Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (34 page)

For many of his old friends in the activist movement,
Kennedy’s
media tour was the ultimate betrayal.

At the time of his first interview, less than three months after he made his confession to friends in Nottingham, Kennedy pretended to be in hiding, claiming he feared he might be killed
by violent political activists seeking vengeance. Posing for
photographs
in a neat shirt and sweater, he looked totally different to Mark Stone; he was clean-shaven, with short hair and a neat side parting. ‘I can’t sleep,’ he said. ‘I barricade the door with chairs at night. I am in genuine fear for my life. I have been told that my former bosses from the force are out here in America looking for me. I have been told by activists to watch my back as people are out to get me.’

Just a few weeks earlier, Kennedy had been on the phone to his friend, the lecturer, apologising for what he had done and thanking his friends for the kindness they showed him on the night he was confronted in Nottingham. Kennedy had been treated humanely, and he knew it, telling the lecturer during the call: ‘I’ve frankly got nothing but gratitude for that.’

In his tabloid newspaper interview, Kennedy gave a wildly different account. For a start, he claimed that he only travelled to Nottingham to meet Megan and the other activists because he thought they might harm his family. ‘I was extremely fearful for my children because I know what the people I had been involved with were capable of,’ he said. ‘I had been infiltrating a lot of very serious people for a number of years. I needed to find out what they knew to assess the threat level. So I went.’

If that seemed far-fetched, so too was his depiction of his arrival in Nottingham, when his friends calmly gave him a chance to explain himself. In Kennedy’s account to the
newspaper
, it was more like a hostile interrogation. ‘I was asked to sit down, which I did,’ he said. ‘Then three or four other people came in. They shut the door in a menacing way. They sat in a semi-circle around me. It was hugely menacing. I cried a lot. It was the end of my tether. They broke me.’ He also denied
telling
friends that night that Watson was also a spy. ‘I didn’t give anyone up,’ he said.

Worst still for Megan and his friends was his portrayal of life in Nottingham. ‘What I found difficult was the dirt,’ he said. ‘They should have known I was a cop as I was the only one who ever cleaned anything. People didn’t buy food; they either stole it or took it out of bins. Often vegetables in the kitchen had mould on them. You couldn’t tell if they’d been there for a while or been salvaged. It would annoy me when I gave someone a lift and they put their filthy feet on the dashboard.’

On the whole, Kennedy gave every impression of a man wallowing in self-pity. It was not the people who he was spying on who were the victims of any injustice, but him. ‘I am physically and mentally exhausted,’ he said. ‘I have had some dark thoughts. I thought I could end this very quickly. I don’t have any
confidence
. My world has been destroyed. I don’t have any friends; they were all in the activist movement.’

There is little doubt Kennedy was suffering from the same kind of psychological confusion that plagued Mike Chitty 20 years earlier. The parallels between the two men are obvious. Both formed intimate relationships while undercover, and both, after finishing their deployments, returned to their former lives, unable to let go of their disguise.

Kennedy was soon giving radio interviews in which he spoke about his dual identities in the third person. ‘What Mark Stone believed in and his values are probably very similar to Mark Kennedy,’ he said. ‘It’s a part of my life which has come to an abrupt end. It’s very much like falling off a cliff. I’m trying to establish who I am now, but I think I have to put Mark Stone in the background and try and think about who I am.’

He was clearly confused, but perhaps Kennedy’s most blatant deception related not to the hygiene of his friends in
Nottingham
, or the nature of his confession, but the vexed question of his sexual activities. Kennedy claimed to have been the victim of
a ‘smear campaign’ by women, and claims he was celibate for the first year of his deployment.

‘I avoided sexual contact, despite the fact that free love is part of that lifestyle,’ he said. He admitted to only two intimate relationships – Lily and Megan – a claim he later repeated in
testimony
to parliament, in effect denying his sexual relationships with all the other women.

Lily, the woman who shared two years of her life with Kennedy, with whom he spent long weekends getting to know her family and even attended her grandmother’s birthday, was reduced to a fling. ‘She came on to me at a party. She seduced me. I know it was wrong,’ Kennedy said. ‘I didn’t consider her a proper girlfriend.’

He was only a little more honest about his six-year
relationship
with Megan, who he described as a Welsh redhead. ‘I was in a relationship with a really amazing person,’ he said. ‘I felt really trapped as to how I was going to extricate myself from such a position without hurting that person and without hurting
everybody
else that was connected to me. At the same time I was being tasked to continually provide intelligence and I didn’t have time to think.’

He said his bosses knew about his relationships, and allowed them to occur because they were necessary for his cover. ‘It was a very promiscuous scene. Girls on protest sites would sleep with guys in order to entice them to stay in these horrible places: cold, wet, with bad food and non-existent bathroom facilities.’ He added: ‘I lived undercover for eight years and if I hadn’t had sex, I would have blown my cover. But I never used these women to gain information. The love we had was real.’

Of all the misdemeanours committed by undercover police, the most controversial question relates to long-term
relationships
. Senior police and ministers have contradicted each other
over whether sex is permitted in undercover policing, although most have claimed it is discouraged. Kennedy claimed that he was told during his training not to have sex with his targets. On the other hand, he said his bosses must have known about his
relationships
. In that much, he is certainly correct.

It would have been impossible for Kennedy’s supervisors not to have known about his relationships. Watson, Jacobs and other undercover police officers all saw Kennedy with women – indeed, one fellow NPOIU spy warned him he ‘should be careful’. His movements were carefully monitored, and he had a tracking device fitted into his BlackBerry. He claims he ‘could not sneeze’ without the NPOIU knowing about it. ‘My superiors knew who I was sleeping with, but chose to turn a blind eye because I was getting such valuable information,’ Kennedy said. ‘The police had access to all my phone calls, texts and emails, many of which were of a sexual and intimate nature. They knew where I was spending the night and with whom.’

Of course, Kennedy was not the only NPOIU officer who slept with activists. Jacobs had two serious relationships with women activists, and Watson is accused of having sex with a male protester in a tent. Top commanders, including those who had spent years working with the SDS, in which sex was routine and systematic, can hardly have been surprised that covert agents were having intimate encounters. It has been the modus
operandi
for undercover police infiltrating protest groups over the last four decades.

Of the 10 undercover operatives identified so far, nine had sex with their targets, and most of them developed meaningful relationships with the opposite sex. It may not have been
officially
sanctioned, but the tactic appears to have been standard practice, born from the culture of the SDS and its motto ‘By Any Means Necessary’.

As more information about the undercover cops has surfaced, a growing number of women have realised that the men they shared their lives with were in fact police spies. Eleven women have begun a legal action against the Met, suing the force for the psychological trauma caused by their relationships with
undercover
police working for the NPOIU and SDS.

They include three of Kennedy’s girlfriends: Megan, Lily and a third woman. Tom Fowler, who became best friends with Marco Jacobs, is the only man who is suing; his girlfriend, and another woman who slept with Jacobs, are part of the same legal action. So too are women who had relationships with John Dines, Mark Jenner, Jim Boyling and, of course, Bob Lambert.

The lawyers bringing the case – Harriet Wistrich and Jules Carey – say their clients have all suffered an unjustifiable emotional toll as a result of the spy operations, which reveal a form of
institutional
sexism in the police. In one of the first rulings in the high court, presiding judge Mr Justice Tugendhat said the events in the case were unprecedented. ‘No action against the police alleging sexual abuse of the kind in question in these actions has been brought before the courts in the past, so far as I have been made aware,’ he said.

His ruling found that damages to the women under common law, including misconduct in public office, deceit, assault and negligence, constituted allegations of ‘the gravest interference’ with their fundamental rights, and should be heard by the court. However, in a blow to the women, he approved the police’s
application
to have the women’s additional claims under the Human Rights Act heard first by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, a secretive body ordinarily used to dealing with complaints about MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. Lawyers are anticipating a protracted court process that could take years before reaching its conclusion.

By the spring of 2013, the situation was getting worse for police. Revelations that SDS officers adopted the identities of dead
children
caused a public outcry. Parliament’s influential home affairs select committee branded the practice ‘gruesome’ and ordered the Met to contact the families of the dead children to
apologise
. Summoned to parliament to explain what was going on, a deputy assistant commissioner at the Met, Patricia Gallan, refused to apologise.

However, she admitted that the NPOIU had been
resurrecting
the identities of dead children too, although it appears the practice may have stopped around 2001, before Kennedy, Jacobs and Watson joined the unit. Gallan would not be drawn on how many identities the two units had stolen over the years. However, it seems probable that the identities of more than 100 dead
children
were used over a 40-year stretch.

Shocked by what had been going on, the committee called for the law governing undercover policing to be overhauled. ‘The impact of the conduct of undercover officers on the women with whom they had relationships has been devastating, and it
represents
a wholly improper degree of intrusion by the state into the lives of individuals,’ said Keith Vaz MP, who chaired the
committee
. ‘Equally shocking has been the revelation of the ghoulish and disrespectful practice of undercover officers looking to develop cover stories plundering the identities of dead infants.’

The MPs were persuaded, in part, after holding a private
hearing
, where women who had relationships with John Dines, Mark Cassidy and Bob Lambert gave evidence. They were joined by Megan, who plucked up the courage to speak for the first time about her relationship with Kennedy. It was an admirable step for Megan, who friends say had struggled, at times, to talk even privately about what had gone on. She was determined to prevent a repeat of the undercover operations in future.

‘You imagine that [a spy] may be in public meetings that
environmental
groups have,’ Megan told the MPs. ‘You imagine there might be somebody listening in there. You could even imagine that your phone might be tapped or that somebody might look at your emails, but to know that there was somebody in your bed for six years, that somebody was involved in your family life to such a degree, that was an absolute shock. It felt like the ground had shifted beneath me and my sense of what was reality and what wasn’t was completely turned on its head.’ She added: ‘The only reason that this has happened to us is because we were members of political groups. The only reason was because I was involved in environmental groups and I was campaigning for social justice.’

Megan said she still had many unanswered questions about the six years she spent with Kennedy. ‘I cared deeply for
somebody
whose life was intermingled with mine, and that person’s life story is a fiction,’ she said. ‘Who else was participating in the relationship that I believed was just me and one other person? Who else was seeing every text message that I ever sent him? Who was listening in to our most intimate phone calls? Who saw our holiday photos? Was there anybody following us when we were on holiday? Who made the decisions about what happened to my life, where I was allowed to go, who I was allowed to see, which I thought was my free will but actually was being manipulated by this person who was being controlled by other people?’

There are still many unresolved questions. But the secret is now out.

An experiment that began in 1968, when Conrad Dixon resolved to get to grips with protests against the Vietnam War, and decided undercover policing was the way to do it, became an enduring and permanent programme of state espionage, directed at political activists.

It is remarkable it took so long for the truth to surface. The torch ignited by Dixon all those years ago was carried by
successive
undercover police working first for the SDS and, later, the NPOIU. It was passed, like a baton in a relay, through
generations
of spies who transformed themselves into new people, living real lives, with jobs and friends and lovers and even children, before vanishing like ghosts.

It took more than 40 years for that to become public
knowledge
. Now that it has, what has changed?