RedHanded - Episode 352 - Over the Thin Blue Line: the Undercover Police Scandal
Episode Date: June 13, 2024Imagine finding out that your partner of six years – the love of your life, the father of your children – had never existed. That during all of your most intimate moments, they’d been s...pying on you, taking notes to report back to their superiors. That’s what happened to dozens of innocent British women in 2011, when they uncovered the SDS – a super-secretive unit of London’s Met Police.To infiltrate groups of (mostly harmless) left-wing activists, these officers went undercover, routinely starting long-term sexual relationships with female members, for years at a time. They groomed these women, sometimes even fathering children, only to eventually disappear without a trace. H&S plunge into the gross, ethically murky waters of undercover relationships.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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I'm Saruti.
I'm Hannah.
And welcome to Red Handed.
Pew pew, that's my police noise.
Oh, that's a good police noise.
Thanks.
It's also the noise we made watching the fall of the House of Usher
when they made a TikTok reference.
Oh, my God.
Why?
I had just about forgotten about that show.
Sorry.
Oh, my God.
So bad.
That entire show needs to be pew-pewed.
But, yeah, if you do watch it and you haven't yet,
play our fun game where you make that noise and do little finger guns every time they make no it wasn't just a tiktok
it was like any any gen z like current reference it was excruciatingly painful
about as painful as this episode might be because uh it's got a lot of dirty cops doing dirty, dirty things. So let's get into it.
In 2011, a 49-year-old woman, who we'll call Jackie, was reading the newspaper when she
saw a face from her past. And it turned her entire life upside down. Back in 1984, when
Jackie had been just 22, she had met a fellow animal rights activist, a long-haired left-winger called Bob Robinson.
Sorry, Robert Robinson? Is that his name?
No.
Spoilers.
And the two instantly fell in love.
They shared the same passions and built a life together.
And a few years later later they had a son. Over that time, Bob had been a committed partner and father. He was by Jackie's side
throughout her 14 hours of labour, which she described as the most intimate moment of her life.
But then, in 1988, Bob disappeared without a trace, never to be seen or heard from again.
And it wasn't until Jackie read that newspaper 20 years later that she realised the truth.
She called up her son to tell him the earth-shattering news. His father, Bob Robinson, had never existed.
Bob had been a police spy, sent to keep tabs on Jackie's friends.
And their now 26-year-old son's conception had all just been part of the plan.
Tragically, this wasn't just the work of one sleazy rogue agent taking advantage of a situation. In fact, Jackie was just one of dozens of women caught up in a police scandal that rocked British democracy.
For more than four decades, British police ran a covert operation that systematically spied on tens of thousands of citizens.
Most of whom had never even got close to committing a criminal act.
And it's their stories that we'll be telling you today.
This week, we're looking at a unit of London's police force, whose operations were so secret
that even the most senior officers in the country didn't know that this unit existed.
And under this unchecked veil of secrecy,
they infiltrated protest groups for years. They made friends, organised dissent and even entered
into long-term sexual relationships with women in the group. Some of these relationships lasted up
to a decade. And sometimes these undercover officers
would even father children with their targets.
As Jackie herself has said,
how better to get into a protest movement
not only to have a relationship,
but to have a child with an activist.
Take a second to imagine the person you're closest with,
who you've shared everything with,
all your secrets and years
of your life. And now imagine that for all those years, that person was a ghost, reporting back
every word of your private life to their superior. To understand exactly how we got here, we have to
go back to the origin of the secretive unit at the heart of this story, back in 1968. By then, the free love of the
swinging 60s had swung pretty sharply the other way, and revolution was in the air. Because it
wasn't all hitting bongs and having casual sex while listening to the Grateful Dead. The other
defining characteristic of the 60s was civil unrest. And the answer, my friend, was blowing in the wind.
Opposition to the Vietnam War exploded into protests in cities across the world.
Students, workers and just ordinary people in general
were fed up with authority.
And many thought that the only way forward
was to remake it from the ground up.
And governments, obviously,
didn't really like that very much.
On the 18th of March 1968,
more than 30,000 people took to the streets of London
to protest the Vietnam War.
And things got ugly.
Clashes with police ended up with more than 200 people arrested.
Everyone at the Met was convinced
that this was only going to get worse
and something needed to be done.
And on the same day as the 2nd March, on the 27th October 1968, a new unit of Special Branch was officially founded.
Chief Inspector Conrad Hepworth Dixon, the working class hero, reportedly told the Home Office,
Give me a million pounds
and ten men and I can deal with this problem for you.
Which in 1968 is a lot of money.
Yep.
Yep.
And the government, fearing that these anarchist hipsters would bring down Parliament by force,
gave Chief Inspector Conrad Hepsworth Dixon, the 17th probably, both of those things.
So within the special branch of the London Metropolitan Police, Hepworth Dixon set up
a secretive unit consisting of 10 officers called the Special Demonstration Squad or the SDS.
It changed its name a bunch of times over the years to various vague, consultio consultio style names, but we're going to stick with SDS just for our own sanity.
Up until this point in Britain, undercover policing mostly dealt with recruiting people
already in the target group and making them squeal.
And more importantly, the aim of any undercover operation so far had been to make an arrest.
And then the mission would be over.
The key difference with the SDS was that they had no end goal.
Their aim was simply to gather information and report back.
Only the officers involved would be briefed.
And like we said earlier, the vast majority of senior officers in the country had no idea this unit even existed. New information gathered would be passed on to
other Met departments, with absolutely no context on how it had been obtained. Because, let's
remember, the STS is not MI5. It wasn't a grand network of information experts working together
to use intelligence to protect the
nation. This was a unit within the Metropolitan Police Force. And these 10 officers within
the SDS were accountable to no one.
Over the years, the London Metropolitan Police had already infiltrated suffragette groups,
pacifists and, worst of all, trade unionists. But the SDS were set up to monitor what they called subversives.
And the official definition of that word has changed a lot over time.
Yeah, it's basically just a group that like, there's no end goal.
There's no ultimate, like, once we get this, we're done, we move on.
And also who they target is just up for debate.
In 1968, when the SDS was founded,
subversives meant anyone who would, quote,
contemplate the overthrow of the government by unlawful means.
How does one overthrow a government lawfully?
I don't know.
But yeah, I guess it's, what's the word?
Oh my God, what's the word? Sedition. Anyone who's going to be seditious. So throwing over, undermining the government by unlawful means. Which, yes, you know, good. Do that. But that's not what they stick to. and became vaguer and vaguer until it might as well have said anyone with a beard.
The SDS set out to insert undercover officers into subversive groups for years.
They would grow their hair
and bone up on radical politics and activism,
earning the nickname the Hairies.
These officers would adopt totally new identities,
often taken from dead children, the classic.
Lists of death certificates would be scoured by the SDS to find a suitable match for each member.
And as Saruti said all of those years ago, sick, but a victimless crime.
I'm not here to defend the Hairies, but in the grand scheme of things, not the worst thing they do.
The Hairies were given official passports and driving licences
with their fake names on, and they were given fake flexible jobs that involved travel and
irregular hours, like delivery driving or labouring. And why was that? Because the officers
in the SDS wanted to be able to spend at least some of their weeks with their actual families
at home. Yep, so just need like some sort of job that explains why you're away for large chunks of time.
So officers would be interrogated in character by senior officers to test their backstories and force them to think on their feet.
And when they were deemed to be finally ready, they were sent off to groups of socialists, Marxists, skinheads, anarchists, anyone who might want
to shake things up. Deployments initially lasted four years, and the hairy SDS men would usually
rock up to one of these groups, introduce themselves, and offer to help. They'd identify
impressionable people within the group and manipulate their trust into getting them into the gang.
They would then form long-term friendships and, yes, sometimes even relationships with members.
And all the while, they'd feed back information on plans, movements and key figures to the Met.
The BBC podcast The Spy Cops Undercover tells the story of Mark Strong, one of the central characters in our story today. And in the BBC show, they also talk to an ex-undercover officer who gave his
thoughts on the ethics and tactics of the job. One interesting thing he talks about is intoxicants.
He'd always been terrified of booze or drugs because when you're less in control of your faculties,
you're more likely to slip up.
And unfortunately for the SDS,
us subversives fucking love drugs.
And I'm sure I've seen loads of interviews
with undercover police where they're like,
there will quite often be a situation
where you are expected to take drugs
in front of other people.
Absolutely, absolutely. There's also examples within the spy cops podcast of undercover police officers who
were like they were plied with alcohol because people were suspicious of them and so they would
make them drink a bunch of alcohol and then question them at length about their background
because there was a lot of internal politics within these groups as well that the cops going
undercover had to navigate a lot of these times within these groups as well that the cops going undercover had to navigate.
A lot of these times, these groups would devolve into the kind of finger-pointing paranoia
that, you know, wouldn't be our place in an episode of The Traitors.
Some SDS officers remember silently watching as other innocent members
were accused of treachery or being a mole, of being a spy and kicked out of the group.
Classic traitor behaviour.
I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest
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Yet the organization continued, and the SDS extended its focus, infiltrating anti-apartheid
groups, women's rights protesters demanding fair pay, anti-fascist collectives and basically
anyone that those specific officers considered subversive. And everyone forgets that apartheid
was fully backed by the British government and was almost entirely our fault.
Anyway, the SDS grew entirely unchecked.
By 1985, concerns were growing in Parliament.
One MP who learned of the existence of the SDS described it in the House of Commons
as having a sinister reputation of force which persecutes harmless citizens for political reasons,
acts in nefarious ways to assist the security services, is accountable to no one and represents a threat to civil liberties. And that was 1985.
The SDS continued until 2008.
Yeah, I think one of the interesting things about this is,
we'll get into talk about whether they were successful or not
and what they were trying to do,
but it's that use of the fear and the paranoia of like sedition happening that then the government uses or the police force uses in this case to undermine ordinary people's civil liberties.
And it's where do you draw the line on that?
A long fucking way away from what was going on here, probably.
So before we hear about the people affected, let's quickly talk about what exactly
the Met had hoped to gain from this unit, from the SDS. Because each officer is estimated to
have cost the taxpayer £250,000 in setting up their identities and maintaining their fake lives.
So what grand plans was this operation trying to foil? Well, you'll probably be aware
of the kind of demonstrations that progressive activists tend to carry out. And you'll likely
already have an opinion on whether blocking roads, chaining us off to a plane or throwing
soup at the Mona Lisa has any real benefit. And we've talked about it a lot before.
We're not here to debate that in detail today no i'm
not against climate protest i'm against them because they're fucking annoying they are fucking
annoying and i'm also like look i'm not a climate denier as if i have to state this but i'm also
like a bunch of people that are just panicking about it aren't the best people in the right
place to demand policy change and then yeah you yeah, you can say, oh, look, now environmental issues are being discussed at
the highest levels because of those kind of protests.
But I'm like, but is it just the government being like, well, a lot of people seem upset
about this, so let's do some random things that don't actually help.
Anyway, that's not what we're here to talk about.
I don't think throwing soup at anything is going to help.
But let's get to the point of today's particular episode.
Because whatever your view, these guys are not ISIS.
There have been large-scale protest demonstrations over the years that have included things like trying to break into coal power stations, for example, and shut them down for the afternoon.
Even here, some people will say, obviously, the grid is so efficient that it wouldn't produce any noticeable disruption to people's homes but obviously that is quite dangerous that a group of people would just
be trying to go in and shut down power stations though on the whole it's just a smorgasbord of
the people they were going after they weren't specifically just targeting people that had
large-scale operations and as we'll go on to see the entire SDS unit was so fucking inefficient
who they were going after.
So these quote-unquote subversive groups might infiltrate places they're not supposed to be or scale buildings they aren't allowed on to make speeches or hang banners.
During apartheid, protesters jumped the barriers during sports games when South Africa were playing
and even superglued hotel doors shut to keep South African players from the pitch.
Animal rights campaigners back in the 70s were known to break into animal testing labs
to try and free the captive animals.
So a lot of it amounts to civil disobedience.
And some of it does break the law.
And when that's the case, you should expect the police to shut these demonstrations down.
But, like we said, these people weren't plotting wide-scale
destruction in large part there was no violence no harm no theft no fraud and barely a blip of
inconvenience to the average person this is the thing the sds had like no ability seemingly now
in retrospect looking back at what they did now that it's become public to identify like who was
an actual threat and who was worth pursuing these kind of things against people are trying to break into a fucking power station yes please stop them but
someone who's like hanging banners and doing whatever this was such a gross overreaction
and the amount it cost the taxpayer and the ethics and the boundaries it crossed is mind-blowing
yet the sds invested millions of pounds of public money
over decades and decades to curtail these activists.
When we probably should have been trying to prop up the NHS.
So, as we tell you the following stories,
keep all of that in your pretty brain hole
and ask yourself,
in what way was it worth all this?
Firstly, let's meet Andrea, not her real name.
Andrea had a close circle of politically active friends in London, socialists and trade unionists,
some of whom were involved in the Socialist Party. Andrea herself had been out of any kind of activism in a real sense for a few years, but she'd still go along to
protest to make her voice heard for causes she believed in. So that's the key thing that I just
want everybody to remember. Andrea is not like some hardcore activist. She's just like a person
who goes to the occasional rally every now and then. She's just an ordinary person. So at one
of these rallies, Andrea met a man named Carlo Neri
at a Stop the War demonstration in 2001.
Carlo was an official steward, and the two got talking.
He was new to the movement, but really keen,
and he started coming along to meetings and social events with Andrea.
Carlo was disarmingly straightforward, down-to-earth, inquisitive,
and interested in others,
and quickly gained the trust of the group.
Carlo was also, very handily, a locksmith,
and so had lots to offer in terms of improving the group's security.
It also meant that the group all gave him access to their flats.
Crucially, and unlike everyone else in the London-based group,
Carlo could also drive
and he'd take the group to and from protests and gatherings across the country
and carlo made it clear that he was also unhappily single and the group started to wonder about
whether they could set him up on dates with their friends but then in late 2002 andrea and carlo
started seeing each other they moved in together within a few
weeks red flag and soon they were inseparable have you heard we can probably take this out
because i'll probably get told off saying it um have you heard the phrase uh hobosexual
hobosexual oh my lord no tell me um he's actually attracted to hobos. No. Someone who sleeps with someone so they have somewhere to sleep.
Keep it in.
Oh, my Lord.
Anyway, the pair of them would spend long evenings
talking late into the night about their likes, their dislikes,
life stories, hopes, fears,
the gradual softening of your guard
that marks the start of any new relationship.
Carla was affectionate and warm, and he told Andrea that he loved her every single day.
Over time, Andrea grew sure that she had found her life partner.
Carlo said that he had a son down in Cornwall and that she'd meet him soon.
Andrea took Carlo to Scotland to introduce him to her family
and a few months later, he joined them on a family holiday to Whitby.
Carlo was a hit.
And then, at a New Year's Eve party, Carlo got down on one knee.
In every way possible, he was Andrea's attentive, loving fiancé.
Except, he wasn't.
Carlo Neri was actually Carlo Soracci,
an undercover police officer reporting every detail back to Scotland Yard.
And his real wife and son lived less than ten minutes away
from the flat he shared with his fiancée, Andrea.
That is cutting it pretty close.
It's bonkers.
They've probably been in the queue at Tesco together.
It's totally's bonkers they've probably been in the queue at tesco together it's totally fucking bonkers like i mean it's it's the whole grooming process right it's not
like he just pops in and he's like oh i'm just gonna sleep with these people and like you know
see what information i can get out of them because they're vulnerable i can break into their flats
because i'm the group locksmith he's like in a relationship with her, going on family holidays, etc, etc.
You know, it just gets worse and worse.
Like Carlo even put up photographs of his real son and real members of his family in the flat that he shared with Andrea. And whenever Andrea raised the point that I haven't met your kid or
like anyone in your family, there was always a series of reasons that Carlo would give her as
to why. He would say that most of them were in Italy. He said that those who were in the UK were
quote-unquote troubled and it was too complicated to go and visit. Then one day Carlo told Andrea
that he'd got a new job, working for an import-export
company bringing Italian food to the UK. So, Carlo started to disappear for four or five nights
every week, and return with samples of food and wine that he was supposedly importing.
Which, by the way, he was actually just picking up from an Italian deli around the corner,
which was owned by his real-life sister. And every other weekend, Carlo would
also go off to Cornwall to visit his son. But remember, he's not actually in Cornwall because
Carlo's son and his wife actually just live down the road. But like this, Andrea and Carlo
continued their relationship, with Carlo being absent almost as much time as he was home.
To make up for his busy work schedule,
Carlo even booked a surprise trip to Venice with Andrea for the end of the year.
But then, around Christmas 2003, after he had proposed,
Carlo said that he'd learned some terrible news.
While in Italy visiting family,
he'd learned something awful from a family relative.
Carlo said that this family member had been sexually abused by his father, and he gave Andrea a long emotional
account, including graphic details of the abuse. To Andrea, it seemed like Carlo was having a
breakdown. He went missing for weeks at a time and even threatened suicide. Four months later, he moved out and took all of his stuff with him.
In November 2004, two years after they met,
he sent Andrea an email saying that he was breaking all contact.
And then he disappeared without a trace.
Two years and a proposal later.
And a flat.
And a flat.
Fuck.
And a family holiday to Whitby.
It's so much.
It's so much.
Now, obviously, what had really happened, of course,
was that the Met had decided that it was done with that particular group
and wanted to close the operation.
So Carlo went back to his regular life just down
the road. How did she not bump into him? That's what I can't get my head. I mean, there's lots
of things I can't get my head on. But like, surely, I don't know, that has to be some sort of safeguarding
concern for the police. Honestly, I have zero idea. And Andrea wouldn't learn the truth about what had really happened with her
one-time fiancé for 15 years. The truth was that the entire time they were together, including all
the times they'd slept together over those two years, Carlo had been on the job. He was reporting
back to the police about Andrea's friends and family and lying through his teeth. And remember,
again, Andrea
wasn't even a dedicated member of any particular activist group. She just went along to the
occasional rally. And as for Carlo's real wife, we know that she did know that Carlo was a police
officer. But we couldn't really find out any more than that, since this story did eventually go
public, which we'll get into at the end,
we assume that she does know by now where Carlo really was during those two years.
But chances are at the time she probably had no idea that Carlo was orchestrating a full-blown relationship with another woman just down the road.
Around about the same time in Nottingham in 2001, a man walked into the Sumac Centre in Nottingham, lovely hub, and introduced himself as Mark Stone.
Very nice plant as well. Very nice tree.
Is it?
It's a very nice tree. The people across the road and like down a couple have this huge tree outside there in their front garden.
And I was like, it's so beautiful. Like leaves are bright red. It's got these weird like nodules on it turns out it's sumac oh there you go i found when i first moved into my flat found this lebanese restaurant and
it was the best food i've ever had in my life oh no and i can't remember which one it is oh no
so i trawl through deliveroo all the time trying to find it and I just can't remember. That is devastating.
I think about it way too much.
That is really, really upsetting.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
It's just one of those ones you like order offhand and then you're like,
oh my God, this is amazing.
I know.
I ordered the other day from House of Momo and I don't remember if I ordered the momos
in curry or chili.
One of them was really good.
One of them was really bad. one of them was really bad,
and now I'm too scared to order again because I don't want the bad one.
And I have no idea.
And also, that's the sumac tree.
Oh.
Very nice.
Nice.
So there you go.
The sumac centre was a community-run space
where like-minded people would meet and discuss sustainability,
DIY action, and environmental activism.
And when Mark Stone said he was new in town and wanted in,
they were more than happy to welcome him.
Firstly, he really looked the part.
He had long hair tied up in a ponytail,
a load of shit tattoos, plenty of piercings and a lazy eye,
and a fondness for both wraparound Matrix-style sunglasses
and black fedoras.
And look, if you do look at a picture of Mark Stone. I'm looking right
now. He does not look like a police officer. No. He looks like somebody who's hanging out at the
supermarket centre and going to help you with some DIY action, whatever that means. So Mark Stone
said that he'd recently moved to Nottingham from London after a messy breakup. He said he wanted
an escape and since he remembered a great school trip to the peaks,
he chose Nottingham to set up a new life.
He said he was interested in making the world a better place,
and that he didn't have many friends up there,
and he was interested in joining the community centre
to, well, build a new community for himself.
At the Sumac Centre, Eleanor Fairtrader
was one of the first people that he met.
It's quite a good name for an environmental activist, isn't it?
And Ms Fairtrader remembers that they weren't particularly selective
about who they let into the Sumac Centre back then.
They'd heard of police keeping tabs on activist groups,
but assumed that this was probably nothing more than a few phone taps
or cops attending meetings here and there.
And that would probably be the extent of it so mostly if somebody said that they wanted to pitch in people at the sumac center took them at their word and i think it's probably because
if you were actually doing something nefarious you're going to be paranoid so some of these
groups were very paranoid because they were probably like we're going to do something dodgy
we're scared the police are on to us if you're not doing anything dodgy like what was going on at the sumac center you're
not gonna think the police are gonna bother spending money and sending an undercover cop
into your midst mark strong walked into the sumac center that day wearing a modified casio
g-shock watch do you remember those crushingly 2000s oh my god what watch did you have i had a baby g
no i didn't actually no i didn't much to my chagrin have a baby g i had a pretend one
i had a knockoff one oh no i had a casio like gold like one of those
and i couldn't figure out how to not get it to beep at 59 minutes past every hour
and i eventually just threw it away because i couldn't figure it out
so fashionable this watch may have been but it was also adapted to let him record
conversations just like james bond that's definitely what mark stone thinks that he is yes 100 the spy that fucking sumac'd me
that's what he thinks he is and it's worth mentioning that the sweet gadgets that mark
strong was allowed to have cost the taxpayer thousands somehow putting a microphone into a Casio cost £7,000.
These people had no sense of proportion whatsoever.
£7,000 of taxpayers' money to put a little microphone in a Casio G-Shock.
Get in the fucking bin.
This is outrageous.
To spy on the people at the bloody Sumac Centre. Mark Strong was, in fact, Mark Kennedy,
who over the next decade would go deeper
than perhaps any other SDS officer before or since.
He was the son of a policeman who'd left school at 16
and eventually, directionless, decided to join the family business.
He got married, moved to the suburbs and had two kids.
But he was still a bit of a free spirit.
He spent his spare time shooting around on his motorbike
and seeking thrills on dangerous rock climbing expeditions.
And he sought out challenges within the police too
and soon joined an undercover unit infiltrating drug gangs.
He once spent weeks sat in a pub every day, dressed as a labourer
before buying coke in the toilets and then returning with a dozen police and sniffer dogs.
What an arc. 13 people were arrested for possession, including the suspected dealer,
an 18-year-old barman who got five years in jail. Mark Kennedy spent four years buying drugs and
jailing small-time dealers before he was moved on to Operation Pegasus. Now here's where it gets a
little bit confusing. Operation Pegasus was run by the National Public Order Intelligence Unit,
or NPOIU. Essentially, the NPOIU is run by a private company which is connected to police intelligence.
So basically, it's the SDS, but with even less accountability because it's a private company.
And most of its work was aimed at activists working on social justice, anti-racist and
environmental campaigns. For this particular mission, there was no named target and no deadline.
Mark Kennedy was just to infiltrate the Sumac Centre and see what he could find out with his £7,000 watch.
So Mark ingratiated himself in the community quickly, taking shifts behind the bar, doing bits of building work, and just hanging around and chatting with people. He would employ a tactic the police called mirroring, which involves repeating back what
people say to you and saying things that you basically think that they want to hear.
Also, what therapists will do, and also quite a good thing to make people like you is to do the
same things they do action-wise, so take a drink when they take a drink.
And, you know look
i'm not gonna diagnose mark kennedy but it does seem like a lot of the men who were drawn into
this sds already we know like typically people drawn into like roles of authority obviously
they're the people with the mindset of like protector who want to do good things and then
you have that subset of people who are going in because they want authority they want power
then narrow that down even further into the kind of people that were attracted into roles in the SDS and undercover
in general you've got to need that high rush of like sensation and thrill seeking which we
absolutely see in Mark Kennedy's past and I think there is that slight psychopathic
tinge to what's going on like I feel like it's people who are bored easily, people
who want that extreme thrill from life, and they found a perfect place for it. It's very difficult.
And that mirroring thing fits alongside that because it is something you see people with
those kind of personality disorders sort of teaching themselves to do, which is like mimic
behavior from other people because they don't actually know how to empathize on that level.
But anyway,
he is very, very successful at working himself into this group. And so he made friends quickly and started going out climbing with some of them. He'd also DJ at parties and even got the cool
nickname Flash because he'd always buy people drinks and offer to pay for stuff. And he had
all this money because he said that his job was pretty specialized involving
his climbing skills and so he was paid pretty well what are you a cave diver i mean he's he's a
fucking cop who probably gets paid hazard pay and has got a seven thousand pound watch on his wrist
i wonder whether you get like pocket money oh i bet i bet. Buying tree hugger's drinks. Look at the money they're pissing away.
In general.
So yeah, within a few months, Flash started dating a woman within the Sumac Centre called Kate.
They met each other at a public meeting in Nottingham and hit it off.
Mark told Kate that he'd lived in the same neighbourhood as her in London
and that their families supported the same football team.
Like her, he was into country music and that their families supported the same football team.
Like her, he was into country music and loved the trailer lifestyle. Classic mirroring. And Kate thought that she had found someone really special. They moved in together and started travelling
across the country to campaign meetings and protests. But, surprise surprise, Mark's mythical
climbing job required him to shoot off to London where there are famously lots of mountains
and he went there all the time. So he was actually only around Kate for a few days at any one time
and since he and Kate were in an open relationship he would regularly bring girls back to the house
and sleep with them when she was away. Which by the way has got absolutely nothing to do
with anything and remember he's got a fucking wife and kids in the
suburbs and what's even more creepy is that we did read that this bed that he had because he's
obviously also mr diy was made out of like old bits of scaffolding oh for god's sake and i'm
just like i can't even visualize what that means like how do you build a bed out of scaffolding
but apparently that's where he brought all these girls back to have sex with him i mean i would be lying if i said i hadn't had sex on the beds made of like pallets yeah sure
bricks yeah this was a four poster bed made out of scaffolding romantic no even i have not done that
he stayed with kate for two years and they split, he started sleeping with their housemate. Classic move, Eleanor.
It's Eleanor Fairtrade-er.
Oh.
I know.
It's all full circle.
And then after he was done with her, he spent a year in a relationship with an American woman called Sarah.
Then he had an eight-month relationship with a woman called Naomi.
They went travelling together, and he even went with her to her brother's wedding.
God, you'd just be so embarrassed, wouldn't you? I don't think i'd ever go over it and maybe they didn't mark told all of these women
that he loved them and needless to say he had regular sex with all of them what exactly he was
gaining intelligence wise from having all of these various relationships with these women
is beyond anybody all the while he was recording conversations,
stealing away to scribble down notes and feeding everything back to his contact at the Met.
Finally he got into a relationship with another activist called Lisa
and this one was his longest yet. Mark and Lisa were together for six years. Six years!
Six years! I like I literally feel so unwell.
That is so much time.
That's fucking hell.
I mean, I know kids that are six.
They can count and read books.
That's so much.
So yeah, everybody just let that sink in.
And before we carry on, I think it's high time that we look at the ethics and rules That's so much. So yeah, everybody just let that sink in.
And before we carry on, I think it's high time that we look at the ethics and rules around officers sleeping with people while undercover.
Well, the modern guidelines of the police state that, quote,
it is never acceptable for a UCO, so undercover officer,
to have an intimate sexual relationship with those they are deployed
to infiltrate and target or encounter during their deployment. Having an intimate sexual
relationship must not be used as a tactic by a UCO. Which sounds good. But A, there's no specific
sanction against doing it. It doesn't quite say that relationships are forbidden. And B, that guideline
was only added in 2016. Before that, it seems that genuinely anything went. There was absolutely no
mention of intimate or sexual relationships in the police's code of conduct before 2016.
In the BBC series that we mentioned earlier, the ex-undercover cop
told a story that says it all. Once while working on a drugs case, he was propositioned for sex by
a vulnerable drug addict, who was in an abusive relationship with the kingpin, and when he told
the higher-ups about this, they basically told him that she was a looker and he should go for it.
It would only help the case, after all.
So, as well as being beholden to absolutely no one,
the SDS also clearly had a fuck it, might as well get my end away attitude to the whole thing.
And I think what's really, really, really key to mention here,
based on this story we've just heard,
is that it doesn't seem it was just like siloed,
like a siloed situation to individual wrong-uns
who happen to be in this unit,
who were hiding it from their superiors.
It seems to be a mentality that came all the way from the top.
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The other more minor but still relevant ethical question
is to do with being an agent, agent, agent provocateur.
No, we're not talking about his 90.
Being an agent provocateur is essentially
when an undercover agent encourages people to commit crimes
that they wouldn't have otherwise committed,
also known as entrapment.
And it's a big ethical no-no in most intelligence groups.
But police officer Mark Kennedy posing as activist Mark Strong did come pretty close.
Whilst he was shagging his way all around Nottingham, he was also playing the part of
a committed activist, with everything he had. He came along to meetings and demonstrations,
but he also got his hands dirty.
He went to protests in Ireland, Iceland, Scotland and Berlin.
And when he was abroad, he'd share techniques for direct action with people that he met.
And he even helped organise some of their demonstrations.
So now he's an international spy for the London police force.
And again, like coming back to the psychological profile of these guys,
whether it's Carlo or whether it's Mark, two people that we've obviously looked at in this episode.
Again, I think that almost the risk of getting caught is quite exciting to them.
You know, you said like his wife, Carlo's wife was like living 10 miles down the road.
Like, did that not scare him?
I think it was part of the thrill for these guys.
And this like slipping off to Berlin and Iceland and living this sexy life like as a spy as far as they're concerned. Yeah. It just adds to the subterfuge. It just adds to the glamour of it for them. I'm certain. And probably
for the same reasons Mark offered his services as a driver and he introduced new ideas for places
he could check out or stuff that he could pick up for all the other activists.
He climbed trees and buildings to hang banners bearing environmental slogans.
He joined the front row and pushed through police lines.
He helped organise road blockades and protest villages, including the one at the G8 in Glasgow.
And once, at a meeting, he even suggested that they try burning a building down.
He suggests it!
But everyone else is like, shut up, Mark.
But this is what I mean.
He can't, like, stop himself,
even when he's in the group of playing that character so deeply
that he becomes the subversive.
And he is fully egging them on to take things to the next level,
to the next level, to the next level.
Because he's got probably the most extreme personality of anyone at the Sumac Centre.
And that brings us on to the D-lock.
One of the most famous photos of Mark Strong in character is of him with a D-lock around his neck locked to a fence his outside of the front of a power station
with several protesters blocking the main entrance mark was arrested and subsequently released and he
would have just loved that the idea that he gets to be arrested he looks like the big tough guy
in front of all of his new mates in this activist group but then as soon as he's behind closed doors he's like listen up fellas yeah i'm one of you yeah yeah i'm undercover like he is just living his best
fucking life so once he was released and back with the group he came back and cut a hole through the
fence with some of the other protesters once they got inside they were almost immediately set upon
by police.
Mark jumped to a few of the protesters' defence, again playing the hero.
And he was actually badly beaten by the officers.
They beat him with batons and repeatedly stamped on his back.
He ended up with a broken finger, a prolapsed disc and a huge gash on his head.
But how did the police know that the protesters would be there?
Well, because Mark had told them.
And you might, at this point, be thinking,
OK, great, that's why he's there.
He's fed information back to the police and they've used it to stop an illegal invasion on a working power station,
which sounds like effective policing.
But, again, think of the women's lives thrown under the bus
and the emotional manipulation of their most
private lives for years why was that necessary to achieve such menial ends really this is what i
mean it's like he could have just been a member of the group without sleeping with any of those
women and manipulating them into relationships to get the same amount of information like why does
he need to become like an intimate
partner to somebody at the sumac center or somebody within these activist groups like he was already
proving himself to be useful he could drive he had a truck he had all that money he has the casio
like he has enough anyway to become an indispensable member of the group why the extra step of the sexual relationships that really feels like
just getting your end away while you're on the job doesn't it like that's the worst bit and also
another thing to make clear about mark strong's situation in particular coming back to whether
he's the one leading the group or not because with him saying they're gonna break into the
the power plant you need to
come arrest them we don't know whether he was the one that suggested that idea anyway because when
he got arrested he could tell the police like come back later i'm one of you they're gonna break in
and then he goes back to the group and he's like let's break in let's cut a hole in the fence and
go in knowing that they're all gonna get arrested because that is entrapment if it was his idea
it's all very confusing.
Whilst he recovered from having the ship beat out of him,
Kennedy was temporarily suspended from active service.
He was supposed to suspend contact with all of his activist friends.
But he did not.
Over the years, the group's plans, along with Mark, grew more dramatic.
They planned to stop a coal train on its way to a power station and occupy it as long as possible. They drew up plans to break into a coal power
station and force a shutdown. And this is what I mean. Look, you can think what you want about
people throwing up like banners about like, you know, eco issues, but breaking into fucking power
stations, this is when you're getting into eco-terrorism. But again, to what extent Mark was leading this, we don't know. Mark also occupied a school with other activists for
weeks, which had closed for the Easter holidays and served as a command centre for the demonstration.
And again, depending on Mark's level of involvement, it all definitely sounds a bit
agent provocatory. But nothing mentioned above was thought to overstep his brief as an undercover
agent for the SDS. Because he was still, as far as they could tell, stopping protests.
And I think an interesting point to raise there is like, if he has information about the protest,
even if he's not the one like leading the charge, what do the police do? Do they let it happen so
that they can arrest people? Or do they stop it, shut it down and then potentially, you know, make the group think that there is a mole inside?
Murky business.
Now, the school, for example, was invaded one night, close to their planned demonstration.
Hundreds of police kicked down the doors, burst in and arrested 114 people, including Mark Strong. When he learned from an activist friend
that his room had been raided as part of the
investigation, Mark
freaked out.
A few days later they had a party,
which they called the 69ers
Party.
Because everyone born in
1969 was turning 40.
Including Mark.
And at this party, Mark played guitar in a covers band that they called the 69ers in Genius.
And they even made matching t-shirts with a picture of a 69ing couple on them.
And as if that wasn't insufferable enough, Mark even read out his own political performance poetry.
Oh my god, this sounds like hell.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But then, later on that evening, Mark got quite upset, seemingly out of nowhere.
Maybe nobody liked his performance poetry.
Or his black fedora.
And word quickly spread throughout the 69ers that Mark had had a breakdown.
He became erratic, angry and very sensitive.
Even Lisa, who had been in a relationship with him for five and a half years by now,
had never seen him like this.
And then one day, he announced that he had to go to America
to stay with his brother for three months.
It would be the last time most of them would ever see him
until he appeared on newspaper front pages,
clean-shaven and in uniform,
exposed as a spy.
I mean, not to put too fine a point on it,
but he obviously has the breakdown because they're like,
nah, we're done, you're out of there, we're pulling you.
And he's like, I fucking love it here.
So, yes, after all this happens, after he left the group, he still kept in touch with Lisa.
He moved back to the UK into a canal boat and they struck up their relationship again.
But he'd still proposition other women into threesomes while Lisa was present.
Then one day he randomly says that they should go away together,
escape to Europe.
So they went to Italy and drove around the mountains in a van.
One day, Mark went off on a solo bike ride
and Lisa went into the van's glove box to look for her sunglasses.
In there, she found a passport under the name Mark Kennedy.
She said maybe, just maybe, he changed his name.
But then she noticed something else.
Under dependence, it said two.
Then Lisa opened up Mark's phone
and found message after message from two children
calling him Dad.
I mean, it's been six years.
How?
Obviously, I'm not advocating this.
How have you not looked at his phone in six and a half years?
Maybe he's got an Android and she doesn't know how to use it.
Because that's my problem.
Honestly, it is just the worst shit.
And poor old Lisa said that in that moment, the bottom fell out of her world.
Three agonising days after she found the passport, Lisa confronted Mark.
He cried in her arms for hours and gave her a new story.
He said he'd fallen in with some dodgy people and had ended up smuggling drugs
and he had to change his name.
And it was quite the tale,
but a lot of it didn't quite add up.
Had he not thought about this eventuality?
Like, did he not think,
my game plan is...
It's six years in.
I think he's sloppy.
He's getting sloppy now.
And yes, but also your point stands.
If you've had six years, why don't you have a better story?
Back at home, a friend was doing one of those Ancestry.com type things
and Lisa asked him to look up the name Mark Kennedy.
And she found him.
And she also found the birth certificates for his two children.
And on them, under father's occupation,
there it was.
Oh, my lord.
The long arm of the law.
After yet more sleuthing,
Lisa learned about Mark's wife, too,
who was in Ireland.
By this point, Lisa and Mark had been in a relationship together
for six and a half years,
and everything was about to turn completely upside down.
Lisa's discovery spread through the activist community, and especially to all the women that Mark had been sleeping with during that time.
He'd been to countless parties, weddings, funerals, holidays, not to mention protests, sit-ins and meetings with all these people for ten years.
And every part of that person had been fabricated to keep tabs on those supposed friends.
Imagine finding out someone you have known for a decade was just a spy.
So an article went up on the website Indymedia, revealing Mark as having
been an undercover officer for almost 10 years. And soon enough, it reached the desk of journalist
Rob Evans, who wrote the fascinating book, Undercover, the true story of Britain's secret
police. Now this was dicey legal territory. So Rob took months, speaking to people across the country,
to try and verify this story.
But it gathered pace around him.
The story was starting to hear headlines.
At first, the police insisted that Mark Kennedy had gone rogue,
that everyone at Scotland Yard was as shocked as the public were,
and totally denounced him.
Mark Kennedy even hired a publicist
to defend him. And guess who that was? It was, of course, one Max Clifford. Thunderclap.
Mark Kennedy told the press that this was all really hard on him as well.
He said, I spent the years with a close-knit group of people, many of which became very good friends.
I was in a position that was probably extremely rare
where I was on the fence and I saw both sides
and I was understanding of the issues which people wanted to protest about.
And it does appear that Mark was genuinely conflicted
about the friendships that he betrayed.
And this is in no way to defend him in the SDS
but it is interesting to think about just how much of this was actually a lie.
I don't see how you can be with someone for six and a half years and have no feelings for them
yeah it's complicated because yeah afterwards he is like this was really hard on me I was you know
doing a job and I formed these relationships with these people and depending on that person I could
believe that but I also think when he looks sad about it all part of me is just like
it's sad because it all imploded and he was having a fucking great time living the life of a police
officer because he's untouchable imagine imagine carte blanche where you're literally like part of
this activist group where you can rile a bunch of people up get them to do batshit crazy things have
really exciting rallies get arrested and then just be like, sorry, boys, I'm out of here. I'm back to fucking these bitches and doing whatever I want. Like,
I think if you were a kind of person who was affected by this, I would feel sorry for you.
And I would have empathy because it is a tricky job if this was your job. I don't feel sorry for
Mark Kennedy because I think he fucking loved it. And yes, some people could not do this for
six and a half years without forming some attachment.
And I'm not saying he didn't, but he was also just fucking about.
Yeah.
Mark claims that he lived two lives, compartmentalised entirely, and that it tore him in two.
Another shocking revelation that came out of these investigations was that at the time of the 69ers party, when Mark went off the rails,
he'd actually left the police.
Yep.
Mark Kennedy had been withdrawn from active service.
His ID documents were taken back,
and that's why his passport said Mark Kennedy
when he went to Italy with Lisa.
He organised that trip with her after his mission
was over. Yep. Yep. And he's got a wife that lives in Ireland and two children. Yes. So
forgive me if I don't feel terribly sorry for you, Mark, and how it was all tearing
you apart. As the word spread about Mark, more men were uncovered, including Carlo, who we told you about earlier.
His girlfriend of two years, or should I say fiancée, Andrea, said that she had been the victim of a state-sponsored crime,
subject to, quote, abusive, cold-hearted psychological torture.
She and seven other women were put in touch with lawyer Harriet Wistrich, who tried to make sense of this legal mess.
Because how, if at all, could they hold the police accountable?
There was clearly a pattern in the way they had infiltrated groups
and used women for sex to gain trust and get closer to the action.
What was clear from the off was that this was not a rogue agent situation.
These were systematic methods used time and time again. Mostly the women were just after answers.
Why had they been targeted? And how much of their intimate moments had been shared?
Wistrick decided that bringing a civil action case for damages was the best route.
It was that or a public inquiry, which would be entirely out of their hands. So to prove that the
women had suffered real measurable damage, she contacted psychologists with expertise in trauma
and sexual violation. But even so, the damage done didn't fit neatly into any recognised diagnoses.
Because it's pretty unusual.
And maybe that's why, despite pretty strong media coverage at the time,
this isn't really talked about that much.
It's also ethically murky, it's hard to know exactly where the line is,
and maybe, when compared to more obvious crimes and failure by police,
it gets passed off as a strange kink in the justice system.
Again, when the civil proceeding was brought,
the police did everything in their power to squash it.
They argued that since it concerned undercover operations,
it should be investigated behind closed doors.
So the women upped the public pressure.
They made their identities public and appeared in The Guardian and on Radio 4.
The eight women called a press conference
and detailed their experiences with the officers that had infiltrated their lives.
And then the police had no choice.
The Met settled their claims for damages
and Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt issued a full apology.
He called the long-term intimate sexual relationships conducted while undercover by officers abusive, deceitful,
manipulative and wrong. He admitted that these were a violation of human rights, an abuse of power
and the cause of significant trauma. He added, there appears to millions in compensation to at least 12 women.
They also found that at least 50 protesters had been wrongfully convicted or prosecuted,
all because evidence concerning undercover police officers had been buried at the time.
In 2020, then Home Secretary Theresa May opened a public inquiry.
Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt said in a statement to the BBC
that it no longer carries out
He added that all deployments are now rigorously assessed
for necessity and proportionality
and governed by a strict legal framework
that is subject to independent oversight.
Bollocks.
We also know that at least 20 officers deceived multiple women into intimate sexual relationships in the course of their service with the SDS.
And we also know that at least three children were fathered whilst these officers were undercover.
Which brings us back to the man at the start of this story, Bob Lambert, who was known to infiltrating a left-wing group, and given
the identity of a dead seven-year-old boy who died of a heart defect in 1959. Lambert
quickly developed a romantic relationship to gain credibility. He met a 22-year-old
animal rights activist, who we know as Jackie, and they had a baby boy. He was known to Jackie
and her friends as Bob Robinson,
a long-haired, committed left-wing activist who loved animal rights and the environment,
and having a terrible name.
And by 1988, when his son was just two years old,
Lambert disappeared without a trace.
But then, 24 years later,
as we told you at the top of the show,
Jackie saw his picture in the newspaper,
revealing that he had been an undercover officer with a wife and children the whole time.
In fact, she later learned that Lambert's two sons died from a rare genetic condition,
one which her son was therefore also at risk of.
The news broke Jackie. She received years of
psychiatric treatment and even contemplated suicide. Her son has said that the Met resisted
the story with everything they had. He said in an interview, quote, it feels as though they are not
genuinely wanting to put a wrong right. They were quite happy to leave all this in the past and not let anyone know the truth.
And as for Jackie herself,
well, she's pointed out,
quote,
they won't admit that they use sex
as a way to gather information and intelligence,
but it all seems to have happened one way.
Undercover male officers and female activists.
The Met eventually paid
£425,000 worth of damages to Jackie.
But the damage was done.
And Bob's son still wrestles with his existence constantly.
When Assistant Commissioner Helena Ball wrote him a personal apology, he had mixed feelings.
She said that the operation had been based on a fundamental deceit and admitted
that it was quote-unquote upsetting. Upsetting! Oh my god. But Jackie's son told Channel 4 what
she was apologising for was that he was conceived in the first place. And that's a confusion that
he still has to live with. He's now remarkably building a relationship with his father
and describes it as positive.
He says he's pleased to finally have one
and would have forgiven Bob at any stage.
He just wishes that he'd had a father growing up.
The Met has yet to reveal a single document
pertaining to Bob Lambert's investigations while with the SDS.
Yep, so basically, lives wrecked, lines crossed, civil liberties destroyed,
trust from the police to the public destroyed,
women's intimate most moments shared with the police for absolutely no reason,
abuse, et cetera, of power, as we've talked about,
and all for basically nothing.
And look, again, I can bear the point that people would be like, but they didn't know they weren't going to get anything out of it. They could have and it would have justified it possibly. But the point again stands with me of why the intimate sexual relationships. If you're putting somebody undercover for 10 years, they're going to get the trust of the group anyway. Why did they need to be sleeping with the women in the group and destroy their lives? Father children destroy the lives of those children in order to achieve the same goal.
Well, they just don't.
No, they don't.
That's exactly it.
They just do not.
They don't.
So yeah, a really, really shocking story that, like we said at the start, absolutely rocked this country when it was revealed.
Because yeah, it had been going on for such a bloody long time in total secrecy so that is the undercover police scandal and we hope you learned something and are not
infinitely suspicious of every single person you meet in case they're an undercover police officer
it just makes me sad it is sad just having to question your whole existence yeah it is truly shocking. And again, not the act of rogue agents.
It was sanctioned.
So that's the really, really troubling part.
But yeah, that's it, guys.
We hope you enjoyed it.
A little bit different this week.
And we will see you next time for something else.
Bye.
ACAB, but also your dad.
Pew pew.
They say Hollywood is where dreams are made.
A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune,
and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, there were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen
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Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America.
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