by Lewis, Paul
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.
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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?’
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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, livin
g 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?
Not much. It is business as usual for the NPOIU, which continues the practice of planting undercover police in protest groups. After the uncomfortable glare of public scrutiny, it seems likely that supervisors will be far more careful to ensure that its agents do not cross the line in the future. During her parliamentary appearance, Patricia Gallan assured MPs that undercover officers no longer use the identities of dead children and are prohibited from developing intimate relationships. ‘I am absolutely clear that such activities should not be authorised or sanctioned,’ she said. ‘It is morally wrong.’ Privately, senior officers say they no longer believe such long-lasting operations are healthy. One recent deployment of an NPOIU spy, suspected to have been directed against animal rights activists in Wales, lasted less than two years and did not, it seems, involve sexual activity.
There have been some other changes. After a number of years based at the Association of Chief Police Officers, where police admit it was not subject to proper scrutiny, the unit was returned to its original home. The NPOIU is now back at New Scotland Yard, under the command of counter-terrorist officers, the very place the whole spy programme was developed by Dixon back in 1968.
Next to nothing has been done to reform the system, or prevent further cases of abuse taking place again, despite a raft of proposals. Sir Denis O’Connor, the chief inspector of the police brought in to clean up the system after Kennedy was outed, recommended ditching the flawed concept of ‘domestic extremism’ and said police should separate out their investigation into serious criminals, which might justify undercover methods, and the routine policing of protest. He also proposed forcing police to obtain advance authorisation from independent surveillance commissioners before deploying undercover officers. As the police’s chief watchdog, O’Connor was a hugely influential bureaucrat. Being a former chief constable, O’Connor rarely liked to rock the boat. When he did, it was for a reason.
Yet more than 12 months after he published his damning report, and despite support from senior officers for many of his key proposals, not a single one of the recommendations has been implemented.
His inquiry was just one of 15 separate official inquiries launched into various aspects of undercover policing since Kennedy was exposed. All have been held behind closed doors. None have come close to providing a full and open account of how police have used spies to monitor activists over the last four decades.
The largest inquiry – Operation Herne – is being conducted by the police themselves, with a team of Met officers conducting an investigation into their colleagues. Their inquiry into the SDS is supposedly a definitive review that, one day, will atone for past mistakes.
Under the command of a chief constable from Derbyshire police, a staff of 31 investigators are combing through 50,000 classified documents, tracking down former spies, and trying to speak with activists who were spied on. Just over a year into its deliberations, the inquiry has already cost the taxpayer £1.25m. It has not yet made a single disclosure about any undercover operation. The Met estimates Herne will not be completed until 2016.
But will the public run out of patience? ‘Things have gone badly wrong,’ says Ken MacDonald, a former director of public prosecutions. ‘It seems only a public inquiry, taking stock of the picture both nationally and locally, receiving evidence and advice, and setting standards and mechanisms of control, is capable of rescuing us, and necessary undercover policing, from a steady drip of exposure and seediness.’
That constant flow of revelations will not stop. The 10 undercover police officers identified so far will not be the last to be exposed. There are around a dozen cases of suspected undercover police who are not mentioned in this book, but are known to be guilty of similar misdemeanours, who might be unmasked any moment.
There is no precise number for the total number of police spies who worked for the SDS or NPOIU. However, evidence in documents and testimony from police suggests there have been at least 100 covert officers, and possibly as many as 150. That means fewer than a tenth of the total number of spies have been unmasked so far. The scandal has a long way to go before it runs out of steam.
How many more undercover police who slept with women, used dead children’s identities or lied in court will be exposed in years to come? How many will argue they were not properly looked after by police, deployed for years undercover without consideration for their psychological health? Will any of them follow the example set by Black, find the courage to come forward, and tell their story on their own terms?
Needless to say, there are tens of thousands of political activists who had police spies as friends, comrades or lovers. Many may now want to go public about the impact on their lives. These campaigners have video footage and photographs, postcards and letters of people they now suspect were infiltrators who lived in their midst. And, for the first time in almost half a century, they feel emboldened by the knowledge that their suspicions may well be true.
If there is one irony to this story, it is that political activists who had no faith in the state, who were labelled conspiracy theorists for claiming they were being watched by secret police, were not nearly paranoid enough. If they were culpable of anything, it was underestimating quite how far police were willing to go in the pursuit of information about their lives. They are unlikely to make that mistake again.
For any police spies currently deployed in protest groups, that must be a chilling thought. Undercover policing is never easy – one misplaced step, one slipped word, and the officer can be found out. Operatives deployed in protest groups today are working in an environment in which all activists are on the lookout for the next spy cop, in the knowledge that they do, after all, exist, and they could be anywhere.
The consequences for those spies who are exposed in the future are laid bare by the mixed fortunes of the officers in this book. Black continues to speak out about his days in the SDS, and believes he has found some closure in coming clean about the excesses of his deployment. He is campaigning for a public inquiry into the undercover policing of protest. If such an inquiry is ordered, he is committed to giving evidence to it without any disguise.
Those who have met Kennedy since his exposure say he seems profoundly unhappy. He has struggled to rebuild his life since he was outed and recently announced his intention to sue the Met police for £100,000 in compensation, claiming that, like Black and Chitty, he suffered post-traumatic stress disorder. He works for the Densus Group, an American security firm that specialises in spying on activists, and also provided some assistance to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. He recently took on a role at a leisure company. He has confided in some friends that he would like to work for the FBI. Recently, after around a year adopting the clean-cut look of his days in uniform, he grew back his stubble and long hair.
But of all the police spies, it is Bob Lambert who faces the most uncertain future. He still faces questions over his role in the arson attacks on Debenhams in the 1980s, his role in the writing of the infamous McLibel leaflet, which gave rise to the court case with McDonald’s, and his relationships with women, including the one which resulted in the birth of his son, an episode he says he kept secret from his bosses and his family for more than 20 years.
For some time, Lambert is known to have tried to win over Charlotte, the mother of his child, persuading her that he was not at fault. He has talked of selling their story to Hollywood. His approaches have been rather persistent, and Charlotte’s lawyer has threatened to take out a harassment order against Lambert unless he ceases contact. For better or worse, he has also established a relationship with the son he never knew.
Lambert’s professional life has taken a turn for the worse. Many of the invitations to make speeches appear to have dried up and Lambert has been obliged to leave an academic post as co
-director of the European Muslim Research Centre at Exeter University. It was a major setback; he had been at the beginning of a decade-long programme of research. He retains his lecturing job at St Andrews where, embarrassingly, students staged a protest at one of his seminars, condemning his ‘reprehensible’ behaviour.
In one sense, Lambert always had the most to lose. He was a skilled manipulator, almost too accomplished for his own good. Having risen through the ranks of the SDS, he now knows he will be held to account for the misdemeanours of the spies who operated under his command. Lambert still socialises with these officers – his old team from back in the day. But even they must have detected a change in their old boss. He recently confided in friends that he planned to convert to Islam.
Lambert will need all of the spiritual guidance he can get in the days ahead. He knows he is the author of his own misfortune. His decision to pursue a new career as an academic, posing as a progressive liberal with a heart, meant that his downfall, when it came, was from an especially high pedestal.
Lambert knew the game was up in October 2011 – the day he was confronted by activists who turned up uninvited to one of his speeches in London. It was a humiliating start to his downfall. As activists handed out leaflets to the audience, entitled ‘The Truth About Bob Lambert and his Special Branch Role’, he left the stage and slipped out of a side entrance.
His heart must have sunk when he saw he was being pursued down the street by Helen Steel and Dave Morris, the tenacious London Greenpeace activists who took on McDonald’s in the McLibel court case.
The ensuing chase was a curious event: Lambert at the front, scurrying along, pretending to ignore Steel and Morris and the camera they were pointing in his face. Saturday afternoon shoppers parted, as the former police spy and his activist friends made their way through the street.