Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (21 page)

Early on his deployment, he went on a week-long trip to Belfast with a small group of English activists who wanted to show their solidarity with the republicans. He was not the first SDS to show an interest in republicanism; its officers had been dabbling in espionage across the border as far back as the 1970s.
But this was in the late 1990s, when the IRA had declared a
ceasefire
, edging towards agreeing a deal to lay down its arms. Special Branch sources believe Cassidy was asked to gauge the appetite among hard-core republicans for an end to violence.

The fact he was trusted to spy in Ireland was testament to his reputation. Among other SDS officers, Cassidy was
considered
a top operator. His relationship with Alison – one of the most enduring of any police spy – was crucial to his success, but it came at a cost. During the occasional spells when he was not undercover, Cassidy would be trying to live a normal, off-duty life with his wife. It is hard to conceive how he managed that. Unlike other SDS officers, who tried to take at least one or two days out of the field, Cassidy was living permanently with Alison. The couple repeatedly went abroad on holiday together – once for three weeks.

Within the squad, it soon became known that Cassidy was having marital problems. That was not unusual for an SDS officer. What made his duplicity so astonishing was his way of coping. It shocked some within the squad. As his relationships with his wife deteriorated, Cassidy attended counselling sessions to repair their marriage. Around the same time, he was also seeing a second relationship counsellor with Alison. ‘I met him when I was 29 … It was the time when I wanted to have
children
, and for the last 18 months of our relationship he went to relationship counselling with me about the fact that I wanted children and he did not,’ says Alison. The SDS officer had two separate, and totally different lives, with two strained
relationships
, and two counsellors.

The end of his deployment, and his chance to
disentangle
himself from the mess, came toward the end of 1999. His departure was put in motion with what appears to be a typically elaborate SDS plot. The day before Christmas Eve, Cassidy told
his girlfriend he had received an enigmatic message on his pager: ‘Call Father Kelly.’ He said his grandfather in Birkenhead had had a stroke. ‘I said I would go with him, and he said, “No, no, I’ve got to do it myself” and he was very odd,’ recalls Alison. It was their first Christmas apart since they had started living together.

When he returned shortly after Christmas, Cassidy was, according to Alison, ‘a very different man’. He claimed to have had a row with his stepfather and said he punched him in the stomach. In the following weeks, Cassidy seemed on a
downward
spiral. He stopped smiling and looked withdrawn. He spent hours staring silently out of their kitchen window. One day in March 2000, he left.

The note Cassidy left for Alison made painful reading. It said: ‘We want different things. I can’t cope. When I said I loved you, I meant it but I can’t do it.’ He claimed he needed time to get his head together. He returned the following weekend and said that he would stay. But most of his possessions had gone – he only had a few clothes in a kitbag. The tool bag he claimed to have used for his work as a joiner was gone. Ten days later, leaving another note, Cassidy vanished for good.

He said he was going to Germany to look for work. Soon afterwards, Alison received a letter – a postcard sent from Germany. Cassidy wrote: ‘Don’t want a holiday in the sun.’ It was an elliptical reference to a song by the Sex Pistols, inspired by the punk band’s trips to Berlin and Jersey. The last line of the song was: ‘Please don’t be waiting for me.’

According to her friends, Alison looked numb the week after he left. She functioned like an automaton – getting up, showering, making cups of tea, buying a newspaper, and staring into space. As Cassidy’s disappearance sank in, Alison became confused and snappy. She started to feel paranoid and fear she was going mad. She felt abandoned without explanation. ‘I was
stuck. I had no grieving process. It was like someone was lost at sea. I had no answers.’ She examined the only things that Cassidy had left behind – a receipt from a cash card, a piece of paper with the registration number of his van, and a prescription for two asthma inhalers.

Cassidy had executed the standard operating procedure for departing SDS spies. It was a formula: the breakdown, the love notes and the sudden and unexplained disappearance, followed by the letter from abroad. Then silence. John Dines had done exactly the same to his girlfriend Helen Steel nearly 10 years earlier. And just as Steel was unable to stop searching for her boyfriend, arriving, eventually, in New Zealand, Alison felt compelled to find her man.

This time round, the girlfriend had reason to suspect her partner early on. Weeks after Cassidy had vanished, Alison was contacted by an activist who wanted to speak to him. After explaining that he had left her without trace, she agreed to meet to talk through his disappearance. She left this meeting thinking he might be some kind of spy. As it dawned on her that Cassidy was not coming back, she began researching his background. It was a journey that, like Steel’s, began in the archives of birth and death certificates. Alison recalled the date Cassidy claimed his father had died in a car crash. She opened up the bound volumes and started to run her finger down the lists of deaths for that year. When she discovered there was no trace of the death, she broke down.

Alison eventually decided her boyfriend had probably been a spy, and that she had inadvertently provided him with ‘an
excellent
cover story … The level to which he was integrated into my family life meant that people trusted me, people knew that I was who I said I was, and people believed, therefore, that he must be who he said he was because he was so welcomed into my family, so much part of it.’

Just as Steel had done before her, she hired a private detective, who managed to access Cassidy’s tax, welfare benefits and national insurance records. Once again, the covert triggers attached to the files would have flashed an alert silently back to the SDS
headquarters
. They would have revealed once more to the SDS managers that someone was searching for one of their spies.

A year after his disappearance, the detective’s findings showed that her boyfriend was a fake, but she had to dig further for his real identity. She was left raking over the past. It was only in
retrospect
that aspects of his behaviour did not fit. He supposedly had a favourite football team, Tranmere Rovers, but he was never recognised by anyone among the small band of followers. And then there was the kitchen he installed in their flat. It was not built very neatly for a man claiming to be a professional joiner. But the most incriminating incident had occurred about a year and a half into their relationship. Intuition had told Alison there was something not quite right with her partner. When he was out at the shops, she rifled through his jacket. She discovered a credit card in the name of M. Jenner. When he returned to their flat, Alison confronted her boyfriend. His hands clasped the sides of his head in shock. She had never seen him do that. ‘He told me he bought it off a man in a pub and he had never used it. He asked me to promise to never tell anyone, which is what I did. I never told anyone until after he disappeared.’

Ten years later, in 2011, Alison was informed by the authors of this book that Mark Cassidy was an SDS officer. His real name was Mark Jenner. He is believed to be still in the police, working in London.

His disappearance and the resulting trauma has had an ‘
enormous
impact’ on her, she says. ‘The experience has left me with many, many unanswered questions, and one of those that comes back is: how much of the relationship was real? I have, for the
last 13 years, questioned my own judgment and it has impacted seriously on my ability to trust, and that has impacted on my current relationship and other subsequent relationships. It has also distorted my perceptions of love and my perceptions of sex.’

The ‘betrayal and the humiliation’ she experienced was ‘beyond any normal experience’, she adds. ‘This is not about just a lying boyfriend or a boyfriend who has cheated on you. It is about a fictional character who was created by the state and funded by taxpayers’ money.’

The stories of Alison and Steel have one thing in common. Despite their extensive efforts, and clues that put them on the right path, they never actually managed to track down their boyfriends. The SDS officers got away. They nearly always did. Jim Boyling was the exception. The story of Laura, an environmental activist who managed to track him down, must count among the most tragic in the history of the SDS. Boyling says that the story she tells is mainly ‘incorrect’, although he declines to elaborate.

The pair met toward the end of his undercover deployment, in the summer of 1999, when they attended a meeting of the Reclaim the Streets environmental group in a traditional Irish pub, the Cock Tavern, near to London’s Euston station. ‘He would rub his shaved head in meetings with a supposed coy but friendly shyness, but he was also known for not suffering fools gladly,’ Laura says of the man she knew as Jim Sutton. To many, he was ‘Grumpy Jim’, the Reclaim the Streets campaigner who had once been prosecuted for occupying the headquarters of London Transport. The ice broke some time later, when she was cooking a meal for fellow activists and he initiated a discussion about the merits of using fresh coriander.

The relationship developed quickly. In November, they started going out and, by February of the following year, Boyling had
invited her to move in to his rented flat in Dulwich, a gentrifying part of south London. He had decorated the apartment with simple, hippyish items – Celtic and African patterned throws. Through a window, they could look out onto a yard where Laura grew herbs. Laura says her boyfriend looked after himself and would often go for a run to keep fit. ‘He ate very well – he bought ingredients I wouldn’t have been able to afford. He regularly bought specific ingredients such as papayas and sauces to add flavours. He took for granted that it was part of his regular shopping – speciality green leaves for stir fries and salads. He never cooked up a cheap,
nutritious
and simple stew.’

During the early part of their relationship, Laura felt she was experiencing the deepest love she had ever known. She was oblivious that he was being paid to spend time with her. ‘The public was paying him for the lengthy time we spent courting, spending time in the park, and even sleeping together,’ she says. The romance was almost overwhelming. ‘In the beginning I nearly broke it off because it felt too strong. It was as if he was a perfect blueprint for something I didn’t even know I was
looking
for.’ There was only one moment when Laura questioned the background of the man she thought was her soulmate. It was the briefest flicker of doubt. ‘It was the way he was cleaning his walking boots. I suddenly thought, “Who the hell is in my kitchen?” and then I came to and suddenly he was Jim again. It was such a brief moment and it made such little sense that I blanked it.’

In May 2000, conscious that Boyling had shown some
interest
in gardening, Laura returned home with some strawberry plants and ceramic pots. ‘Out of the blue, he told me that he had to leave me. He seemed quite shocked and it made no sense. It was completely out of character. He said he had to go alone; that there were things in his head that he had to sort out.’

The next few months were agonising for Laura. Boyling’s moods ‘swung violently’. He kept breaking down and crying in her arms, saying: ‘I never want to lose you’. He told her that he had been adopted and had had a disturbed childhood. He showed Laura a photograph of what he said was him climbing out of a cardboard box on the lawn at his adoptive parents’ house.

In September of that year, Boyling left, saying he was going to travel to Turkey and South Africa. A postcard from Turkey arrived soon afterwards, and it was followed by a phone call. ‘I told him I loved him and he sobbed his heart out. He said he thought he had messed everything up,’ she says. ‘He was supposed to call me again when he was hitchhiking through Syria. When he didn’t, I became worried and called the Foreign Office to ask what was going on. They told me he hadn’t left Istanbul and they were instigating a missing persons search.’

News of this development would have been sent over to Scotland Yard where Boyling’s supervisors would have looked on disapprovingly. Operatives were expected to be skilful enough to vanish without loose ends. A little anguish over the disappearance of a loved one was useful; it cemented the idea among activists that the spy had gone for good and made the exit seem real. But too much, and people left behind would try to track down the missing person. Laura was a case in point. Hers was an
extraordinary
and single-minded quest to find the man she loved.

She began looking into his background. She was worried that he may be at risk in some way. She had also become
increasingly
distressed and confused by his behaviour, and needed counselling for her depression and panic attacks. ‘I tried to locate his parents because I was worried, but I couldn’t find them, or his brother, who he said was an independent travel agent in Nottingham. I wanted someone to know to contact me if something happened to him,’ she says. ‘If Jim was a nice guy,
I wanted to help him. If he wasn’t a nice guy, I needed to know that so I could move on.’

Unable to find any trace of Boyling, she began to consider the possible explanations. ‘I was suspicious, but I kept thinking there was some explanation,’ she says. ‘I kept trying to turn to
something
solid to base the truth on but I couldn’t find it – each time it crumbled.’ She discovered from official records that he was not adopted and neither was he born on the day he claimed. ‘When I found a hopeful lead, I felt that there was hope that life would start to make sense, that life was going to be OK, but when it didn’t come through, I would be sat on the floor in an empty hall feeling overwhelmed, my head spinning. He no longer existed in physical presence or on paper. I didn’t know what to think or what to do. I felt like I was trying to climb out of a black hole with my fingertips.’