'We did not consent': victims of the spycops scandal

This was the moment Wilson learned that her lover was really an undercover cop bent on infiltrating her radical network by any means necessary.

When she recalls that revelation in this astounding memoir, it’s striking that Wilson doesn’t dwell on the romantic and sexual betrayal that, from the outside, seems the most shocking thing about her story. “I thought of all the people I had introduced Mark to: the bright social scene we had been part of, and the daredevil things we had done together.”

Kate and Mark met seven years earlier at a workshop to discuss protests against a forthcoming G8 summit. She was then a 25-year-old Oxford graduate, anarchist, environmentalist and peace activist, soon to train as a nurse. The man who introduced himself as Mark Stone was really Mark Kennedy, a police officer with a wife and two kids. Kennedy groomed Wilson with love poetry and led her to believe he cared for her. “Mark often expressed his love and stressed how important I was to him,” she writes.

What Wilson didn’t know during their 475-day affair was that the intimate details of their relationship were being reported by Kennedy to his handlers, known as EN31 and EN30, who belonged to a shadowy outfit called the National Public Order Intelligence Unit. Kennedy often had two lovers on the go at the same time. His cover was blown in 2009 when Lisa, another of the ostensible threats to the British state who Mark seduced, found his real passport and a phone containing messages from his children.

Kennedy has told his story several times. You can hear his account in Undercover, a BBC radio documentary and podcast on the Sounds app. You can read the Daily Mail interview he gave in 2011 when he was under the tutelage of the late PR guru and sex offender Max Clifford. Kennedy then claimed he had to have sex with “eco-warriors” to keep his cover.

Here, Wilson gets to tell her side. She does it with eloquence, rage and hurt, painting a devastating picture of official incompetence wedded to misogynistic sexual license. She meticulously describes a police operation costing millions of pounds (Kennedy alone was claiming about £200,000 annually in expenses, for everything from curries to condoms), which invaded the privacy and bodies of women who purportedly threatened this country’s stability, and aimed to curb their legitimate right to protest against warmongers, fat-cat capitalists and the destroyers of our climate. At least 27 women in their 20s and 30s were targeted. Many of them, Wilson relates, were so traumatised by their experiences they became unable to forge intimate relationships.

Kennedy, for his part, got so deep into his role as radical protester – ferrying demonstrators around in vans and organising accommodation near meetings they sought to disrupt, including 2005’s G8 summit at Gleneagles – that he arguably did more for the radical causes he was supposed to be undermining than the anarchists themselves. More important is what Wilson expressed in a caps-lock tweet in 2021 when she came out of one of the last of the court hearings that dominated 10 years of her life: “WE DID NOT CONSENT.” But none of the male officers who targeted women under Operations Penguin and Pegasus has been prosecuted for anything, certainly not the crime of rape.

Meanwhile, an inquiry into undercover policing, set up in 2014, is ongoing. More than a decade later, it is no clearer what the outcome will be. True, judicial process and inquiries into allegations of serious misconduct and terrible crimes must be meticulous, but equally to the point is the principle that justice delayed is justice denied. It is already more than 20 years since many of the most shocking incidents described in this book took place. It was reported last month that Wilson is slated to give evidence to the inquiry next year.

In Disclosure, Wilson pieces together the truth from often heavily redacted police files as well as her own memories and those of friends. This makes for a compelling piece of literature, since she juxtaposes officer logs with her third-person reconstructions of how it felt to be in Mark’s arms, and how it feels now to look back on those intimate moments from a disabused perspective.

It’s both formally inventive and bracing to read. “He used intimacy and lies to manipulate a 25-year-old woman he knew to be vulnerable and afraid,” writes Wilson, ruefully. One redacted message from Mark to his superiors discloses that he knew his lover had a “susceptibility to suffering from anxiety”. Kennedy played on this, using it to induce her into yielding contacts in the radical community. Even in the middle of their affair, her memoir suggests, Wilson felt something was wrong, which she now thinks explains her frequent panic attacks at the time. “I wanted to reach out and comfort my former self,” she writes. “I knew she was going to blame herself… I wanted to tell her it wasn’t just emotional instability making her feel something was off.”

Anyone in any doubt about whether Wilson and the other women involved in the spycops scandal were really threats to the British state need only take a cursory look at the kinds of groups Kennedy infiltrated. As well as Earth First!, he targeted the Wombles, whose acronym – which honours the cuddly litter-pickers of Wimbledon Common from the children’s TV series – stands for White Overalls Movement Building Libertarian Effective Struggles. Other groups investigated include the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army – which mounted anti-capitalist protests tooled up with water pistols – Uist Hedgehog Rescue, and Eat Out Vegan Wales.

Truly, each of us can sleep safer knowing hedgehog-loving vegan subversives were being monitored by undercover boys in blue. Perhaps, deep in Whitehall, there is an Office for Budget Irresponsibility that signed off on this profoundly sexist omnishambles.

More seriously, for women such as Kate Wilson, the consequences of having undercover cops like Mark Kennedy in their lives and beds have been awful. Their frustration at a state that facilitates police officers to commit the basest of crimes without fear or favour only grows over time. They often daren’t commit to having families. For some, trusting men or strangers has become difficult, and so communal living or engaging in protest is no longer possible. If the cops involved weren’t such bunglers, one might have thought that this kind of chilling outcome was the point all along.

Disclosure: Unravelling the Spycops Files by Kate Wilson is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£20). Order a copy from observershop.co.uk to receive a 10% discount. Delivery charges may apply

Photography Alamy