I felt raped by the state after being duped into romance by undercover cop with dead kid’s name…we even planned a family
AFTER falling heavily in love with a charming and caring man she met at a community centre, Alison found herself in an intense and passionate romance.
But, just as she was planning her future with Mark Cassidy, imagining a family life with children, he suddenly vanished from her life – leaving behind a letter saying he was leaving the country.
Searching for answers unearthed the shocking revelation that the man of her dreams was not who he said he was at all. In fact he was an undercover police officer.
This was no isolated incident but a top secret policy which saw a special unit of undercover police spying on members of the public for 40 years.
More than 60 women were deceived into deeply intimate relationships with officers who they had no idea were deployed in covert operations.
The officers had fake identities, shockingly using the names and birth dates of dead children.
The ‘spycops scandal’ is the subject of an almost decade-long £88 million public inquiry and now, a gripping three-part documentary series for ITV1 and ITVX. The Undercover Police Scandal: Love and Lies Exposed, which begins tonight, sees the women share their stories on camera for the first time.
Alison, a secondary school teacher, was in her late 20s and had become involved with a local community centre when one of the group brought along a new member she was immediately attracted to.
“He was burly with cropped hair, had a lovely (Liverpudlian) accent and told us his name was Mark Cassidy and that he was a joiner. I fancied him straight away,” she says.
“One night he drove me home from the pub and I invited him in for a drink and that was the beginning of the relationship.
“Mark was a great boyfriend. Because we were part of the same political group, we had that kind of shared perspective. He was interested in anti-fascism and family justice campaigns and really blended in.
“He had an old van and he used it to ferry people around in the group and take them home after meetings. He was really good fun. I filmed a lot of our time together.
“I had a young nephew and niece and he was absolutely natural with them. I sensed he would be a good father. I definitely saw my future with him and it was with children, but Mark didn’t have a big loving family of his own.
“His father had been killed in a road accident by a drunk driver and he was estranged from his mum. I didn’t want to poke at things that were upsetting, but I felt there was something he wasn’t telling me.
“One weekend Mark went out to the shop and I decided to have a look in the pockets of his leather jacket in the hall. I didn’t expect to find anything really but in the inside pocket was a bank card in the name of M. Jenner and the signature was his handwriting. I thought, ‘This is weird. What the hell is going on?’
“I heard him come back and I called, ‘Mark, can you come in here a minute?’ I wielded the card at him and he put his hands on his head and said, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been so stupid. It’s nicked and I bought it off a bloke in a pub. I’ve only used it once.’
“I got some nail scissors and chopped the card up and told him I couldn’t believe he could be so stupid. But I believed everything he told me, more or less. We believe people that we love and I trusted him.”
World crumbles
In 1999, after five years together, Alison desperately wanted to start a family but every time she brought the subject up, Mark refused to talk about it.
“He withdrew emotionally and I became deeply worried about him and his well-being and our future as well.
“I came home one day, expecting him to be there, but the house was silent. In the corridor I saw a letter on the table. Without even reading it I knew it was an ‘I’ve left you,’ letter. “My world had crumbled around me. I was hysterical and sobbing and shouting.”
Searching for answers or any sort of explanation, she turned to a friend who worked in the passport office.
“He said they could do a search on Mark’s details but when he got back to me he said it was a bit weird because when he put his name and details in, it flashed up ‘File stored in CE.’ He had no idea what it meant.”
It was only later revealed that CE was part of an undercover police squad that spied on left-wing campaigners.
A conversation with another member of the community centre left Alison’s head spinning.
My brother said, ‘He has left you because you’re a pain in the arse. You don’t have to come up with some James Bond theory to make yourself feel better.’
Alison
“We were in pub and he was asking me questions about Mark, like did he have a bank account or did he pay for things in cash? When I asked him why he was asking me these questions he said, ‘We just want to rule out that he’s not a spook – a spy.’
“I came out of that meeting and there was shift in my head. Spook? Hang on a minute. That makes sense. That’s why I had never met any of his family or seen any photographs of his childhood and that’s why he doesn’t want me to find him.
“But people were finding it hard to believe my theory that he was an agent of the state. My brother said, ‘He has left you because you’re a pain in the arse. You don’t have to come up with some James Bond theory to make yourself feel better.’
“I knew I had to try and move on, which I did, until I received a message from a woman called Helen Steel.”
Identity unmasked
Helen, a renowned animal welfare activist had had a remarkably similar experience to Alison. In the late 80s, working with a local campaign group, she got chatting to John Barker who shared her empathy with animals who were suffering.
Like Mark, he used to give people lifts home from demos and meetings in his van and had a lack of any meaningful family telling Helen he had grew up in the UK but moved to New Zealand as a teenager and had lost both his parents in a fairly short space of time.
“We grew closer and he told me he loved me. No one had ever really said that to me. I was blissfully happy. It felt like I’d met the person I was going to spend the rest of my life with.”
But she too was suddenly left with just a letter from him, saying he was having some kind of mental breakdown and was leaving her and going to South Africa to escape everything.
“I didn’t understand. Why, if he still loved me, like he said, did he disappear? It’s like a bereavement but you haven’t got a body. This person has just suddenly vanished.”
Her determination to find out where he was and what had happened led her to the General Register Office where she saw his name, John Barker, which matched when and where he was born, but it was a child who had died when he was eight.
Travelling to New Zealand and going through records in the local library made her convinced that he was married to a woman named Debbie. Back in London she established that he was actually John Dines and his marriage certificate stated he was a police officer.
This pattern of behaviour by the spy cops led Helen to discovering more victims, like Lisa who was involved in the climate movement and whose new boyfriend Mark Stone had a van he would give lifts to other members to.
How was Mark Kennedy exposed?
‘Mark Stone’ approached an environmental group known as Earth First in August 2003.
He befriends them and is accepted into the group, getting the nickname “Flash”.
He spies on them, passing on information to his police bosses and MI5.
Kennedy, undercover, starts a relationship with ‘Lisa’ and could have had as many as 10 sexual relationships with other women in the group, including Kate Wilson and Eleanor Fairbraida.
By the summer of 2006, Kennedy entered the circle of people planning the first of the annual Climate Camp gatherings, helping to set up the encampment near the Drax coal-fired power station in North Yorkshire.
Suspicions about the real identity are raised when a passport with his proper name is discovered.
On October 21, 2010 six friends confront him, he confesses and breaks down in tears, saying that he is not the only cop working undercover.
‘Mark Stone’ was unmasked as Mark Kennedy.
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal found in January 2022 that his actions amounted to an “abuse of the highest order” and that he had “grossly debased, degraded and humiliated” Kate Wilson.
The inquiry is ongoing and expected to conclude in 2026.
Lisa fell madly in love with him until he “started to become apart at the seams” and then she discovered his passport saying he was Mark Kennedy and emails on his phone from other people of that surname calling him ‘Dad.’
It turned out that Mark was married, had kids and on his marriage certificate it said he was a police officer. When she put all this to him, he confessed that he worked for the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, which collected information on demonstrators. Then he left.
Fight for justice
After the women spread word of what had happened, the story was splashed in the media and more and more women came forward with similar stories.
Helen garnered a group of women, including Alison and Lisa, to take legal action against the police to prevent such things happening to women ever again and met up with Harriet Wistrich, a respected solicitor who had been fighting significant miscarriages of justice for decades.
“The women were very supportive of each other because they recognised that the that they’d suffered in isolation were mirrored by each other,” Harriet tells us in an exclusive Sun interview.
“The investigative work they did was extraordinary. What the police probably hadn’t considered was that, if you just suddenly vanish from somebody’s life when you’ve been involved in a very long term intimate relationship with them, they’re not necessarily going to just accept that.
“These women were traumatized by disappearances that were not properly explained. There were excuses about having a breakdown or whatever and they were worried about them and felt compelled to find them, because the men had pulled on their hearts.”
As she built the case, Harriet and the women were frustrated by the police saying they would neither confirm nor deny anything on security grounds.
“It felt like we were raped by the state,” says Helen. “There was nothing about these men that was real. They knew, from the start, that we would never have consented if we knew who they really were. But they disregarded our right to make an informed choice.”
It was a police whistleblower, named Peter Francis who changed everything. He revealed he had worked for a special section of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit called the Special Demonstration Squad, spying on left-wing groups. He felt particularly bad about the policy of adopting the identities of dead children.
There was more shocking revelations to come. Stephen Lawrence had died in a racist attack and the family wanted the police to investigate his murder properly. But while they were trying to find out the truth of what had happened to their son, the police employed undercover officers to spy on their campaign.
“I was asked could I find out anything else that could be used to maybe get the public to not have as much sympathy for the Stephen Lawrence campaign,” said Peter Francis.
They were just expecting us to be the oil that greased the wheels that kept the operation turning. But actually, we turned out to be a great big spanner in the works.
Lisa
The then Prime Minister, Theresa May, ordered a public inquiry to investigate undercover policing which is still ongoing. Having lost the right to hide behind their “neither confirm nor deny” policy.
The police settled the legal case with the women out of court for an undisclosed sum of money, along with an apology saying that relationships like these should never have happened and that they were wrong and were a gross violation of personal dignity and integrity.
It is known that 139 officers have spied on over 1,000 campaign groups and more than 60 women have been in intimate relationships with undercover officers.
“They underestimated our intelligence,” says Lisa. “They were just expecting us to be the oil that greased the wheels that kept the operation turning. But actually, we turned out to be a great big spanner in the works.”
UK policing scandals over the years
THE 'spy cop' scandal is far from the only scandal to have engulfed the Met. Here are a few others:
- Wayne Couzens
In 2021 serving Metropolitan police firearms officer Wayne Couzens kidnapped, raped and murdered 33-year old Sarah Everard after faking an arrest.
The case shocked the nation and led to widespread criticism of the Metropolitan Police, especially for their handling of the vigil held in her memory.
Couzens was handed a whole-life order in September 2021, meaning he will die in jail.
- David Carrick
Rapist ex-cop David Carrick was jailed for a minimum of 30 years in Februrary 2023 for a string of violent sexual offences over a period of nearly two decades.
The former firearms officer admitted to 49 charges, including 24 counts of rape, against 12 separate women.
The case led to criticism of the police for failing to perform sufficient background checks, with the Met admitting sufficient intelligence checks had not been conducted.
- Baroness Casey report
A year-long investigation into the Metropolitan Police by Baroness Casey published in 2023 concluded that the force needed a “complete overhaul”, and that racism, homophobia and misogyny was rife.
The 363-page report also found widespread evidence of bullying and “boy’s club” culture, and that it was possible other officers like Couzens and Carrick were still serving.
- Child Q
In March 2022 it emerged that in 2020 officers had strip searched a 15-year-old girl at her school, after she was wrongly suspected to be carrying cannabis.
The girl had been searched without another adult present and while she was on her period, prompting an investigation that saw four officers served with gross misconduct notices.
- Hamas Protests
The Metropolitan Police has come under fire recently for its handling of anti-Israel protests that have taken place in London over the last year, including accusations of soft-touch policing and allowing supporters of Hamas – a banned terrorist group – to act with impunity.
And in April this year, Campaign Against Antisemitism chief executive Gideon Falter was called “openly Jewish” by an officer, and threatened with arrest.
- Offensive messages
Numerous serving police officers have been disciplined or sentenced for sharing offensive messages, including racist, sexist, and homophobic jokes in groupchats.
In October it emerged that chair of the Met’s Black Police Association is set to face a hearing for sharing “racist and violent” messages over Whatsapp, while in December last year six former cops were handed suspended sentences over racist messages sent in a groupchat.