Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (30 page)

If the protest went to plan, the ground would be prepared for the most important group of all: the green team of specialist climbers who by then would have scaled one of the four towering chimney stacks. High above the rest of the power station, they would be able to see the glow of Nottingham beyond distant hills, and a snake of cars making its way along the nearby M1 motorway. These activists would harness themselves to the stack to avoid being blown over in the wind and then begin the delicate procedure of entering the chimney, abseiling down and
suspending
their bat tent. By the time the sun appeared over the hills,
they would spot the first TV satellite vans parked down below, as news spread of the occupation. Whoever was inside the tent would turn on a small laptop and begin broadcasting live around the world.

The bubble was popped shortly after midnight, when most
activists
were inside their sleeping bags in the school, trying to get to sleep. ‘Bang,’ recalls Tom. ‘Something gets smashed. Then we just see police storming in from every direction.’ A police video camera captured the scene inside one room in the school minutes after the raid: two dozen sullen-looking activists, staring at the floor in silence. The camera panned round at the sound of
banging
and glass breaking elsewhere in the building.

‘Sir, there is a locked door here,’ an officer shouted.

‘We’re going to enter here by force, OK,’ said another. ‘We haven’t got a key.’

Inside, some activists were hurriedly trying to eat scraps of paper containing their notes. Moments later, a senior police officer stood in the middle of the room and said: ‘You are all under arrest on suspicion of being involved in a conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass and/or criminal damage at a power industry facility.’ One activist began singing Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’ and, slowly, everyone joined in. Then they began a chorus of Dolly Parton’s ‘9 to 5 (What a Way to Make a Living)’, to mock the banality of police work. ‘It was a surreal moment,’ one activist remembers. ‘But it lifted everyone’s spirits.’

The police raid was unprecedented. Throughout the history of the SDS and NPOIU, police always waited for a protest to happen before arresting the suspects. Sometimes there would be clever ploys to disrupt a planned demonstration. But never before had riot police stormed in to arrest this number of activists before they had even begun. This was the birth of a new strategy: wait
for activists to gather in one place and then pre-emptively arrest them on charges of ‘conspiracy’. Kennedy had just facilitated the largest pre-emptive arrest – for any type of crime – in modern policing history.

Over the next few hours, activists were frogmarched, one by one, into the school gym where they were searched and made to pose for a police camera. Among the less co-operative was Kennedy, dressed head to toe in black and still wearing his watch. The arresting officers had no idea he was a police spy.

‘You’re being mass-arrested mate, just face here,’ a policeman told him. ‘You’ve been arrested and now you will be individually arrested by this officer.’

Kennedy turned to one side and stared into the middle distance. He looked drained. He was handcuffed and taken with the others to the waiting police vans parked outside the school to be transferred to a police cell. Among the last to be escorted out was Penny. ‘I remember walking out the school and there were so many flashing police vans,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t see anything but blue.’

The barn in Herefordshire was packed to the rafters with a drunken crowd. A bunch of veteran activists were turning 40 and this was their joint party: a weekend celebration in honour of eight old-timers who had been born in a year synonymous with protest: 1969. They had formed a rock band for the occasion called ‘The 69ers’, and the amateur musicians were about to take to the stage. They were all wearing black T-shirts printed with an image of a couple going down on each other in the so-called ‘69’ position. It was five months after the raid on the school, and many of the people in the barn were on bail over the planned occupation of the power station. Now, though, they were in a mood for partying. Logan looked the part on drums, his purple
hair draped over his shoulders. So too did Kennedy, who was wearing a black trilby hat and posing with an electric guitar.

Kennedy had been waiting for this moment for months. It was the peak of his six-year deployment, a final moment in the spotlight for Mark Stone, his alter ego. Kennedy was the person who first suggested the joint 40th birthday bash for him and his friends. A trail of email correspondence reveals quite how much the party meant to the undercover police officer. One of the first emails came from Logan: ‘Following a suggestion from the venerable Flash Mark, over the last year or so we’ve made noises about having a joint party in 2009 for all those of us turning 40,’ he wrote. He summarised the idea of the weekend party, a kind of Earth First without the politics. To prevent ‘a ruck with the cops’ they would hire a venue instead of squatting in a field. It would be a family affair, with space for camping and activities for guests with children. Logan wanted to incorporate just a bit of political activity as ‘a great affirmation of our common politics’.

Kennedy could not conceal his excitement. He promised to DJ a ‘flash drum and bass set’ and even offered to pay for a Croatian band called Analena to fly over to perform a set. ‘
Eastern
Europe anarchist punk,’ Kennedy told his friends. ‘It keeps you young, a must-have for any 40th.’ He didn’t like Logan’s suggestion of adding politics to the mix, but told the others they could ‘crack on if you feel the need to wave banners in front of something’. Transport Mark promised to ‘rustle up’ a marquee from his Activist Tat Collective and said he would take care of logistics for the weekend. ‘Whatever we want,’ he told his friends. ‘It’s all possible.’

The police spy promised to write some poems for the
occasion
and said he would buy everyone themed printed T-shirts, joking he could get them from an ethical supplier who would
guarantee ‘water, food, a bike and education for a family of 16 in Mozambique’. The celebrators calculated they could fit around 350 of their closest friends on the farm. Kennedy’s list of
potential
guests was testament to the friendships he had forged during his years undercover; it was filled with the names of hundreds of activists, including some from Germany. A flyer produced for the party was composed of pictures of John Lennon and Yoko Ono and a hippy confronting police with a flower.

In the dozens of emails Kennedy sent to his friends in the lead-up to the party, there was one topic he mentioned more than any other: the 69ers band. When his friends agreed to form the rock group ‘for one night only’, Kennedy replied: ‘Excellent, excellent. I have a lead guitar and an amp, I’m sure we can borrow drums from the bands that play. I also have a banjo and a large bongo. Or so I am told!’ He added: ‘I have lyrics already forming in my head for a bit of a song about all of us and 69 and crazy times.’ A few months later he told his friends he had been
practising
guitar ‘until my fingers bleed’ and learned ‘a bunch of tunes I can thrash out in an angsty punk style’. He seemed obsessed.

Of course, thoughts of his imminent debut on stage as a rock artist distracted Kennedy from darker thoughts. Dozens of his closest friends were on bail over the planned occupation of Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station. As a result of his betrayal, they were facing the prospect of jail. ‘I just felt so bad, I felt fucking awful,’ Kennedy reflected months later. ‘I did my job very well but I had got to a point in my deployment where it was
becoming
very hard to do those things against people who really meant a lot to me on a personal level.’ At the back of Kennedy’s mind, he knew that he may have to help prosecute his comrades. If that were to happen, it would be a significant departure for the NPOIU which, like the SDS, always avoided its officers appearing
in court. ‘I’d be facing people I’d known for seven years – and who were really good friends – across a witness box,’ he said.

Even if the case against the activists never reached court, Kennedy was increasingly paranoid that activists would work out he was the mole in the Ratcliffe protest. Out of all the 114
activists
who were arrested that night, Kennedy was the only one who was not represented by the same firm of London-based lawyers, Bindmans. Kennedy was furious with the NPOIU, who did not want to risk one of their operatives being represented by the human rights firm. ‘I said: look, everybody else has got a solicitor, Mark Stone hasn’t – it looks really odd,’ he said.

If Kennedy was compromised by being the only activist without a lawyer, the situation was made even worse when
prosecutors
began deciding who out of the 114 should be charged. A decision was taken to let most of the activists walk free, to concentrate on bringing charges against a smaller group for conspiracy to commit trespass. In a terrible error, Kennedy was placed in the smaller group who potentially had to go to court. When police realised the mistake, the case against Kennedy was suddenly dropped. He believed that made him stand out even more. Kennedy felt suspicious eyes were turning toward him. It was a concern that may have been shared by his supervisors at the NPOIU, who seem to have believed their prized agent was running out of time.

The truth is that Kennedy was not quite as exposed as he feared. Everyone knew Mark Stone as an eccentric character with a dodgy past, and he had a good excuse not to want to share the same lawyer as everyone else. Other people were suspected as possible infiltrators, but not him. When the birthday festivities got underway on the farm in Herefordshire on a warm
September
Friday, Kennedy must have felt reassured that his friends still trusted him. It was an impressive turnout for a 40th celebration.

Although Kennedy had not wanted a political festival, it was impossible to escape the fact this was a party for veterans of the radical protest movement. The menu consisted of black-eyed bean, nut and parsley stew with rice and green salad, and food was supplied by Veggies and the Anarchist Teapot, two collectives which had been feeding protest camps for years.

During the day, friends lounged on bales of hay and drank organic local cider in the sunshine. There were egg and spoon races, football matches, a mud-wrestling contest, a traditional Gaelic céilidh dance, cabaret and a barbecue. Inside one of the barns, Logan had pinned up photographs of all of the 40-
year-olds
, showing how much they had changed over the years. It was the first time that most of Kennedy’s friends had seen images of his previous life. One showed Kennedy as a young boy in the 1970s, stood next to his brother. Another, from the 1990s, captured a dazed-looking Kennedy at the end of a long-distance running race, caked in mud and wrapped in a blanket. His hair was bleached blond, separated by a centre parting and held back with a headband. Finally, there was a photograph of Kennedy a few years older, around 2002. It was the old Kennedy, the man as he was just before he went undercover in Nottingham. He was wearing the same dark sunglasses that helped to conceal his injured eye, but his hair was shaved short and his arms looked naked without the tattoos.

Another barn was converted into a music venue for the
highlight
of the weekend: the live Saturday-night performance by Kennedy and the 69ers. This was the part of the weekend that Kennedy had been looking forward to most. ‘He had been saying how it was his dream since he was a kid to be in a band and he had never had the chance,’ one friend says. ‘It seemed really
genuine
.’ Kennedy’s emails confirm his emotional investment in the
band. He told friends he had purchased a DVD with ‘rare
amazing
event footage’ from 1969, to be projected on the wall behind them when they played. He hired a sound studio in Leeds so the band could rehearse more than a dozen times. And he helped plan a detailed set-list.

Everyone turning 40 had the chance to sing at least one song. The opening track would be the Stooges’ cover, ‘1969’, followed by ‘Anarchy in the UK’ by the Sex Pistols and T. Rex’s ‘20th Century Boy’. Logan would sing ‘White Riot’, the classic punk anthem by the Clash. Megan would also have a chance to come on stage to sing a song. Kennedy was determined that he should sing Johnny Cash’s ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, in honour of all the comrades who had gone to prison for the cause.

Kennedy emailed each of his friends in the band, giving them specific instructions. Clearly, he had given a lot of thought to the performance. Before each song, band members should take to the microphone and engage in ‘a little banter’ with the crowd. ‘Let’s not ramble on,’ he said. ‘I like to think it’s more about the punk rock.’ Before anyone walked on stage, they would play a pre-recorded tape, mixing a drum roll by American rock band MC5 and Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Star Spangled Banner’ medley from Woodstock in 1969. Via email, Kennedy told his friends that, after individualised introductions from the master of
ceremonies
, each band member would take it in turn to jump up onto the stage ‘to raucous applause, wolf whistling and
screaming
groupies’.

That was pretty much what happened on the night. The room was packed full of friends. The mix tape was played,
building
up to a crescendo before the band jumped on stage, smiling and waving. Megan did a turn on the microphone as a guest vocalist. Then the master of ceremonies, who was dressed in a
tailcoat peppered with glittery sequins, took to the microphone and introduced Kennedy. ‘On guitar, direct from the bar!’ he shouted, as the crowd began to cheer. ‘Diamond geezer, he’s a rock and roll star! It’s Flash!’

The crowd went wild, but Kennedy was not feeling the love. He looked dejected for a reason. Moments before he was called onstage, he had received a text message from the NPOIU. ‘The operation is over,’ it said. ‘At least you had a great party and now it’s over.’ He had three weeks to ‘get out’ of Nottingham.