Met Police Agent Provocateurs

[Jan Klimkowski]

The truly pathetic coverup begins.

Kennedy's bosses failed to "manage" him properly......

Kennedy ignored his handler's instructions....

Kennedy went "rogue"......

Beaten by colleagues, mishandled by bosses: how Mark Kennedy went rogue

Police spy became resistant to intervention of management, who failed to control him properly or work out exit plan, report finds

Rob Evans and Paul Lewis
The Guardian, Thursday 2 February 2012

When protesters watched horrified as the man they knew as Mark Stone was beaten up by five police officers, they would not have guessed what was actually going on.

For the truth was that the police were beating up one of their own, putting him in hospital with a broken finger, a prolapsed disc and a big cut across his head. Stone was really Mark Kennedy, an undercover police officer in the middle of a seven-year covert mission to infiltrate and disrupt the environmental movement.

A damning report published on Thursday reveals that the bizarre incident was a key milestone in a scandal that has inflicted great damage on the police over their 40-year penetration of political groups. The deployment of Kennedy was so disastrous that police chiefs have now been forced to clean up the running of undercover operations in the protest movement.

No one could have predicted that outcome when Kennedy turned up with long hair, tattoos and a plausible backstory at a gathering of environmental activists in 2003. He pretended to be Stone, a professional climber with a dodgy past dealing drugs. Soon, he became a trusted activist who was always ready to help organise demonstrations.

He took part in almost every major environmental protest during his seven years undercover. One of them was a climate change demonstration against the Drax power station in 2006. According to his account, he rushed to protect a protester who was being hit on her legs with a baton by police.

"They kicked and beat me. They had batons and pummelled my head. One officer repeatedly stamped on my back," he told the Guardian last year. He complained that he "experienced a lot of unjust policing" and was at times "appalled at being a police officer".

Ironically, the police were there only because he had secretly tipped them off about the protesters' plans just one of the numerous occasions he fed his handlers intelligence about the activists.

But the incident should have warned police chiefs that something was beginning to go badly wrong with their secret mission.

Kennedy defied his bosses' instructions to stop working after he was beaten up and arrested at the Drax demonstration. He went back to visit the activists where, he says, he received far more love and attention over his injuries than the police gave him.

Kennedy was "becoming resistant to management intervention", in the view of Dennis O'Connor, the head of the body that inspects the police. "He seems to have believed that he was best placed to make decisions about how his deployment and the operation should progress," O'Connor's report concludes.

O'Connor found that Kennedy also ignored his bosses' instructions when he accompanied a protester abroad in 2009, and should have been removed from his deployment at that point. O'Connor concludes that Kennedy broke the rules by operating outside of the police's code of conduct, and his wrongdoing included sleeping with women he had been sent to spy on.

The report criticises Kennedy's bosses for failing to control him properly. The "operational supervision, review and oversight" of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), Kennedy's handlers, was too weak "to identify that his behaviour had led to disproportionate intrusion" into the privacy of the activists, it says.

"There were insufficient checks and balances to evaulate and manage Mark Kennedy's deployment. The measures in place (such as monitoring intelligence reporting on Mark Kennedy's activities whilst deployed) proved ineffective," O'Connor concludes.

Kennedy was deployed to spy on activists in 11 countries, including Germany, Iceland and Denmark, on 40 occasions. But his unit was failing to properly inform the police chief in charge of authorising these overseas missions about what he was doing abroad.

O'Connor found that the unit's managers were also to blame for failing to stop Kennedy sleeping with activists. He found that however Kennedy was misbehaving, the "absence of robust controls and systems" in the unit led to the miscarriage of justice when a group of environmental activists were wrongly convicted over a plot to break into a power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, in Nottinghamshire, in 2009.

They were cleared after judges at the court of appeal ruled that police and prosecutors had withheld secret recordings made by Kennedy of the activists' private meetings.

By 2009, Kennedy was about to "go rogue" and was experiencing a conflict of loyalties between the activists and the police. He had become good friends with many of the campaigners and enjoyed socialising with them. But at the same time, he felt impelled by his job to continue telling his bosses about their political activities. Trouble was brewing.

"The long-term aspects of Mark Kennedy's welfare and personal development were not well provided for," the report says. Little thought was given by Kennedy or his bosses to how he could end his undercover mission and take up another police job.

Kennedy quit the police after being told, he says, in a curt text message that his undercover mission was over and then that he was only qualified to drive a panda car.

O'Connor criticises Kennedy's managers for failing to devise a proper plan to remove Kennedy from his secret mission without provoking the suspicion of the activists. The bungling meant it was the activists themselves who eventually unmasked him in the autumn of 2010 the discovery that lead to stream of disclosures about the police's infiltration of political groups over the last 40 years.

The irony, O'Connor reveals, is that the entire disaster for the police could have been averted, as the NPOIU had rejected Kennedy as unqualified on his first attempt to join the covert unit.

Of course what made Kennedy/Stone/Flash credible to activists was that he shagged like a bunny and got badly beaten up by coppers who assumed he was a protestor rather than a fellow rozzer.

Fwiw Kennedy/Stone/Flash has already torn holes in the spindoctor's cover up strategy:

As police watchdog HMIC reviews the use of undercover officers, Home Affairs Correspondent Simon Israel asks if we can trust them to robustly challenge how far operations go in the world of protest.

Channel 4 News

Operations by undercover police should in future be approved in advance by high-level authorities outside the force, according to the findings of a review by the chief police watchdog.

Tighter controls are needed after policeman Mark Kennedy spent seven years living amongst environmental campaigners. He had relationships with two women he was sent to monitor, and fell in love with one of them. His actions led to the collapse of a court case against activists accused of planning to invade Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station near Nottingham.

Sir Denis O'Connor, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary (HMIC), said today's report was about moving forward, about greater clarity of mission, greater oversight, and about assessing what constitutes serious disruption to the life of a community, writes Home Affairs Correspondent Simon Israel.

And with that the handful of undercover operations in the sometimes overlapping worlds of domestic extremism and protest movements will continue.

Last year the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) Sir Hugh Orde called for greater independent oversight. The organisers of that seminar, Liberty, wanted judges to have that role.

Sir Denis's report makes clear the judiciary want nothing to do with it. I understand very senior judges feared it would undermine their independence.

So responsibility for oversight has returned to the very watchdog that failed to spot the rogue behaviour of the very undercover officer Mark Kennedy which prompted the HMIC inquiry.

We learn from the report that unlike placing a bug in a car, the deployment of an undercover officer does not require prior approval by the Office of Surveillance Commissioners, and is only subject to review, astonishingly, through random sampling....in other words by chance.

The report points out the Office of Surveillance Commissioners (OSC), headed by former Appeal Court judge Sir Christopher Rose, only twice reviewed Kennedy's role during the seven years he was undercover and twice the OSC gave him the all clear.

They ticked the technical box, the one about compliance with guidelines but they failed to probe the nature of the intrusion, the risks of becoming an agent provacateur, the value of the intelligence he was supplying, or the quaility of supervision.

So Sir Denis has recommended the OSC works harder and reviews undercover operations more often. But the only link the OSC has to the public is a report which comes out just once a year.

How can the public trust such a body to robustly challenge how far undercover operations should go in the world of protest?

Kennedy reaction

Mark Kennedy, the policeman whose actions led to this review, has reacted with "outrage" to the claim he was "resistant to management intervention".

Kennedy went undercover to infiltrate left-wing protest groups and spent seven years using the persona "Mark Stone". He travelled to 11 countries on 40 occasions.

The report said: "He seems to have believed he was best placed to make decisions about how his deployment and the operation should progress."

During an interview on BBC Radio 5 Live, Mr Kennedy was asked if he recognised that he was "resistant to management intervention".

He said: "I found that, well, I was outraged, to be honest.

"I was so closely monitored by my cover officer, I had one cover officer who was in contact with me every single day that I was deployed in those seven years.

"There was a whole chain of rank structure all the way up to the chief constable of Nottinghamshire who signed the authorisations."

Mr Kennedy said a claim in the report that he worked outside the investigation's boundaries by accompanying a protester abroad in 2009 was not true.

"Everywhere I went and everything that I did was authorised.

"I perceived that I was being told by my cover officer that the authorities were in place for me to travel.

"I honestly think that the lust for intelligence and other people's career development really overshadowed the care and attention that should have been placed, or should have been there, for me and for other officers because I wasn't the only officer who was travelling to all these countries to various different protests."

Sir Denis O'Connor told Channel 4 News: "We think that over seven years, Kennedy tested the controls in the system in a variety of ways.

"He did produce some very useful intelligence which we detail in the report. But the controls and support... were inadequate to assist him.

"Any member of the public would understand that if you are working to somebody else's persona for a number of years it is going to take an awful lot of personal discipline and control to stay on track and in touch with your mission all of the time."

Plus ca change.

Shagger of the Yard can carry on fucking hippies to boost his undercover legend.

It's a charter for agents provocateur.