One of the British State’s Deepest Secrets

Mark Jefferies writes:

They thought they had met the man of their dreams, someone to spend the rest of their lives with.

But in reality these men were playing a role, faking relationships and in one case even having a child with a woman as part of their 'job' to spy on campaigners and activists. The full inside story of a secret unit of undercover police, paid to spy on ordinary members of the public, will now be laid bare in a shocking TV documentary series.

ITV have joined forces with five women to tell the extraordinary story of their intimate relationships with police officers who they had no idea were deployed in covert operations. In total more than 60 women were deceived into deeply intimate relationships with officers, with new women still finding out in recent months about this cover up for decades.

The women who were deceived and blew the lid off the scandal will speak on camera collectively for the first time in The Undercover Police Scandal about how they turned detective to uncover one of the state's biggest secrets.

They lived together for five years and he claimed to be Mark Cassidy who worked as a joiner One woman identified as Lisa who had a long term relationship with an undercover policeman says: "They underestimated our intelligence. The police never in a million years imagined that we would all be in a room together, comparing notes."

Helen says: "They just never imagined that we would be capable of tracking down and finding out who they really were. When we started, each of us were fighting on our own and we spoke to a few people and quite often got the reaction 'you're being paranoid'. It was only really when we came together that we could see the patterns emerge. This wasn't an accident or a rogue officer which is how they tried to portray it at the start. This is institutional sexism being handed from officer to officer, how to deceive women into relationships and use them for cover or for sex.

"When we started there were eight of us who had relationships between us with five different officers over 25 years and that showed the systematic nature of it. Through the public inquiry we know there are at least 60 women who have been deceived and we also don't have all the names of the officers yet. So we are quite sure there are a lot more. It is a serious problem that needs tackling. We hope this documentary will raise the profile of the issue." 

Another victim at the hands of the police called Alison adds: "We hope that this contributes to a shift in the culture, you know, a shift away from misogyny and sexism that's been institutionalised in the police, and that we hope it makes some change, because that is why we got involved in this in the first place."

In response to the programme, Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jon Savell has now admitted to ITV in a statement that the relationships were "abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong". In a full statement he said: "It would be inappropriate to comment on some of the issues raised as there is evidence yet to be heard by the Undercover Policing Inquiry with which we are fully cooperating.

"However, I'd like to apologise unreservedly for the significant harm and distress caused to the women who were deceived into sexual relationships by undercover officers. These were abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong. The Met failed to make clear to undercover officers and their managers in the 1980s that such relationships were unacceptable or provide training and guidance.

"Undercover policing has undergone significant reform since this happened and today is underpinned by strong governance and oversight with clear ethical guidelines and a legislative framework."

But Naomi, who features on the programme after being deceived herself during an eight month relationship, responded by saying: "The apology is not worth the screen it's printed on, it is hollow and empty. If they are actually sorry they would actually do something to change it and let us know what happened.

"The only reason this is out there is because the women involved found them out and this has been exposed. It was an entire institution that put a police officer in my bed in order to spy on me and all my friends and family." The work of the women who turned detectives ultimately led to an almost decade-long £88 million public inquiry which is still ongoing.

Director Lucy Wilcox was keen to make sure the women and their injustice is heard on a wider scale. She said: "What ITV does really well is tell the story. The audience does care once they understand what has happened. This story is so dense but I am hoping by packaging it this way people feel galvanised to get involved.

"They didn't find anything out. There is not a piece of Police paperwork I've seen that justifies any of this. One of them has got an MBE and they have all been told they have done a very good job."

At the public inquiry in November, a former animal rights activist known as Jacqui, described how the undercover officer Bob Lambert fathered their son in 1985 and then vanished two years after his birth, claiming to be on the run from the police. Lambert told her lies after leaving, and she uncovered the truth by accident when she read about him in the media.

The women at the centre of the documentary

The shocking ITV documentary focuses on the story of five women who had intimate relationships with police officers - but had no idea they were deployed in covert operations. On screen they have changed their appearances using elaborate hair and make up changes to protect their identities and some are not using their real names. Here are there stories:

Lisa

At the end of 2010 she discovered a seven year relationship she had with a tattooed professional climber by the name of Mark Stone was fake. They met in Leeds in 2003 and he was “very charming, very friendly" and fitted in with their friends who were into anti-capitalist and anti-nuclear campaigns. But in reality she was undercover policeman Mark Kennedy, sent to spy on Lisa and her circle of activist friends. Police terminated his mission in October 2009 when Mark was acting strangely and left Lisa to go abroad but he mysteriously reappeared in Lisa's life in January 2010, when he was employed by a clandestine private security firm that was paid by commercial firms to monitor protesters. She finally made a key discovery in July 2010 when they were on holiday and she found his passport with the name Mark Kennedy along with emails from his children. Kennedy went on to sell his story to the media and to work for a US security firm. Lisa has never had children and says she will never know how much of that decision is down to Mark.

She tells the doc: "I ended up spending all those kind of crucial, most fertile years of my life of my 30s with somebody who didn't really exist."

Naomi

She also had a relationship with Mark Stone - real name Mark Kennedy - lasting eight months and a friendship afterwards for many years, as she believed they both supported social justice campaigning. She ended the relationship and says he cried in her arms when this happened and she thought they connected "over a shared belief in openness and honesty".

She insists she would never ever have consented to this relationship if she knew who he was or what he was doing and why. 

Alison

She lived with 'Mark Cassidy' for five years believing him to be a joiner from Birkenhead.

The doc features footage she shot of them together with a camcorder in the late Nineties including on Christmas Day, when he spent the day with Alison rather than his own wife and children. But despite seemingly being in love with Alison, he was a police officer working undercover for the Metropolitan Police Special Demonstration Squad and apparently had a wife and children at the time. He fitted a new kitchen in their home before he disappeared in Spring 2000.

Belinda

She was 24 when she met Bob Robinson at a party in Tottenham, north London. They had an 18-month relationship and he appeared to be an impassioned campaigning with shoulder-length hair. But Belinda was actually dating Bob Lambert, an undercover police officer who had created the fictional persona to spy on political activists. She discovered his true identity 20 years on and has been left feeling angry and violated. Lambert dated multiple other women undercover, and has been awarded an MBE for his police services.

Helen

Campaigner Helen had a relationship with John Barker lasting almost two years after they met at a Greenpeace meeting in 1987. They were friends for three years seemingly sharing lots of common interests and emotional bonds before getting together as a couple. Not long after he told Helen his mum had died and he needed to borrow money to get to New Zealand for the funeral.

But in reality, his mum was still alive, so was his dad, and he had brothers and sisters.

Helen and John rented a flat together and talked of starting a family together but in reality he was undercover policeman John Dines.

And Rob Evans writes:

At least 25 undercover police officers who infiltrated political groups formed sexual relationships with members of the public without disclosing their true identity to them, The Guardian can disclose.

The total shows how women were deceived on a systemic basis over more than three decades. It equates to nearly a fifth of all the police spies who were sent to infiltrate political movements.

Four of the police spies fathered, or are alleged to have fathered, children with women they met while using their fake identities to infiltrate campaigners.

One woman, known as Jacqui, has said her life was “absolutely ruined” after she discovered by chance that the father of her son was an undercover officer, more than 20 years after his birth. The officer, Bob Lambert, abandoned them when the son was an infant, claiming falsely that he had to go on the run abroad to escape being arrested by police.

Other women had intimate relationships lasting up to six years with men who concealed the fact they were undercover officers who had been sent to spy on them and their friends.

More than 50 women are so far known to have been deceived by the undercover officers, although the total is unknown at the moment and is likely to be higher. They unknowingly shared their most intimate lives with the spies and some attended weddings and funerals with them.

The women were devastated when they discovered how the men had betrayed them, leaving them profoundly traumatised and unable to form trusting intimate relationships again.

The scale of the deception has been revealed as ITV starts to broadcast a major series on what has become known as the “spy cops” scandal.

Starting on Thursday, the series – made in collaboration with The Guardian – shows how five women pieced together disparate clues to expose the real identities of their former boyfriends. The identities of its covert officers is one of the British state’s deepest secrets.

The women scoured obscure archives and even travelled abroad to unmask the men after they abruptly vanished from their lives using what turned out to be fake claims.

Their detective work over many years led to a series of revelations that have exposed the highly secret undercover operations to infiltrate political campaigns and misconduct by the spies, forcing the government to set up a public inquiry.

The long-running inquiry – led by the retired judge John Mitting – is examining decades of undercover deployments. A key part of the inquiry is looking at how the women were deceived and who among those supervising the undercover work knew about it.

David Barr, the inquiry’s chief barrister, told a hearing last year that it was not scrutinising whether sexual deception was justified. “It was not,” he said.

Years of campaigning and legal action by the women have forced police chiefs to apologise and admit that the “abusive, deceitful, manipulative” relationships resulted from “a wider culture of sexism and misogyny” within the police. The police have also admitted that the managers supervising the officers – imbued with that culture – failed to prevent the abuse from happening.

The deceptive relationships were a frequent part of intensely secret operations that began in 1968 and lasted more than 40 years.

The relationships started in the 1970s and continued until 2010. Only two of the 25 officers were women. Many of the identities of the police spies remain secret, meaning there is an unknown number of women who may be unaware that they had been deceived into sexual relationships.

In total, about 139 undercover officers – employed in two covert squads – spied on more than 1,000 political groups. Tens of thousands of mainly leftwing and progressive campaigners were put under surveillance.

Many of the spies created aliases based on the identities of dead children after searching through archives containing birth and death records to locate suitable matches.

The officers typically spent four years pretending to be campaigners while they infiltrated political groups, befriending activists while simultaneously hoovering up information about their protests.

They routinely gathered huge amounts of information about the personal lives of political activists, such as their holiday plans, sexuality and bank accounts.

As well as the 25, there are a further three spies who deny they had sexual relations under their fake identity.