Undercover police officer who infiltrated green groups and had affair is probed himself over ‘deceiving women into relationships and leaking secrets’
- Police spy who infiltrated green activists for years is now under investigation
- Police chiefs probe Mark Kennedy after he deceived activists into relationships
- He formed relationships with women while spying on them & their inner circles
- Green activist Lisa Jones said she had been ‘deceived and abused’ by Kennedy
An undercover police officer who infiltrated green campaign groups is under investigation by police after it emerged he had affairs with several of the activists.
Police chiefs are probing Mark Kennedy after he deceived four women into romantic relationships, two of them long-term, while under a false persona, and leaking secrets.
A probe into Kennedy, codenamed Operation Montrose, commenced on 31 October 2014, Metropolitan Police confirmed to MailOnline.
Police chiefs are probing Mark Kennedy (pictured) after he deceived four women into romantic relationships, two of them long-term, and leaking secrets
Kate Wilson (pictured) was in a relationship with undercover police officer Kennedy for two years while he posed as an environmental activist. She is one of eight women who took the police to court after they were duped into relationships by undercover officers
The former officer remains under investigation by the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC), headed by Chief Constable Andy Cooke.
Kennedy was one of about 140 undercover police officers who were deployed on long-term missions to spy on a total of over 1,000 green groups from the 1960s up until 2008. He was eventually unmasked in 2011.
The Crown Prosecution Service decided in 2014 that the undercover officers who formed relationships with green campaigners would not be prosecuted.
Kennedy was first deployed to a group of environmental campaigners in Nottingham in 2003, where he posed as a long-haired, professional climber named Mark Stone.
For the next seven years Kennedy used a fake persona to pose as a left-wing environmental activist, and struck up love affairs with his fellow campaigners.
He formed a relationship of six years with one woman named Lisa Jones, all the while spying on her and her inner circle of anti-capitalist and anti-nuclear activists.
Kennedy was first deployed to a group of environmental campaigners in Nottingham in 2003, where he posed as a long-haired, professional climber named Mark Stone
An earlier relationship with another activist, Kate Wilson, began in Scotland in 2003 and lasted two years.
She is one of eight women who had relationships with undercover officers who later took the police to court.
Ms Wilson claimed she had been ‘deceived and abused’ by Kennedy.
In November 2015 Scotland Yard apologised to the eight women and admitted they had been ‘abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong’.
They said such a relationship would ‘never be authorised in advance’ nor used as a tactic and they were ‘failures of supervision and management’.
A compensation settlement was reached with seven of them.
Court documents released in September 2018 and seen by MailOnline revealed that a number of police officers were aware of Kennedy’s relationship with Ms Wilson at the time and allowed it to continue for two years.