Police spy story plot sickens
British women ‘deliberately deceived’ by our own government.
Imagine the scene: a woman fills in a form stating who her partner and father of her child is. Then after a quick background check by a would-be employer, or a lender, or a bank official, it is revealed that there is an untruth in the signed document.
Next thing comes a knock on the door.
The knock is not a postman with a registered letter or a ‘you can start tomorrow’ confirmation, but some guys in uniform calling for an explanation as to why the father named in the form died when he was eight.
And there she is, accused of attempted fraud – if not terrorism given today’s paranoia – and before she knows it she is in jail.
All she did was have a baby.
The Metropolitan police’s deputy assistant commissioner Patricia Gallan has now told a parliamentary inquiry that two secret police units broke internal guidelines when they stole dead children’s IDs for use during their undercover operations.
Secret police – in the UK?
One such document seen by the Guardian indicates that around 80 police officers used such identities between 1968 and 1994, and, the total number could be higher – not surprising when we consider how many protest groups there are in this country.
One police officer, who adopted the fake persona of Pete Black while undercover in anti-racist groups, had even visited the dead child’s home town to familiarise himself with the surroundings, so as to ‘fully immerse himself in the adopted identity and appear convincing when speaking about his upbringing’.
Black, who was undercover in the 1990s, said his operation was “almost Stasi-like”, referring to how former police in East Germany are held with contempt by British governments.
Black said officers in the covert unit known as the special demonstration squad (SDS), which was originally set up to tackle anti-Vietnam protests, visited the house[s] they were supposed to have been born in so they would have a memory of the building.
“It’s those little details that really matter – the weird smell coming out of the drain that’s been broken for years, the location of the corner Post Office, the number of the bus you get to go from one place to another,” he said.
MPs have criticised this activity – the stealing of dead children’s details – as “gruesome” and “very distressing” but have said remarkably little about the women affected by the men who stole and lived with these IDs.
Another SDS undercover police officer who adopted the identity of a dead child has been named as sergeant John Dines.
During his covert deployment, Dines, under the assumed name John Barker, had a two-year relationship with a female activist before disappearing from her life after faking a nervous breakdown.
In an attempt to track down her boyfriend under his assumed name, the activist was unaware that she was actually searching for a dead child.
She said she was relieved that she never managed to find his ‘family’, the parents of a dead boy.
“It would have been horrendous,” she said. “It would have completely freaked them out to have someone asking after a child who died 24 years earlier.”
The disclosure about the use of the identities of dead children, says the Guardian, is likely to reignite the controversy over undercover police infiltration of protest groups.
It better had.
Fifteen separate inquiries have already been launched since 2011 when Mark Kennedy was unmasked as a police spy who had slept with several women, including one who was his girlfriend for six years.
Six years.
Lord Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, has called for a public inquiry into undercover policing following the Guardian’s revelations about officers ‘who stole dead children’s identities and formed sexual relationships with members of anti-capitalist and environmental protest groups’.
Macdonald said the police appeared to have “completely lost their moral compass”, and an inquiry was needed to ensure such tactics were still not being used.
In the normal course of events, to search your house the police have to get a warrant, and to bug your house or tap your phone they have to have approval from the Home Secretary.
But to live in your house, hear all your calls, integrate into your family, be your quasi-marital partner, have a child that they know they will leave you to bring up alone from pre-school age onwards, this apparently just requires the police to decide they want to do it.
But this is not the only issue MPs appear to be not talking about.
Who ordered all this?
Do the police make up these missions for themselves or are they given ideas, directions and commands from acknowledged – read ‘elected’ – political sources?
If ‘yes’ to the latter, are these (elected) political source connected to or some part of the government of the day? Or an international mix of governments and security services?
Maina Kiai, the Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, was in the UK for a week in January and was reported as saying: “The case of Mark Kennedy and other undercover officers is shocking as the groups in question were not engaged in criminal activities.”
“The duration of this infiltration, and the resultant trauma and suspicion it has caused, are unacceptable in a democracy.”
Kiai has called on the authorities to ‘undertake a judge-led public inquiry into the Mark Kennedy matter, and other related cases, with a view to giving voice to victims, especially women, who were deliberately deceived by their own government, and paving the way for reparations’.
‘Deliberately deceived by their own government’.
Those of us who live in the UK may wonder who is it who thinks so little of British women that they encourage or permit someone to hone in on them, totally invade their lives and then actively, purposely, have children they intend to leave?
It makes you wonder how far this contempt for women actually goes.
Earlier this month the official policing inspectorate report concluded that the “intrusive” tactic should in future be used only after independent authorisation.
The report had little to say on one of the most explosive aspects of the controversy – undercover officers sleeping with, and even having children, with the activists they have been sent to spy on.
Eight women, former girlfriends of these police spies, have started legal action against police chiefs, saying they were “deliberately and knowingly deceived” into forming long-term intimate relationships with undercover policemen.
‘This report,’ they said in a statement, ‘misses an opportunity to clearly and unequivocally outlaw any undercover operative from entering into and maintaining long term intimate relationships whilst undercover.
‘It is of concern that whilst the report recognises the psychological harm that may be caused to the police officer, no mention is made of the harm they cause to the women with whom they enter such a relationship which is potentially far more serious.
‘There can be no justification for such relationships and for the outrageous state intrusion on the privacy of those concerned nor for the serious emotional and psychological damage caused’.
The eight want an end to this kind of conduct.
“We are,” they said, “bringing this case because we want to see an end to the sexual and psychological abuse of campaigners and others by undercover police officers.
“It is unacceptable that state agents can cultivate intimate and long lasting relationships with political activists in order to gain so called intelligence on those political movements.”
It is indeed.