Then in her early 30s, she had for some years been active in environmental, anti-capitalist, and anti-nuclear campaigns. In the autumn of 2003, Lisa met Kennedy when he visited Leeds, where she was living. Among campaigners, he earned the nickname “Flash” as he always seemed to have a lot of money. The fake persona he chose was that of a long-haired, tattooed professional climber by the name of Mark Stone. Kennedy first infiltrated a group of environmental campaigners in Nottingham in 2003. “No amount of money or ‘sorry’ will make up for the lack of answers about the extent to which I was spied upon in every aspect of my most personal and intimate moments,” she says. But it comes more than a decade after Kennedy’s mission began. Lisa, for her part, welcomed the apology. On Friday it was announced that police had agreed to give a full apology and pay compensation to Lisa and six other women for the trauma they suffered after being deceived into forming intimate relationships with police spies. More than 10 women have discovered that they had relationships with undercover policemen, some lasting years, without being told their true identity. Kennedy was one of more than 100 undercover officers who, over the previous four decades, had transformed themselves into fake campaigners for years at a time, assimilating themselves into political groups and hoovering up information about protests that they had helped to organise. Only a limited number of senior police officers knew about it. Their unmasking of him five years ago kickstarted a chain of events that has exposed one of the state’s most deeply concealed secrets.īack then, the public knew little about a covert operation that had been running since 1968. For seven years, he had adopted a fake persona to infiltrate environmental groups. They established that he was Mark Kennedy, an undercover policeman who had been sent to spy on her circle of activist friends. Assistant commissioner Martin Hewitt apologises for undercover officers’ relationships Guardian
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