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Kate Wilson’s new book, Disclosure, reads like fiction. Unfortunately for her, it is not.
It is the latest in a long-running fight for truth and accountability, after discovering her partner of two years was not the eco-activist he claimed to be.
Their relationship began in 2003. Mark Kennedy was working as an undercover police officer – infiltrating protest movements – throughout their two-year relationship. He was using Kate as a ‘way in’ to disrupt environmental campaigns in the UK.
Kate learnt of the deception in 2010 – and ever since has been battling to find out the extent of the scandal.
Her book “Disclosure: Unravelling the Spycops Files” was published last Thursday. It is described as ‘experimental non-fiction’. It means that although it reads like a novel, it is true to her experiences, based on combing through thousands of pages of disclosures and documents uncovered in an official Investigatory Powers Tribunal, and now an ongoing public inquiry into the scandal.
In conversation with Byline Times, she discusses where the campaign stands now – and what undercover cops may still be getting away with.
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Josiah Mortimer: You’ve got the official launch this week, but you’re also dealing with the ongoing Public Inquiry. That must make this saga all very live for you, 20 years since your relationship with an undercover cop began?
Kate Wilson: “Yes, the book deals primarily with the relationship. But the case actually went wider than that because I knew seven undercover officers over a 12-year period…
“The inquiry is looking at all of the undercover policing operations, and so the other six will also be investigated.
“There is an entire public inquiry looking at 50 years of this with 200 – at least – people from the side of the spied upon, so the non-state core participants in the inquiry. That inquiry has been working chronologically, looking at spying starting in 1968, and they are just reaching my era now essentially.”
Are you confident the inquiry can get the results you’re looking for?
“I think I can say: absolutely not. A public inquiry of this scale is a very complex thing – it’s not going to get the answers that I want, but that doesn’t mean it’s not getting answers.
“The public inquiry is skimming the surface, but they will also be publishing all this material and so there is the opportunity then to keep going, to keep understanding.”
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How has the inquiry treated the victims?
“I don’t like the way that we are treated by the public inquiry. The officials… said four years ago that they were going to publicly release the name of the man who was Mark’s handler for seven years, referred to in the book as EN 31.
“Over just the last week, they announced that they’ve changed their minds and they’re going to keep that name secret. I’m horrified by that.
“One of the significant hopes I had in this public inquiry was that some of the faceless backroom men who ran Mark, who gave him his orders – to some extent, I hold them far more responsible even than Mark himself.”
A note from the inquiry chair suggests the anonymity order has been made to protect Mark’s police handler’s (i.e. his spy boss) mental health.
These were illegal operations, right?
“They were unlawful…I think there are things that were probably illegal. I think having sex with people, lying about who you are, deceiving your way into their homes and having sex with them probably breaks a whole bunch of laws. These operations did not meet the requirements to be lawful. That’s what the IPT found – these operations were unlawful.”
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But you think the threat continues?
“I think that the very nature of the secrecy that surrounds these operations makes them a danger to society. People often say, well, okay, things went wrong, but undercover policing is an important part of policing. I think that needs to be looked at very carefully because after 50 years, we found out what was going on in left-wing political movements.
“I dread to think what is going on in mosques and community centres in Muslim communities around the country [right now] in the name of counter-terror policing.”
The units involved were disbanded, but you think they’ve just moved elsewhere?
“There’s a complicated alphabet soup of police units. The trail gets hasy after that, but that doesn’t actually mean that they’ve gone away, because a lot of the functions that the NPOIU carried out still happen. Undercover policing was a secret department. If it moved somewhere else, it went there secretly.
“I believe that they have publicly said that they are not spying on political movements. I think it’s a lie.
“It is not unheard of for the police to lie about their undercover operations. But it’s also possibly a carefully worded truth, because we know that even when the SDS and NPOIU officers like Mark were working, there were also corporate spies.”
The Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act was passed in 2021 and essential (formally) legalised much covert surveillance. Kate argues that “it basically means that anything undercover officers do, whilst undercover is lawful” though officials say they must operate in line with the Human Rights Act.
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You think they might be using private companies now?
“It’s possible that when the police say they are no longer sending spies into political groups, what they’re doing is paying private companies to do it for them. That is even more problematic, because while there is no public oversight or accountability for the police, it gets even worse when you go into the private sector.”
Despite all the apologies, it’s still not illegal for officers to do what they did to you.
“We’ve got a petition petitioning Parliament right now to ask them to very clearly make it illegal for undercover officers to have sex with members of the public while they’re working. People are surprised because they’re like, what, you mean it isn’t?
“Despite all the public announcements, despite all the apologies, it is still actually not illegal for a police officer to deceive people that they’re spying on into sexual relationships.”
The CPS declined to bring rape charges in your case.
“They declined to bring charges on the grounds that the individual officers would have a defence that they were ‘only doing their job’.
“It’s this kind of weird Catch-22, where the police say, well, this absolutely wasn’t their job, and they could never have been authorised to do it. And then the CPS say, well, we can’t bring charges because they would be able to say that they were doing their job, and that would be a defence. The official positions on this are very, very contradictory.”
Some of these officers went on to have successful careers…
“Bob Lambert is the classic example. He had four relationships whilst undercover [while having a wife and child in his ‘real’ life]. He fathered a child whilst undercover. He was accused of having taken part in planting an incendiary device in a department store and setting fire to it.
“Following all of that, he was highly commended. He was the gold standard for the Special Demonstration Squad, and he went on to run the unit. John Dines, Andy Coles, both deceived people into relationships whilst undercover and then went on to train officers.
“Andy Coles actually went on to become policing commissioner for Peterborough and Cambridge, and was a local councillor and ran for election on behalf of the Tory party in the last local elections. He lost, but he ran. These men have no shame.”
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Do you think current protest movements are being infiltrated?
“I think we need to be very careful of paranoia. I certainly don’t want to scare anybody off from the absolute vital work that people in groups like Just Stop Oil and XR are doing. The South East Counter Terror Unit recently had one of their manuals leaked, and it included Fridays for Future, the school strike, and Extinction Rebellion on its list of extremist groups. Police have an ideological bias against progressive movements.
“I don’t know what they’re doing to undermine those groups, but I am sure that they’re still engaged in political policing, and they are still unlawfully targeting and undermining people’s right to protest.”
How has this experience changed how you relate to protest movements?
“It definitely had a chilling effect on my protest activity. One of the most painful impacts really for me is I always lived in collective communities, all my life. There were some very, very dark times and a lot of mistrust and one of the results of that was that I ended up living alone. I never thought I would live alone. I was very, very committed to communal living…
“I used to live in radical collectives, where everybody was doing protest stuff and now, I don’t. And that was a direct result of my inability to trust people, making it really impossible to live like that day to day.”
But you continue investigating this issue. How is that for you?
“I find it fascinating. I studied history at University before going on to become a nurse. Going through the little details and looking for the evidence – there’s an element to it that I enjoy.
“There is something enjoyable about finding the truth, and also now having done it for so long, I’m able to support people who are at a different stage in the process.”
Kate Wilson’s book “Disclosure: Unravelling the Spycops Files” is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
You can find out more about the Undercover Policing Inquiry here, and follow the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance, which Wilson is involved in, here.
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Josiah Mortimer also writes the On the Ground column, exclusive to the print edition of Byline Times.
So for more from him…
