5 days ago
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This episode first aired on 8 December 2020.
In 2010, Mark Stone, an environmental activist, was on holiday with his girlfriend when she discovered a passport for a man called Mark Kennedy in the glove box of their van. The man she was in a relationship with was actually a police officer who for seven years had lived deep undercover at the heart of the environmental protest movement. When the story became public, senior officers tried to quell the outcry, insisting that Kennedy was merely a rogue officer. In fact, the opposite was true. Kennedy was just one of many footsoldiers who had been routinely infiltrating political groups, mostly on the left, since as far back as 1968.
Anushka Asthana talks to the Guardian’s Paul Lewis and Rob Evans about their decade-long work with activists to investigate police spies. Officers’ deployments typically lasted four to five years, with them living alongside political campaigners, forming deep bonds of friendship, or having romantic liaisons with their targets. At least three of the police spies fathered children with women they met while undercover. The existence of a squad of officers sent deep undercover in political groups was so secret that many of the UK’s most senior police officers were oblivious until they began reading the reports in the Guardian 10 years ago.
Anushka also hears from Jessica (a pseudonym) who, in 1992, when she was 19, had a year-long sexual relationship with Andy, a fellow activist. In 2017, she discovered that Andy was Andy Coles, a police spy, who was 32. She believes she was “groomed” by Coles and describes the devastating impact the discovery has had on her life. Coles has denied that he had an intimate relationship with Jessica while he infiltrated political groups in the 90s, dismissing her claims as ‘lurid’.
The exposure of this network of spies has led to a public inquiry that is examining the covert infiltration of political groups and will examine the conduct of a large number of undercover officers, including Coles.
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