Met Police Agent Provocateurs

[Magda Hassan]

Undercover police had children with activists

Disclosure likely to intensify controversy over long-running police operation to infiltrate and sabotage protest groups

Rob Evans and Paul Lewis
guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 January 2012 20.15 GMT

Bob Lambert, believed to be holding the son he fathered while working as an undercover policeman
Bob Lambert (far left), with his child. The undercover police officer had a relationship with a woman who is now taking action against the police

Two undercover police officers secretly fathered children with political campaigners they had been sent to spy on and later disappeared completely from the lives of their offspring, the Guardian can reveal.

In both cases, the children have grown up not knowing that their biological fathers whom they have not seen in decades were police officers who had adopted fake identities to infiltrate activist groups. Both men have concealed their true identities from the children's mothers for many years.

One of the spies was Bob Lambert, who has already admitted that he tricked a second woman into having a long-term relationship with him, as part of an intricate attempt to bolster his credibility as a committed campaigner.

The second police spy followed the progress of his child and the child's mother by reading confidential police reports which tracked the mother's political activities and life.

The disclosures are likely to intensify the controversy over the long-running police operation to infiltrate and sabotage protest groups.

Police chiefs claim that undercover officers are strictly forbidden from having sexual relationships with the activists they are spying on, describing the situations as "grossly unprofessional" and "morally wrong".

But that claim has been undermined as many of the officers who have been unmasked have admitted to, or have been accused of, having sex with the targets of their surveillance.

Last month eight women who say they were duped into forming long-term intimate relationships of up to nine years with five undercover policemen started unprecedented legal action. They say they have suffered immense emotional trauma and pain over the relationships, which spanned the period from 1987 to 2010.

Until now it was not known that police had secretly fathered children while living undercover. One of them is Lambert, who adopted a fake persona to infiltrate animal rights and environmental groups in the 1980s.

After he was unmasked in October, he admitted that as "Bob Robinson" he had conned an innocent woman into having an 18-month relationship with him, apparently so that he could convince activists he was a real person. She is one of the women taking the legal action against police chiefs.

Now the Guardian can reveal that in the mid-1980s, just a year into his deployment, Lambert fathered a boy with another woman, who was one of the activists he had been sent to spy on.

The son lived with his mother during the early years of his life as his parents' relationship did not last long. During that time, Lambert was in regular contact with the infant, fitting visits to him around his clandestine duties.

After two years, the mother married another man and both of them took responsibility for raising the child. Lambert says the woman was keen that he give up his legal right to maintaining contact with his son and cut him out of her new life. He says the agreement was reached amicably and he has not seen or heard of the mother or their son since then.

Lambert did not tell her or the child that he was a police spy as he needed to conceal his real identity from the political activists he was spying on. The Guardian is not naming the woman or the child to protect their privacy.

Lambert was married during his secret mission, which continued until 1988.

The highly secretive operation to monitor and disrupt political activists, which has been running for four decades, has come under mounting scrutiny since last year following revelations over the activities of Mark Kennedy, the undercover police officer who went rogue after burying himself deep in the environmental movement for seven years.

Police chiefs and prosecutors have set up 12 inquiries over the past year to examine allegations of misconduct involving police spies, but all of them have been held behind closed doors. There have been continuing calls, including from the former director of public prosecutions Ken Macdonald, for a proper public inquiry.

The second case involves an undercover policeman who was sent to spy on activists some years ago. He had a short-lived relationship with a political activist which produced a child.

He concealed his real identity from the activist and child as he was under strict orders to keep secret his undercover work from her and the other activists in the group he infiltrated. He then disappeared, apparently after his superiors ended his deployment. Afterwards, she remained under surveillance as she continued to be politically active, while he carried on with his police career.

The Guardian understands that as he had access to the official monitoring reports, he regularly read details of her life with a close interest. He watched as she grew older and brought up their child as a single parent, according to an individual who is aware of the details of the case.

The policeman has been "haunted" by the experience of having no contact with the child, whom he thought about regularly, according to the individual.

If you have information please contact paul.lewis@guardian.co.uk

:banghead::fullofit::monkeypiss::darthvader: I do not have words to express my utter contempt for the man/men and The Man involved in this. How many people's lives to they have to ruin before they consider the operation a success?

[Peter Lemkin]

Gives new meaning to being 'fucked over' by the Police and TPTB!

Imagine how these children will grow up.....wouldn't surprise me to hear one hunted down and did violence to his/her undercover father.....or killed him/herself over their coming into being...that goes for the mothers too. And I get the feeling NEW Scotland Yard is holding back hundreds and hundreds of others just like this they assigned and know about.....! It will be 'discussed' in Parliment tomorrow...oh, the words of righteous condemnation!! [and NOTHING will be done!!!!]

its not date rape, but STATE RAPE!!!!!!!

[Magda Hassan]

Gives new meaning to being 'fucked over' by the Police and TPTB!

Imagine how these children will grow up.....wouldn't surprise me to hear one hunted down and did violence to his/her undercover father.....or killed him/herself over their coming into being...that goes for the mothers too. And I get the feeling NEW Scotland Yard is holding back hundreds and hundreds of others just like this they assigned and know about.....! It will be 'discussed' in Parliment tomorrow...oh, the words of righteous condemnation!! [and NOTHING will be done!!!!]

its not date rape, but STATE RAPE!!!!!!!

Absolutely. Rape and child abuse. I'm just astounded...And we can extrapolate this behaviour to all the police around the world. I doubt it is only happening in the Met. This disgusting abuse is getting on a par with the officers adopting the babies of the women they murdered in South America coups.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Here's more on how Special Branch's Lambert fucked the protest movement.

Note that, in the 1990s, Shagger of the Yard went on to become "head of operations in the covert unit, running a network of spies".

Undercover police: how 'romantic, attentive' impostor betrayed activist

I feel angry and violated, says woman apparently used as cover by officer who was trying to infiltrate Animal Liberation Front

Rob Evans and Paul Lewis
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 23 October 2011 21.48 BST

They met by chance one night at a party in Tottenham, north London. The man she would come to know as Bob Robinson was standing on his own. Jenny (not her real name), a 24-year-old who had come to the capital to find work, was intrigued by the slim man with the endearing smile, who was slightly older than her.

They fell easily into conversation and before long, Jenny was smitten. The love she felt for him rolls easily off her tongue. He was, she says, "polite, considerate, very romantic, attentive, charismatic". He smiled a lot and was non-judgmental. And he was cute.

"I thought I had found my Mr Right. He was very charming and I thought I could take him to meet my parents," she says.

They had an 18-month relationship and one of his characteristics struck her in particular: "I thought he had a high moral code."

But now she feels very different about him. It turns out that there was a lot more to Bob Robinson than his impassioned campaigning and shoulder-length hair, which gave every impression of a rebel with many causes.

He was, in fact, the opposite. Bob Lambert today admits he was an undercover police officer who had created the fictional persona of Bob Robinson to spy on political activists.

The special branch officer was one of a group of police spies in a covert unit who have been infiltrating and disrupting the activities of political campaign groups across Britain for decades.

Jenny and others only discovered his true identity more than 20 years after they first met him. The discovery has left Jenny feeling that he deceived her about the bedrock of any relationship his identity. She is very hurt that he duped her about who he was. "I was cruelly tricked and it has made me very angry. I feel violated," she said.

As she was trying to persuade him to set up home and have a family together, he was resisting, claiming he had to flee abroad as he was being pursued by special branch because he was a dangerous radical activist.

The sorry episode has left her wondering if he loved her at all. Today, Lambert admits that "as part of my alter ego's cover story, I had a relationship with 'Jenny', to whom I owe an unreserved apology".

So far, seven undercover police officers who infiltrated political groups have been exposed and most have admitted or have been accused of sleeping with activists they were spying on. They have faced claims that they did so to glean intelligence about the activists and the protests they were organising. A growing number of women say they have suffered terrible trauma and damage from the betrayal of having a relationship with a person they later found out was a fake.

Police chiefs claim that undercover officers are forbidden from having sex with their targets "under any circumstances" as it is "unacceptable and unprofessional". But Pete Black, an undercover officer from the same unit who infiltrated anti-racist groups in the 1990s, said sex was widely used as a technique to blend in and gather intelligence. He said there was an informal code in the unit that the spies should not fall in love with the women or allow the women to fall in love with them.

An investigation by the Guardian has shown that Lambert was no ordinary police spy. His skills of deception would earn him legendary status in the elite ranks of the covert unit known as the special demonstration squad (SDS). "He did what is hands down regarded as the best tour of duty ever," said Black.

Lambert admits that in the 1980s, he "first built a reputation as a committed member of London Greenpeace, a peaceful campaigning group [on environmental issues]". He did so "as part of my cover story" to "gain the necessary credibility to become involved in serious crime".

His aim was to penetrate the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), which he says was "then engaged in incendiary device and explosive device campaigns against targets in the vivisection, meat and fur trades".

In the 1990s, he drew on the techniques he had learned undercover to become the head of operations in the covert unit, running a network of spies.

It was May 1987 when Jenny met Bob. Very quickly they were spending most of their free time together. Bob said he was a gardener, doing cash-in-hand jobs in well-heeled places such as Hampstead. He told her that he was also earning a living by driving a minicab, although he was touting illegally for customers.

But politics was really his thing, he said. He told her how he was deeply involved in campaigning for animal rights and the environment.

Bob confided that he was heavily active in the ALF. But she was not interested. "He was always asking me to go to meetings. He introduced me to lots of activists. I did not realise what the ALF was."

But why did Lambert have a relationship with Jenny when she had never been an activist ? "I have no idea. It's a great mystery," she says.

It seems from his admission today that he was using her as his girlfriend so that he could portray himself as a fully rounded person with a private life to the rest of his political and social circle. Activists, eternally on their guard against police spies, are suspicious of people who, for example, turn up at their meetings out of the blue without any discernible evidence of friends or a family. Taking her along to the pub or parties with other activists was a neat way of deflecting those suspicions.

Jenny was working at the time as an administrative assistant at the state-owned Central Electricity Generating Board. But she kept quiet about her job as she feared the activists would take against her because the CEGB was running nuclear power stations.

She was keen to develop her career and have a family. She lived in an east London house with eight other friends, but none of them were politically active, other than having a general antipathy to Margaret Thatcher's government.

They spent most nights together at her house, although he lived in what she called a "grotty flat above a barber's" in Hackney. He had a "single man's room with a shared kitchen" but with very little in it. "He claimed to be not interested in possessions," she said.

A few months into their relationship came the episode that was to seal Lambert's reputation as one of the best undercover operatives the SDS had ever had.

In the summer of 1987, Lambert had been undercover for three years and had worked his way into the inner recesses of the animal rights movement. The Animal Liberation Front operated through a tightly organised underground network of small cells of activists, making it difficult for spies to get among them. Police chiefs were on the hunt for sorely needed intelligence after three incendiary bomb attacks on Debenhams shops in Harrow, Luton and Romford. Activists had planted the bombs because the shops were selling fur products. The attacks had reputedly caused millions of pounds' worth of damage.

Lambert identified the perpetrators to his handlers. The intelligence was so precise that the police caught them red-handed. The Old Bailey heard how police raided a flat in Tottenham and found two activists sitting at a table covered with dismantled alarm clocks, bulbs and electrical equipment for making four more firebombs.

The prosecution told the court that Andrew Clarke, then 25, and Geoff Shepherd, then 31, were wearing gloves to conceal their fingerprints. The bombs were made in large matchboxes, with a warning: "Do not touch. Ring police. Animal Liberation Front." Shepherd was jailed for four years and four months, and Clarke for more than three years.

But his feat also went down in SDS legend because Lambert had skilfully disguised that he was the source of the tip-off, managing to throw the suspicions on to others within the small ring of activists who knew about the attacks. So well had he retained the trust of the activists that Jenny remembers that he went, with her, to visit one of the accused in jail while they were awaiting the trial.

Jenny remembers that after the arrests, Bob would often say that special branch was hot on his and other activists' trails. There was, he says, a "big crisis" because the animal rights campaigners suspected that there was an informer in their midst.

A bizarre incident happened at about that time. By 1988, Jenny had moved into a Hackney flat with two others, who were not politically active. One day, special branch detectives raided Jenny's home, letting slip that they were "looking for Bob". He was not there. She remembers that one of the detectives picked up a pair of shoes and asked who owned them. They belonged to Jenny. The raid, the Guardian understands, was orchestrated by police to bolster Lambert's cover story.

After more than a year together, Jenny felt that Bob had given her the right signals that he was interested in having children with her. He had been to see her parents three times. But when she broached the question, he said no, upsetting her hugely. She wrote in her diary that it was a black day. "I remember crying a lot that day. I was just so shocked."

Soon afterwards, she says, Bob began to tell her that he would have to go on the run abroad to escape the special branch. Over the last few months of 1988, they discussed what to do. She said she wanted to go with him, but he said she should not.

According to Jenny, he argued that she should not waste her life on the run, constantly looking over her shoulder, and that she deserved better a rewarding career and a family. "He said he was not good enough for me."

He left his flat and stayed for a couple of weeks in what she called a "safe house" with one of her friends in London. She remembers meeting him once there: there was "still a lot of electricity between us".

In December 1988, Bob and Jenny spent a week alone together in a friend's house in Dorset to say goodbye. "I was heartbroken. Even when he left, I could not imagine that it had finished because we loved each other so much. I wanted to go on the run with him. I was prepared to do that for him."

But his sacrifice in not taking her with him made her admire him even more.

He said he was going to Spain. In early 1989, she received a long letter from him in Valencia, saying he was not coming back but raising the possibility that she could join him there. "Even then I could not believe it," she says. It was the last she heard from him.

The drawn-out goodbye was a ruse. His trip to Spain and the postmark on that letter was genuine, but the reasons were not. Bob's undercover tour was ending and he needed to leave the activists without arousing suspicions. Using standard tradecraft, he had created the perception of a convincing reason for his departure that special branch were after him. The Spanish bolthole was far enough away to deter activists from going to see him, and avoid the risk of their bumping into him.

[Peter Lemkin]

Maybe they need [or secretly have] a rank of Shagger In Charge. :wirlitzer: More than one way to get a promotion...but it is an interesting variant on the more usual 'sleeping one's way to the top'!

Magda, I totally agree is on 'par' with what happened in many Latin American fascist regiems, as you said.....which goes to show how far along that road the UK is and has been...I'm sure the same is going on in the USA, but we haven't yet heard much about it. Occupy has already been infiltrated and we know all about many groups from 60s [and well WELL before] to now infiltrated and I'm sure many of those infiltraors became fathers of real radical mothers - or what the state considered 'radical' - which is just left of Attila the Hun.

[Ed Jewett]

Britain: Undercover Police Had Children with Activists

January 22nd, 2012Via: Guardian:
Two undercover police officers secretly fathered children with political campaigners they had been sent to spy on and later disappeared completely from the lives of their offspring, the Guardian can reveal.
In both cases, the children have grown up not knowing that their biological fathers whom they have not seen in decades were police officers who had adopted fake identities to infiltrate activist groups. Both men have concealed their true identities from the children's mothers for many years.
One of the spies was Bob Lambert, who has already admitted that he tricked a second woman into having a long-term relationship with him, as part of an intricate attempt to bolster his credibility as a committed campaigner.
The second police spy followed the progress of his child and the child's mother by reading confidential police reports which tracked the mother's political activities and life.
Posted in COINTELPRO, Dictatorship, Police State, Surveillance

[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.

[Jan Klimkowski]

British Army intelligence (Force Research Unit) and MI5 agent "Kevin Fulton", who went undercover in the Provisional IRA, then became a whistleblower and an assassination target, with some advice to anyone considering becoming an undercover infiltrator (like Mark Stone/Kennedy) or Fulton himself:

[Danny Jarman]

[URL="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/04/mark-kennedy-police"]
Watchdog criticises police over Mark Kennedy's undercover tapes[/URL]

IPCC finds a collective responsibility for failure to disclose undercover officer's recordings to activists

Police have been criticised for their role in withholding crucial surveillance tape recordings made by undercover officer Mark Kennedy.
The tapes were kept from activists who were being prosecuted for planning to occupy one of Britain's largest power stations. The contents of the tapes would have cleared the activists.

In a report published on Wednesday, the Independent Police Complaints Commission said "there was a failing by the police officers and police staff members involved to disclose" the tapes appropriately.

The IPCC began investigating last year after the prosecution of six activists collapsed.

The IPCC said there were collective failings by relevant parties to ensure the tapes were properly disclosed to the activists' lawyers but "the actions of individual police officers and members of police staff did not amount to misconduct".

The IPCC commissioner Len Jackson said: "Our investigation has shown that the sharing and recording of sensitive information, initially between the various officers involved and then with the Crown Prosecution Service, was not well handled … Whilst there were some weaknesses in the manner in which Nottinghamshire police officers and staff carried out their disclosure duties in this case it is our view that none of their actions amount to misconduct."

Kennedy, who infiltrated the environmental movement for seven years using the alias Mark Stone, covertly recorded a private meeting of activists on a £7,000, specially adapted Casio watch.

Nottinghamshire police used the intelligence to arrest more than 100 activists, hours before some of them planned to invade Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, Nottinghamshire, in April 2009.

Twenty other activists were convicted in December 2010 but their convictions were overturned last summer when appeal court judges ruled that the Kennedy tapes had been withheld from them.

The IPCC report follows a similar inquiry by Sir Christopher Rose, a retired high court judge, who ruled in December that both prosecutors and police had failed to ensure the surveillance recordings made by the undercover police officer were handed over to lawyers representing the activists.

How is this not misconduct?

The quote from Len Jackson reads almost as satire, like something you would see from the Onion.

A total farce.

[Jan Klimkowski]

The IPCC press release can be seen here.

That page has a link to the full 25 page report, which I've just read.

Note that this was a strictly limited investigation of Nottinghamshire Police's behaviour. The terms of reference are narrow.

The key officers, some of whom have now retired and thus are no longer subject to police disciplinary action, gave highly legalistic and strictly constrained answers to key questions.

I further note that:

The DCI from the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), now known as the National Domestic Extremist Unit (NDEU), provided a report on his involvement with the UCO and the product provided. This DCI has now retired and will be referred to as the NPOIU DCI throughout.

The conclusions begin at page 22.


Here they are.

UCO stands for Undercover Officer, namely Mark Kennedy/Stone/Flash.

Conclusions
108. This investigation was tasked to ascertain if there was a failure to disclose relevant material to the CPS by Nottinghamshire Police prior to the trial of six alleged offenders. The investigation has found that a UCO had been authorised to participate in criminal activity, which included aggravated trespass. During the operation the UCO used an audio recording device and a transcript and statement detailing this was later produced. It is these items that are at the centre of this investigation.
109. In his report, Sir Christopher Rose stated that he had read all of the RIPA authorities and reviews completed by ACC Ackerley. He made no criticism of them and it is noted that Sir Christopher Rose is the Chief Surveillance Commissioner. Whilst the authorities have stood up to the scrutiny of Sir Christopher Rose, ACC Ackerley failed to brief Det Supt Pearson, the SIO, about the UCO and what he had been authorised to do. He relied on the NPOIU to do this, yet Det Supt Pearson was a member of Nottinghamshire Police. Had ACC Ackerley fully prepared and briefed Det Supt Pearson, this may have assisted Det Supt Pearson to have an early understanding of the potential difficulties of the case and in particular the status of the UCO.
110. The dissemination of the sensitive material from the NPOIU through to the police is best described as ad hoc. The officers from the NPOIU should be considered experts in their field of work, which includes UCOs and the material they produce. The transcript should have been fully explained to Nottinghamshire Police with regard to its evidential value, whether it went beyond the UCO use and conduct, or if there were any issues around the UCO potentially having acted as an agent provocateur. There is no evidence that
IPCC Final Report Aeroscope Nottinghamshire Police
Version 1.0 Page 23 of 25
this conversation took place.
111. The Disclosure Manual explains that in cases involving highly sensitive and CHIS material, the person holding the material, in this case the NPOIU, should prepare a highly sensitive schedule and make contact with the prosecutor. The material must be viewed by a unit head, special case lawyer or a delegated prosecutor. This did not occur in this case.
112. Mr Cunningham stated that from 27 April 2009 he was aware a UCO had been involved with the operation and was shown a single piece of paper which outlined the UCO's tasking and report. He stated it was not until the week commencing 24 January 2011 that he saw the statement and transcript. He accepted that he saw the authorisation document of the UCO and believed it to be in order, but stated he did not recall the section describing the parameters of what the UCO had been authorised to do. If he had inspected all of the authorisation documents in full he would have been aware of what the UCO was authorised to do.
113. Det Supt Pearson accepted that he did not give this investigation his full attention as he had additional SIO roles to deal with. However he was content that he shared the crucial elements of the covert product, namely the UCO statement and the transcript with the CPS.
114. Although there is an inconsistency of the date, Det Supt Pearson and DI Roberts state that between 15 May and 31 May 2009 they met with Mr Cunningham and provided him with the transcript. They both state that he read it and commented that it was a safety briefing.
115. Det Supt Pearson also stated that a meeting occurred on 15 May in which he became aware that Mr Cunningham was already aware of the UCO. Det Supt Pearson does not elaborate on how he became aware of this and he also suggested that it was during this meeting that Mr Cunningham was shown the draft statement. Nobody else recollected the meeting as described by Det Supt Pearson.
116. DI Roberts stated that following a briefing with the CPS on 16 June 2009 it was agreed that it would be beneficial for the Disclosure Officer to compile a
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collection of all documents relating to the UCO which could be looked at in isolation by the CPS so further guidance could be given. There is no evidence to suggest this occurred.
117. The NPOIU DCI stated he had a meeting on 15 September 2009 with Mr Cunningham and Mr Paul, during which the transcript and statement were discussed. Mr Cunningham was asked if he wished to retain them, but he declined stating he did not have adequate storage.
118. DI Roberts, Det Supt Pearson, the NPOIU DCI and Mr Matharu all state that they discussed the transcript that had been generated by the UCO with Mr Cunningham at various points throughout the investigation.
119. In addition, the email between Mr Cunningham and Mr Paul gives a clear indication that they were both aware the UCO had been a participating informant, and Mr Cunningham himself accepts that he was aware a statement had been produced but he stated he decided not to read it. Had he done so, this would have explained that the UCO had been authorised to use an audio recording device.
120. Whilst none of the police officers involved with the investigation adequately recorded the details of any meetings, on the balance of probabilities Mr Cunningham had at the very least been told about the products generated by the UCO and had been given opportunities to read them prior to 24 January 2011. However the investigation cannot prove what Mr Cunningham had sight of, nor what his understanding of the implications may have been, before 24 January 2011.
121. The investigation has been unable to identify a one page document referred to by Mr Cunningham and Ms Gerry.
122. Whilst the investigation has shown that the CPS, and particularly Mr Cunningham, appeared to have knowledge of the products generated by the UCO, there was a failing by the police to disclosure them separately on the relevant MG6 schedules.
123. Mr Matharu was inadequately skilled in dealing with sensitive information and
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intelligence within covert investigations, and made an incorrect assumption about the transcript he was provided with. As a result, he failed to record this appropriately on the MG6D schedule. However, despite this, Mr Cunningham accepted that he signed off a MG6D schedule without having read it.
124. The investigation concludes that the failures highlighted in this investigation were a collective failing by a number of parties and that the police individual actions do not amount to misconduct.
125. The review conducted by Sir Christopher Rose concluded that the disclosure issues discussed throughout this investigation did have a bearing on the collapse of the criminal proceedings against the six alleged offenders.

The IPCC has interpreted the evidence as cock up, rather than a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

On the available evidence, which is far from complete and which has not been rigorously challenged and tested, I do not share the IPCC conclusions.