cover of episode Spy Cops | Interview | 4

Spy Cops | Interview | 4

2022/5/3
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British Scandal

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The hosts discuss the shocking tactics used by undercover police officers to infiltrate environmental activists, including the emotional abuse and manipulation of women.

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From Wondery, I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford. And this is British Scandal. So Matt, what an unbelievable story. What was the bit that got you the most? The thing that still really nags me is that they went to all this effort, all this emotional abuse, all these lives ruined...

just to infiltrate some environmental activists. Yeah, so many men in so many relationships. And I think these tactics would be hard to justify if they were infiltrating the IRA or a neo-Nazi group, let alone people that were just trying to protect the environment. So that really drives me mad. And then the details about how these women were manipulated. Women in different parts of the country...

manipulated using that playbook in the same way is really chilling. Yeah, it's so sinister that it's replicated so closely over and over again.

Men with vans, working away, the dark backstory. But the thing I think that was kind of inspiring about the story was how the women rallied round to take on the Met and force them to apologise. They met up, created a website and fought back against the institution that had abused them. And in this episode, we're talking to one of those women. We'll call her Alison, although that isn't her real name. Her story's coming up after this. MUSIC

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As an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalogue. New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash WonderyPod or text WonderyPod to 500-500. That's audible.com slash WonderyPod or text WonderyPod to 500-500. Alison, can you tell us how you first became interested in politics?

So I grew up, my mum was very left-wing, so there was lots of, my brother studied, my brother's a bit old, four years older, he studied international relations at university. So politics was, you know, often discussed around the table at home. I think I joined the Labour Party Young Socialists when I was about 16, but I wasn't, didn't really do anything. I think I attended one or two meetings. And then I was

was very interested in left-wing politics and socialist ideas all through my 20s.

But I didn't get actively involved in anything until the mid-90s when I joined the Colin Roach Centre. And I'd been a teacher, I trained as a teacher in the late 80s and became a teacher in 89, 90 and was very active in the NUT. And then I joined the Colin Roach Centre in about 93, I think, which was a local sort of non-aligned political group in

a campaigning group in Hackney that campaigned around police harassment and it monitored the police, particularly in Stoke Newington, which had at that time a reputation for considerable wrongdoing. And also anti-racist and anti-fascist and trade union politics. Those were kind of my three areas, which kind of overlapped with what I was doing at work as a teacher as well. What do you remember about first meeting Mark?

What do I remember? I remember lots of things. I mean, I do and I don't. I remember him being, you know, big and burly and kind of wearing a lumberjack shirt and army greens. And I remember his accent. You know, he came from Birkenhead. So I was pathetically attracted to his accent. And he was just very easygoing, working class bloke. I mean, that was the other thing that the Conning Roach Centre had,

not exclusively, but there were a number of working class people in the group, which seemed a bit different to me to some of the other kind of left-wing groups that I was used to, where it was mainly students and sort of, you know, teachers, local government workers. I remember Mark just being very affable. We had a van. He was very easygoing. He was very friendly with everyone. It was a nice bloke, just a very nice down-to-earth,

you know, working class bloke. And how quickly did that relationship develop? Quite quickly. But that was me. I mean, you know, people ask like, why were you targeted or,

And of course we don't know the answers to that, but for me and every of the, all of these stories are different. You know, we're all different women. They were different men. Obviously there are massive similarities, but the details of them are different. And until we ever get our files or any disclosure, we're not going to really know the answers to this. And maybe the answers won't be in our files either.

How long? I don't know, really. Maybe I'm going to say like a month. I don't know. I wrote three weeks, four weeks. I don't know. I saw him at meetings. We had meetings once a week and maybe there'd be another action or an activity another day of the week. And we would go as a few of us to the pub afterwards. We were chatting and he would give people a lift home afterwards, which was useful because it meant with hindsight that he had the addresses of where everyone lived.

And I think on one of those occasions, you know, I asked him if he wants to come in for the proverbial cup of tea.

In that time, in those early weeks and months, how much of his backstory or how much about himself did he share with you? Again, it's all a bit blurry. I think he told us, a few of us, in a pub once about the story about his father being killed by a drunken driver in Ellesmere Port.

because that was a reason why he could always drive, basically. He never went over the limit. He felt very strongly about drink driving. And therefore, he was available for Lyft home after the pub. I suppose when we started seeing each other soon after that, I would have asked about family. He told me he didn't see his mother. He was estranged from his mother. He had a brother who lived in Rome.

who we once got a postcard from, which I realise now was probably also sent by a special branch. And he had a grandad who was still up in Birkenhead. His grandma had died a couple of years before he met me. She was the only person he ever loved, he said. So, you know, it came out sort of drip, drip, I suppose, in the first, you know, few weeks and months. So he's lying about his family, but how close did he become to yours?

He became very close to mine. I mean, you know, we're a big Jewish family who have kind of, you know, weekly markers in the diary of Friday night dinners and then annual ones of, you know, Passover and various Jewish holidays through the year. He came to all of those. He came to, you know, all weddings and bar mitzvahs and

He came to everything. I mean, we were together for five years. You know, he moved in pretty quickly. He lived in a grotty bedsit around the corner where I lived. And I think I went there once and thought, well, I'm not staying here. Thank you very much. And so he spent most of the time at mine. And within, literally within a year, he officially moved in. I mean, who knows whether he actually kept that bedsit on. I really don't know. He may well have done. But he, as far as I was aware, he was living with me for four out of those five years.

He was there all the time. We were, whatever I did, he did, you know, there were occasions. I mean, when you look back on it, in my head, I think, well, there were like three or four, maybe three, four, five times that I can remember, if that, when we were apart. But in a way, I'm thinking about those times where he was away. So I know there was a weekend where he went to, said he went to some conference and there was a week where he said he went to Spain with his boss and,

But there may have been other times where I went away perhaps with friends for a weekend and I thought he was at home and maybe he wasn't. So maybe it is a bit more than I remember. But, you know, I remember afterwards when this kind of, you know, when I'd worked it all out, I remember saying to friends of mine, I'm not going mad. He was here all the time, wasn't he? And they're like, yeah, he was.

So he came to everything. You know, we went on holidays to Israel. We went to Crete. We went to Thailand, Vietnam, went to Holland. He's in my mother. My mum remarried during those years. He's in my mum's wedding photo, which still sits in her, in her flat.

What did your family make of him? That's a good question. Because I always think with this stuff, you know, will he be listening? Maybe? I don't know. What did they make of him? They liked him. I mean, he helped my brother sort out, you know, because without stereotyping too much, you know, we are a Jewish family who don't really do much DIY or we don't hold pickaxes. And he smashed the back of my brother's concrete back.

back garden to make a shed or something. So, you know, my brother liked him and got on with him. My mum was very fond of him. You know, my mum liked his anti-fascist kind of position and his, you know, his politics. After he went, you know, when I was devastated, she was like, yeah, well, you know, it wasn't really that warm to us, really was. I never really felt that he was, I don't know, she was a bit ambivalent, but she wasn't at the time.

Other people, I mean, my stepbrother and, you know, one of my friends at the time, people thought he was really good for me. I mean, that's the irony, isn't it? They thought he was good for me because he was steady Eddie. He was, you know, I can be quite out there sometimes. And he was like a modifying, modulating influence, I think people thought. Yeah.

Yeah, they liked him. I mean, I was very happy, so they were happy for me. What was there not to like? I mean, you know, he wasn't a convention... You know, I think ideally my mum would have liked me to have been with a nice...

a nice jewish man which i now am but um i think she probably would have liked that then no they accepted totally accepted him he was completely one of the family and in fact i was you know we've got our book deep deception coming out at the end of this month and i took my copy to show some friends last weekend there's a photograph in the book of when we went to center parks with my friends and her husband and her two daughters as babies you know this is like 20 odd years ago

And one of the young women is now like 28, you know, my friend's daughter is now 28. She looked at the photo and there's a photo of Mark in a hammock

in the flat that I lived in at the time with him. And she was like, oh, that's so creepy because I remember that hammer. I remember, you know, people remember him, obviously, you know, he embedded himself in my life and he had a big influence and particularly with what's happened since, obviously, in the lives of other people as well who are not core participants in the public inquiry, who are not probably on any police files, but just who he met through me.

And that will be the same for all of these cops. Yeah, he was a fixture. I know that hindsight sort of distorts the picture, but thinking back, was there anything that you noticed about him that was strange, that perhaps momentarily, fleetingly was a red flag, but that you dismissed? Or was it just all very...

very pleasant and kind of very normal, as you described. It was very normal. It was all very normal. I mean, I think, you know, I come from a middle class, lowest, you know, divisions of middle class, but, you know, kind of middle, middle class background from London. I probably made allowances, you

or I let things slide that I believed at the time were kind of differences in code and register between the way that middle class people and working class people speak. And there were times where we were in a pub maybe with people who he was speaking to who I wasn't really involved in politically, men, like quite hard men,

And I might notice his kind of face change or the way he talked was a bit more macho or a bit harder than when he spoke with me. But, you know, that's what people, I'm aware that people can be different with different people. So I saw it as that. To be honest, one of the things that kind of, one of the things that, although it was annoying at the time, was also quite helpful, is that soon after I started, really soon after he left and I started to believe that he was not who he said he was and that he was working for the state,

When I started telling people that and people who knew him and talking to really anyone who cared to listen about it, everybody was like, what are you talking about? And in a way, that was quite validating at the time because there weren't any clues. If there were clues, we wouldn't know. We're not idiots.

There were no clues. He had a pass, you know, I told you, we traveled, you know, quite extensively. He had a proper passport. He had one of those red and blue credit card style NHS numbers. You know, he had bank statements that came to the house. So, you know, if anything, the issue with him was that he was emotionally stunted. You know, he was stuck at some point in his life emotionally that meant that towards the end of the relationship when I wanted to

Think about having children and starting a family. Those were blocks. Those were the things that were blocked. But that didn't suggest police spy. That just suggested dysfunctional man. There are obviously things in retrospect that you are now more aware of, perhaps, than you were at the time, the way he was talking to different people in pubs and places. But what is the actual moment that you start to think he's not who he's been telling you he is?

After he'd left, I had a conversation with somebody who he'd been working with politically that I didn't really know very well, who they'd phoned to speak to him. And I was like, he's gone. I don't know where he is. And he's gone. And I met with this person and this person was like, OK, we just need to kind of check that he's not, you know, not a spook. And I was like, what do you mean?

And then we went through various details and this person was like, no, he's not. He sounds like a man who's trapped and he's, you know, it's what men do. They're just, he's done a bunk. And I came out of that meeting thinking, hang on a minute.

maybe he is a spook, you know, what does that even mean? But actually it was kind of a, you know, it was like a gestalt shift almost where my brain went, okay, let's think about this as an idea, as an explanation, because all the other explanations didn't, you know, I'd had a few weeks. It wasn't long after, it was only about three or four weeks, I think.

was there another woman? I'd already started to trace him before that conversation. I'd already tried to

phone his grandpa. The number and address that I'd had for his granddad was completely scored out of my address book, like really, really heavy, like loads and loads of bio over it. So I couldn't see it. I contacted his boss at work who I'd remembered the name of. And, you know, there was, I'd had lots of dead ends. So when this idea was kind of rejected, I picked it up and ran with it and became

really obsessive and probably not very well. I know now because I've had a report on it, but not very well. But that was the line of inquiry that I then started to pursue. And as I did that,

suddenly everything made sense. You know, it's a theory, it's a proposition, it's not, you know, all the evidence was circumstantial at that point, but I became totally convinced by it. I mean, we were aware as a group, the idea of undercover police infiltrating left-wing groups was not new. I mean, it wasn't like unheard of, but in a way we'd always kind of thought, okay, there might be people who are around the meeting table or there might be people who are on a demonstration.

No one thought that they were embedded in women's lives in the way that they were.

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You lived with the man that you knew as Mark Cassidy for five years. What was the moment that that relationship broke down? What happened when he left? Well, it was quite prolonged and I still don't, again, you know, it goes back to will I ever know the real answers to this? He went very weird on Christmas 1999. So my dad was taken ill suddenly and almost at the same time his grandfather died.

had a stroke, which meant that he couldn't be with me for Christmas as we planned. He had to go back up to Birkenhead. And I said, well, I'll come with you. You know, we're Jewish. It doesn't matter. Christmas isn't a big thing. I'll come with you. And he insisted that I couldn't come with him. Then, I mean, I've written about this in the book. So the kind of the days and the details are in that because it is the sequence of events is quite bizarre because then my dad was suddenly, um,

rushed down to a hospital in Torquay with a police escort. And at that point, Mark said, no, you've got to stay with your dad. You know, you've got to go and sit. You can't. It's ridiculous. You need to stay. Okay. So that's what I did. And then my brother and I went to see my dad, I think on Boxing Day. And he'd made a miraculous recovery. He was kind of come out of this. He was in a coma and he suddenly come out of this coma speaking, talking about very weird stuff.

And then Mark came back just before New Year, I think maybe the 27th or 28th of January, and he just looked awful. You know, his eyes were hollowed out. He kind of used to have a bit of a stubble and that had grown. He looked like he hadn't slept for days. And he told me a story about how he'd had an argument with his mum

stepfather who he'd punched and then he was very very low between then and March and he said he was doing a job in Luton and that involved him going up the M1 every day and so he was going to have to leave really early and he was going to be back really late and that happened between January and March so he would leave at like half five ish and get back at about nine ish and then he

Then one day I came home from work and there was a letter on the table and more or less everything had gone. And then I was hysterical and phoned him. And then he said he couldn't come back. He couldn't, he couldn't. But then he said, OK, I'll come back and see you. And then he did come back for about another 10 days and was quite strange in that time. And then he left. And then it happened again. I came home from work and another note on the table. And that was the last I've seen of him.

And that was 20 years ago. I'm really sorry to ask this. Yeah. But just to be clear, the circumstances around your father's coma with a police escort and his miraculous recovery...

Do you think there's anything unusual about that? I'd love to know. I did talk to my dad about it. He looked at me like I was mad, obviously. He was like, what are you talking about? There's a couple of bits about that story that don't add up. Do you know, I think Special Branch can put someone in a drug-induced coma and move them. I've got no idea. You know, it's the stuff of films, isn't it? Probably not. Probably not. I'd have to say, keeping my sane head on.

but it was all so weird and the stuff that my dad you know my dad when he came out of his coma he was talking about he was talking about being in Alcatraz and being in an RAF base in Alcatraz and

I mean, it was nuts. But my brother was like, look, you've been on very strong drugs and you're hallucinating. And that is probably what it was. But I don't know. I don't know. They said it was millennium overspill. So that's what they were worried about. So that's why they moved him to Torquay. Who knows? I mean, I've put it in the book because it was such a weird time and maybe, but I suppose in a way,

I suppose the point is that this whole experience is so disturbing that what it does, even if that isn't, you know, if that's true, that's a whole story of its own. You know, if that did happen, if they did put my dad into a drug-induced coma, that's an extraordinary story of its own. If they didn't, then that might...

My perception that that might have been the case is indicative of how disturbing this experience is and what it does to your brain in terms of paranoia and twisting your judgment and your perception of the world. Because suddenly when you realize that the person who you've lived with for five years is a fictional character who is sadistic,

put into your life and the life of your friends to spy on you and collect information that gets passed on

up the chain, when you realize that, then suddenly everything else just becomes jelly. Everything else is just like, well, who can I trust? Who do I, who is real? Your contacts become much smaller because suddenly it's like, okay, well, I know that my family are who they say they are. I know my friends who I've known since I was, you know, a kid are who they say they are. And also people who you might not even like or agree with are

at least they're not lying about who they say they are. So I suppose it's a very disturbing experience. And the story about my dad's coma is kind of illustrative, I think, and indicative of how disturbing the experience is, whether or not the police had anything to do with it. I mean, that would be so tormenting to wonder about things like that and the harm that they could do, not just to you, but to your family and people you care about. Thinking about your life now...

Do you still find it difficult to trust people or accept what you see as real? Not really, no. I mean, I think, again, our stories are all different and the way we've come to our stories is different. I think because I had 10 years, you know, I started to suspect Mark was working for the States. I mean, I didn't... It wasn't until I met Helen Steele in 2003 that we kind of nailed it to Special Branch, but...

For those first three years, between 2000 and 2003, I didn't know if he was MI5 or Special Branch or what he was, but I knew he was some kind of state agent. And then it wasn't until 2010 when Lisa's story about Mark Kennedy came to light that...

that, you know, that I met these other women and that suddenly our case came about. So I had 10 years of processing what happened. In spite of all of that, I suppose, and because, you know, I do trust people quite quickly. I am quite trusting and probably quite naive in some ways. I just think you can't live your life like that. I mean, I've always got in the back of my head that, you know, if something doesn't feel right or someone's not being straight, then I feel like I do need to say it.

So I don't think it's... I think the impact is more about my need for honesty and my need for people to be straight with me and not to keep things from me rather than not trusting them. Maybe that is the flip side of it. I don't know. But I don't... No, I'm not living in a kind of a paranoid existence. I mean, things can trigger it. You know, there are... If I'm meeting women and we're talking about something or we're having a meeting, you know, we might... We will keep our eyes open to see whether, you know, we're being...

observed or listened to. But to be honest, if you know that someone's following you and if you know you're being listened to, then that's probably because they want you to know, because the technology is sufficiently advanced that people can listen to your conversations now. And the surveillance is skillful enough that you really wouldn't know. I've been very fortunate. I've been very, very fortunate that I was able to connect with somebody and meet up with somebody

you know, just about two or three years after Mark disappeared, who I grew up with. I hadn't seen him for 20 years, who I was able to, you know, someone I had a crush on when I was a kid and we had a snog when I was about 16. So, you know, I've been very lucky. And that is the result of being rooted in a kind of a, you know, a kind of a minority community in London where,

And I've been able to have a family and have another loving relationship. So I'm very, very, very fortunate. As you say, the details of your story are, they feel impossible. They're so far-fetched, so dark. They're stranger than fiction. Did you have one of those almost filmic moments of realising this dual identity that Mark had?

I suppose the filmic moment is when I didn't realise, is the moment that you kind of want to shout at, you know, my 30-something-year-old self and say, why are you cutting that card up? The most dramatic moment in the story probably is when I found a credit card or bank card

in his name. And that was, I don't know exactly. I mean, I think in the book I've said it was around 97. I don't know exactly when it was. I felt like he wasn't being straight with me about something. I didn't think he was having an affair. And I didn't think, I mean, you know, to be clear, he was married with three children throughout our relationship.

But I didn't think he was seeing anyone else. I didn't think... I don't know what I was looking for. I think maybe I thought he was getting involved politically with stuff that he wasn't telling me about, which probably was true. Well, it was true. So he went out to the shops one morning and I looked in his...

It doesn't reflect well on me, I have to say, but I looked in his jacket pocket. I think I was looking for leaf... I don't know what I was looking for, but anyway, I found a bank card and it was in his... It was signed in his handwriting, but instead of saying M. Cassidy, it said M. Jenner. And then...

Again, in my memory, I wrote that down and I wrote down the name of the card. And I think I probably did do that because otherwise I don't think I would have remembered the name. I think I wrote down the name of the card and wrote down the details and wrote it on a piece of paper and put it like under a drawer, like a little drawer in my dressing table. And then he came back and I confronted him about it. And he told me his whole story about, I mean, he looked all, you know, he was really shocked and told me a story about how he felt

bought it off a bloke in a pub he was filling hard up and he'd only used it for petrol twice and I was like you know it's so stupid it's just a ridiculous thing to do and then I cut the card up in little pieces in the bin and he made me promise never to tell anyone so I think that was the moment that I could have blown it for him but I believed him

I don't really have any reason not to believe him, I suppose. So that, I think, is probably one of the more dramatic moments. And I think after that, I suppose, once I'd had this moment of thinking, OK, maybe he is a police spy or a spook, you know, MI5 or something, that would make sense.

Then I went to the family records office to check out his, the story that he told me about his dad. I mean, I've got a weird sticky memory for some things. There are some things that are vague, but there are some things that stick and,

And so he told me the date that his dad was killed, and I remembered that date, and I looked that up at the Family Records Centre, and there was no record for it. And his grandma's death, there was no record for. And at that point, I was like, okay, he's lied about something as fundamental as this. What else has he lied about? You weren't the only victim of this sort of behaviour. What was it like meeting the other women?

So meeting the other women has been one of the most extraordinary and one of the most powerful and the best bits of this whole experience. So Helen I knew, Helen Steele I knew because at the Collie Roach Centre we supported hers and Dave Morris's campaign against McDonald's. So I didn't know Helen very well but we did have mutual friends and Helen came to see me in 2003 to tell me about

her experience, I mean, she didn't completely trust me at that time. She wasn't sure whether I was just saying this story to kind of draw out hers or whatever. But then in 2010, when I met Lisa and Kate and Naomi and Ruth and Rosa and Belinda, it was extraordinary. The stories individually are mind-blowing. And when you start to hear other women talking

explain what happened to them. And we just like saw these parallels and these similarities like emerging from these memories. And it was, it was very disturbing. It was, you know, very weird and very disturbing. You know, the stuff about the van, the stuff about, I think one of the things that Kennedy had and Cassidy or Jenna had is this sort of working class laddishness that was quite refreshing in some of our circles, you know, people, you know,

You know, there's a tendency, I mean, I have it a bit, you know, there was a tendency on the left to be a little bit earnest and a bit self-righteous. And they weren't. They were kind of, well, I didn't know Kennedy, but certainly Mark Jenner was a bit irreverent. So there were similarities in that way. And also the way the accommodation that they lived in, you know, for many of them was quite similar. This kind of single grotty bed set. Many of them were in Hackney. I mean, not exclusively, but there seemed to be a lot of them

over the years we've been in Hackney. But I mean, as soon as I knew about my story and then I knew about Helen's story, and then when I found the other eight women, the other six women, the eight of us all together, we agreed immediately that we're not the only ones. You know, we were obviously not the only ones. So we knew pretty early that we were probably uncovering something that was going to unravel through the, you know, across the years ahead. And it has.

And it still is. Am I right in thinking there was a big gap between you realising that this guy was a spy and meeting these other women who had had this very similar experience? Yeah, no, it was eight years later, like 10 years after he disappeared, that I met the other women. So it was a long time. So I've lived with it. So for me, in a way, for Lisa and Kate and Naomi...

who were when the case, when we first brought the case or when their story hit the print, that was within weeks of them finding, you know, a very short time after they'd found out. So they were still in the absolute shock of,

of just learning that Kennedy was a spy, plus having a massive press interest and all of the upset and the difficulties that that presents. And then Belinda also was fresh to finding out that Bob Lambert had been a police spy. Similarly, Ruth was new to finding out. Rosa, whose story...

unfortunately is not included in our book, Deep Deception. And I know how much she wanted it to be, as did we all, because her role is absolutely crucial, but she's just got too much on at the moment. And we've dedicated the book to her. Rosa had lived with the reality for many years. Helen had, and I had. You know, by the time the Kennedy stuff hit the papers,

for me in a way it was a bit like, thank God, thank God there are these, A, there are these other women, B, they're amazing women, and C, maybe we can, you know, maybe we can actually kind of get some truth around this. Maybe we can bring this to the public attention and make sure that it never, ever happens to other people again.

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continue talking about it. I'm sure it was cathartic in a way to know that other people have been through this and that you're in contact with them. But were you all of the same mind that you wanted to do something about it? Or for some people, is that something they don't want to do? No, all the eight of us, everybody was wanting to do something about it. There's an inherent paradox about this story because it's so deeply personal and yet it's, and it's political. And in order to raise awareness,

public awareness, you've got to put it in the public domain, which no one really wants to do. And I remember right at the beginning, our lawyer, Harriet Wistrich, saying, you know, through the case and around the case, we probably should be doing a campaign about this. And I remember saying, yeah, you know, but you can't do a campaign without doing a campaign. You can't do it without talking. You can't do it without having public appearances and, you

speaking out and going over the story and no one really wants to do that and yet you know you can't draw attention without doing that. So the eight of us by virtue of the fact we were bringing the case were all on board

We're really different. I mean, we come from really different political backgrounds. I mean, you know, I'm not vegetarian, let alone vegan. And my politics was very red, not green, you know, because people, journalists sometimes want to,

summarize or gloss some of the facts you know I've often been described as one of the you know environmental activists or that this happened to environmental activists it did happen to environmental activists but it also happened to trade unionists it happened to construction well the women not construction workers but the spying it happened to people who were working construction industry who were blacklisted it happened to families who were fighting for justice

for their loved ones who were killed in police custody. It happened to people who were wrongly arrested and there were the victims of miscarriages of justice. It happened to people who lost children, whose children died, who the police then used to steal their identities to create the fake identities of some of these police officers.

So the people impacted by these two police squads, the special demonstration squad that Mark Jenner was a member of and the MPOIU,

It's not an exaggeration, I don't think, to say certainly tens of thousands of people's lives over a period of 50 years. You know, not everybody experienced the personal violation and the violation of bodily integrity that the women who were deceived into sexual intimate relationships suffered. But there's no kind of...

hierarchy of oppression you know we don't want to get into you know the suffering olympics just all appalling what they've done it's completely chilling a tough question that you've just touched on there is that you embarked on a relationship with mark cassidy but you did not embark on a relationship with mark jenner was it a consensual sexual relationship if you were misled into it

No, it wasn't. It wasn't. I mean, it's a really difficult one. We have had a couple of women who have tried to take the officers they had relationships with to make a criminal case against them for rape. And the CPS said there's no evidence because in their estimation, the relationships were based on genuine feelings. The fact that we didn't know who these people were doesn't mean that we didn't consent.

which is nonsense. We had one of those cases got as far as it could, and I think it went to judicial review and it failed. So, you know, we kind of are waiting to see what we're going to do about that. But the problem is that, you know, nobody, no woman wants to, you know, go to court and take a rape case. No one wants to. It's the most invasive case.

appalling, you know, prospect. The idea of trying to argue that it was rape

And, you know, Mark Barrister showing photos of us very happy and, you know, on our various holidays and me smiling. You know, it's a very nuanced definition of rape. Some of the similarities in terms of our experience is that at first people don't believe you. So definitely my experience was people didn't believe me about who he was and what he was.

And then if you get them to a point where they do believe you, and we had this when we gave evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee in 2013,

They ask kind of what you did to bring it on to yourself. You know, were you wearing a short skirt when you walked down the alleyway? So they ask, well, what were you involved in? As if that is in any way a justification. And it's worth mentioning, I think, that personally, I haven't got a criminal record. But if I did have or if any of us did,

if we have criminal records or that's what the criminal justice system is for. You know, if you commit a crime, you can be tried for that crime. But no one, there was no follow-up from any of these officers' undercover operations. None of us were prosecuted for anything. One of the discussions that we did have between ourselves, the eight of us, right at the beginning, was...

was about being prepared for people to ask us about justification of undercover policing tactics. And we kind of pushed it to the most extreme and imagine, well, hang on a minute, let's say the most kind of justified operations, let's say human trafficking, paedophile rings.

Is it acceptable to task an officer with raping a child in order to infiltrate a paedophile ring? Well, of course it's not. It's not a job in a civilised society to rape someone. You know, whatever anybody had or hadn't done, because I think there's a danger that

that I'm, you know, some of us are a bit concerned about with the public inquiry and with public perception of the core participants in the inquiry, that's people like me, that somehow there are good witnesses and bad witnesses, that there are some people who deserved it and other people who didn't deserve it. And it's really important to understand that no one deserves this. No one deserves to be spied on in a democratic society. You know, Kate Wilson's case, Kate was one of the eight people

And she was the only one who was able to pursue her case through to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. And the ruling came out a few months ago for Kate's case. And, you know, there's a misunderstanding, I think, sometimes about Kate's case at the IPT, because, yes, the sexual relationship she had with Mark Kennedy was part of that. But the most significant part of her case is the fact she was spied on by five that

that she knows of, five undercover police officers. And the judges in that tribunal ruled that it was unlawful in a democratic society. It was unlawful. It was a breach and a violation of her Article 10 and 11 rights, you know, the right to assemble, the right to protest. I mean, you know, the personal impact and the

the institutional sexism that we have and that the wives and the families of these officers have been victims to is so significant.

But it's not the whole story. The whole story is bigger than that. It's a much bigger political scandal. The institutional sexism is crucial. Sometimes our stories get looked at, I think, as human interest stories and almost like a bit, you know, they're a bit titillating. They're a bit kind of, they're relatable because everyone, you know, many people have been lied to and many people have been betrayed in intimate relationships. So they're relatable in that sense. But

They also have a political significance that it's really important for us that people understand. Your book is out, Deep Deception, which is crucial in telling the stories of the women who uncovered the truth about what these police officers were doing. But do you think the timing of it is so crucial now? Do you think it can have an impact in changing public perception and perhaps changing politicians' perception about these things?

The establishment, you know, whatever that means, what does that mean? The judiciary, the public, you know, the police, parliament, the civil service, home office, they, you know, are very skilled at kicking things into the long grass.

and obfuscating and delaying and hoping that people will either give up or die or they'll rely on public apathy or like happens now, there are massive other stories in the news. We had COVID and now we've got a war. There's always something that is a priority above exposing the corrupt ways

in which the police and effectively the Home Office and the politicians at the time, because this information that these undercover police officers were gathering, it went somewhere, you know, it went in reports, those reports went somewhere. So this idea that, oh, we didn't know, no one knew is ludicrous. So we hope, you know, in terms of like what we want now really,

Yes, we want this book to kind of have a big impact. We want people to revisit our stories. You know, some people, oh, I heard those stories years ago. I thought that was all over. It's really not all over. Our case is settled. You know, we took out a civil case against the police and

And the eight of us, our case was settled in 2015. We went through a mediation process and we won that fought for and won that apology, which was unprecedented in which they admit that it was a violation of our human rights. But since then...

There have been, you know, at least another 16 cases, I think. There are more than 50 women, not all the women who've been affected in the way that I have, have brought a legal case. But we know that there are up to and beyond 50 women who've been affected like this. These units ran from 1968 to 2008. So that's a lot of years.

And we know from the public inquiry into undercover policing, we know that there are officers who are giving evidence from the 1970s and early 80s now who are admitting to sexual relationships. We don't know who the women are. We don't know who the officers are. So there are more women probably who are yet to find out that they were impacted and affected in this way. So we

We want kind of public attention on the public inquiry. The public inquiry is a judge-led inquiry. And

We want the judge, Sir John Mitting, to feel that eyes are on him. We want people to be watching. They make it quite difficult to watch. It's not that accessible and it's very legalistic. There's a lot of ciphers used. We don't get many officers' names, so it's difficult to follow. But the message that we have, really, we want a finding of institutional sexism. We want, just like the Macpherson inquiry case,

found the Metropolitan Police to be institutionally racist. The Independent Panel and Daniel Morgan Inquiry found the police to be institutionally corrupt. And we would like the Undercover Policing Inquiry to score the hat trick and find the Metropolitan Police to be institutionally sexist. We also really fundamentally, we want our files.

I mean, you know, this idea that the inquiry, you know, they're working chronologically and they're still going through the 1970s and the 1980s. So the current timetable for reporting is 2026. The tranche in which my story and my evidence will be given is 2025. Now,

We want our files now. We've kind of raised this issue. We raised this issue in 2010 when we brought our legal case. So the police, not like the police haven't had to collect any information that they've got about us already. So we want our files, not just the eight of us, but all the women affected and all the core participants who are in the public inquiry. They're all people who have been spied on and who know they've been spied on. So we want our files. We want to know...

how this information was collected and where it went. We get drip, drip, drip of information. So in the last tranche of hearings, which was in May 2021, so it was a year ago, I don't know exactly what the inquiry had been doing for a year, but the last tranche of hearings were in May 21. The next tranche starts on May the 9th, 2022. In May 21, the

Celia Stubbs, who is a core participant, whose partner Blair Peach was killed by the police in South Hall at a demonstration. Celia was a member of the Colin Roach Centre, where I was a member and Mark was a member. Celia had disclosure to her, to some information, before the inquiry hearings took place, but she wasn't allowed to share that with anyone until after the hearings.

So I'm watching Celia being cross-examined by a barrister in the hearings. And the barrister puts in front of her a document, two documents that have at the top the title touchy subject. And it's dated 96 or something, or 99. It was when Mark was around and it was obvious that Mark had written this report. The barrister then says to Celia,

I'm looking at now at this document entitled touchy subject. I've already, you've had already explained to you, but just for the record, touchy subject does not refer to the contents of the report. It refers to the officer writing the report. So at that point, okay, touchy subject is Mark's code name. Now, how, why, what,

But we don't get anything. So we want some answers, you know, rather than, you know, it feels like the police are the priority of the public. The inquiry is supposed to be neutral. You know, they're supposed to be a neutral party and it's not supposed to be adversarial. It's supposed to be inquisitorial. So they're not cross-examination isn't really the right word for it. They're not supposed to be cross-examining. They're supposed to be asking questions.

But at the moment, it's been a very frustrating process and we're sticking with it because, frankly, we've got nothing to lose. But, you know, part of what we hope our book will do is kind of re-energise our campaign and draw in new people, bring further attention, public attention to it and hopefully, you know, impact some change. You've brilliantly and eloquently explained

how perhaps for the police it would be very convenient to say this was small scale, these were rogue officers, bad apples. But over 40 years and at least 50 women, this was a vast campaign of abuse, basically. And I would definitely direct people towards your book, Deep Deception. Alison, thank you so much for talking to us. Thank you. Thank you, Alison. Thank you for having us on the programme. Thank you.

Thank you so much to Alison. And you can now buy the book, Deep Deception, the story of the spy cop network by the women who uncovered the shocking truth. Next week, we've got a new story. And it's your turn, Matthew. Yes, next week, we are taking on a story I've been desperate to cover since we first started doing British Scandal. And that is Geoffrey Archer. Yes, I said we should do this the other day. Well, someone was listening to you and your wish has been granted.

This is the final episode in our series, Spike Ops. If you'd like to know more about this story, you can read Undercover by Paul Lewis and Rob Evans. You can also listen to the Bed of Lies podcast from Cara McGugan and The Telegraph. I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford. This episode was produced by Dee King. Our senior producer is Joe Sykes. Our executive producers are Jenny Beckman, Stephanie Jens and Marshall Louis for Wondery.

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