as one of the most closely guarded secrets in British policing history. When the public inquiry, announced six years ago, finally starts taking evidence on Monday more of the story will unfurl.
The existence of a squad of police officers sent deep undercover in political groups was so top secret that many of the UK’s most senior officers were completely oblivious until they began reading reports in the Guardian 10 years ago.
When Lisa Jones – who uses a pseudonym – and her friends established that Kennedy was a police officer who had been spying on climate change activists, the story caused a firestorm, collapsing a major trial and quashing the convictions of environmental activists who had been prosecuted for conspiring to shut down one of the UK’s biggest power stations.
Senior officers tried to quell the outcry, insisting Kennedy was merely a rogue officer. In fact, the opposite was true. Kennedy was just the latest foot soldier in a very long line of undercover police who had been routinely infiltrating political groups, mostly on the left, since as far back as 1968.
Unlike almost all of his predecessors, Kennedy did, briefly, claim to be conflicted; after he was exposed, he phoned one of his targets and, his voice trembling, lamented: “I fucking hate myself so much. I betrayed so many people.” The person on the other end of the line, a climate scientist, was smart enough to record the call, catching Kennedy confess the entire operation was “like a hammer to crack a nut”.
The police spies initially belonged to the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), which was created to control the restive protests of the late 1960s, including those opposed to the war in Vietnam, but continued to monitor protest groups for a further four decades. Known only to a select few at the upper echelons of Scotland Yard, the squad, whose officers often grew beards and long hair ahead of their deployments, adopted the nickname “the hairies”.
Related: UK political groups spied on by undercover police – the list
As one detective inspector in the SDS said: “We were part of a ‘black operation’ that absolutely no one knew about and only the police had actually agreed that this was all OK.” The SDS was disbanded in 2008 because, according to one senior officer, the officers had “lost their moral compass”.
Yet the techniques of highly intrusive, long-term infiltration of protest groups continued in the unit to which Kennedy belonged: the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU).
The scale of both spying operations was remarkable: over more than four decades, at least 139 police officers were given fake identities to closely monitor the inner workings of more than 1,000 political groups.
These were not ordinary undercover operations, which are designed to acquire evidence that can be used in criminal prosecutions. Rather, these police spies were tasked with gathering intelligence that could be used to disrupt and monitor political groups.
Their deployments typically lasted four to five years, with officers living alongside political campaigners, forming deep bonds of friendship, or romantic liaisons, with their targets. At least three of the police spies fathered children with women they met while undercover.
Many others were instructed by their superiors to adopt the identities of dead children to lend credibility to their aliases – with some, in a macabre ritual, even visiting the graves of the deceased children whose identities they were using.
One of the most notorious police spies, Bob Lambert, who adopted the identity of a seven–year-old boy who had died of a congenital heart defect in 1959, is also accused of turning agent provocateur, setting fire to a branch of Debenhams while undercover in the 1980s. He denies the charge. Lambert, who fathered a child while posing as Bob Robinson, was promoted to a senior manager role in the SDS. He later received an MBE for “services to policing”.
The inquiry
The public inquiry into what became known as the “spy cops” scandal was announced by Theresa May in 2014 when she was home secretary. Her decision followed years of disclosures unearthed by the Guardian and activists who had been spied on. But it was a revelation by a whistleblower, Peter Francis, that appeared to tip the balance.
Related: Peter Francis: the changing faces of an undercover police spy - in pictures
A former SDS officer, Francis revealed how police spied on the family campaign of Stephen Lawrence, the teenager murdered by racists. Ordering the inquiry, May branded the discovery “profoundly shocking and disturbing”.
There had, by then, been no fewer than 14 inquiries prompted by the spy cops scandal, but they had barely scratched the surface of the story. May announced a full judge-led inquiry on a statutory par with other significant inquiries, such as Lord Saville’s investigation into Bloody Sunday and the Chilcot examination of the Iraq invasion.
The former judge running the undercover policing inquiry, Sir John Mitting, has a team of 90 staff working for him. In total, more than 200 witnesses are expected to give evidence, including politicians and Whitehall officials who oversaw the operation. Thousands of confidential documents that police assumed would never see the light of day are also due to be published.
However, one large tranche of documents, which may have shed light on operations since the 1990s, will not be released because it was recently destroyed by police.
A police watchdog inquiry into the matter was initiated after an officer reported seeing a colleague standing next to a shredder with a “substantial quantity” of documents relating to the infiltration of political groups. The watchdog concluded the documents were destroyed despite an instruction that they had to be preserved.
Mitting’s inquiry has cost more than £29m so far, with the final bill set to be far higher. The inquiry is not expected to conclude until at least 2023, and even then many of those who were spied upon remain doubtful over how much it will reveal.
They see Mitting as an obdurate establishment figure whose decisions so far have preserved the secrecy surrounding the undercover operations he was supposed to expose. A major reason for the six-year delay in the inquiry starting to take evidence in public, for example, is the large number of legal applications by undercover officers to keep their identities concealed during its proceedings.
The spies argued that exposure of their identities could put them in danger, as they had carried out risky deployments, or could damage their privacy and breach their human rights.
Mitting has approved a large number of these applications, even though in cases the deployments were often decades old and involved the infiltration of peaceful protest groups.
He is allowing more than a third of the undercover officers to keep their real and assumed identities concealed. They will still give evidence, but be known only by a cypher – two letters, followed by a number.
Those who were spied on point out they will be unable to challenge claims by the undercover officers if they are unaware of the fake identities they used during their deployments.
Doreen Lawrence, the mother of Stephen Lawrence, has accused Mitting of “turning what should be a transparent, accountable and public hearing into an inquiry cloaked in secrecy and anonymity”.
At one point, victims of the surveillance operation temporarily walked out of the inquiry, calling for Mitting to be replaced. They called the 73-year-old “the usual white, upper middle-class, elderly gentleman whose life experiences are a million miles away from those who were spied upon”.
They have also questioned how Mitting, a member of London’s male-only Garrick Club, can understand the systemic racism and misogyny that underpinned so many of the undercover deployments.
Committed to transparency?
From Monday, Mitting’s inquiry will hold public sessions to hear evidence from undercover officers, their superiors, and those who were spied on.
The first sessions, across seven days in November, will examine the covert deployments between 1968 and 1972. Prominent in this phase will be the infiltration of the campaign against the Vietnam war by at least six undercover officers.
Former officers, now in their 70s, will be called out of retirement to be questioned in public about their activities half a century ago. Their targets included the black power movement, the anti-apartheid campaign, leftwing groups such as the International Marxist Group and the International Socialists, and anarchists.
One spy, who appears to have used the fake name Sandra, will be questioned about why she was deployed for a year to infiltrate a Women’s Liberation Front group that the inquiry has described as being “non-violent” and “apparently harmless”.
In the months that follow, Mitting will work chronologically through decades of undercover operations and examine numerous controversies, including how at least 26 undercover officers were arrested for participating in criminal activity.
It comes as the government, with the support of Labour, progresses the controversial covert human intelligence sources bill (CHIS), which provides a legal basis for state operatives to commit crimes while undercover.
The inquiry is also tasked with looking at how political activists were wrongly convicted of crimes after evidence relating to their case was concealed by undercover police, and how police passed intelligence on activists to big companies that then blacklisted them from employment.
In another move that Mitting’s critics believe symbolises a lack of commitment to transparency, there will be no live feed of public evidence given at his hearings – such as the one broadcasting video from the inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire. Due to Covid-19 restrictions, the public will not be permitted to attend the inquiry in person either.
Instead, those who wish to witness proceedings must sit in a room in a four-star central London hotel, the Amba, a few miles miles from the venue in Southwark, south London, where the inquiry is taking place.
They will be shown a carefully restricted broadcast of witnesses giving evidence. Inquiry staff will be monitoring the public to stop them photographing the video screens or recording the audio. Only a written transcript of evidence will be published online.
Yet some still hope the inquiry will provide answers – particularly to those women who were duped into long-term relationships with police posing as activists.
Sophisticated deception
After Kennedy was unmasked a decade ago, other women began to piece together how they had been deceived into long-term relationships by men who turned out to be police spies.
They include police officers such as John Dines, who had a two-year relationship in the 1990s with the environmentalist Helen Steel, who later became known for fighting a long libel battle against the McDonald’s burger chain without legal representation.
And Mark Jenner, who lived for four years with his girlfriend in a London flat to bolster his credibility among activists. She believed they were almost “man and wife”.
In what became a familiar pattern, men like Lambert, Dines and Jenner vanished completely from the lives of their girlfriends, claiming, for example, to be suffering mental health breakdowns.
Often they would send their ex-partners postcards with stamps indicating they had moved overseas. It was a commonly used ruse, intended to bring deployments – and relationships – to an end without raising suspicions.
So far, more than 20 undercover officers are known to have had sexual relationships while using their fabricated identities between the mid-1970s and 2010. They are alleged to include police officers such as Lynn Watson, who infiltrated an anti-war group in Leeds in the mid-2000s, and an officer known as Marco Jacobs, who spied on a small anarchist collective in Cardiff around the same time.
In a nod to the sophistication of his deception, Jacobs, who claimed to be a haulage driver, had a permanently tanned right forearm that he told friends was the result of resting his arm beside his truck window. In a particularly callous move, Jacobs also sought to develop a bond with an activist he was spying on by attending her father’s funeral. He later formed a sexual relationship with her.
Kennedy, too, attended the funeral when Lisa Jones’s father died. “He was the one who held me as I cried through the night, and helped me pick myself up again after that,” she recalled in an interview.
“I don’t think I am ever going to be in a position where I feel like I know what went on and what it all meant, and that there’s nothing more to wonder about.” She often asks herself how much Kennedy genuinely loved her. “It is an endless, endless question that I will always be wondering about. That will always keep me awake at night.”
