Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (28 page)

Kennedy watched as a handful of excited activists scurried out of the shrubbery, snipped the wire fence and started wriggling through the hole like rabbits. One by one, they squeezed into the grounds of the power station. Watson got through. So did Megan. But another woman had only crawled halfway through when riot officers pounced and started beating her legs. Kennedy snapped and lashed out at the officers to distract their attention.

The riot police later described how they were assaulted by a bearded protester without justification. Kennedy told a very different story, claiming that he was dragged to the ground and subjected to a senseless beating. One officer stamped on his back, causing a prolapsed disc. As he was dragged away he was heard shouting: ‘This is the face of peaceful protest.’

Back at the camp, he removed his top to allow his friends to photograph his injuries: a badly bruised back, broken finger and a cut forehead. ‘He looked like he was in serious pain,’ one recalls. ‘He said his back was seriously fucked. I remember he said: “They kicked me in, but I beat up some of the coppers so it was worth it.”’ Kennedy told another friend how the officers pinned him on his back and took turns to punch him in his face. He claimed to have shouted back: ‘Your mum punches harder than that.’

The police spy was fuming. He felt he was the victim of an unprovoked attack and believed his assailants should be
disciplined
. His supervisors at the NPOIU saw the situation rather differently. Operatives were not supposed to engage in hand-
to-hand
combat with their uniformed colleagues. When Kennedy’s handler asked to meet with him, he refused. Instead he emailed his superiors pictures of his injuries and took to the activist website Indymedia to decry the ‘deluge of police brutality’ meted out at the power station. When the NPOIU ordered Kennedy to leave
his activist friends and return to his wife and children, he replied with an astonishing text message. ‘I’m going to stay here for the time being, where people are actually going to take care of me,’ it said. ‘You’ve completely fucked it up.’

Police chiefs now had a rogue officer on their hands. Kennedy was openly disobeying orders. He was out of control, a loose cannon. If he had been an officer in the SDS, Kennedy would almost certainly have been pulled from the job with immediate effect. Managers like Bob Lambert were conscious of the risks of long-term spies showing split loyalties, and would terminate deployments at the slightest whiff of disloyalty. Senior officers in the NPOIU, however, were reluctant to lose their top operative. Kennedy had undergone a number of assessments with
psychologists
, none of which returned any concerns. He was delivering superb intelligence, both in the UK and abroad.

Toward the end of the year, after a stern warning about who was paying his wages, Kennedy was allowed to return to Megan. The couple headed straight to Germany, where Kennedy had been developing some promising friendships. It was the start of a sustained period of foreign travel for the undercover police officer, who made Berlin a base for his activities on the continent. ‘He knew quite a few people already,’ says Jason Kirkpatrick, an activist Kennedy stayed with in the city. ‘We went out pretty much every night. And we drank a lot. It is no secret that Mark loved Berlin. He told me it was his favourite city.’

Some people who knew Kennedy in Germany say he adopted a more brooding, dark persona over there. He spent some of his time infiltrating black bloc anarchists, famed for hiding their faces behind ski masks and military balaclavas. The spy himself claims to have met some ‘fairly serious people’ in Berlin, and obtained a manual about how to construct incendiary devices and derail trains which, he says, was accidentally shredded by the NPOIU.
Kirkpatrick says he was unaware the police officer was meeting violent campaigners, although he seemed to want to. The Berlin resident recalls one awkward conversation with Kennedy after a night of heavy drinking. ‘He said to me: “Jason, I’ve been
meaning
to ask you, do you know any serious neo-Nazis? Because if you know anyone that needs to be taken out, I’ve got the crew in England who can sort them out.”’ Kirkpatrick says he was ‘shocked to hear him talk of violence like that’.

While working in Germany, Kennedy was listed as an ‘
informant
’ by police authorities in the country. The status should have explicitly barred him from having intimate relationships with women he was spying on, which is prohibited under German law. He is known to have had sex with at least two women in Germany, but there could have been more. But Kennedy’s trips to the country did not appear particularly impeded by rules or regulations. He was only formally authorised on two operations, first to gather intelligence about plans to disrupt the G8 summit and second to infiltrate protests against a NATO meeting near Strasbourg. However, Kennedy came and went from Germany as he pleased, once after no more than a phone call informing German authorities that a British spy was on his way.

He was twice arrested in Germany, the second time after a mysterious incident involving an arson attack in the street. It was unclear whether he had received clearance to even be in Berlin at that time, let alone to commit crime. He was becoming something of a lone agent. At least once, Kennedy travelled abroad despite being instructed by the NPOIU not to go. These foreign missions occasionally appear to have taken his colleagues by surprise.

On one occasion, he was spotted in Berlin by Watson, who appears to have been stunned to see him there. She was in the city for the annual May Day protest with her friend Matilda, when they saw Kennedy appear suddenly out of a bustling crowd, the
lower part of his face covered with a bandanna. ‘Lynn just looked so shocked,’ says Matilda. ‘I was saying to Mark: “What are you doing here?” He was like, “Oh, I just came over, I’ve kind of got to go.” Then he rushed off.’

Whatever Kennedy was getting up to in Germany, it was not the only place his services were required. In the space of just a few years he travelled to Denmark, Greece, Italy, Spain, Iceland, France, Poland and America as well as Germany. In France, he claimed to have witnessed activists practising bomb-making near a small village, a claim that was later cast in doubt. In the bureaucratic-speak of European intelligence sharing, Kennedy was monitoring ‘Euro-anarchism’, and was one of a fleet of British spies travelling all over Europe. So many resources were going into these trips that, during one European protest
meeting
in Poland, two out of the three Britons present were police spies. The British delegation, who travelled to Poland together, consisted of Kennedy, Jacobs, and just one genuine protester.

In total, Kennedy worked in 11 countries. One of his more curious foreign deployments was to New York in 2008, a visit that resulted in a special commendation from the Federal Bureau of Intelligence. It is not exactly clear what Kennedy did to earn the approval of the FBI, other than attend a meeting in
Manhattan
, amid the first stirrings of what would become the Occupy Movement, and tip them off about a supposed French
revolutionary
who had visited the country.

Back in Nottingham, Kennedy was gaining a reputation as a committed activist with a thousand connections abroad. He was fast becoming one of the people activists turned to when planning an ambitious protest, particularly if they needed help with transport. When friends concocted a plan to take over a train delivering coal to Drax power station in 2009, Kennedy
agreed to ferry them to the location in a transit van. Posing as railway workers, the activists used red flags to wave the train to a halt on a bridge over the river Aire. They then clambered on board and politely informed the driver they were taking over his cargo. The campaigners were commended by a judge for making an ‘eloquent, sincere, moving and engaging’ case for why they stopped the train, but he found them guilty of obstructing a
railway
engine under the Malicious Damages Act of 1861.

Kennedy was also known as the master of logistics. He helped build more Climate Camps, first near Heathrow airport, and later at Kingsnorth power station in Kent. It was always a huge upheaval, and could take months to prepare. Like his colleagues Watson and Jacobs, the police spy was often unable to conceal his frustration with his activist friends. Kennedy often complained that activists could be disorganised and moaned about the effort that was required to pick up protest camp equipment – the
generators
, marquees and tools that activists call their ‘tat’.

It was partly for this reason that Kennedy pushed for the
creation
of a group called the Activist Tat Collective. They found a warehouse in which to store protest equipment, and conducted a proper audit of the materials they owned. The idea was that the ATC provided a more centralised, efficient system, and that anyone organising a major protest could loan out equipment on request. In practical terms, that meant asking for a key for the storage depot from the director of the group – Kennedy.

It was a remarkable achievement. The go-to man for anyone wanting to organise a big protest camp was an undercover spy from the NPOIU. Kennedy even wrote the manual, or ‘recipe book’, as the collective called their guide to building protest sites. The document detailed the quantities of food needed for a vegan kitchen (5kg of bulgar wheat will feed 60–80 people) and contained diagrams for constructing toilets from straw bales. The
chapter about transport was written by ‘Lumsk’. He opened with a wry complaint about the ‘endless meetings focusing upon going round in circles’ that he had endured over the years.

Kennedy’s chapter, which detailed the kinds of trucks, vans and quad bikes required to construct a large campsite overnight, was his opportunity to impart advice that had been gleaned, as he put it, ‘from the experiences, adventures, trials and
tribulations
of a few who have burnt some rubber’. He cautioned that drivers in the world of activism were in short supply and warned that arguments could often degenerate into ‘sarcasm, tears or a few terse and sharp words between gritted teeth … You must remember that you will be collecting generously donated yurts and tepees from people who have a different understanding of time management to the efficiently clockwork-like and
synchronised
transport collective,’ he added. ‘An element of frustration at this point is inevitable.’

The tone was classic Kennedy: jokey, laddish, perhaps a little self-important. It was a persona that had served him well over the years. By the end of 2008, Kennedy was reaching the zenith of his undercover deployment. He projected the image of a veteran activist who could be confided in with the most sensitive of plans. That reputation would enable one last major act in Kennedy’s undercover mission. And it would end in a catastrophe.

It began at 11.07pm one Sunday night, when a police chief with a pot belly stood in a warehouse in the city and began
addressing
his men; there were around 200 of them, stood in rows and dressed in the black protective clothing of the riot squad.

‘Right, ladies and gentleman,’ he shouted. ‘First of all, can everybody hear me? I don’t intend to use a microphone if I can help it. Right. Welcome to Operation Aeroscope. Many of you, I guess, will be wondering what we are doing here and what all of this is about. I am not going to go into all of the information that surrounds this, only to say that there is information that a group of individuals intent on … erm.’

The senior officer was lost for words. ‘How can I put it? Disrupting a major … erm.’ He scratched his bald head and folded his arms: ‘Erm…’

The crowd of riot officers started laughing.

‘Power station!’ their boss barked. ‘Within the east
Midlands
area!’

Regaining his composure, the police chief gave a brief rundown of the operation to intercept activists who were
planning
to disrupt the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station. ‘There is information that these individuals are at this moment at a location called Iona school, which is off Sneinton Dale. We’re expecting up to 100 individuals at the premises. They are in possession of
items that would allow them to disrupt a generating
establishment
for up to seven days, which is probably unprecedented in this country. They are in possession of lock-on equipment. They are in possession of food which will keep them going for seven days and vehicles to assist them in that.’

He paused and looked out at the crowd of officers. They had been drafted in from across the region, some of them taken off leave during the long Easter weekend in April 2009. It was
dawning
on the men that they were going to see some action and the excitement showed on their faces.

‘The intention of this operation is to enter their premises, by force, under warrant, and arrest all 100 of them,’ the
commanding
officer said. ‘Again, pretty unprecedented in this force and you can imagine the planning that has gone into it.’ Both sides – police and activists – had been preparing for this moment for seven months. They were less than an hour away from the crescendo.

The plan to break into the power station was hatched by five eco-activists. Two were undergraduate students, Tom and Penny. Childhood friends, they typified the new crop of
articulate
, young campaigners pouring into the movement against climate change. By their own admission, they were also a little naïve. Tom, who was 21, was initially surprised that the veteran campaigners wanted to collaborate with two students. ‘You do know we don’t know anything about direct action at all?’ he remembers telling them. ‘Are you sure you want us involved?’ Penny, a 20-year-old, was also taken aback. ‘We were rookies, basically. I was amazed they wanted to work with us. We were in our early 20s and working with seasoned activists and they respected us. We were so excited.’

The other three activists involved in the plot were older and more experienced, and two already had experience of breaking
into power stations. But none of the group had ever taken part in a demonstration on the scale of what was now planned. The idea was to quietly recruit more than 100 activists from across the country for a showpiece act of civil disobedience: breaking into the Nottinghamshire station, turning off the generator and occupying the plant for a week. If they pulled it off, this was likely to be the most high-profile direct action against global warming in British history.

Discretion had to be absolute, and the security precautions were a baptism of fire for Tom and Penny, who were quickly exposed to the rigours of ‘activist security’ and counter-espionage. None of the five could confide in anyone outside the group, discuss their plans on the telephone or behave in a way that might raise suspicions among family or friends.

During one of the first meetings, Penny and Tom were told to sit on a bench outside Angel Tube station in north London. They waited there until a man cycled past and gave them an address scribbled on a piece of paper. It was for a terraced house in nearby Finsbury Park. When they arrived, the man on the bike and two other activists were waiting for them. At each meeting, they were given the address of the next rendezvous, and instructed to write down the details on pieces of paper in code. Meetings took place in London, Oxford, Nottingham and Leeds and they chose
locations
they were confident would not be bugged; church halls, crowded pubs or student houses.

‘We were never meeting in activist-related places,’ says Tom. Fearing their phones might be tracked, they left them switched on in their homes each time they met. If police were monitoring their movements through their phones, they would assume they had been at home. And they always paid for bus and train tickets with cash. For the university students, life was overtaken with some elaborate routines.

Penny, whose job, among other things, was to take notes at meetings, was told to periodically destroy the evidence. One night every few weeks she would wait until the early hours of the morning before stepping outside her Oxford college dorm. When she was sure no one was watching, she hurried along a cobbled path, past a lake, to what she thought was a suitable hiding place. Wrapped in a red overcoat and carrying matches, lighter fluid and a tin pot filled with the incriminating pieces of paper, she kneeled down and started a fire. ‘I never felt so safe as when I had burned everything,’ she says.

Tom had his own curious ritual. In order to make sure his friends did not know he was missing from university in Swansea, he made a point of going out drinking with them the night before he had a planning meeting. They would often end up in a
nightclub
. The only thing that made Tom stand out was his backpack. At 3am, when his friends were drunk, he would slink off into the darkness and head straight for the train station to catch the night train into London. ‘No one would know I was gone,’ he says.

Two months into the planning, Tom, Penny and the three other activists had reached a crucial stage. They had drawn up detailed plans and studied maps of the power plant. Now it was time to undertake a reconnaissance visit. After weeks of silence and caution, the time had also come to allow a sixth person into their plot. They needed a driver to take them to the power station. It had to be somebody who was totally trusted and experienced, a driver who was familiar with the local area.

‘We were told we were going to get driven up to the power station by this guy called Flash,’ says Tom. His friend Penny says the decision made sense at the time. ‘Mark Kennedy was just known as the man when it came to activist skills,’ she says. ‘He was always up for it and at the centre of everything and just completely trusted and sound.’

At 6am on January 10, after a night at the Sumac Centre in Nottingham, the activists were woken by tapping on the window. They came out of their sleeping bags and opened the curtains to see Kennedy standing outside in the semi-darkness. He looked worried. Despite his efforts, he claimed to have been unable to hire a car. They were going to have to drive to the power station in his personal vehicle. ‘We just thought: we cannot possibly go in Mark Stone’s own car because he is such a prominent activist – he must be known to police,’ says Tom. ‘But we had no choice.’

An hour later, Kennedy’s Octavia estate was parked up in a layby in the village of Thrumpton, 12 miles outside Nottingham. Kennedy, as ever, was in the driving seat. He and another
activist
were going to drive around the power station to assess the access routes. Meanwhile, Tom, Penny and a third campaigner were tasked with getting as near to the power plant as possible to take photographs with a long-lens camera. They got out of the car and walked south, the silhouettes of cooling towers appearing in the dawn light. They found their way through a muddy field and a small wood before they reached the footpath that circles the reinforced steel fence defending Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station.

‘It was absolutely terrifying because we were just thinking about all the ludicrous security precautions we had taken to not get found out,’ says Penny. ‘And here we are, at the perimeter of the massive power station with the biggest long-lens camera I have ever seen in my life, taking photographs of all of the
mechanisms
. We were photographing how the site was laid out, the infrastructure, the access routes.’

It did not go to plan. Out of nowhere, two security guards stopped them in their tracks. The guards demanded to know what they were doing. ‘We had a cover story,’ says Penny. ‘We were arts students at Nottingham Trent university and we were doing a project on the intersection of nature and industry. We
wanted to get some images of this crazy futuristic architecture and the beauty of the nature around it. We were absolutely
terrified
so I was just babbling telling this story. Eventually we were basically sent on our way.’

They returned to Thrumpton and waited for Kennedy and the activist in a village hall. When the car arrived, they nervously bundled into the back and headed back to Nottingham. They had been driving for a few minutes when someone in the rear of the vehicle shouted: ‘Shit! Where is the camera?’ The large camera, containing dozens of incriminating images of the power station, was missing. ‘Mark just reversed and turned around the car and said: “OK, stay calm people,”’ says Tom. ‘He said we should retrace our steps and we went back to the village hall and found the camera in the toilets.’

It was a close shave and, for Tom and Penny, perhaps a little embarrassing. They were the youngest in the group of five core organisers, and the least experienced. Mostly, they were treated as equals. However, both of them got the feeling that Kennedy was looking down at them. ‘I was torn between thinking he was really cool – a super-experienced activist – and a bit of a cock,’ says Penny. ‘He was just quite arrogant and definitely clearly enjoyed the company of young women. I felt Mark just had this attitude towards us that we were kids who had bitten off more than we could chew.’

As it turns out, that is more or less what Kennedy did think about the two students. His verdict is contained in the reports he was sending back to his handlers at the NPOIU. The restricted documents, marked ‘secret’, reveal another side to Kennedy: his work as an intelligence source. He made a parting reference to Tom and Penny, describing them merely as ‘youths believed to be based in London’. One NPOIU document, based on
Kennedy’s
intelligence, states: ‘Youngsters are getting more and more
involved with climate change issues on the back of this year’s Climate Camp.’ It adds that they are less of a threat than other activists and ‘just want to save the world from climate change’.

Kennedy’s communications to his bosses provide a revealing insight into the inner workings of the NPOIU. The reconnaissance trip to the power station, for example, is covered in remarkable detail, even recording the incident involving the lost camera. ‘The two girls realised that they had left the telephoto stills camera somewhere,’ Kennedy reports. ‘It apparently contained
photographs
of strategic points of Ratcliffe power station. They were very worried. I got them to retrace their steps verbally. It
transpired
that one of the girls had taken it into the toilet in the village hall. We returned to the hall and the camera was retrieved.’

The police operative’s secret reports to his managers reveal the depth of access he had. Remarkably, given all the precautions taken by the five activists, Kennedy knew about the plan to break into the power station before he was even asked to drive them to the plant. Two months before Kennedy was approached by the activists, his superiors had authorised a surveillance
operation
, stating in internal NPOIU documents that they were aware there was a protest that could ‘damage’ a power station and could cause a ‘severe economic loss to the United Kingdom and have an adverse effect on the public’s feeling of safety and security’. Kennedy was the undercover officer tasked with finding out as much as he could.

A few weeks after he drove the activists to the power station, Kennedy filed another report, this time detailing the precise time and date the protesters planned to occupy the plant. By now he had also established the scale of what they were attempting, telling his bosses that protesters were ‘hoping to recruit 150 people to take part’. This was intelligence gold dust. It enabled the NPOIU to liaise with the Nottinghamshire police force and devise a plan
to scupper the protest, exploiting the fact they had Kennedy in a prime position.

The question was: how far should the undercover officer go? Kennedy was asked by the activists to perform his familiar role as driver, carrying a truckload of equipment to the power station on the night of the occupation. But the campaigners also wondered whether he might use his rope expertise to help them with another critical part of their plan: climbing. Getting into the power station was not going to be the hard part. The challenge would be forcing the plant to turn off its generators and prevent it from operating for a week.

The activists had figured out that if they immobilised key parts of the infrastructure, the energy giant E.ON would have no choice but to turn off the coal-burning furnaces for health and safety reasons. They would switch to an emergency supply of gas-produced energy, thereby leading to a huge reduction in carbon emissions for the period during which the plant was
occupied
. If they could keep the furnaces turned off for seven days, they calculated that they would be preventing the emission of 150,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

That was where the climbers came in. The plan was for a team of climbers to scale one of four chimneys and force the furnaces to be turned off. One activist would abseil down inside the shaft and hang a ‘bat tent’; an expensive, cradle-like contraption used by professionals to suspend themselves beneath vertical cliffs. There was no way E.ON could turn on its furnaces with an
environmental
campaigner hanging inside one of the chimneys. If things went to plan, and they had sufficient food and water, the climber would be able to stay suspended inside the chimney for a week.