They were young, innocent members of charities like Greenpeace. What they didn’t know was that their long-term boyfriends were undercover police officers - some of whom were married with children.
In the six years that Lisa spent with Mark Kennedy, when he was an undercover police officer and she his unsuspecting girlfriend, there were innumerable moments of betrayal and deceit. Hiking holidays in the mountains, travelling to music festivals, cooking at home, meeting her family, conversations in bed. For her, these were sincere and intimate milestones as they moved towards a happy future together. For him, they were merely details of his fake identity that enabled infiltration of an environmental campaign. Lisa - who protested against the Manchester Airport second runway and Drax power station in North Yorkshire - was a prop to be discarded when he returned home to his wife and children.
Lisa’s face falls and her voice drops to an incredulous whisper as she details one of the most hurtful deceits of all - Kennedy’s attendance at her father’s funeral, where he was part of the cortege.
“A sexual relationship isn’t just about the sex,” she says. “You become intimately involved in the whole of each other’s lives - some of your most intimate moments, some of your most vulnerable moments. He was in the second mourners’ car at my father’s funeral. It’s how he met my cousins. The intrusion of that is just indescribable.”
She later discovered the shocking extent to which that intrusion was state sanctioned. Lisa found sign-offs by senior officers authorising Kennedy, whom she knew as Mark Stone, to attend events including the funeral. He lodged overtime claims for nights spent at her house. His colleague wrote a tradecraft manual explaining how undercover officers should conduct sexual liaisons with their targets.
The Metropolitan Police justified its tactics as “collateral intrusion”, a sterile term that belies the elaborate deception that shattered Lisa’s life.
“When I found out that he wasn’t who he said he was, it wasn’t just a question mark about him. The question was: who am I? I’ve just spent six years with somebody who doesn’t exist. Somebody who is a fictional character.
“In those years with someone, you change; you grow with them. You make life decisions based on conversations with your loved one. I was left with a profound sense of not knowing who I was.”
Lisa lightly touches her wig - she is using a disguise to appear in this photoshoot and upcoming documentary.
“Every single detail of my relationship was known about within the police. I have worked very hard at rebuilding myself, and that’s what the anonymity is about. I get to focus on that. They don’t get to have everything of me.”
She pieced together Kennedy’s lies and exposed him publicly in 2010 after finding a passport in his real name. Her lingering doubts over his explanation - that he had previously been involved in criminality - led her to research his marriage certificate. It revealed his true occupation as a police officer and she uncovered his life with a wife and children in Ireland.
“I felt so alone. I think it’s a symptom of trauma that you imagine absolutely nobody in the world understands how you feel. I really felt like I was the only person in the world experiencing this.”
Fifteen years later, we now know she was far from alone. Kennedy himself had a string of relationships and other sexual liaisons while pretending to be an eco-activist in Nottingham in the Nineties and Noughties. Over a period of 25 years, more than two dozen of his colleagues, from the Met’s undercover special demonstration squad and its sister unit, the national public order intelligence unit, had relationships with more than 60 women. They stole the identities of an estimated 80 dead children to aid their deception, while at least four undercover officers are believed to have fathered children with unsuspecting targets.
Their victims were law-abiding citizens. Often, but not always, they were involved in campaigning or had an interest in social justice. They became police collateral because of their connections, which made them useful cover for officers looking to gather information on environmental movements, animal rights groups and political campaigns.
Yet when Lisa first exposed Kennedy, the official narrative was that he was an aberration. It was only through the painstaking research and campaigning of a core group of victims, including Lisa, that the systemic nature and extent of the targeting was exposed.
Five of them appear together on screen for the first time this month in a three-part ITV documentary in the United Kingdom, The Undercover Police Scandal: Love and Lies Exposed, detailing how they individually became suspicious of their relationships before linking their involvement to the wider conspiracy. Women stumbled accidentally on documents revealing their partners’ real names, or became suspicious when they suddenly disappeared without a trace. They combed through birth, marriage and other official records. They tracked down family members, in one case to New Zealand, and confronted officers on camera to get answers. They refused to go away silently.
When Helen Steel, now aged 59, voiced concerns that her former partner might be an undercover operative, well-meaning family and friends said, “ ‘You’re becoming paranoid. That wouldn’t happen in this country. They wouldn’t do that.’ That was why I felt like I had to find conclusive proof,” she says.
Steel, a Greenpeace activist deceived into a relationship with police officer John Dines for nearly two years in the early Nineties, knew that “individually the police could write us off. But as a group, we showed a pattern.”
‘One bad apple? It was a whole rotten barrel’
Eight victims took landmark legal action over the harm caused by deceitful long-term relationships, winning compensation and an apology from the Met in 2015. What resonates is the similarity of their experiences: the systemic, manipulative infiltration methods used on innocent members of the public. Their accounts, detailed in a series of newspaper stories at the time, blew away the myth of a rogue officer.
Each woman speaks of a pattern of love bombing and then of blissful, easy relationships free of arguments - a ploy, in hindsight, to keep them going as long as needed. With each victim, officers laid the groundwork for the end of their deployments. Their fake stories of mental health woes, childhood traumas and family bereavements had the dual effect of deepening their bond with the women, while acting as explanations for their later, sudden disappearances.
In Steel’s case, Dines faked a breakdown and left, while insisting in letters, “I’ve loved you more than I’ve ever loved anyone,” and, “You must believe I was sincere about kids and a home.” Steel, then in her mid-twenties, recalls how he even kept her hanging on, promising that “if he managed to sort his head out he’d come back to me. He actually said at one point, ‘I’ll feel jealous if you get in a relationship with someone else.’ That is really manipulative, really cruel.”
For Belinda Harvey, 62, new details of Bob Lambert’s betrayal, revealed recently at the long-running public inquiry into the spy cops scandal, which was set up in 2015, feel like “just another stab in the heart”. Three decades since he abruptly ended their two-year relationship with the lie that he was going on the run, she takes a deep breath to steel herself.
“I found out he’d arranged with his managers the exact date that he was going to leave his undercover, and that was a full year before he did, and yet he moved in with me and continued the relationship,” she says. The couple went on holiday shortly before Lambert, who used the fake name Bob Robinson, left. “I found out that the day before we left that he got a commendation from the police, and his wife came to the ceremony in London.”
For each of the five, the impact on their lives has been irrevocable.
Lisa laments her loss of choice, still grappling with the notion that the state would do that to her. “I didn’t know at the time whether I wanted a family. I ended up spending those crucial years of my thirties with somebody who didn’t really exist. Now I’m 50 and I feel like I didn’t get to make that choice. I’ll never know what choices I might have made, but I didn’t have free will.”
She does not know whether she could ever have another relationship. “When you’ve been lied to on such a fundamental level, it’s about the idea of trusting your own ability to see that in someone again. Will I recognise a lie?”
Deep-seated trust issues are probably the reason that, of more than 60 female victims, Alison, now in her late fifties, is the only one to have had children after learning of a deceitful relationship. “My son overheard me say that once, so now he calls himself the miracle child.”
During her early thirties, Alison spent five years with Mark Jenner, whom she knew as Mark Cassidy, when he pretended to be a joiner to exploit her connection to an anti-fascist justice group. In spring 2000 he vanished without a trace, lying that he had moved to Germany.
Alison went on to marry and had two children, now young adults, but is emphatic that it only happened because her husband is a childhood friend with whom she reconnected. She would never have moved on with someone she met as an adult, because she could not have trusted them.
When her son was 10, Alison realised she needed to tell him about Jenner. “I got very, very angry with him about lying about something. It was nothing, trivial rubbish - he was only small. But I freaked out that he had lied. I had to explain why.”
Belinda was targeted merely because she had friends in activist circles, but was not an activist herself. She had already had two sons with another partner when she found out about the true identity of Lambert, who had sexual relationships with three other female activists, fathering a child with one of them. Her sons are now adults, and telling them about the relationship was “confusing and distressing. It probably does impact their trust [of people]. And their trust in the authorities, because they know their mum has never done anything wrong and is an upstanding member of society. If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.”
Naomi, an environmental activist now in her early fifties who also had a relationship with Kennedy, says, “Shall I tell you what my vulnerability was? I was a trusting, open-minded, positive person. I was hoping that I could, in a democracy, raise a dissenting voice and contribute to progress. What is it we were raising a dissenting voice about? For me, climate change, reliance on oil and the Gulf War. Well, fair enough.”
It is ironic, Alison says, that in seeking transparency and accountability as a group, they are bigger activists now than they ever were in their youth. And this group has been their lifeline - “people who can really connect emotionally with the experience and the paranoia and the issues around trust”.
Although, Alison grins, as a young anti-fascist concerned with politics, she was always “more red than green… These women I’m close to now, there’s a lot of animal rights activists, environmentalists.” She jokingly pulls a face. “There’s a lot of vegans is what I’m telling you.”
Against the odds, they exposed a secret unit within a secretive institution and the institutional sexism that enabled it. Ahead of the documentary’s release, the Met has issued a fresh apology for the “legacy of hurt” from abusive, deceitful relationships. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jon Savell said that undercover policing had undergone “significant reform” and was now distinguished by strong governance and clear ethical guidelines.
But the women say their fight is not yet over and that they are still faced with “smoke and mirrors” from the authorities.
The Met continues to cite “NCND” - saying it can neither confirm nor deny - when it comes to many elements of undercover operations, while the women are campaigning for the closure of gaps in legislation that could even now allow officers to form fake sexual relationships. The true scale of victims is likely never to be known, particularly after the public inquiry awarded anonymity to many officers, blocking even the release of their fake cover names.
For Lisa, it is important that the focus is not on individual officers but on the system that enabled them. She is proud that she and the others were able to dispel the fallacy of a rogue officer.
“That idea was a useful narrative for the Met and it would have let them avoid questions about the structure, the set-up, the fundamental principles it was all based on. That’s how they would have liked this story to have gone, that there were just one or two bad apples. Well, we exposed the whole rotten barrel.”
Written by: Fiona Hamilton
© The Times of London