The only way there can be real justice is if the inquiry releases the cover names and opens the files.” “Yet we are denied access to any information about the extent of the intrusion into our lives, who knew and how far up the hierarchy it went. “It is now clear that wrongdoing goes far beyond the individual undercover officers,” Kate Wilson told the BBC. As more cases are revealed, the story looks looks less like the police using covert methods to protect the public from extremism and more like Scotland Yard using ugly tactics to protect its own back and quash political protest. Even now, the inquiry is not allowing activists like the Undercover Research Group, which has been instrumental in exposing police infiltrators, to be involved in the hearings as core participants. The Pitchford Inquiry itself was launched after it emerged that officers had spied on the family of Stephen Lawrence during the investigation into police racism following his murder. In 2013, it was revealed that undercover officers monitored activists in the case of Jean Charles De Menezes, the Brazilian plumber shot by police in 2005. Since then, undercover units have been also been assigned, at considerable expense, to gather intelligence on campaigns against police violence. If we have a police force that can deliberately spend decades putting officers in the field to spy on peaceful civilians, manipulating and abusing women and undermining legitimate protest, what does it say about the relationship between citizen and state? They want to know who authorised these relationships, and they want a list of aliases published – so that anyone who has been in a relationship with an undercover officer can finally know the truth. These cases are finally coming to light, as more and more undercover officers are exposed, and a public inquiry is underway into how much the government knew about these activities.īut the women affected want more than an apology. Many, like Kennedy, formed relationships with women activists, and at least two of them fathered children. They used the identities of dead children to maintain their cover.

Since 1968, an unknown number of police officers systematically infiltrated political organisations in Britain and Northern Ireland, under the auspices of two now-disbanded units of the Met. And as the story unfolded, it became clear that Wilson was far from the only woman to have been deceived into a relationship with a member of the British police.

The man Kate knew as Mark Stone, as a friend she had loved, slept with and lived with for two years, was in fact an undercover police officer called Mark Kennedy, sent by the state to spy on the environmental campaigns of which Kate was a member. It was a friend, telling her that her ex-boyfriend Mark was not all he seemed.

In 2010, Kate Wilson received a phonecall.

Scotland yard undercover detective