by Lewis, Paul
Within just four months of his Nottingham deployment, Kennedy had chosen his first woman. Lily was a bright and popular 23-year-old whom he met at a political event in Nottingham. ‘We started hanging out after that meeting,’ she says. ‘He was very charismatic, exciting, good fun. He claimed to like country music, caravans. He claimed to be interested in climbing, in travelling, in all kinds of political projects. He seemed like a really nice guy. He was quite a lot older than me – nearly 10 years older. He was very romantic and set the tone for our relationship.’
Kennedy appears to have had no qualms about getting deep into the life of the young activist. On the frequent occasions they passed through London they stayed at her parents’ flat in Putney. ‘They both had long hair so they would sit down and watch TV, combing each other’s hair after it was washed,’ says her mum, Pauline. ‘He used to eat with us and slob around watching TV with us. All the stuff you do in a relaxed way with people in the family.’ The spy worked hard to gain the affections of his girlfriend’s family. He bonded with her brother over Chelsea football club and when her mother’s choir group sang outside East Putney Tube, Kennedy stood beside them rattling a can for donations. He also accompanied Lily and her mum Pauline on a trip to the theatre, telling them it was the first time he had ever worn a suit.
So close did he become that within just a few weeks of going out with Lily, he found himself at her grandmother’s 90th birthday. There is a photograph of him there, wearing a roll-neck sweater beneath a quilted waistcoat. Pauline said she found her daughter’s new boyfriend ‘quite funny, good company’ but thought he was different to her previous companions. ‘Mark was laddish, compared to some of Lily’s more cerebral friends,’ she says. ‘He was not particularly bright or articulate and didn’t have a hugely broad vocabulary. He talked about politics in a much more naïve, down to earth kind of way.’
Kennedy’s relationship with Lily was profoundly different to the one he had with his Catholic wife in his real life. Lily believed in open relationships, more formally known as polyamory. Proponents of open relationships say that this unconventional approach is no less meaningful than traditional, monogamous partnerships, which can leave people feeling shackled. Open relationships are different with each couple, but often the arrangement allows both people to have more than one sexual partner, which advocates say encourages honesty.
This of course allowed Kennedy to have more than one girlfriend at a time. ‘He was a bit different from all of us. He ate meat, had a pickup truck and was just not very hippy in a way,’ says Anna, a 21-year-old Kennedy slept with around 20 times. ‘I knew he was seeing other people at the same time and it was never, you know, any type of romance involved.’ It is not possible to know exactly how many women Kennedy slept with during his six years undercover. He claims it was only two. His friends in Nottingham can name more than 10 women he slept with while living in the city and expect there were more. ‘It just seemed he was up for sexual liaisons anytime, anyplace, anywhere,’ Christodoulou says. ‘He had just come on board and he was at it right away. One person I know who had a romantic relationship with him challenged him and said: ‘I’m not going any further because I think you’re a copper.’ Then Mark said something to her which apparently calmed her down.’
Not long after Lily’s grandmother’s 90th birthday, the effort Kennedy was putting into his second life was paying off. He was attending various political meetings with her up and down the country. He travelled to a May Day protest in Dublin with an anarchist collective called the ‘White Overalls Movement Building Libertarian Effective Struggles’, or WOMBLES for short. They were famed for their tactic of covering their bodies with white overalls, padding and helmets to protect themselves from riot police, a tactic they anointed ‘self-protection from the depredations of the constabulary’. It was the same group that Richardson had infiltrated just a few years earlier.
Kennedy returned from Ireland boasting that he had been drenched in water cannon and nursing his first protest injury, a damaged knee. It was his first bruising encounter with his colleagues in the riot squad, and Kennedy seemed to have relished it. He cut out a newspaper photograph of himself stood in a line of masked anarchists and hung it framed on his living-room wall. After that, Kennedy delved into a panoply of activist events. ‘It was really a smorgasbord of grievances,’ says a friend. ‘It could have been saving the animals one day, stopping the BNP the next day, protesting against a war in some far-flung corner of the world the next day, and then trying to stop an asylum seeker getting deported or a post office closed. I just assumed he was a bit of a lost soul looking for something he could believe in.’
By the following year, Kennedy had inveigled himself into the core of the group mobilising ahead of the G8 summit in Gleneagles. There was no greater NPOIU priority at the time than gleaning intelligence about how protesters planned to disrupt the meeting of world leaders in July 2005. Kennedy would come to view his surveillance operation at the G8 summit as one of the high watermarks of his entire deployment, and claim his reports were reaching the desk of the then prime minister, Tony Blair.
The anti-summit protests were months in the planning. Blair had suggested the G8 would deliver agreement among leaders on two totemic issues: climate change and economic development in the world’s poorest nations. Protesters were loosely split into two camps. On one side, there was a large and moderate coalition of trade unions, charities and campaign groups that coalesced under the Make Poverty History banner. They planned a huge demonstration through Edinburgh, capitalising on the spirit of the protests against the Iraq war. On the other were the more radical contingent of anti-capitalist protesters, of whom Kennedy was part, mobilising under the name Dissent. Their objective was to stop the G8 summit meeting from taking place by blockading roads to the fortified hotel and other forms of ‘resistance’ to the state.
If they were going to be organised, the protesters needed a base, and they chose to construct an Earth First-style campsite 12 miles from the Gleneagles Hotel. It would be another sustainable camp, host to thousands of protesters from across Europe. Kennedy volunteered – and was considered sufficiently trustworthy – to co-ordinate the immense logistical challenge of ferrying equipment to the camp.
He hired a convoy of vans and began touring the country to pick up ropes, portable toilets, tent poles, canvas and other supplies. He was accompanied by a 22-year-old student from Holland named Wietse van der Werf. ‘Mark was willing to take stuff on,’ he recalls. ‘He seemed keen and took the initiative. People just let him get on with it. If you have someone that has a credit card ready to hire any vehicle, and a political movement that doesn’t have a lot of funds, then that person becomes very valuable, very quickly.’
The Dutchman remembers a laptop placed on the back seat of Kennedy’s pickup truck which was connected remotely to the internet. ‘This was 2005 – that was quite uncommon back then,’ he says. Kennedy often encouraged activists to borrow his laptop to send emails, presumably to spy on their electronic communications. He was also a fast driver, and had some curious routines. It was only years later, and with the benefit of hindsight, that it dawned on Van der Werf that his friend’s driving habits were those of a police officer. ‘He took tea breaks all the time and bought food whenever we stopped,’ he says. ‘He also made a point of keeping all of his receipts.’
In the end, the G8 protests, like the summit they intended to disrupt, did not quite live up to expectations. There were some roads blocked, although never for that long, and an attempt to break through the perimeter fence of the hotel ended when riot police emerged out of Chinook helicopters.
But for Kennedy, the G8 was an impressive milestone. The NPOIU had a whole network of spies at the protests, including both Watson and Jacobs. So too did the SDS, and foreign police spies were invited to attend too. Germany alone sent five undercover police officers. But no infiltrator is believed to have come close to securing the kind of access Kennedy achieved.
He now had a reputation among activists as a reliable and trusted campaigner who could get things done. Just two years after first showing his face in Nottingham’s Sumac Centre, Kennedy had wormed himself into the close-knit group of radical activists and, with the help of Lily, landed himself a key role by taking care of logistics, and a new nickname: Transport Mark. He was no longer being viewed through the prism of suspicion. He was just Mark Stone. And he was on a roll.
CHAPTER 15
International Playboy
The commotion started in the semi-darkness, just as the sun began to rise over the peaks of Mount Kárahnjúkur. Kennedy looked on as masked protesters locked themselves to an enormous yellow dump truck. They were in a remote corner of the Icelandic wilderness, battling to stop the construction of a 690-ft dam. And for Kennedy, watching from the sidelines in a flat cap, undercover work was about to get personal.
Among those clambering all over the huge truck was his new girlfriend, Megan, to whom Kennedy had grown very close. The pair had been together for a few months, and it was a whirlwind romance. Now Kennedy watched as Megan used a bicycle D-lock to attach her neck to the vehicle, a tactic often used by activists as a form of civil disobedience. Usually, police will have to spend hours using special cutting equipment to break the lock. Megan and the others hoped that by locking themselves to the truck, they would halt its progress, blockading a major construction route to the dam. Suddenly, there were terrified screams. The protest was not going to plan. Chinese construction workers commanding the truck had turned on the engine and started to inch it forward, protesters still draped to the side. Bones were about to be snapped. Kennedy and some other activists leaped onto the front of the truck, pleading with the driver to stop. Kennedy yanked open the bonnet and started to rip at cables and levers in the dark until the engine fell silent, before pulling the keys out of the ignition and throwing them into a ditch.
Kennedy was furious, believing that Megan had come within an inch of being killed. He scuffled with police guards and was dragged away with his arms held behind his back. ‘He possibly saved her life – and he certainly likes to point it out as if he was some kind of hero,’ says Olafur Pall Sigurdsson, who led the Saving Iceland campaign. Sigurdsson was not present when Megan chained herself to the yellow truck, but the incident was relayed to him afterwards in detail by Kennedy and others. It even appeared in the newspapers. The Icelandic press were briefed by the police that the incident on the yellow truck was an act of sabotage, and evidence of the violent intent of foreigners flocking to the island. They reported it as such, unaware that the man who immobilised the truck was in fact a British spy.
The battle to save a pristine region from destruction was becoming a priority for European conservationists. The enormous Kárahnjúkur dam was rising out of the bleak volcanic terrain of the eastern highlands like an alien structure. Situated near Europe’s largest glacier, it would become the largest of several hydroelectric plants the Icelandic government wanted to build in the area, supplying energy to a huge aluminium smelter plant, 75km to the east.
Kennedy’s role in Saving Iceland has been vastly overstated. He was not, Sigurdsson says, involved in any of the direction or control of the campaign. Instead, he was one of the many British activists who joined the campaign, heading to Iceland immediately after the 2005 G8 summit. But Kennedy did show a real interest in the battle against the dam project, and tried to get close to Sigurdsson.
The following year he and Megan joined the Icelandic campaigner on a road trip through Spain, to raise awareness about Saving Iceland. The activists were living a hand-to-mouth existence, camping under the stars or staying in squats. A number were ‘freegans’, scavenging unused foods from supermarket bins. Kennedy chose a more comfortable existence, a decision that raised eyebrows. ‘People were getting a bit pissed off with Mark because he was treating it like a holiday,’ Sigurdsson says. ‘He was eating in really nice restaurants when everyone else was eating some horrible vegan grub.’
During the trip, an editor of an environmental journal asked Sigurdsson if he could pen an article about the campaign in Iceland. Kennedy offered to write the piece for him. But rather than use his activist identity Mark Stone, Kennedy wrote the article under a pseudonym, ‘Lumsk’. It is not uncommon for activists to use aliases when writing online, and Kennedy told his friend that Lumsk was the name of a Norwegian folk-metal band he liked.
Sigurdsson, however, was aware the word had another, somewhat suspicious, meaning in his native tongue. One day, he confronted Kennedy about his choice of pseudonym, telling him that the Icelandic translation was ‘duplicitous’. ‘He was jolted,’ Sigurdsson recalls. ‘It was like I had given him a small electric shock – he became aggressive for a few seconds. I thought that was a bit odd.’
As the trip through Spain continued, Kennedy managed to annoy Sigurdsson even more. The Icelandic campaigner was heading a peaceful campaign against the dam project and was finding himself labelled as a dangerous radical on the island. But he says Kennedy began to cajole him to go even further. ‘He kept coming to me to say: what you’re doing is not really working, is it?’ he says. ‘All these lock-ons and protest tactics you are using are not effective.’
Sigurdsson believes the undercover police officer was trying to plant ideas in his head. ‘The way he said it was: “I know some extremely heavy people. I can get hold of them and they can do some real damage. I can get these people to come over to Iceland.” He was talking about seriously damaging the infrastructure of the dam – sabotage.’ Sigurdsson says he told Kennedy he wanted nothing to do with violence. ‘He kept coming back to me, like some sort of parrot. I was just like, “It is very nice you know these people, Mark, but don’t come to me – as far as the Icelandic police are concerned I am already like a Bin Laden.”’
*
Back in Nottingham, Kennedy was settling into his new life with Megan. He had moved out of the shared home and started renting a terraced house near the Sumac, occasionally letting out his spare room to a lodger. It was neatly furnished, with framed pictures from various protests he had been involved in. There was not a huge amount for Kennedy to do during the day. When he wasn’t away, telling friends he had found climbing work, he would often wake up early, go for a run, and then disappear for a few hours, saying he had odd jobs to do. It was a domestic life, often revolving around Megan.
They had been together by then for two years and the relationship was serious – equivalent, friends say, to that of a married couple. A warm-hearted and principled woman from Wales, Megan was in her 30s. She has never spoken publicly or been interviewed about her relationship with the undercover police officer, but her friends say she loved him deeply. They would end up being with each other for six years.
They spent time living together, travelled on holiday abroad and spoke to each other every day. He got to know her family in much the same way as he did with Lily, who had split up with him the previous year. It is impossible to know how much, if any, of Kennedy’s affection for Megan was genuine, but those who know the couple believe it must have been. Without irony, Kennedy would one day declare: ‘The love I shared with her and the companionship we shared was the realest thing I ever did … Yeah, there were no lies about that at all.’
Megan was an obvious choice for an undercover police officer to target. She was connected with activists across the country and ‘trusted and respected by everyone’, according to one friend, who adds: ‘She was one of the most universally loved people you could find.’ Like Lily, she was also an advocate of polyamory. When she first met Kennedy she had another boyfriend, a thickset man with purple hair called Logan. When Kennedy arrived on the scene, the dynamic obviously shifted. ‘We were seven years in by that point and she had not had a relationship with anyone on the scale of what we had,’ Logan says.
Logan was keen to accept Kennedy; he says he was pleased that his girlfriend had found a second meaningful relationship. It was an unconventional set-up. In
simple terms, Megan had two boyfriends – Kennedy and Logan – and they became good friends. ‘He was a really gregarious guy, and for all his kind of blokey, cockney-geezer bluster, there was a real sensitivity and generosity there,’ Logan says. ‘I used to call him detective inspector Mark. I didn’t for a second really think he might be a cop. It was just a comment made in jest, because it was funny how he fit the mould of an infiltrator: turns up out of nowhere, works away all the time, has loads of money, starts seeing somebody who is really central in the protest movement.’
Although, for a few years, Megan had intimate experiences with both men, she eventually chose Kennedy. She had been seeing Logan since 1997, and they remained close. When her father died, both men attended the funeral. Although, according to friends, Megan never agreed to Kennedy’s requests for a monogamous relationship, he did become the most important man in her life. ‘Both of the women Mark had close, intimate relationships with were very trusted women in the movement,’ notes one friend. ‘That cannot have been a coincidence.’
Lily, Megan and the other women gave Kennedy access to the heart of radical protest, a place few of his colleagues in the NPOIU are believed to have reached. Routinely, Kennedy found himself at the centre of all the action. One day, he scaled a tree outside the BP oil company’s headquarters in Grosvenor Square, in London. On another, he joined a small group of activists who climbed a tower at Didcot power station to hang a ‘Climate Crime’ banner. Later he locked himself to the gates of a nuclear power station in Hartlepool, wearing a black cap, sunglasses and scarf covering his face.
His friends were noticing a change in the man they knew as Mark Stone. When he first turned up in Nottingham, they had been amused to find his iPod full of ‘edgeless rock’. By the middle of 2006 he had started listening to drum and bass dance music, buying himself mixing decks so he could DJ at all-night raves and squat parties. He rarely if ever took drugs but, like his colleagues Lynn Watson and Marco Jacobs, enjoyed a drink. ‘Mark drank, certainly most nights,’ says Logan. ‘And drinking to that really, really, gone state – that memory void thing for him was not uncommon.’