Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (29 page)

Kennedy was in a Wetherspoon’s pub at Leeds railway station when the elaborate plan involving the climber and the chimney was relayed to him for the first time. It was just two weeks before
the Easter protest was due to commence. He was sat drinking a beer with a veteran campaigner, one of the five, including Tom and Penny, who had been organising the direct action from the start. The two men scrutinised aerial images of the chimney stacks and talked about what was required. Kennedy recounted his conversation in one of his NPOIU reports.

‘He started to explain the Ratcliffe action,’ Kennedy wrote of the conversation. ‘He asked if I was prepared to be the main climber on the action.’ The activist who met with Kennedy that day denies he proposed the undercover police officer should take the star role of abseiling into the chimney stack. However,
according
to Kennedy’s account to his bosses, this was exactly what he was asked to do. He told his superiors that, if he agreed to the role, he would have a mobile internet device so they could
broadcast
updates from inside the chimney. ‘I would then be able to take pictures of the event and myself wearing a gas mask and send them around the world,’ Kennedy reported. ‘He said I would be broadcast around the world and jokingly said I would be a hero. He said if we pulled it off it will be amazing.’

Kennedy may have wanted to take the lead climbing role in the protest, but he was informed by his supervisor that this was out of the question. Detective inspector David Hutcheson had been Kennedy’s cover officer for the last six years. He had been his shadow, tracking his movements, reading his emails and text messages, staying in nearby hotels in case of an emergency and sanctioning his every move. In theory, it was Hutcheson’s job to make sure Kennedy never crossed the line. On April 9, the eve of the planned Easter weekend protest, Hutcheson met with Kennedy. The two police officers went through a familiar ritual that takes place before covert operations: the senior officer reads aloud a set of guidelines called ‘instructions to undercover officers’, recapping what they have been tasked to do and the limits of their powers.

Technically, like all the other SDS and NPOIU officers, Kennedy was supposed to only ever be an observer, taking part in criminal activity as a last resort. His instructions for the next 48 hours were explicit: his job was to obtain ‘pre-emptive intelligence’ and explore ‘possible opportunities to disrupt’ the protest at the power station. He only had permission to hire a van and drive activists to the gates of the power station. He was prohibited from entering the site and barred from taking part in the demonstration.

That much was standard practice. But this particular
operation
would differ from the others in one crucial way. Rather than just monitoring the activists, Kennedy’s supervisors wanted him to gather evidence against them, using a specially modified covert watch.

The following morning he went to the Nottingham offices of All Truck Vehicle rentals and hired a 7.5-tonne lorry. He gave the manager of the company Mark Stone’s fake passport and driving licence, which contained a recent speeding fine. He used Mark Stone’s Maestro debit card to pay £278.48 for the rental and left a £500 cash deposit. The manager of the hire company later provided this description of the customer: ‘I would describe Mark Stone as a white male, 5ft 10in to 6ft tall, mid- to late 30s in age, of a medium build, with long brown hair tied in a ponytail. He had distinctive boss eyes, in that his eyes looked in different directions.’

Kennedy drove the van to the Iona primary school in the suburbs of Nottingham, where activists from across the country were scheduled to meet the following day. One campaigner had keys to a disused wing of the school and it was empty over the Easter break. If anyone asked, the activists planned to say that they were hosting a weekend of workshops, teaching
sustainability
through street theatre. To add credibility to this cover story, they had even advertised the Ecological Showstoppers
weekend and printed hundreds of flyers for the fake event. All of the protesters who were heading to Nottingham knew, of course, that they would be involved in something more exciting than amateur dramatics. But they had no idea exactly what kind of protest was planned. Details of the protest had only been shared on a need-to-know basis – the core group of five had expanded now to around a dozen. Only they knew the magnitude of what was being planned.

Over the next 24 hours, scores of minivans would depart towns and cities across the UK and bring activists to
Nottingham
. Each minibus driver had a set of instructions, maps and a mobile phone with an unregistered SIM card. They were told to stay in touch with base at the Iona school for further
directions
. There was always the chance the protest would be pulled at the last minute, so the drivers were told not to set off on their journey until the phone beeped with a text message confirming the all-clear. If organisers had counted correctly, more than 100 activists would start arriving at the school the following morning.

Once everyone was at the school, they would be split into groups and given a detailed briefing about what the direct action involved and the specific role each individual would have if they decided to take part. It was inevitable that some people would drop out. This was a radical direct action protest, and anyone inside the power station was likely to face arrest for trespass. It was a risk some would take out of conviction to the cause, but not everyone. Those activists who agreed to the plan would be ferried to the power station in the middle of the night in three 7.5-tonne trucks, two people carriers and a Ford transit. The vehicles had already been packed with bolt cutters, angle-grinders, ropes, metal fences, food, concrete blocks and bicycle D-locks. They had prepared for every eventuality, except perhaps the possibility that they had already been rumbled.

The activists first began to grow concerned that police knew about their plan that evening. There were still only around a dozen activists at the school and some of them decided to take a quick drive around the power station to go over the route they planned to take the following night. They returned to the school with some bad news: parked around the power station, in what looked like strategic spots, were three police cars. ‘We just thought: Oh, no! Oh fuck! They know about it!’ says Tom. ‘It was just completely gutting. All of the work we had put in over the months and now it seemed there were police there guarding the station.’

It would have been foolish to attempt to break into the plant when the entrance was being protected by police. For a brief period, they considered changing the target of the protests, heading instead to Kingsnorth power station in Kent. After lengthy discussions, they decided it was impractical to switch power stations at the last minute. If the police cars remained outside the Nottinghamshire power plant, there was no choice – they would have to abandon the protest altogether. The
organisers
phoned the minibus drivers and told them not to set off in the morning; the protest would have to be put on hold until further notice. Tom remembers the look on the face of a stalwart of the protest scene, someone who, like him, had spent months preparing for this moment. ‘He looked absolutely broken. We all did, I suppose.’

There was a sombre mood at the Iona school the next
morning
. Activists had intermittently driven past the power station through the night and each time the three police cars were still there. It looked like they were on the verge of having to pull their plans. It was 8.30am on that Sunday morning when Kennedy told activists he would make one last visit to the power station to see whether police were still guarding the facility. He
left the school in a taxi. Away from the activists, he would have been expected to call his superiors at the NPOIU, and explain that the protest was about to be called off because activists had seen police guarding the station. At that point, police could have chosen to arrest the dozen depressed-looking activists sat around the school. They could be sure they were arresting some of the key organisers, before all the other protesters had even started travelling to Nottingham. Instead, they chose a different course of action.

When Kennedy returned to the school 90 minutes later he was smiling. ‘They’ve gone,’ he told the other activists. ‘There are no police there. No cars. No nothing.’

The other campaigners were ecstatic. With police apparently no longer outside the power station, there was still a chance they could get inside. They sent messages to the minivan drivers: the protest was on again, and they should bring the activists to Nottingham as soon as possible. Tom recalls the irony of that decision: ‘We did not know we were phoning up activists across the country and telling them to come to Nottingham for what was essentially a police trap.’

Kennedy walked away to find a quiet corner of the room where he could not be heard. He rolled back his sleeve and lifted his watch to his mouth. ‘I am an authorised undercover police officer engaged on Operation Pegasus,’ he whispered. ‘This weekend, Easter weekend, I am together with a group of activists that are planning to disrupt Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station.’ He paused. ‘Shortly gonna go, to record briefings that subsequently take place throughout the day … The time on the watch is 10.06am.’

Kennedy’s reports to the NPOIU record what happened next. ‘People arrived at the school throughout the day. I
recognised
many people and knew them from various parts of the UK, including London, Bristol, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds,
Nottingham and Scotland.’ What Kennedy omitted from this report was that these people were by now his friends; some were pals from the Sumac Centre, including Logan.

The school was transformed into a buzz of activity by the arrival of the activists. Small parties arrived throughout the
afternoon
, unloading sleeping bags and carrying stocks of food into the school, while others slipped out of the back, to burn bundles of incriminating paper at a nearby allotment.

By the evening, all 114 activists were gathered in one room in the Iona school to hear a briefing about the planned protest. It was around that time that the pot-bellied police chief was briefing the riot squad in a warehouse a few miles away, preparing them for the impending mass arrests. In just a few hours, these two worlds would collide.

Kennedy was sat with his fellow activists in the school and, for the second time, activated his watch to work as a recording device. It picked up the excited murmur of more than a hundred campaigners against global warming packed into a single room. It was now dark outside and everyone who needed to be at the school had arrived. Above the chatter, the watch strapped to Kennedy’s wrist captured snippets of his brief discussion with a man sat next to him.

‘Gonna get a bit hot in here as well, ain’t it?’ Kennedy said.

‘Yeah, in about an hour’s time,’ the man replied.

‘Yeah.’

‘There’s no air flow and there’s lots of people.’

The conversation was interrupted by the sound of applause. Someone at the front of the room had stood up and was
beginning
to talk in a deep voice. It was one of the five organisers.

‘Everyone bear with us a bit. It has been a long night and this is amazing,’ he said. ‘The basic plan – there is a big power station over there, it emits 10 million tonnes of CO
₂
every year. That’s
more than the 41 lowest-emitting countries in the world. We’re gonna go and shut them down for seven days.’ The man’s voice was drowned out by the sound of cheering and clapping.

Taking turns, the five activists explained various aspects of the plan. They stressed that even though people had travelled for miles to reach Nottingham, they should not feel obliged to participate in the protest. Each person had to decide if they wanted to be involved and agree to abide with strict safety
procedures
, avoiding interference with the water flow system and the potentially toxic cooling towers.

The direct action was laid out with clockwork precision. At precisely 3am, they would climb into their allotted vehicle and head to the power station in teams. The convoy of vehicles would first drive to a 24-hour café for truck drivers that was perhaps a mile from the power station. They would wait a few minutes and then drive off in a pre-planned order. Activists were divided into colour-coded groups, each assigned a different role. At the front of the convoy would be the people carrier and transit van
containing
the orange team. Their job was to force their way through the gate and ensure the other vehicles could get in. Once everyone was safely inside the grounds, they would use arm locks made out of fire-extinguisher shells to form a human barricade across the entrance, preventing police from accessing the site and buying time for everyone else.

The bronze team, dressed in suits, would make a beeline for the power station control room and calmly inform managers that a peaceful protest was underway, demanding they turn off the furnaces for the safety of those involved. Meanwhile, the blue team would head toward the nearby river – used to channel water into the cooling towers – and lock themselves to the pump facility. They were instructed not to tamper with the water pump
mechanism
– their role was simply to distract police and security guards
by causing a nuisance. The silver team was also a decoy. Tasked with creating the ‘illusion of chaos’ inside the power station, they would splinter into small groups and lock themselves to any components they could find. When police arrived they would be baffled by the mayhem and forced to attend to activists locked on to various parts of the plant.

All of which was the perfect distraction, allowing the two most important teams in the protest to get on with their work. One was the black team, which would be driven to the power station in the back of Kennedy’s truck. Its role was crucial: immobilising the enormous conveyor belt that delivers coal into the four furnaces. It was a tricky climbing task. When Kennedy parked his truck inside the grounds of the power station, the back doors would be flung open and activists would come streaming out wearing harnesses and helmets and carrying rope equipment. Halting the conveyor system by pressing an emergency button, they would clamber on top and wrap their ropes around the huge, car-sized teeth used to scoop up the coal. Once secure, they planned to suspend themselves underneath the conveyor belt, preventing the power station managers from turning it on. Police would arrive to find a handful of protesters dangling 20ft off the ground and the furnaces would be starved of fuel and turned off.