by Lewis, Paul
The other three activists involved in the plot were older and more experienced, and two already had experience of breaking into power stations. But none of the group had ever taken part in a demonstration on the scale of what was now planned. The idea was to quietly recruit more than 100 activists from across the country for a showpiece act of civil disobedience: breaking into the Nottinghamshire station, turning off the generator and occupying the plant for a week. If they pulled it off, this was likely to be the most high-profile direct action against global warming in British history.
Discretion had to be absolute, and the security precautions were a baptism of fire for Tom and Penny, who were quickly exposed to the rigours of ‘activist security’ and counter-espionage. None of the five could confide in anyone outside the group, discuss their plans on the telephone or behave in a way that might raise suspicions among family or friends.
During one of the first meetings, Penny and Tom were told to sit on a bench outside Angel Tube station in north London. They waited there until a man cycled past and gave them an address scribbled on a piece of paper. It was for a terraced house in nearby Finsbury Park. When they arrived, the man on the bike and two other activists were waiting for them. At each meeting, they were given the address of the next rendezvous, and instructed to write down the details on pieces of paper in code. Meetings took place in London, Oxford, Nottingham and Leeds and they chose locations they were confident would not be bugged; church halls, crowded pubs or student houses.
‘We were never meeting in activist-related places,’ says Tom. Fearing their phones might be tracked, they left them switched on in their homes each time they met. If police were monitoring their movements through their phones, they would assume they had been at home. And they always paid for bus and train tickets with cash. For the university students, life was overtaken with some elaborate routines.
Penny, whose job, among other things, was to take notes at meetings, was told to periodically destroy the evidence. One night every few weeks she would wait until the early hours of the morning before stepping outside her Oxford college dorm. When she was sure no one was watching, she hurried along a cobbled path, past a lake, to what she thought was a suitable hiding place. Wrapped in a red overcoat and carrying matches, lighter fluid and a tin pot filled with the incriminating pieces of paper, she kneeled down and started a fire. ‘I never felt so safe as when I had burned everything,’ she says.
Tom had his own curious ritual. In order to make sure his friends did not know he was missing from university in Swansea, he made a point of going out drinking with them the night before he had a planning meeting. They would often end up in a nightclub. The only thing that made Tom stand out was his backpack. At 3am, when his friends were drunk, he would slink off into the darkness and head straight for the train station to catch the night train into London. ‘No one would know I was gone,’ he says.
Two months into the planning, Tom, Penny and the three other activists had reached a crucial stage. They had drawn up detailed plans and studied maps of the power plant. Now it was time to undertake a reconnaissance visit. After weeks of silence and caution, the time had also come to allow a sixth person into their plot. They needed a driver to take them to the power station. It had to be somebody who was totally trusted and experienced, a driver who was familiar with the local area.
‘We were told we were going to get driven up to the power station by this guy called Flash,’ says Tom. His friend Penny says the decision made sense at the time. ‘Mark Kennedy was just known as the man when it came to activist skills,’ she says. ‘He was always up for it and at the centre of everything and just completely trusted and sound.’
At 6am on January 10, after a night at the Sumac Centre in Nottingham, the activists were woken by tapping on the window. They came out of their sleeping bags and opened the curtains to see Kennedy standing outside in the semi-darkness. He looked worried. Despite his efforts, he claimed to have been unable to hire a car. They were going to have to drive to the power station in his personal vehicle. ‘We just thought: we cannot possibly go in Mark Stone’s own car because he is such a prominent activist – he must be known to police,’ says Tom. ‘But we had no choice.’
An hour later, Kennedy’s Octavia estate was parked up in a layby in the village of Thrumpton, 12 miles outside Nottingham. Kennedy, as ever, was in the driving seat. He and another activist were going to drive around the power station to assess the access routes. Meanwhile, Tom, Penny and a third campaigner were tasked with getting as near to the power plant as possible to take photographs with a long-lens camera. They got out of the car and walked south, the silhouettes of cooling towers appearing in the dawn light. They found their way through a muddy field and a small wood before they reached the footpath that circles the reinforced steel fence defending Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station.
‘It was absolutely terrifying because we were just thinking about all the ludicrous security precautions we had taken to not get found out,’ says Penny. ‘And here we are, at the perimeter of the massive power station with the biggest long-lens camera I have ever seen in my life, taking photographs of all of the mechanisms. We were photographing how the site was laid out, the infrastructure, the access routes.’
It did not go to plan. Out of nowhere, two security guards stopped them in their tracks. The guards demanded to know what they were doing. ‘We had a cover story,’ says Penny. ‘We were arts students at Nottingham Trent university and we were doing a project on the intersection of nature and industry. We wanted to get some images of this crazy futuristic architecture and the beauty of the nature around it. We were absolutely terrified so I was just babbling telling this story. Eventually we were basically sent on our way.’
They returned to Thrumpton and waited for Kennedy and the activist in a village hall. When the car arrived, they nervously bundled into the back and headed back to Nottingham. They had been driving for a few minutes when someone in the rear of the vehicle shouted: ‘Shit! Where is the camera?’ The large camera, containing dozens of incriminating images of the power station, was missing. ‘Mark just reversed and turned around the car and said: “OK, stay calm people,”’ says Tom. ‘He said we should retrace our steps and we went back to the village hall and found the camera in the toilets.’
It was a close shave and, for Tom and Penny, perhaps a little embarrassing. They were the youngest in the group of five core organisers, and the least experienced. Mostly, they were treated as equals. However, both of them got the feeling that Kennedy was looking down at them. ‘I was torn between thinking he was really cool – a super-experienced activist – and a bit of a cock,’ says Penny. ‘He was just quite arrogant and definitely clearly enjoyed the company of young women. I felt Mark just had this attitude towards us that we were kids who had bitten off more than we could chew.’
As it turns out, that is more or less what Kennedy did think about the two students. His verdict is contained in the reports he was sending back to his handlers at the NPOIU. The restricted documents, marked ‘secret’, reveal another side to Kennedy: his work as an intelligence source. He made a parting reference to Tom and Penny, describing them merely as ‘youths believed to be based in London’. One NPOIU document, based on Kennedy’s intelligence, states: ‘Youngsters are getting more and more involved with climate change issues on the back of this year’s Climate Camp.’ It adds that they are less of a threat than other activists and ‘just want to save the world from climate change’.
Kennedy’s communications to his bosses provide a revealing insight into the inner workings of the NPOIU. The reconnaissance trip to the power station, for example, is covered in remarkable detail, even recording the incident involving the lost camera. ‘The two girls realised that they had left the telephoto stills camera somewhere,’ Kennedy reports. ‘It apparently contained photographs of strategic points of Ratcliffe power station. They were very worried. I got them to retrace their steps verbally. It transpired that one of the
girls had taken it into the toilet in the village hall. We returned to the hall and the camera was retrieved.’
The police operative’s secret reports to his managers reveal the depth of access he had. Remarkably, given all the precautions taken by the five activists, Kennedy knew about the plan to break into the power station before he was even asked to drive them to the plant. Two months before Kennedy was approached by the activists, his superiors had authorised a surveillance operation, stating in internal NPOIU documents that they were aware there was a protest that could ‘damage’ a power station and could cause a ‘severe economic loss to the United Kingdom and have an adverse effect on the public’s feeling of safety and security’. Kennedy was the undercover officer tasked with finding out as much as he could.
A few weeks after he drove the activists to the power station, Kennedy filed another report, this time detailing the precise time and date the protesters planned to occupy the plant. By now he had also established the scale of what they were attempting, telling his bosses that protesters were ‘hoping to recruit 150 people to take part’. This was intelligence gold dust. It enabled the NPOIU to liaise with the Nottinghamshire police force and devise a plan to scupper the protest, exploiting the fact they had Kennedy in a prime position.
The question was: how far should the undercover officer go? Kennedy was asked by the activists to perform his familiar role as driver, carrying a truckload of equipment to the power station on the night of the occupation. But the campaigners also wondered whether he might use his rope expertise to help them with another critical part of their plan: climbing. Getting into the power station was not going to be the hard part. The challenge would be forcing the plant to turn off its generators and prevent it from operating for a week.
The activists had figured out that if they immobilised key parts of the infrastructure, the energy giant E.ON would have no choice but to turn off the coal-burning furnaces for health and safety reasons. They would switch to an emergency supply of gas-produced energy, thereby leading to a huge reduction in carbon emissions for the period during which the plant was occupied. If they could keep the furnaces turned off for seven days, they calculated that they would be preventing the emission of 150,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
That was where the climbers came in. The plan was for a team of climbers to scale one of four chimneys and force the furnaces to be turned off. One activist would abseil down inside the shaft and hang a ‘bat tent’; an expensive, cradle-like contraption used by professionals to suspend themselves beneath vertical cliffs. There was no way E.ON could turn on its furnaces with an environmental campaigner hanging inside one of the chimneys. If things went to plan, and they had sufficient food and water, the climber would be able to stay suspended inside the chimney for a week.
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 ou
t 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.’