Latest news with #TheUndercoverPoliceScandal:LoveandLiesExposed
The Independent
07-03-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Why has it fallen to TV execs to fight for the victims of the Spycops scandal?
Watching ITV 's excellent new documentary series on undercover policing and the scandalous abuse meted out by officers to a group of well-meaning, left-of-centre women, I was struck by the similarities to the Post Office scandal. I know this seems unlikely on the face of it. The former involved coppers spying on groups running the gamut from animal rights to the environment to anti-fascism. The police involved used women as little more than props to maintain their functional identities. They established relationships with them – sometimes even fathering children together – before vanishing into thin air. As if that wasn't bad enough, the names and details of dead babies were used to facilitate the creation of their undercover identities. Meanwhile, the Post Office scandal involved a misfiring IT system which led to honest, hard-working sub-postmasters and mistresses getting landed with huge bills. Some were accused of fraud. Lives and livelihoods were destroyed and innocent people went to prison. But there is a common theme nonetheless – and it goes beyond ITV's commendable role in drawing attention to these sickening scandals. In both instances, institutions of the state, their employees and their leaders behaved disgracefully. The victims who investigated and brought their misdeeds to light were ordinary people who showed the sort of skills that many detectives – by which I mean the ones who investigate actual crimes – would envy. They also displayed remarkable resilience after being hurt, taking on the dead hand of the state and the grey men and women wielding it – people who seem to spend far more time trying to cover up institutional failure than actually doing their jobs. The fact that one of those institutions was the Metropolitan Police should disturb us all. Here you had people who were supposed to be police officers conducting surveillance on individuals and groups that did no more than hand out leaflets on high streets and organise small demos. Some of the protests only went ahead because the spy cops all seemed to have vans. Vehicles were typically lacking in the lefty or green circles of the time because those who ran in them didn't tend to have much in the way of cash. Offering to ferry people around was thus a great way to ingratiate yourself with them. When ITV screened Mr Bates vs the Post Office, a slow-burn scandal in which clearing those wrongly accused of crimes and paying redress was stuck in establishment goo, suddenly exploded into life. That drama, led by Toby Jones as Alan Bates, was so powerful that it reduced viewers to tears. The furore that followed meant that things started to move. However, as I wrote at the time, we really shouldn't have had to wait for TV execs to take an interest for that to happen. Will the same be true of The Undercover Police Scandal: Love and Lies Exposed? The difference between it and Mr Bates is that it is a documentary, not a drama. Spy cops conning women into sex and then vanishing, leaving behind only a letter – if that – is a compelling story, and it is well-told. I watched all three episodes back-to-back without even breaking for a coffee (those who know me well know how rare that is). The women victimised by the Met's Special Demonstration Squad are remarkable. You will want to hear their stories. Yet, documentaries don't tend to generate the sort of ratings that dramas and famous actors do and so it isn't so easy for them to establish themselves in the zeitgeist. I hope this one is an exception. It deserves to be – Theresa May actually established a public inquiry into this affair ten years ago. The trouble is, as one of the women noted, that this was the state investigating the state. Very slowly. The inquiry has dragged on for an inordinate length of time and cost £64m in public funds and counting. That in itself is scandalous. The principal aim appears to have been to kick a problematic ball deep into the long grass in the hopes of getting it buried with time – and that would have happened long ago were it not for Davina and her friends. ITV has done a far better job telling their stories than those with an official remit to do so. And I sincerely hope, documentary or not, that these women get a similar response from the public – as did the sub-postmasters.
The Guardian
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Undercover Police Scandal: Love and Lies Exposed review – what sort of country would let the police do this?
What function does a television series have when the disgrace it covers is already in the public domain? The 'spy cops' scandal has been the subject of extensive reporting, spearheaded by the Guardian. There is no need to demand a public inquiry, either: one is under way. Yet ITV's three-part The Undercover Police Scandal: Love and Lies Exposed – produced with the Guardian and featuring its journalists Rob Evans and Paul Lewis – more than earns its place. Aside from television simply hitting a wider audience, the way it unfolds narratives using personal testimony has a power a written summary may not achieve. And, as the series uses the tricks, and some of the cliches, of the true-crime documentary to keep viewers happily engrossed for three hours, it gives us the time we need to sit with the story and absorb its importance. Because this injustice asks huge questions about Britain. Over several decades, peaking in the 1990s and 2000s, undercover police officers infiltrated local campaign groups using false identities. You might argue this is an outrage in itself, but the scheme went much further. More than 60 women are now known to have had sexual liaisons, often developing into long-term relationships, with men they thought were political allies. Some even had children with the impostors. Women who fell victim to these conmen – virtually all the undercover officers were male, targeting female activists – appear on camera to tell their stories, although most are disguised with wigs and makeup or their names are changed. Lisa spent five happy years with her boyfriend before a glimpse of his passport suggested he was not who he said he was. When the partner of 'Alison' suddenly left her, she remembered finding a debit card with an unfamiliar surname. Helen – which is her real name, because she is the activist Helen Steel, of McLibel fame – was similarly abandoned by the love of her life and wondered if the gaps in his family history might offer an explanation. It is a tale with all the twists, coincidences and courage that the intrigue-hungry viewer would want, told using tested true-crime tradecraft. Genre thrills kick in as the women remember apparently idyllic courtships, followed by creeping doubts, then their transformations into dogged amateur detectives. By the time one of them involves the Guardian and a snowball starts rolling, they have each independently busted the cover of a different professional spy. Then the scandal goes national. The real value of this series, though, is in seeing the faces of the victims and hearing their anguish, which brings new clarity to the depth of the harm done. In photographs and home movies, and in memories of the times their partners accompanied them to siblings' weddings and parents' death beds, we are privy to those moments, all irreplaceable, all now tainted. It's not just the cruelty and professional misogyny that linger. That the women's experiences were eerily alike underlines that this was an elaborate and expensive state-sanctioned operation. That raises the question of what would drive our government to such extremes. We learn part of the answer when we are told that 'Alison' was in a community group that supported the families of Black people killed in contact with the police – and that, as the home secretary, Theresa May was forced to commission an inquiry in 2014 when it emerged that the Stephen Lawrence justice campaign had been infiltrated and undermined. Many of the women were engaged in nothing more subversive than small-scale anti-fascist or environmental campaigns, yet were seen as nuts to be cracked with a sledgehammer. One valid response to this level of official chicanery is hopeless, reclusive terror; another is to be encouraged by how paranoid the spy cops scandal shows those in power to have been. In her interview, Steel reminds us that every significant right and privilege citizens enjoy today was won through protests that began at grassroots level. 'Alison', recalling the day she deduced that her boyfriend was a cop, says: 'I felt like I had uncovered something you weren't supposed to uncover.' Shocking and disgusting as the facts of the case are, this documentary is part of a preciously rare moment when we can lift that lid a little higher. The Undercover Police Scandal: Love and Lies Exposed airs on ITV1 and is available on ITVX
The Guardian
06-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on undercover policing: the struggle for accountability continues
Information in the public domain about the undercover policing of protest groups from the late 1960s onwards would not be there were it not for the extraordinary courage of a group of women who were conned by officers into long-term sexual relationships. It is more than a decade since the investigation of this, and other wrongful actions, by undercover units was taken over by a judge-led public inquiry. Following revelations that officers had spied on Stephen Lawrence's family, Theresa May, who was then the home secretary, ordered that inquiry. ITV's new three-part documentary, The Undercover Police Scandal: Love and Lies Exposed, made in collaboration with the Guardian, emphasises that there was nothing inevitable about this outcome. The series, which features remarkable home-video footage of one officer, Mark Jenner (known undercover as Mark Cassidy), is a gripping and shocking account of the way that five women were tricked into romantic relationships lasting years. As well as the insidious conduct of individuals, the series sheds light on the systemic nature of the abuse and the tenacity of the women who uncovered the truth. Undercover police, like the intelligence services, have a role to play in protecting the public from dangerous criminals. But the methods of the secret unit that these officers belonged to, the Special Demonstration Squad, were abusive and wrong – as the Metropolitan police admitted when it settled a civil case 10 years ago. The women spied on were grossly unsuitable targets. The activists in the film were involved in non-violent leftwing protests. When Mark Stone (in reality Mark Kennedy) was unmasked in 2011, efforts were made to present him as a 'rogue officer'. But this too was false: a tradecraft manual obtained by this newspaper recommended 'fleeting' relationships as a tactic. We now know that 50 or more women were manipulated into relationships by at least 25 officers, several of whom had children with partners who did not know their real names (the mother of Bob Lambert's child learned his identity from the press). Whose idea was all this? Who authorised it in specific cases? Was the officer the sole conduit for intelligence or were conversations bugged? What kinds of discussions with supervisors took place when women began to speak about having children, or suffered bereavements and asked their boyfriends to attend funerals? Despite the inquiry, vast amounts of material remain hidden. Of the four men featured in the series, so far Lambert is the only one to have testified at the inquiry. John Dines (known undercover as John Barker), with whom Helen Steel spent two years before he deserted her, has refused to appear. Last year, one officer, Trevor Morris, described the Met's official apology to the women as 'outrageous'. Years of reflecting on what happened have made these women eloquent witnesses as well as skilful detectives. Almost all the undercover officers using these tactics were men, some of them married with children. Their victims derive some satisfaction from having outsmarted the secret state. But nothing can turn back the clock or get back those stolen years and feelings. The officially sanctioned deception and abuse of multiple young women by British police officers was a disgraceful episode. It is not enough to pledge that it will never be repeated. Continued resistance to full disclosure, and accountability, must end.
The Independent
03-03-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
My boyfriend was paid to spy on me and have sex with me for six years
Something I am still fighting to know is, why was it me?' Lisa* is speaking over Zoom, with her camera turned off – a tool to protect her anonymity and take back a morsel of control more than a decade after becoming police property. 'Was he just given free rein? Was it his choice? Was I someone convenient? Was it that he really was attracted to me, so that it worked out? Was he given my name by someone else? Was I a target?' Lisa, 50, was a target – though how exactly that played out in paperwork will perhaps never be known. In 2011, when she was 37, she discovered that her loving six-year relationship had been orchestrated by the Metropolitan Police; that her boyfriend, Mark Stone – real name Mark Kennedy – was an undercover spy. Everything she'd felt, and felt to be true, had been a lie. She is one of 60 women who were victims of the so-called 'spy cops' scandal. Officers working for the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) under the Metropolitan Police Special Branch ran a covert operation, spying on the lives of thousands of citizens for more than four decades. Around 140 police officers were sent to spy on 1,000 political groups, concocting elaborate fake personas as committed activists to compile damning dossiers on mostly left-wing, progressive groups like Greenpeace; they even used the names of 80 dead babies to carry out their surveillance. To anyone listening to Lisa's story – the long years she spent in a relationship with Kennedy, which drew out over the course of her thirties, and over significant, painful events in her life – the basic details are shocking enough. Kennedy accompanied her to her father's funeral, where he met and lied to her entire family, playing the supportive boyfriend that he never was. They were, Lisa believed, in love – a simple thing, and Kennedy's cruellest weapon, all part of the plot. 'Actually, I didn't have the free will to be in love,' she explains. None of the women involved did. In fact, they were manipulated into intimate, sexual relationships, their lives invaded and forever changed by a government-endorsed tactic to spy on political groups who posed no real threat to the state at all. Undercover officers, most of whom – like Kennedy – were married, were 'encouraged to sleep with activists', a landmark tribunal case brought by one victim, Kate Wilson, heard in 2021. This week, five of the women involved will speak on camera for the first time, in a new documentary by ITV and ITVX, The Undercover Police Scandal: Love and Lies Exposed. They're a formidable group, bound by terrible secrets and shared trauma who, together, tell a chilling story that they say is far from over. Lisa first met Mark when she was 29, when he became involved with a social community centre for environmental campaigners she was part of. Her friends trusted him so, naturally, so did she. Their tight-knit lobby group became social – he came to parties at her house, they went on climbing trips together and began seeing each other a short time later. She loved him 'totally, completely, more than anyone', she's said in the past. 'I thought I knew him better than anyone else knew him.' He would often be away on weekends or on long trips, sometimes for three months at a time 'for work' – but, still, they were closer than close and rarely argued. Lisa later learnt that undercover police like Kennedy were given training from a textbook to learn how to manipulate women like her: 'It was only afterwards that I heard the word 'mirroring',' she says. Kennedy would imitate her interests, body language and values to gain trust. Any common ground was ultimately hollow, any conflict artificially resolved. When they did argue, it was 'when he wasn't able to be around, when I needed him'. Kennedy heartlessly accompanied her to her father's funeral, but weeks later told Lisa that he couldn't be by her side to scatter his ashes. In disclosure documents she has seen during the long, ongoing inquiry into the scandal, 'I've since seen authorisations given to him about attending my father's funeral,' she explains. 'When I wanted him to come and help me with my dad's ashes, his authorisation was refused.' The mundanity of their lives together is all documented in official police files. Anyone with whom Kennedy happened to form a basic relationship during the course of his 'investigation', like Lisa's friends and family, was coldly marked up as 'collateral intrusion'. She recalls a time that Kennedy told Lisa he was going to watch the Tour de France, and came back with a set of Le Creuset pans for her, which prompted a 'whole discussion between him and his handler about giving me this present,' she explains. 'Had I liked it? Was it useful? Did it 'work' to convince me? For one thing, I just kept thinking about the police budget that's being spent on this,' she continues, adding, 'I've still got some of those pans.' It wasn't until the pair were on holiday, travelling around Italy in a van in July 2010 that Lisa pulled the first thread that would eventually unravel their idyllic life together. When he went out on a cycle ride, she happened upon his passport, which named him as Mark Stone. It also included information about his child. Nearby was a mobile phone he rarely seemed to use, which she unlocked. It contained emails from two children, both of whom were calling him 'dad'. Lisa didn't say anything straight away – and when she did, a few days later, Kennedy eventually broke down and came up with another elaborate lie about his past as a drug runner. He told Lisa that during this time, his best friend was shot in front of him and he'd promised to look after his child. He was emotional, and Lisa desperately wanted to believe him, despite her gut telling her otherwise. They put it behind them – but Lisa's subsequent suspicion that he was undercover police remained. The discovery of his son's birth certificate, by a friend who was researching ancestry online, confirmed it: his occupation was recorded as 'police officer', he had a family in Ireland all along. With a group of carefully selected friends, she confronted him. Shortly afterwards, Lisa told her story on Indymedia, a networking site for grassroots campaigners and 'alternative media activists', which blew the 'spy cops' scandal's epic proportions wide open. A trial for a separate case, in which Kennedy tipped off police about a plot by climate change activists to 'disable' a power plant in Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire, collapsed in the wake of Lisa's revelations. Journalists began investigating and uncovering the overwhelming extent of officers' deception, and slowly, more women came forward with eerily similar stories and chilling patterns. Most of the relationships ended the same way – a sudden disappearance to move abroad, an apologetic letter. In 2011, eight began landmark legal action to sue the police for emotional trauma; Mark Kennedy was said to have had relationships with three of the women involved. In 2015, they won an apology from the Met Police. The same year, Peter Francis, a whistleblower who exposed how police had spied on the campaign for justice for Stephen Lawrence, spoke up in 2015 and a public inquiry was called. Today, more than a decade later, the weight and reverberations of what Lisa has been through and carried with her for more than a decade since her story broke the 'spy cops' scandal wide open are ever-present. She has had to come to terms with the fact that Kennedy took away her chance to decide if she really wanted to have children; she says she's struggled to have a relationship since. For her, the devil truly lies in the details – in the chilling realisations and unending quest for truth. 'I've possibly wasted quite a lot of years trying to think about whether his feelings may or may not have been genuine,' she says. 'You can tie yourself up in knots. I have done so. 'Actually, the most harrowing thing is this: you don't just find out that your partner's been lying to you, but you find out that I was his job. He was being paid overtime for nights spent with me, for example. The thing that really kept me awake at night for quite some time was the question of how many people were in our relationship – when I was speaking to my boyfriend on the phone late at night, were there other people on those calls?' The Met Police has issued a fresh apology to victims of the scandal in light of ITV's documentary release for the 'legacy of hurt' caused. But victims and campaigners say that not enough has changed – and legislation still allows inordinate freedom of power to undercover police. The women are now campaigning for gaps in legislation that essentially allow for officers to form sexual relationships with 'targets' to be closed. 'Meanwhile, laws on protesters have been tightened,' says Lisa. Now she wants the public to understand the extent of the 'rot' of a system rooted in misogyny that allowed her and so many others to be so cruelly abused. 'What I want people to know is: this could have happened to anyone. It could happen to anyone. It could be happening to anybody who's reading these words now, or somebody's daughter or cousin or friend,' she says. 'It's not like we were a strange group of outliers. I think everybody should be concerned. Not because of what they did to us necessarily, though that is a warning. But because of what they could be doing to anybody, right now, right this second.'
