bob lambert: still spying?

Of all the undercover police officers exposed so far, Bob Lambert is one of the worst. The longevity of his involvement, the range of campaigns he helped to weaken, and his personal life behaviour - there seems to be nothing appalling that any of the other officers did that he didn't do too, and he seems to have done much that others didn't.

He was an undercover police officer in the 1980s, infiltrating London Greenpeace. He had a long term sexual relationship with one of the activists he spied on, fathering a child. He later formed a relationship with a non-activist just to help his social plausibility, and had her flat raided by his colleagues at Special Branch to bolster his image as a hardcore activist.

He then went on to oversee the deployment of other officers in the 1990s, including Jim Boyling's spying on Reclaim the Streets and Pete Black's undermining of anti-racist groups including justice campaigns like that of Stephen Lawrence's family.

The relationship with Boyling was perhaps especially close, as BristleKRS noted

Both Boyling and Lambert are accused of lying to courts to preserve their cover; both Boyling and Lambert duplicitously entered into sexual relationships with activists on whom they were spying; both Boyling and Lambert sired children by these women. Is this coincidence, or an indication of the nature of the training Lambert offered his protégés?

Their work together continued beyond infiltrating activists. After devoting the major part of their careers to undercover work they abruptly shifted focus, setting up the Muslim Contact Unit in January 2002. This police outfit is aimed at building bridges with muslims and muslim communities. And maybe that's all it is.

But if I were the police, wanting to have undercover officers in muslim groups in the wake of 9/11, I'd have to think of a new tactic. Having a legion of trained white folks wouldn't help me be surreptitious. So, what if they openly approached muslims as police but had this nice supportive role? They would then be well placed to identify people who could become a ring of informants. They would also be highly trained and very experienced at the tricks and tactics of gaining people's trust and making them confess things they want to keep secret.

I have absolutely no evidence that's what the Muslim Contact Unit is. I just find it very peculiar that, of all the available officers, they chose two of the country's most experienced undercover infiltrators to set up and run it.

The Islamic Human Rights Commission is proud to present this award to Inspector Robert Lambert (Head of Muslim Contact Unit), upon his retirement from the Metropolitan Police Service. In appreciation for his integrity and commitment to promoting a fair, just and secure society for all, which, is a rarity and will be greatly missed.

perpetrating acts of a serious and violent nature against citizens

Margaret Thatcher famously decried Irish Republicans, saying it can never be right to use violence for political ends. She was, of course, in charge of the British soldiers on the streets of Northern Ireland at the time, fought the Falklands War and was vociferously supportive of torturer-dictators such as General Pinochet.

'Violence' sounds like a bad thing, so if we commit an act of violence and want to feel good then we must think of it as something different, something less unpleasant. I've been told that political violence is wrong by someone who, less than an hour later, was justifying the bombing of Dresden.

The fact is that everyone believes political violence is right if the case is strong enough. We've seen riots bring about positive change in this country on innumerable issues ranging all the way from the abolition of the Poll Tax to the right of farms to sell home made cider.

But it's interesting to see that the state makes accusations and connotations of certain foes being violent irrespective of their actual conduct. The recent report by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary about Mark Kennedy describes his employers, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, as being concerned with countering people who

were not individuals engaging in peaceful protest, or even people who were found to be guilty of lesser public order offences. They were individuals intent on perpetrating acts of a serious and violent nature against citizens going about their everyday lives.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CLIMATE PROTEST VIOLENCE

One of Kennedy's main efforts in the UK was infiltrating climate change activists. So, as I said the other day, he was there from the start, actively participating in the first Climate Camp at Drax in 2006. On that occasion Kennedy was among the unarmed non-violent activists beaten and hospitalised by armed and armoured police. He was there with undercover officer Lynn Watson who had played a key organisational role in the Camp.

The following summer Climate Camp was near Heathrow airport. One evening a small group of riot police forced their way on site. There were only 20 or so, and what we didn't realise was that there were many more in vanloads waiting down the lane. It was an attempt to provoke violence and give them the excuse to come charging on in numbers.

However the police incursion was swiftly surrounded by a very large group of campers who did not react violently but chanted 'off off off' as they steadily shuffled the police back beyond the camp perimeter. We then fell absolutely silent and put our hands in the air; holding our ground but no baiting, no taunting, no threat, no words or movement of any kind. It was the single most powerful piece of non-violent direct action I have ever seen, and was all the more so for its total spontaneity.

Later on that week protesters marched out with a banner saying 'we are armed only with peer-reviewed science' (not the snappiest of slogans, but still a good point well made), and they had pages of scientific reports taped to their hands.



The police attacked, ordering people to the ground then kicking and beating them. Here are two mounted officers trampling an isolated woman who is trying to escape, still armed with her two sheets of A4 paper.



In June 2008 a group of activists stopped a coal train that was approaching Drax power station and started shovelling the cargo overboard (video here). All across the media this was described as a hijacking, which in many ways is accurate, but I can't help feeling that the word conjures up images of staff being bound and gagged, of threats and reckless danger. As was made clear in the subsequent court case, the activists followed railway protocol for stopping trains and had done a safety assessment before deciding to go ahead with the action. The judge called them 'eloquent, sincere, moving and engaging', and pointed out that the train driver had spoken of them being 'polite, orderly and responsible'.

In the summer of that year Climate Camp was at the proposed site of a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent. Kennedy was there co-ordinating transport for that too. The police put scare stories in the media about finding a 'cache of weapons' (padlock and chain, kitchen knives) and parliament was told 70 officers had been injured at the protest. Freedom of information requests later revealed that none of the injuries came from protesters but instead included injuries to police such as 'stung on finger by possible wasp'. (Is that better than being stung by an impossible wasp?) More on that stuff can be found here.

At Kingsnorth the police did, again, force their way on site in riot gear and beat people for being near the gate. Also, for days on end they would come and surround the site at 5am; one officer every few metres along a couple of kilometres of perimeter, a metre or two beyond the fence, in riot gear, standing silently awaiting orders. This - as was clearly intended - got everyone in the camp out of bed to come to the fence.

If you sealed off a housing estate or a festival with riot cops at 5am, giving no explanation, someone amongst the hundreds of outraged people inside would be likely to throw something. The police would then have an excuse to come on and beat that person, the violence would escalate, and you'd have a riot on your hands. Not even a housing estate in fact, you could probably do that in a shopping centre or at Last Night of the Proms and it would kick off. Yet at Climate Camp people behaved in a less violent way than average people would be expected to.

A few months later at London's G20 protests in April 2009, baton-wielding riot police waded into the climate demonstration. As at Heathrow, the activists neither retreated nor responded in kind. Instead, they put their open palms in the air and chanted 'this is not a riot, this is not a riot'. Again, the police incursion failed. Later on they kettled the protest before attacking it with baton charges and dogs.



THE REAL THREAT

Mark Kennedy had been heavily involved in organising Climate Camp for its duration, presumably alongside other undercover officers and informants. The police knew full well that the threat to the safety of the public, and thereby any possible excuse for bloody repression, was non-existent. That they responded with such violence shows it was not about proportionality or risk to life and limb, it was about threat to the status quo.

It's not a person's behaviour that is deemed unacceptable and gets them targeted as a domestic extremist, it's their politics. You can be a pensioner with no criminal convictions who protests against arms factories and you're a domestic extremist. Meanwhile those who do sow violence and hatred on the streets are treated differently if their views are less objectionable and methods less likely to succeed. In a leaked email last year Adrian Tudway, National Co-ordinator for Domestic Extremism, said that (unlike Climate Camp) the English Defence League are not considered extremist.

LET'S PUT IT ALL TOGETHER

Last week the Metropolitan Police finally admitted that they'd acted unlawfully in not telling people that their phones were being hacked by journalists at News International. Why would they not have warned people, except that they didn't want to disrupt the hacking or expose their part in it? This shows that the hacking is not the odd constable taking a few quid for accessing data; the cover-up implies that it was widely known, that this is institutional corruption.

Add what we know together and it is appears widely yet quietly acknowledged that we have an institutionally corrupt, institutionally racist, institutionally violent police force.

institutionally violent

When police attack protesters the right wing press are always quick to talk of a peaceful march hijacked by those intent on violence and how the police had to step in. Police forces abroad may attack those who pose no threat of violence, but our jolly old British bobbies would never do such a thing and you'd have to be a soap-dodging anarchist to suggest otherwise.

One of the interesting things about the coverage of the Mark Kennedy affair is when he got beaten up by police. At the first Climate Camp, at Drax power station in Yorkshire in 2006, Kennedy was part of a small group that was trying to get through the perimeter fence. Officers in riot gear set upon a woman getting through the fence, batoning her legs, so Kennedy intervened and the officers hospitalised him.

They kicked and beat me. They had batons and pummelled my head. One officer repeatedly stamped on my back. I had my finger broken, a big cut on my head and a prolapsed disc.

I can't find any right wing media or pundit questioning the veracity of Kennedy's story. As there are pictures and it's verified by the activists with him at the time as well as Climate Camp medics, it is indisputable.

Leaving aside the hilarious irony of coppers laying into one of their own, the acceptance of this is profound. It is the acceptance that yes, the police will seriously injure people for no real reason, far beyond anybody's definition of reasonable force.

This is not one officer losing their head in a volatile situation, but the generic workaday tactic of armoured officers against defenceless nonviolent citizens.

It's the same casual blase use of violence that we see in the notorious footage of PC Simon Harwood's deadly assault on Ian Tomlinson. It's the same thing seen a thousand times the day Tomlinson was killed, and on countless other days elsewhere.

It appears that we've reached a stage where, with its wealth of incontrovertible evidence, this is broadly accepted. If that's so it shouldn't just be quietly known but declared and acted upon.

mark kennedy: the hmic report

The latest report on undercover police infiltration of activists came out last week. Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary looked into the work of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) who ran the network of spy cops until 2008, and especially at the work of their officer Mark Kennedy.

Radio 4's Today programme said that HMIC are independent and 'this was not the police investigating themselves'. The report was written last year by Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Chief Constable of Merseyside, now Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. When it finally came out it was presented as the work former Surrey Police Chief Constable, Sir Dennis O'Connor.

This was the second attempt at releasing Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary's findings. They were all set to publish last October, and were widely believed to say Kennedy was a rogue officer off mission, and no outside oversight is needed for undercover cops.

But with just hours to go before publication the whole thing got pulled after the Guardian published a report of another undercover cop, Jim Boyling, who went through a court case under his activist alias. This proved that it's not about one cop and, as Boyling's bosses must have known about his prosecution, the beyond-the-lawness of the undercover unit is something systemic.

The new version of the HMIC report makes passing reference to this, merely dismissing it as outside the report's remit. This raises an important question; if the Boyling revelations are not the subject matter of the report, why did it need to be withdrawn and given a four-month rewrite?

The most obvious answer is that the report was going to hang Kennedy out to dry but say everything else in the garden was rosy. If that's so, the original report was either a pile of lies or else the product of pathetically superficial research into its subject. I'll leave you to decide for yourself which is the more likely.

BEHOLD THE NEXT SCAPEGOAT

This time it's gone one level up; they've decided it was one rogue officer and his one rogue unit. But nothing worse than that, honest. The report says that those who were asked to sign the approval to deploy officers weren't aware of what they were authorising; indeed, it says the NPOIU kept it from them.

No single authorising officer appears to have been fully aware either of the complete intelligence picture in relation to Mark Kennedy or the NPOIU's activities overall, or of the other intelligence opportunities available to negate the need for an undercover officer. Additionally, it was not evident that the authorising officers were cognisant of the extent and nature of the intrusion that occurred; nor is it clear that the type and level of intrusion was completely explained to them by the NPOIU.

You might have thought it would occur to them to ask.

Even more shocking is that the people running the operations make their own job up. The actual undercover officers are trained before they are deployed but, the HMIC report says, neither those who authorise them, nor their supervisory handlers known as 'cover officers', receive proper training.

The cover officer is the personal daily liaison that the undercover officer speaks to. The psychological stress of being an undercover cop is easily imaginable and probably all but universal. A cover officer's twin roles are to ensure someone keeps doing something that's profoundly fucking them up whilst also being responsible for them not getting fucked up.

With the cover officer's boss handing out plaudits for the intelligence received, it's easy to see how the undercover officer gets left in place for too long. It's also easy to imagine how they get pushed to garner information by any means available.

The HMIC report timidly posits

appropriate training for Cover Officers in dealing with people who are in extremely testing operational conditions needs to be considered.

So not only is it not happening yet, but in future it only needs to be considered?

What of the ranks above, the ones who authorised the spying? Even if they are being told the full truth or it occurs to them to check, have they got any clear idea of who they should and shouldn't target? In a report full of qualifiers and conditional language, the statement is startling in its plainness:

there is no formal training provision for authorising officers

It's just their own decision and gut feeling, then. Gene Hunt is alive and well.

To tap a single phone call takes the approval of the Home Secretary. To send in an undercover officer to integrate into your life, have children with you and then leave without warning when the mission is over, it only needs the approval of a police Superintendent.

There were insufficient checks and balances to evaluate and manage Mark Kennedy's deployment. The measures in place (such as monitoring intelligence reporting on Mark Kennedy's activities whilst deployed) proved ineffective... the evidence suggests the risks of intrusion into the lives of members of the public while undercover were not well managed

Later on it makes an allied point with a key difference in phrasing

Mark Kennedy operated outside the code of conduct for undercover officers. This suggests that NPOIU operational supervision, review and oversight were insufficient to identify that his behaviour had led to disproportionate intrusion.

The use of conditionals is crucial here; it only 'suggests' that his supervision was inadequate, but it baldly accepts that there was disproportionate intrusion in the lives of those he spied upon.

WHEN IS A ROGUE NOT A ROGUE?

The idea that Kennedy was going wildly astray and that his superiors didn't really know what this £5,000 a week asset was doing is just laughable. As I said in October, from Mark Kennedy's intelligence reports that were later disclosed to Ratcliffe defendants we know he was recording things in minute detail, right down to people's biscuit preferences.

Kennedy - for whatever negligible amount his word may be worth - repeated last week that he was in contact with his cover officer every day of his seven year deployment. He alleges that his bosses had complete access to his phone calls, texts and emails.

Even if we disregard what this walking bullshit engine claims, as the report's quote says, his activist persona of Mark Stone would have been reported on by other undercover officers and informants (we know he worked alongside Lynn Watson for some time). Did they also fail to report what they were seeing and doing? Or do his bosses know more than they're letting on?

Kennedy also reasserted that his long term relationships with activists were never discussed. But if he was in contact every day when he was at his partners' houses or on holiday with them, did he not say where he was? Even if it didn't occur to his cover officer to ask where Kennedy was and what he was doing - which would often, surely, have been a major point of the phone call taking place - Watson and co will have seen what was happening.

Despite the fact that most exposed undercover officers had such relationships, and that it goes back to at least the 1980s, the report claims that those in charge hadn't really considered that it might occur.

Mark Kennedy, by his own admission, had intimate relationships with a number of people while undercover, and in doing so encroached very significantly into their lives. NPOIU documentation did not provide assurance that such risks of intrusion were being systematically considered and well managed across the organisation.

As to whether officers are permitted to have such relationships, whether it even forms an encouraged part of the strategy, the report stays deafeningly silent about it.

The Association of Chief Police Officers' Jon Murphy has been unequivocal in the past:

It is absolutely not authorised. It is never acceptable for an undercover officer to behave in that way.

Yet in the wake of the HMIC report's glaring omission, it has been reported this week that 

Undercover officers are not banned from having sex with targets because it would give those they are infiltrating an easy way to “test” them, police chiefs and inspectors said.

The report clarifies a point that's been much discussed in the last year.

The law does allow for an undercover officer to participate in criminal activity, but this must be authorised, and the limits of the authorised conduct made clear. In addition, specific restrictions must be placed on the behaviour of the undercover officer, such that:

- they must not actively engage in planning and committing the crime;
- they are intended to play only a minor role; and
- their participation is essential to enable the police to frustrate the crime and to make arrests.

It's clear that Kennedy's deployment at Ratcliffe fails on all three counts. You can comfortably argue that his shining star case of the G8 protests in 2005 fail on all three counts too.

DOMESTIC EXTREMISTS

Kennedy's unit, the NPOIU, had a serious job to do.

The NPOIU was involved in the successful collection of intelligence on violent individuals, whose criminal intentions or acts were subsequently disrupted, and who were in some cases brought to justice.

These were not individuals engaging in peaceful protest, or even people who were found to be guilty of lesser public order offences. They were individuals intent on perpetrating acts of a serious and violent nature against citizens going about their everyday lives.

Against this backdrop the report, like many police who deal with protest, talks of those spied on as 'Domestic Extremists'. The report concedes it's a loose term but settles on a definition;

activity, individuals or campaign groups that carry out criminal acts of direct action in furtherance of what is typically a single issue campaign. They usually seek to prevent something from happening or to change legislation or domestic policy, but attempt to do so outside of the normal democratic process.

This means anyone who blockades a shop doorway or stands in a road is on the list, alongside firebombers and armed gangs of racist thugs. It would certainly have included the Suffragettes and indeed the legion of womens' rights groups who found the suffragettes too extreme. Black civil rights campaigners in 1960s America were arrested for having sit-ins at racially segregated restaurants and cafes. Had the term existed then, they too would have unarguably been domestic extremists.

People who protest and take direct action are often a nuisance; they often intend themselves to be. That is, in fact, part of the 'normal democratic process'; it's just not the electoral system. If you are not a threat to life and limb then nobody can credibly argue that you warrant the intrusion of an undercover police officer in your home and family for years on end.

The struggle for the right to protest does not only take place in the streets and in what we discuss, but in the words we use to discuss it. 'Domestic Extremist' is a piece of political phraseology dressed up as something neutral, like 'pro-life' or 'pro-choice'. Every time it is used it reinforces the political point it was designed to trojan-horse into our minds.

It is used to conjour up images of rabid, terrifying obsessives threatening the lives of random people with violence; that done, we can then feel that anyone labelled as one probably deserves surveillance, beating and jailing.

Among the HMIC report's recommendations are

ACPO and the Home Office should agree a definition of domestic extremism that reflects the severity of crimes that might warrant this title, and that includes serious disruption to the life of the community arising from criminal activity.

Yet this is just as conveniently broad and vague as the previous definition. It certainly covers the traffic chaos caused by a peaceful anti-war march blocking a road.

The NPOIU has now become part of the National Domestic Extremist Unit (NDEU). They run a database of political activists. It merrily conflates numerous levels of activism, described in the HMIC report as

protest associated with extreme methods used in environmental protest, animal rights and violent political extremism

However, despite having a 'weeding policy' of removing ex-activists, they are retaining information on many people who pose no danger. In producing the HMIC report a number of cases on the NDEU's files were examined and it was found found that

the rationale for recording and retaining the intelligence was not strong enough

It also found that Mark Kennedy was only one of many undercover officers to become private corporate spies.

A number of police officers have retired from NDEU's precursor units and continued their careers in the security industry, using their skills and experience for commercial purposes.

The ex-officers still like to use the database though, as the HMIC admitted there have been

attempts by retired officers to then contact and work with NDEU

What's the NDEU up to now? We're not really told. What's to be done? In future undercover officers must be approved by the Office of Surveillance Commissioners. You can judge their effectiveness in this matter already. They're the people who've been overseeing the authorisations of undercover police up till now.

A CONTROLLED EXPLOSION

Rather like the way the authorities are granting access to the truth about the Hillsborough Disaster now because it's 20 years later and nobody's career's at risk any more, so the HMIC report roasts Kennedy as off-mission and blames his unit the NPOIU, who conveniently no longer exist. This isn't the police fessing up; it's finding a scapegoat that won't hurt them.

It's clear Mark Kennedy is one of many. It's risible to suggest he went seven years without major details of his action being noticed. It just went unquestioned. "We're the good guys; therefore anything we do is right; therefore anyone who disobeys us is wrong; therefore anything that undermines them is good."

But now they behave as police at all levels do when accused of wrongdoing. Irrespective of the strength and clarity of the evidence and of the immorality of the misdeed, they clam up for as long as possible, lie when forced to speak, and try to appease any sustained clamour for justice by pushing a low ranking grunt out as a sacrifice.

The report concedes that Kennedy ended up spending a long time a long way beyond defensible behaviour. Either he did this himself due to negligence and shoddy oversight, or else this was the deliberate strategy of his superiors. There is no third option. Either way, his bosses are culpable.

Given what has been exposed - up to now all of it by activists and journalists, the few scant unredacted details in the HMIC report are only there because the first version was exposed as a whitewash - the report has had to admit that the system of oversight doesn't work. But by focusing on just Kennedy and the NPOIU it ignores the fact that the police have spent forty years with dedicated squads doing this to political activists, and that political policing reaches much further than that.

There appears to be nothing in Kennedy's behaviour, aside of the length of his deployment, that was unusual. We know of eight other undercover officers who behaved similarly, at least six of whom had intimate relationships with the citizens they spied on, two of them fathering children.

The obvious implication is that other officers before him were likewise wrongly intruding into the lives of activists; if Kennedy warrants a shiny important report, then what about the rest?

add your voice for justice for kevin williams

Even as people were dying, the official lies about the Hillsborough Disaster started. Fans were massed outside the 1989 football match with minutes to go until kick-off, so police ordered gates open and there was a crush that pinned people up against the fences at the front of the crowd.

Watching it unfold from the police control box the man who'd ordered the gates open, Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield, told officials that the gates had been forced open by fans. Afterwards, laywers and senior police edited hundreds witness statements to remove material damaging to the police.

The inquest into the 96 deaths made two indefensible decisions that served to cover up the truth. They ruled that everybody had died of the same cause, traumatic asphyxia, and they decided that everyone was dead by 3.15pm. This latter decision meant that any evidence from after this time was not admissable and so was kept from the public.

At a stroke this denied any place for a vast array of accounts from medical professionals, police and others who had seen people suffer and die after 3.15. It meant that nobody got to question why the police would not let ambulances into the ground.

Fifteen year old Kevin Williams was pulled out from the crush alive at 3.28pm. An off-duty police officer who found a pulse at 3.37pm tried to flag an ambulance down. Kevin was saveable, but they cordoned off the care on the day.

Kevin's mother Anne has long campaigned for a new inquest into her son's death. The evidence is extremely strong, both that he was alive after 3.15 and that he died from other injuries than traumatic asphyxia; injuries that could have been treated.

If a new inquest rules that these things are indeed true, it means the original inquest is proven false. This, in turn, means a reopening of the inquest into the other 95 victims and a demolition of the cruel whitewashed stonewalling that the families of the victims have faced for so long.

Here's where you come in.

Anne Williams has launched a government e-petition to force a parliamentary discussion of the case. A previous e-petition asked for disclosure of Cabinet files relating to Hillsborough. A four hour Commons debate and unanimous vote agreed. Even though it will expose police and politicians lies, there is huge momentum for the truth about Hillsborough to be revealed. How long that momentum will last is unknown; certainly, our best shot at proving that the inquest was a cover up is this petition that has only days to go.

There needs to be over 100,000 signatures to force the parliamentary debate. There are 25,000 on Kevin Williams' petition and only four days left.

This is not about football. This is about justice. This is about holding the state and its agents to account for a massive arse-covering abuse of power. If you are a British citizen or UK resident you can sign the petition here. It needs to be done - signed and the confirmation email clicked - before 19th January.

don't bite the hand that beats you

It is gratifying that two of Stephen Lawrence's racist killers have been convicted, but as they were part of a five strong gang and have eluded justice for 18 years, it is far too little far too late.

Amongst the reasons for the delays were a Tory government deeply committed to defending the police from criticism no matter how valid; we had to wait until the Blair government before a proper inquiry was launched.

The Metropolitan Police were forced to admit to 'institutional racism' and have a serious crackdown on overt racism in the force. A Home Office report of 2005 assessed the impact of the Lawrence Inquiry on the Met and found that overt racism amongst officers at work is indeed largely unacceptable these days, though homophobia, transphobia, sexism and other bigotry are all still alive and well.

There has been a lot written about the police not taking racist attacks seriously, and strong allegations of the father of one of Lawrence's killers bribing officers. What I haven't seen mentioned is the police actively attacking the campaigns for justice.

Almost two years ago, a year before the outing of Mark Kennedy put the issue into the spotlight, an undercover Metropolitan police officer gave an interview to the Observer. Deployed by his boss Bob Lambert, the officer infiltrated far left and anti-racist groups for four years in the mid-1990s; exactly the time when the Lawrence campaign was actively working for justice from a heads-in-the-sand police force. He said

At first, I could convince myself that my job was about fighting subversion, but once I began targeting the groups set up to win justice for those who had died in police custody or had been victims of racism, it was clear that what the loved ones of the deceased wanted was justice. My presence in the groups made that justice harder to obtain.

The officer - identified in the piece only as 'Officer A' but subsequently "named"as Peter Black - does not specify which campaigns he infiltrated and undermined. The use of the plural is interesting and, given that the Lawrence campaign was by far the most prominent, it would be surprising if he had not targetted them.

Even if the Lawrence campaign was not amongst those Peter Black infiltrated, he will have disrupted others just as serious and deserving of justice. Whichever campaigns they were, it is one of the starkest illustrations of unaccountable political policing yet unearthed in the whole undercover scandal. Whilst infiltrated groups like Climate Camp did not riot (even to the extent of putting their hands in the air chanting 'this is not a riot' whilst being batoned by police), there is undeniably some crossover between anti-capitalist environmental groups and public order situations that kick off into riots.

But with campaigns for justice for those who died in custody, or those whose attacks were under-investigated and dismissed, there is no such hardcore element. The police sent in an officer to grieving relatives pretending to befriend and support them when he was actually there to make their plight worse. The twisted callousness, the absolute lack of conscience and compassion, beggars belief.

Why would the police deploy vastly expensive operatives to these families and their campaigns, what were those groups planning that could possibly warrant such deceit and intrusion? Put simply, they could make the police look as incompetent, belligerent and racist as they actually are. The one thing that power does above all other concerns is protect its position.

So never mind the validity of your cause, never mind the plain documented truth of what happened, if you're going to make police look bad then you can expect the most unaccountable, invasive tactics available to be used against you.

undercover cops' girlfriends sue police

Eight women who had sexual relationships with undercover police officers are taking legal action against the Metropolitan police.

Jon Murphy of the Association of Chief Police Officers spoke about his undercover officers having sexual relations with the people they're sent to spy on.

It is absolutely not authorised. It is never acceptable for an undercover officer to behave in that way...

It is grossly unprofessional. It is a diversion from what they are there to do. It is morally wrong because people have been put there to do a particular task and people have got trust in them. It is never acceptable under any circumstances... for them to engage in sex with any subject they come into contact with.

Yet most of the unmasked undercover officers not only did so but formed emotionally committed relationships with their targets. Indeed, most of them aren't involved in this legal case - it concerns three of the established officers plus two new names.

These people were expensive assets, watched over by cover officers on a daily basis. The idea that their handlers didn't know who they were with for years on end is laughable. One of them, Bob Lambert, graduated from fieldwork to running the deployment. If Lambert thought his relationship had been a mistake, why were his subsequent agents encouraged to do the same thing?

Lambert was in charge of Jim Boyling's spy work; Boyling had relationships with two of the litigants. Lambert also oversaw Pete Black who says that sexual relationships were condoned by senior commanders.

Back in January ex-undercover officer Liam Thomas explained

At training school, it was drummed into your head that you are only limited by your imagination. The whole UC [undercover] model in the police is taken from the spooks, where an agent sleeping with the enemy is condoned.

The official Met line was 'don't do it', but unofficially it was condoned. I remember one senior detective saying to me, 'Have you embedded yourself in the community yet?'

Despite several exposed officers admitting the policy, Mark Kennedy has tried to downplay what happened.

He is also furious at what he calls a ‘smear campaign’ that he bedded a string of vulnerable women to extract information.

He said angrily: 'I had two relationships while I was undercover, one of which was serious'.

Yet three of the women taking action had long relationships with Kennedy during his seven years undercover.

The state trained these people in techniques to gain trust, to create a sense of intimacy and closeness. They then used this to deceive these women, and others, into having profound permanent sexual relationships.

Internet message boards and comment sections are awash with arguments about whether what was done is rape. The r-word is so emotive that it rapidly polarises discussion and often makes political allies turn against one another.

Some people say that these women were not giving informed consent, and so it is a form of rape. Indeed, when this point was put to Mark Kennedy he folded into sullen silence and did not deny it. Others point out that all relationships have secrets and many people lie about themselves in order to pull someone. If I tell someone in a club that I'm a commando it doesn't mean it's rape if they swoon for me.

The discussion is interesting and important, but off the point. This is not about a single instance of sexual activity. They did not lie to make themselves a bit more impressive in order to get laid. They went and integrated themselves into people's lives and families, became the closest possible companions, in long term emotionally committed relationships. The officers did so only as a paid agent in order to undermine everything that these women worked for and held most dear.

They did this under orders, and were withdrawn at very short notice leaving those who had loved them devastated.

It's not rape in the commonly defined sense. It's perhaps not fraud in the common sense. This is because the set definitions are for things that we have *had* to define. What happened to these women is so rare that we don't actually have a familiar definition or name for what crime it is. Just because that's the situation it doesn't alter the clear moral position of what was done.

Despite the press focus it is not about sexual assault. As they make clear in their statement, the womens' action is for many crimes committed against them, including deceit, misfeasance in public office and negligence as well as the Human Rights of protection from inhumane and degrading treatment, and respect for private and family life, including the right to form relationships without unjustified interference by the state.

The bravery and dignity of these women is admirable and impressive. Already intruded upon and destabilised, it would be completely understandable if they kept quiet and got on with their lives, yet they are putting the personal injustice they suffered into the public arena.

They have not hired publicity agents to splash them across the press for money, nor are they going for their specific cops individually. Instead, by going anonymously they emphasise the way police invaded their personal lives; by going collectively they demolish the lie that relationships were forbidden and Mark Kennedy was one rogue officer; and by suing the Met as an institution they go for the real villains and give the best chance of bringing the workings of this murky corruption out into the light.

the next bucket of whitewash

You know the cliche about how a frog thrown into hot water jumps out, but a frog put in warming water stays put and gets boiled alive?

One all-encompassing cover-up report into the actions of undercover police officer Mark Kennedy and his colleagues would be such a hurricane of bullshit that it would cause outrage. Instead there are - count them - twelve separate narrow little inquiries reporting one at a time.

The frog dropped into a pond of whitewash jumps out; but slowly add whitewash to the pond and it doesn't notice until it's swallowed a load and gone blind.

Yesterday Sir Christopher Rose published his report.

BACKGROUND

The Crown Prosecution Service failed to mention they had transcripts of recordings made by Mark Kennedy at the meeting where activists planned to close Ratcliffe power station - evidence that exonerated many of those involved. Twenty people were convicted and a further six were on the brink of it when they demanded Kennedy's report; the prosecution refused and the trial collapsed.

Had activists not uncovered Kennedy, those convictions would stand. How many other people have been wrongly convicted due to the prosecution witholding evidence of undercover cops who, unlike Kennedy, were never found out?

HOW MANY ONE BAD APPLES CAN THERE BE?

Sir Christopher Rose was a poor choice to write the report (or a good one, if you want a cover-up). He was Surveillance Commissioner, a post that has the ultimate sign-off on deployment of undercover cops. He was one of the people who sent Kennedy and co in. This isn't the same state investigating itself, nor even the same institution; to some extent it's the same individual.

Did he find any systemic problems then? Have a guess.

As I said when the last Kennedy report was due to come out, when it gets caught doing the unacceptable, state power denies it's done anything wrong. When that fails, they hang a small number of lowlies out to dry. No officers went to jail for the American policy of torture exposed at Abu Ghraib. A solitary Second Lieutenant was convicted of the My Lai massacre. If they can do that for such atrocities, the spy cops thing is a walk in a finely kept park.

Just as the undercover cops were 'one rogue officer' (even though Kennedy did nothing that wasn't done by a slew of others subsequently uncovered), so Rose has found that the CPS' witholding of evidence was down to one rogue prosecutor, John Cunningham.

Which takes some brass balls to say, given that emails proving conspiracy between Cunningham and his superior were leaked months ago.

Cunningham exchanged a series of emails with Nick Paul, a more senior CPS prosecutor based in London, according to the documents. At that early stage Paul was also aware of a "participating informant" and "sensitive disclosure issues" relating to Kennedy's evidence.

And of course, there were many CPS staff who will have seen the transcripts of Kennedy's recordings. Rose admits

all involved were well aware

that they should disclose the evidence, yet he says

at no stage of the prosecution was there any deliberate, still less dishonest, withholding of information.

I know I should tell you something, I don't, yet I'm not deliberately witholding it? You fucking what?

The weaselling is done by essentially claiming that the Crown Prosecution Service didn't notice the hundreds of pages pertaining to Kennedy, or if they did they didn't think it would have any bearing on the case to have a transcript of what was said and by whom. (And let's just ignore all the police officers involved who were fully aware but stood by and watched a miscarriage of justice, they're in the clear too). This is a one-off, then, right?

NOT ONE, BUT ONE OF MANY

But we already knew that one of Kennedy's predecessors, undercover cop Jim Boyling, had been arrested as an activist and been prosecuted under his false identity. (Truth, whole truth, nothing but the truth?).

This week we learned that Boyling had earlier been on a hunt saboteur action that ended in arrests, and he had supplied a witness statement for the defence. (In a poetic twist, the sabbers' lawyer was Kier Starmer, who these days is the Director of Public Prosecutions who ordered the Rose report).

What's interesting is that in that case the prosecution declared that they were witholding certain evidence. We still don't know what it was but the only obvious answer is that the 'sensitive' documents showed that the activist Jim Sutton was actually the police officer Jim Boyling.

If that's right then the CPS definitely knew about Boyling, and about undercover officers among activists, at that time. Which means that when Boyling was prosecuted later on, the CPS knew who he was yet it got waved through.

One of Boyling's contemporaries, Pete Black, says that prosecutions under false identities were commonplace in order to build the credibility of undercover officers.

This means that there are many other cases like the Ratcliffe one where the prosecution has pertinent evidence that mitigated or even exonerated the defendants, yet they witheld it.

TELL ME WHAT YOU CANNOT KNOW

The Director of Public Prosecutions, Kier Starmer, went on Newsnight last night to defend the Rose report's weapons-grade whitewash. He said that there was no need to go back through all the prosecutions involving undercover officers. Instead, he would look at any cases that concerned people bring to him.

He knows full well nobody can do that, it's yet another shutdown whitewash tactic. How can anyone know what cases to suggest if we don't know who the secret police officers are?

Either the CPS has to get a list of the spy cops and examine all cases, or they have to publish a list of the cops' names so we can say which cases we saw them in.

THE FORECAST IS FOR FURTHER DOWNPOURS OF WHITEWASH

These enquiries and reports - despite all the evidence incontrovertibly proving otherwise - are saying there is no systemic corruption. They are a denial that there has been decades of this political policing. They are decoys to keep us from asking a larger question about what the mission has been and how far it has gone.

Beyond that there is a larger question still - who invented this role? Did the police invent it for themselves and the prosecutors and politicians keep nodding it through? Did they sit down and do it together? Or was it invented by politicians?

For such a large and long-running scandal, during this extraordinary past twelve months the politicians have been deafeningly quiet.

sweets for my sweet, twit for my twitter

Just to point out that I've got a Twitter account, @MerrickBadger.

It has notifications on the increasingly rare occasions when I publish a blog post, plus some personal life idle thoughts, and mostly (so far) it's been political stuff on current events.

There's a wee grey button in the sidebar if you want to follow me.

mark kennedy's thatcher tears

Margaret Thatcher was clearly choked up and her eyes welled with tears as she left Downing Street for the last time. Some political observers remarked that this was evidence of her having common humanity after all.

But to only cry for your own loss of power, status and income after despoiling communities and instigating brutal political crackdowns without a glimmer of remorse, well, that actually proves your complete lack of common humanity.

This is not the same as crocodile tears, so needs a different name. As it's not a unique phenomenon perhaps we should call every instance of it Thatcher tears.

Last night, a year after he was uncovered by the activists he had infiltrated for seven years, undercover cop Mark Kennedy starred in a Channel 4 documentary (it can be watched online here, at least for now). In it he said how wonderful the activists had been to him day in day out for years on end and how he feels bad having shopped them by the dozen. If that were true and he had a conscience as you or I understand it, he would have ended his mission years earlier.

After he left the police, he came back to the activists under his real name because he missed the camaraderie, he said. In fact, he'd set up a private spy firm and returned to continue his infiltration. This explained his sudden interest in animal rights, an odd turn of events for a meat eater. He continued spying and lying even without police instructions. He would still be doing it now had he not been caught by suspicious friends.

That he kept working as part of the darkest police mission after he saw the routine brutality of the police on protests - even getting hospitalised by them himself - shows a man in love with power rather than morality. For several years after his beating, he was instrumental in organising similar police war parties on subsequent protests.

To see him on TV saying how great his victims were, and portray himself as the biggest victim of all, is as stark a case of Thatcher tears as can be.

He says he feels guilty about betraying people. Yet he was happy to do it for as long as the cash kept coming in. Jim Bliss likened him to 'Judas pretending to be Jesus'. But Judas started out as a disciple. Kennedy was only ever there because he'd had the pieces of silver up front, and then went looking for more people to hand over to the crucifiers on his own initiative.

He said the activists really cared for him and loved him. Except, of course, they didn't. They cared about a man who didn't exist. They didn't love him any more than the Anti Nazi League would love a secret Klansman in their midst.

LIES AND CONTRADICTIONS

He talks of the people who exposed him as dignified and said he didn't feel threatened by them. Funny that earlier this year he told the Guardian the meeting was 'hugely menacing', and his earlier Mail on Sunday story said it was a 'terrifying kangaroo court' and the front page headline said I FEAR FOR MY LIFE.

He still claims to have only had two sexual relationships with activists - which even the fawning voiceover clearly didn't believe - and says he was in love. Yet when asked if it was abuse as the women did not give informed consent, he crumples and does not deny it.

Both he and the film makers refer numerous times to the four year relationship. They say it was underway by the time of the Icelandic dam campaign of summer 2005 and continued until he was outed in October 2010. Kennedy and the film crew are unable or unwilling to count to five, an indicator of the level of clarity and accuracy in the programme as a whole.

An anonymous undercover cop said that he couldn't be expected to 'live like a monk' for seven years. A man like Kennedy who is frequently returning home to visit his wife and kids is not in that position, though. Incidentally, in the film his marriage continued until he was outed in the press. In previous interviews he said the marriage broke down years ago.

The film makers not only share his poor numeracy but also his attitude towards the truth. Near the end they said that not one activist would participate in the film. Earlier this year they contacted many. After a few weeks, despite having being told in very stern terms to shove it, they contacted some of them again offering them anonymous contributions and saying that others were already co-operating. Using lies to make a vanity film about a liar. You've got to admire the neat consistency of approach there.

Much was made of his arrest at the Ratcliffe power station action in April 2009 and how dropping charges against him made it obvious he was a cop. In real life, 114 people were arrested and bailed. About half of them had no further contact from the police. Were they all suspected of being cops too then? Around 60 were recalled for interview, including Kennedy, after which charges were brought against just 26. Charges are frequently inexplicably dropped against activists. It is not an alarm bell.

He said his role was not to inform on individual people, yet this is completely untrue. Documents disclosed to Ratcliffe defendants show that he was given a short list of named activists to keep tabs on that day. Is seems scarcely credible that his other orders were not along similar lines.

He said he didn't want the publicity. If I didn't want publicity, I don't think I would hire the world's most notorious publicity agent Max Clifford to get me on the front of the Mail on Sunday dressed like Alan Partridge's golfing partner, followed by a five figure sum for being in a documentary about me not wanting publicity.

Amongst the big lies were many small ones. He was described as a 'committed vegan', a point he reiterated in the sycophantically filtered webchat after the show (seriously, was there someone at a computer in Max Clifford's office with the word 'brave' in the clipboard?), yet he never even pretended to be vegan.

Why would they put in such a pointless lie, unless he is a man who genuinely cannot distinguish between truth and falsehood?

He appears to have spent so long in the role of agreer to those around him, surfing the moment, that he not only doesn't know what he thinks but can't even keep track of what he does.

He plainly has no idea why he did what he did, nor who he is. He has a personality disorder that was cultivated and exploited by his bosses, just as they did it to other officers before, just as they're doing it to Kennedy's successors right now. To them, Kennedy and his ilk are just grist to the mill and the legion of people psychologically and sexually abused are irrelevant collateral damage.

ENTER THE PUPPETMASTER

The police refused to comment on Kennedy specifically, but they propped up Jon Murphy from the Association of Chief Police Officers. Despite its public body sounding name, ACPO is an unaccountable private company that was responsible for deploying Kennedy and other undercover cops.

Murphy said that intimate relationships 'shouldn't happen', yet we know that most of the exposed undercovers had them, often having several.

One of them, Bob Lambert, went on to run undercover operations and was in charge of deploying officers who had relationships. If he knew the danger and thought it a bad idea, surely he would have made sure it didn't happen. From the evidence we have, it seems more likely that he encouraged it as a way to ingratiate.

Murphy says undercover cops lie, but they do it 'within the bounds of the law'. Yet this has never been tested. What about the cops who were prosecuted, who stood up in court swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, before giving evidence from someone who didn't exist? What about those sexual partners who have a legal right to privacy and a family life? What about the baton-charged protesters who have a right of free assembly?

HUMANITY WITH PERSPECTIVE

A man moves in next door to you. He is friendly and helpful and shares your interests. Over the years you become close, going on family holidays together, he babysits for your kids, you eat at each other's houses. Then seven years in you find out that he only moved in so he could get close to you in order to film himself abusing your children. More, he did it not out of any compulsion but because a gang of film distributors paid him to do it. But when they stopped paying him, he carried on making the films, selling them freelance until you caught him at it.

When you discover what he's done he is ostracised, his life ruined. The inner void of that abuser warrants some serious counsel and guidance, but he cannot be viewed as the main victim. He chose this. Those he abused did not.

However, neither can he be viewed as the real villain. His hands did the work, but the true evil is in those who sent him in; they run an army of abusers, knowing lives will be shattered, sitting back in the shadows with all of the power and money and none of the risk.