At least 25 undercover police officers spied upon and dated members of the public for up to six years, leaving women’s lives ‘absolutely ruined’, a new documentary is set to reveal.
Four of the spies are alleged to have fathered children with their targets, before disappearing while their offspring were still infants.
Some of the undercover officers were married and had their own children at the time of their alleged activities.
Although the ‘spy cops’ scandal, involving undercover officers sent to spy on mainly left-leaning activist groups between 1970 and 2010, has been known about for some years now, a new documentary is set to reveal the scale and impact of the deception.
One of those featured in the new ITV series, known only as Jacqui, has told how she was left ‘absolutely ruined’ after finding out by chance that her son’s father had been an undercover officer some 20 years later.
Officer Bob Lambert is accused of abandoning the pair when his son was still an infant and falsely claiming he had to go on the run abroad to escape arrest.
More than 50 women have so far been confirmed as victims of the undercover officers, the Guardian reports.
Airing from Thursday, the series – made in collaboration with the paper – shows how five women pieced together the clues to expose the real identities of their former partners.
Officer Bob Lambert (pictured) is one of 25 officers accused of having sexual relationships while working as undercover cops
Mark Kennedy is said to have relationships with at least 11 women he was spying on while undercover in Bristol
The unit behind the practice, the NPIOU, operated in secret for decades monitoring more than 1,000 campaign groups, including the family of Stephen Lawrence, who was murdered in 1993.
A long-running public inquiry into the practice was set up by former Prime Minister Theresa May in 2015.
Led by retired judge John Mitting, the inquiry is looking into how the women targeted were deceived and who exactly knew about the lengths the undercover officers went to.
It heard last year from its chief barrister David Barr that sexual deception was ‘not justified’.
A total of 139 officers employed by two separate squads are believed to have engaged in spying activities.
Of these, 25 are confirmed to have entered sexual relationships with targets. Three further officers deny that they had sexual relationships with members of the groups they were targeting.
The officers spent an average of four years as undercover members of the political groups while mining extensive information about protests, members’ identities and even sexualities.
The Mail previously reported on the case of undercover officer Mark Kennedy, who had sexual relationships with at least 11 women he targeted.
Mark Kennedy was part of the Met’s National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPIOU) which along with the SDS employed undercover officers
Eleanor Fairbraida is one of 11 known victims of Mark Kennedy – she entered into a sexual relationship with him unaware that he had been sent to spy on her
Victim Eleanor Fairbraida became friends with Kennedy after he attended the Sumac Centre, a community hub in Nottingham from 2003.
He is known to have had sexual relationships with Fairbraida and as many as 10 other women during his deployment between 2003 and 2010 – in one of the biggest policing scandals in modern times.
Fairbraida, 46, who now lives in Bristol, said she and Kennedy were friends for seven years after meeting at the centre and at one point their relationship progressed to become lovers.
But the whole time he had been sent to spy on the work the activists were doing and was secretly married with two children.
Kennedy, 55, had a passport in his undercover name and attended gatherings at power stations like Drax in North Yorkshire and the G8 Summit in Gleneagles in 2005, even travelling around Europe to ‘take part in’ protests.
He was so convincing in his role as an environmental activist fighting against climate change that he was even willing to be beaten up by the police while attending the protests.
Fairbraida continued: ‘He moved into our house. I lived with him and three other people and I stayed with him in his house afterwards.
‘We were very close friends. I knew him for seven years. In 2008 our relationship developed and we were lovers for a while.
‘At the time we had no idea that this sort of thing happened.’
Kate Wilson, an environmental activist, was also duped into a long-term relationship with Kennedy (pictured together)
The Special Demonstration Squad was operational between 1968 and 2008 while the National Public Order Intelligence Unit worked between 1999 and 2010
Fairbraida said Kennedy also formed a long-term relationship with her friend Kate Wilson, as he pretended that they supported the same football team, liked the same music and had the same ‘trailer’ lifestyle.
In 2021, Wilson won a landmark tribunal case against the Metropolitan Police for breaches of her human rights.
The tribunal – in which Fairbraida was a witness – heard he had ‘police-issued phones, laptops, passport and bank cards’, all in his false identity, and ‘had a police-issued van and a flat paid for by the police’.
It also heard he was told to develop personal relationships in order to gather pre-emptive intelligence’ on activists at the centre, with the help of ‘an extensive support system for the purpose of this long-term infiltration’.
Kennedy’s relationships are just one example of the kind of activities being looked into by the national inquiry.
Methods employed by the police spies included using the names of dead children as cover identities without their families’ consent.
The families of 20 children born between 1938 and 1975 have been told that their relatives’ details were used, 19 of whom had died young and the other where an officer used a living child’s identity.
