Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police (27 page)

Kennedy, who was presumably briefed by Richardson about the best way to gain access to activism in Nottingham, chose a similar strategy: renting a spare room at a house near to the Sumac. It was rented by five politically engaged campaigners. Kennedy took a room on the top floor and built himself a
four-poster
bed from discarded scaffolding. He tried to be the model housemate, washing, cleaning, doing odd jobs around the house. He also made a point of giving his room-mates gifts.

One housemate, the recipient of a T-shirt, says Kennedy was ‘a breath of fresh air’. ‘He was very creative – good with his hands – and he drove around a lot,’ says Loukas Christodolou, then aged 26. ‘It was like he was there to enrich our lives.’ But there was something about Kennedy that made him a little too keen. ‘He was like an Afghan hound with his long hair and puppy eyes. He had this air of extreme vulnerability while also wanting to get stuck in,’ Christodoulou adds. ‘People in the early days called him “dodgy Mark”. He just didn’t seem right.’

It was as though Kennedy’s housemates could see through the mask. ‘Mark Stone looked like a copper,’ says Christodoulou. ‘He was heavy-built, a kind of lower-middle-class man. He had a certain physical readiness about him. I remember people saying: he can’t be a copper, he has a funny eye – he wouldn’t get into the police with dodgy eyesight like that.’ Others around at the time agree that Kennedy initially struggled to fit in. As one friend puts it: ‘Mark needed to prove himself.’

One strategy he used was an NPOIU favourite. One day, Kennedy told his housemates that he had some childhood friends
visiting and asked if they could sleep on the sofa. ‘They were both heavily dreadlocked and bearded,’ says Christodoulou. ‘One of them was strawberry blond and had huge amounts of hair – he called himself Ed and he was really jocular. He was just relaxed and joking.’ He says the second man was ‘dark, with a bit of a beaky nose’ and much taller. ‘He was totally silent and seemed scared out of his wits. I just assumed he had taken bad drugs back in the day.’

Both of these friends were almost certainly fellow
undercover
police officers. Lynn Watson used a similar strategy when she introduced two operatives as her boyfriends. So too did Rod Richardson, who occasionally introduced his friends to a woman called ‘Jo’ who they now believe must have been a fellow spy. Kennedy of course had no reason to introduce his friends to female undercover police, to pretend they were his girlfriends. Doing so would have been counterproductive.

His alter ego was more in keeping with the template used by the SDS for decades: Mark Stone, as activists knew him, was a bachelor looking for a long-term girlfriend.

Within just four months of his Nottingham deployment, Kennedy had chosen his first woman. Lily was a bright and
popular
23-year-old whom he met at a political event in Nottingham. ‘We started hanging out after that meeting,’ she says. ‘He was very charismatic, exciting, good fun. He claimed to like country music, caravans. He claimed to be interested in climbing, in
travelling
, in all kinds of political projects. He seemed like a really nice guy. He was quite a lot older than me – nearly 10 years older. He was very romantic and set the tone for our relationship.’

Kennedy appears to have had no qualms about getting deep into the life of the young activist. On the frequent occasions they passed through London they stayed at her parents’ flat in Putney. ‘They both had long hair so they would sit down and watch TV,
combing each other’s hair after it was washed,’ says her mum, Pauline. ‘He used to eat with us and slob around watching TV with us. All the stuff you do in a relaxed way with people in the family.’ The spy worked hard to gain the affections of his
girlfriend’s
family. He bonded with her brother over Chelsea football club and when her mother’s choir group sang outside East Putney Tube, Kennedy stood beside them rattling a can for donations. He also accompanied Lily and her mum Pauline on a trip to the theatre, telling them it was the first time he had ever worn a suit.

So close did he become that within just a few weeks of going out with Lily, he found himself at her grandmother’s 90th
birthday
. There is a photograph of him there, wearing a roll-neck sweater beneath a quilted waistcoat. Pauline said she found her daughter’s new boyfriend ‘quite funny, good company’ but thought he was different to her previous companions. ‘Mark was laddish, compared to some of Lily’s more cerebral friends,’ she says. ‘He was not particularly bright or articulate and didn’t have a hugely broad vocabulary. He talked about politics in a much more naïve, down to earth kind of way.’

Kennedy’s relationship with Lily was profoundly different to the one he had with his Catholic wife in his real life. Lily believed in open relationships, more formally known as polyamory.
Proponents
of open relationships say that this unconventional approach is no less meaningful than traditional, monogamous partnerships, which can leave people feeling shackled. Open relationships are different with each couple, but often the arrangement allows both people to have more than one sexual partner, which advocates say encourages honesty.

This of course allowed Kennedy to have more than one
girlfriend
at a time. ‘He was a bit different from all of us. He ate meat, had a pickup truck and was just not very hippy in a way,’ says Anna, a 21-year-old Kennedy slept with around 20 times.
‘I knew he was seeing other people at the same time and it was never, you know, any type of romance involved.’ It is not possible to know exactly how many women Kennedy slept with during his six years undercover. He claims it was only two. His friends in Nottingham can name more than 10 women he slept with while living in the city and expect there were more. ‘It just seemed he was up for sexual liaisons anytime, anyplace, anywhere,’
Christodoulou
says. ‘He had just come on board and he was at it right away. One person I know who had a romantic relationship with him challenged him and said: ‘I’m not going any further because I think you’re a copper.’ Then Mark said something to her which apparently calmed her down.’

Not long after Lily’s grandmother’s 90th birthday, the effort Kennedy was putting into his second life was paying off. He was attending various political meetings with her up and down the country. He travelled to a May Day protest in Dublin with an anarchist collective called the ‘White Overalls Movement Building Libertarian Effective Struggles’, or WOMBLES for short. They were famed for their tactic of covering their bodies with white overalls, padding and helmets to protect themselves from riot police, a tactic they anointed ‘self-protection from the
depredations
of the constabulary’. It was the same group that Richardson had infiltrated just a few years earlier.

Kennedy returned from Ireland boasting that he had been drenched in water cannon and nursing his first protest injury, a damaged knee. It was his first bruising encounter with his colleagues in the riot squad, and Kennedy seemed to have relished it. He cut out a newspaper photograph of himself stood in a line of masked anarchists and hung it framed on his living-room wall. After that, Kennedy delved into a panoply of activist events. ‘It was really a smorgasbord of grievances,’ says a friend. ‘It could have been saving the animals one day, stopping the BNP the next
day, protesting against a war in some far-flung corner of the world the next day, and then trying to stop an asylum seeker getting deported or a post office closed. I just assumed he was a bit of a lost soul looking for something he could believe in.’

By the following year, Kennedy had inveigled himself into the core of the group mobilising ahead of the G8 summit in
Gleneagles
. There was no greater NPOIU priority at the time than gleaning intelligence about how protesters planned to disrupt the meeting of world leaders in July 2005. Kennedy would come to view his surveillance operation at the G8 summit as one of the high watermarks of his entire deployment, and claim his reports were reaching the desk of the then prime minister, Tony Blair.

The anti-summit protests were months in the planning. Blair had suggested the G8 would deliver agreement among leaders on two totemic issues: climate change and economic development in the world’s poorest nations. Protesters were loosely split into two camps. On one side, there was a large and moderate
coalition
of trade unions, charities and campaign groups that coalesced under the Make Poverty History banner. They planned a huge demonstration through Edinburgh, capitalising on the spirit of the protests against the Iraq war. On the other were the more radical contingent of anti-capitalist protesters, of whom Kennedy was part, mobilising under the name Dissent. Their objective was to stop the G8 summit meeting from taking place by blockading roads to the fortified hotel and other forms of ‘resistance’ to the state.

If they were going to be organised, the protesters needed a base, and they chose to construct an Earth First-style campsite 12 miles from the Gleneagles Hotel. It would be another
sustainable
camp, host to thousands of protesters from across Europe. Kennedy volunteered – and was considered sufficiently
trustworthy
– to co-ordinate the immense logistical challenge of ferrying equipment to the camp.

He hired a convoy of vans and began touring the country to pick up ropes, portable toilets, tent poles, canvas and other supplies. He was accompanied by a 22-year-old student from Holland named Wietse van der Werf. ‘Mark was willing to take stuff on,’ he recalls. ‘He seemed keen and took the initiative. People just let him get on with it. If you have someone that has a credit card ready to hire any vehicle, and a political movement that doesn’t have a lot of funds, then that person becomes very valuable, very quickly.’

The Dutchman remembers a laptop placed on the back seat of Kennedy’s pickup truck which was connected remotely to the internet. ‘This was 2005 – that was quite uncommon back then,’ he says. Kennedy often encouraged activists to borrow his laptop to send emails, presumably to spy on their electronic
communications
. He was also a fast driver, and had some curious routines. It was only years later, and with the benefit of hindsight, that it dawned on Van der Werf that his friend’s driving habits were those of a police officer. ‘He took tea breaks all the time and bought food whenever we stopped,’ he says. ‘He also made a point of keeping all of his receipts.’

In the end, the G8 protests, like the summit they intended to disrupt, did not quite live up to expectations. There were some roads blocked, although never for that long, and an attempt to break through the perimeter fence of the hotel ended when riot police emerged out of Chinook helicopters.

But for Kennedy, the G8 was an impressive milestone. The NPOIU had a whole network of spies at the protests, including both Watson and Jacobs. So too did the SDS, and foreign police spies were invited to attend too. Germany alone sent five
undercover
police officers. But no infiltrator is believed to have come close to securing the kind of access Kennedy achieved.

He now had a reputation among activists as a reliable and trusted campaigner who could get things done. Just two years
after first showing his face in Nottingham’s Sumac Centre, Kennedy had wormed himself into the close-knit group of radical activists and, with the help of Lily, landed himself a key role by taking care of logistics, and a new nickname: Transport Mark. He was no longer being viewed through the prism of suspicion. He was just Mark Stone. And he was on a roll.

The commotion started in the semi-darkness, just as the sun began to rise over the peaks of Mount Kárahnjúkur. Kennedy looked on as masked protesters locked themselves to an
enormous
yellow dump truck. They were in a remote corner of the Icelandic wilderness, battling to stop the construction of a 690-ft dam. And for Kennedy, watching from the sidelines in a flat cap, undercover work was about to get personal.

Among those clambering all over the huge truck was his new girlfriend, Megan, to whom Kennedy had grown very close. The pair had been together for a few months, and it was a whirlwind romance. Now Kennedy watched as Megan used a bicycle D-lock to attach her neck to the vehicle, a tactic often used by
activists
as a form of civil disobedience. Usually, police will have to spend hours using special cutting equipment to break the lock. Megan and the others hoped that by locking themselves to the truck, they would halt its progress, blockading a major
construction
route to the dam. Suddenly, there were terrified screams. The protest was not going to plan. Chinese construction workers commanding the truck had turned on the engine and started to inch it forward, protesters still draped to the side. Bones were about to be snapped. Kennedy and some other activists leaped onto the front of the truck, pleading with the driver to stop. Kennedy yanked open the bonnet and started to rip at cables and
levers in the dark until the engine fell silent, before pulling the keys out of the ignition and throwing them into a ditch.

Kennedy was furious, believing that Megan had come within an inch of being killed. He scuffled with police guards and was dragged away with his arms held behind his back. ‘He
possibly
saved her life – and he certainly likes to point it out as if he was some kind of hero,’ says Olafur Pall Sigurdsson, who led the Saving Iceland campaign. Sigurdsson was not present when Megan chained herself to the yellow truck, but the incident was relayed to him afterwards in detail by Kennedy and others. It even appeared in the newspapers. The Icelandic press were briefed by the police that the incident on the yellow truck was an act of sabotage, and evidence of the violent intent of foreigners flocking to the island. They reported it as such, unaware that the man who immobilised the truck was in fact a British spy.

The battle to save a pristine region from destruction was becoming a priority for European conservationists. The
enormous
Kárahnjúkur dam was rising out of the bleak volcanic terrain of the eastern highlands like an alien structure. Situated near Europe’s largest glacier, it would become the largest of several hydroelectric plants the Icelandic government wanted to build in the area, supplying energy to a huge aluminium smelter plant, 75km to the east.

Kennedy’s role in Saving Iceland has been vastly overstated. He was not, Sigurdsson says, involved in any of the direction or control of the campaign. Instead, he was one of the many British activists who joined the campaign, heading to Iceland
immediately
after the 2005 G8 summit. But Kennedy did show a real interest in the battle against the dam project, and tried to get close to Sigurdsson.

The following year he and Megan joined the Icelandic campaigner on a road trip through Spain, to raise awareness
about Saving Iceland. The activists were living a hand-to-mouth existence, camping under the stars or staying in squats. A number were ‘freegans’, scavenging unused foods from supermarket bins. Kennedy chose a more comfortable existence, a decision that raised eyebrows. ‘People were getting a bit pissed off with Mark because he was treating it like a holiday,’ Sigurdsson says. ‘He was eating in really nice restaurants when everyone else was eating some horrible vegan grub.’

During the trip, an editor of an environmental journal asked Sigurdsson if he could pen an article about the campaign in Iceland. Kennedy offered to write the piece for him. But rather than use his activist identity Mark Stone, Kennedy wrote the article under a pseudonym, ‘Lumsk’. It is not uncommon for activists to use aliases when writing online, and Kennedy told his friend that Lumsk was the name of a Norwegian folk-metal band he liked.

Sigurdsson, however, was aware the word had another, somewhat suspicious, meaning in his native tongue. One day, he confronted Kennedy about his choice of pseudonym, telling him that the Icelandic translation was ‘duplicitous’. ‘He was jolted,’ Sigurdsson recalls. ‘It was like I had given him a small electric shock – he became aggressive for a few seconds. I thought that was a bit odd.’

As the trip through Spain continued, Kennedy managed to annoy Sigurdsson even more. The Icelandic campaigner was heading a peaceful campaign against the dam project and was finding himself labelled as a dangerous radical on the island. But he says Kennedy began to cajole him to go even further. ‘He kept coming to me to say: what you’re doing is not really working, is it?’ he says. ‘All these lock-ons and protest tactics you are using are not effective.’

Sigurdsson believes the undercover police officer was trying to plant ideas in his head. ‘The way he said it was: “I know some
extremely heavy people. I can get hold of them and they can do some real damage. I can get these people to come over to Iceland.” He was talking about seriously damaging the
infrastructure
of the dam – sabotage.’ Sigurdsson says he told Kennedy he wanted nothing to do with violence. ‘He kept coming back to me, like some sort of parrot. I was just like, “It is very nice you know these people, Mark, but don’t come to me – as far as the Icelandic police are concerned I am already like a Bin Laden.”’

Back in Nottingham, Kennedy was settling into his new life with Megan. He had moved out of the shared home and started
renting
a terraced house near the Sumac, occasionally letting out his spare room to a lodger. It was neatly furnished, with framed pictures from various protests he had been involved in. There was not a huge amount for Kennedy to do during the day. When he wasn’t away, telling friends he had found climbing work, he would often wake up early, go for a run, and then disappear for a few hours, saying he had odd jobs to do. It was a domestic life, often revolving around Megan.

They had been together by then for two years and the
relationship
was serious – equivalent, friends say, to that of a married couple. A warm-hearted and principled woman from Wales, Megan was in her 30s. She has never spoken publicly or been interviewed about her relationship with the undercover police officer, but her friends say she loved him deeply. They would end up being with each other for six years.

They spent time living together, travelled on holiday abroad and spoke to each other every day. He got to know her family in much the same way as he did with Lily, who had split up with him the previous year. It is impossible to know how much, if any, of Kennedy’s affection for Megan was genuine, but those who know the couple believe it must have been. Without irony,
Kennedy would one day declare: ‘The love I shared with her and the companionship we shared was the realest thing I ever did … Yeah, there were no lies about that at all.’

Megan was an obvious choice for an undercover police officer to target. She was connected with activists across the country and ‘trusted and respected by everyone’, according to one friend, who adds: ‘She was one of the most universally loved people you could find.’ Like Lily, she was also an advocate of polyamory. When she first met Kennedy she had another boyfriend, a thickset man with purple hair called Logan. When Kennedy arrived on the scene, the dynamic obviously shifted. ‘We were seven years in by that point and she had not had a relationship with anyone on the scale of what we had,’ Logan says.

Logan was keen to accept Kennedy; he says he was pleased that his girlfriend had found a second meaningful relationship. It was an unconventional set-up. In simple terms, Megan had two boyfriends – Kennedy and Logan – and they became good friends. ‘He was a really gregarious guy, and for all his kind of blokey, cockney-geezer bluster, there was a real sensitivity and generosity there,’ Logan says. ‘I used to call him detective
inspector
Mark. I didn’t for a second really think he might be a cop. It was just a comment made in jest, because it was funny how he fit the mould of an infiltrator: turns up out of nowhere, works away all the time, has loads of money, starts seeing somebody who is really central in the protest movement.’

Although, for a few years, Megan had intimate experiences with both men, she eventually chose Kennedy. She had been seeing Logan since 1997, and they remained close. When her father died, both men attended the funeral. Although,
according
to friends, Megan never agreed to Kennedy’s requests for a monogamous relationship, he did become the most important man in her life. ‘Both of the women Mark had close, intimate
relationships with were very trusted women in the movement,’ notes one friend. ‘That cannot have been a coincidence.’

Lily, Megan and the other women gave Kennedy access to the heart of radical protest, a place few of his colleagues in the NPOIU are believed to have reached. Routinely, Kennedy found himself at the centre of all the action. One day, he scaled a tree outside the BP oil company’s headquarters in Grosvenor Square, in London. On another, he joined a small group of activists who climbed a tower at Didcot power station to hang a ‘Climate Crime’ banner. Later he locked himself to the gates of a nuclear power station in Hartlepool, wearing a black cap, sunglasses and scarf covering his face.

His friends were noticing a change in the man they knew as Mark Stone. When he first turned up in Nottingham, they had been amused to find his iPod full of ‘edgeless rock’. By the middle of 2006 he had started listening to drum and bass dance music, buying himself mixing decks so he could DJ at all-night raves and squat parties. He rarely if ever took drugs but, like his colleagues Lynn Watson and Marco Jacobs, enjoyed a drink. ‘Mark drank, certainly most nights,’ says Logan. ‘And drinking to that really, really, gone state – that memory void thing for him was not uncommon.’

Kennedy was immersed in another world, far away from the staid Tory suburbs where he left his wife and children. He and Megan would go on tree-planting weekends or on long
camping
expeditions in the Scottish Highlands. One ritual among the group involved savouring a bottle of expensive Port Ellen whisky and talking late into the night. On one such weekend Kennedy arrived with six whisky glasses, each engraved with the name of a friend in the group.

Years later Kennedy would reflect on his life undercover and remark: ‘I began to live the life and enjoy it. People have this
image of hairy tree huggers and, yes, there is an element of that. But there are also a lot of educated, passionate people with degrees who really believe in what they are doing. There were people who, if they had only a couple of quid left, would buy you a pint. So many people I knew, or Mark Stone knew, became really good friends. It wasn’t just about being an activist all the time.’

But the lifestyle came with a cost. For much of the time he was undercover, irrespective of what he was doing, Kennedy was earning overtime. ‘Every day I was on the job, even if I was at “home” in bed watching telly and doing the laundry, I got five hours’ overtime. My handler got the same,’ he said. ‘I was taking home more money than an inspector who was two ranks higher than me.’ Kennedy was also blowing several thousand pounds a month on rent, petrol, rope equipment, parties, a fleet of new vehicles and flights abroad. He bought himself two bicycles, a top-of-the-range sound system and a Mitsubishi Warrior pick-up truck. His life of adventure, parties and domesticity with Megan was costing the British taxpayer close to £250,000 a year.

Some friends felt his spending habits were incongruous with the lifestyle of an anti-capitalist. But Kennedy was unapologetic, telling friends he was earning ‘Hollywood wages’ doing climbing work and revelling in his new nickname: Flash. He set up an email account beginning ‘flashwheels@’ and introduced himself to new people as ‘Flash Mark’. By then, some of Kennedy’s closer friends were under the impression that he was living off the proceeds of a criminal fortune. ‘The story was Mark had been a cocaine courier, and he had made a lot of money doing that,’ Logan says. ‘But people in that drug world had done his head in. It was just a lot of coked-up, superficial gabbling twats, so he wanted to do something meaningful with his life. It seemed plausible for
somebody
who was not educated, not especially intelligent, not very old, and yet he had got a wad of money.’

It was not just his persona that was evolving. As he spent more and more time living as Mark Stone, the police spy’s appearance changed too. As time passed, he seemed to look like an
exaggerated
caricature of himself. He started wearing bigger earrings and tight black vests that exposed his torso and an ever-growing collection of tattoos. He was becoming obsessed with a genre known as biomechanical body art. Etched into his forearm was a tattoo that depicted his skin being peeled back to reveal
mechanical
levers beneath the flesh. It suggested Mark Stone was a shell, and beneath the surface were the mechanics of a robot.

That summer, Kennedy had an altercation that tested his loyalties and left his managers asking who exactly was in control.

The brawl that took place in the shadow of a power station was not a fair fight. On one side was Kennedy, red-faced and with his hair loose and ruffled in the wind. His assailants had helmets and metal batons. It was him versus a handful of armed men, who had no idea that the protester they were beating was a fellow
constable
, receiving a painful introduction to police brutality.

It was August 2006 and the climax of the Climate Camp gathering in North Yorkshire. There had already been one march, in which protesters donned white paper boiler suits and walked toward the power station carrying a puppet ostrich, to symbolise people with their heads in the sand. Now a splinter group of protesters was trying to break into the grounds of Drax power station to force a temporary closure. The previous night, protesters had crawled through some woodland to bury cutting equipment near the perimeter fence. Kennedy was among a dozen activists, including his girlfriend Megan and his fellow spy Lynn Watson, who were hidden in some bushes, waiting for the right moment to cut open the fence and run inside. With two officers involved in the plan, the NPOIU knew what was about
to happen. Unbeknown to the protesters, police were themselves hiding nearby, preparing an ambush.