A woman who was tricked into a relationship by an undercover officer on a spying mission has said that he and his colleagues behaved like the Stasi.
Alison was a teacher of English and media studies when she was targeted by undercover cop Mark Jenner while she was a member of an anti-racist, anti-facist campaign group in Hackney, London.
Speaking to ITV’s This Morning on Monday, Alison told how no-one in the group had any suspicion that undercover police officers would go as far as to instigate sexual relationships with their targets.
And she likened their behaviour to that of the secret police force which operated in East Germany during the Cold War.
‘Most people kind of thought there were undercover police at protests, maybe even at public meetings, just monitoring, keeping an eye on them,’ she told the programme.
‘No-one expected that they were going to be in your bed, even having short term sexual, intimate relationships.
‘This wasn’t about prosecuting people, it wasn’t about putting people through the criminal justice system, this was about simple surveillance.
‘It’s like the Stasi. I don’t want to be hyperbolic, I don’t want to be alarmist but this is akin to the Stasi.’
Alison Smith’s boyfriend of five years, Mark, was actually an undercover police officer
Mark ‘Cassidy’ – actually Mark Jenner – had become a part of Alison’s family and they even planned to have children together
But Jenner abruptly left Alison after five years together with just a note left on the table
She was speaking ahead of the release of a new documentary, in which she features, which will reveal that 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’.
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.
Alison was targeted by a man who gave his name as Mark Cassidy. In reality his name was Mark Jenner, and he was a married father, undercover police officer and a real-life sergeant in the Met Police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS)
‘We were together for five years, he was completely integrated into my life and my family,’ she told ITV.
She added: ‘He was one of the family, we were planning to have children together and upsetting and distressing though this story was for me on a personal level, especially when I first found out, I’m not the only one.
‘What we know is there are more than 60 women that this has happened to, probably more.’
Alison said the Met originally tried to tell her and some of Jenner’s other victims that he was just a ‘rogue officer’: ‘The police tried to tell us at the beginning that this was a rogue officer. And what we can see really clearly now is that it was systemic.
‘They’re professional liars, they’re trained, they’re funded by taxpayers. We pay for this work. They have proper false passports, false numbers.’
Speaking to This Morning on Monday, Alison said she knows of at least 60 women who were victims of undercover officers since the 1970s
The couple hit it off instantly, with their friendship blossoming into a romantic relationship
She described finding a credit card in Jenner’s jacket one morning that was in a different name to the one he had given her – but he talked his way out of it by claiming he had made a ‘mistake’ and bought a stolen card off a man in a pub.
‘I was a teacher, what do I know about buying stolen credit cards?’ Alison said.
She told how Jenner left her by leaving her a note on the table one day, which pushed her to look for answers.
‘I needed to make sense of that and I needed to talk to people who knew him. It became apparent that he didn’t want to be found.’
Despite her ordeal, Alison is more focused on the bigger picture than the harm done to her personally.
She said: ‘It’s not about him. He was part of a machine, he had a manager, he had a back office, there was a manual that told them how to manage this deceit.
‘What we found out about the whole unit is that they were hoovering up intelligence on everybody who was involved in a progressive movement.
‘I think there have been women who have had children with undercover police officers, people are rightly horrified by that.
Alison compared the routine undercover operations to the Stasi, and accused the Met Police of being fundamentally sexist
Officer Bob Lambert (pictured) is one of 25 officers accused of having sexual relationships while working as undercover cops
‘But the thing we don’t look at so much is the women who have had their most fertile years stolen from them and lost the opportunity to have children because of those years and because they have had their trust so fundamentally undermined.’
She blasted the SDS (Special Demonstration Squad), and the Met Police of which it was a part, as ‘institutionally misogynist and sexist’, and hit out at the fact that the practice is still not illegal.
Another woman 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.
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.
Mark Kennedy is said to have relationships with at least 11 women he was spying on while undercover in Bristol
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.
Victim Eleanor Fairbraida became friends with Kennedy after he attended the Sumac Centre, a community hub in Nottingham from 2003.
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
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.
