My boyfriend was paid to spy on me and have sex with me for six years
Unbeknown to Lisa, the loving boyfriend who had been by her side for over the course of her thirties, was an undercover police officer who was hiding his double life from both her and his own wife and children. Ahead of a major documentary, Zoë Beaty hears her extraordinary story where even her friends and family were dubbed ‘collateral intrusion’ by the Met Police
Something I am still fighting to know is, why was it me?” Lisa* is speaking over Zoom, with her camera turned off – a tool to protect her anonymity and take back a morsel of control more than a decade after becoming police property. “Was he just given free rein? Was it his choice? Was I someone convenient? Was it that he really was attracted to me, so that it worked out? Was he given my name by someone else? Was I a target?”
Lisa, 50, was a target – though how exactly that played out in paperwork will perhaps never be known. In 2011, when she was 37, she discovered that her loving six-year relationship had been orchestrated by the Metropolitan Police; that her boyfriend, Mark Stone – real name Mark Kennedy – was an undercover spy. Everything she’d felt, and felt to be true, had been a lie.
She is one of 60 women who were victims of the so-called “spy cops” scandal. Officers working for the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) under the Metropolitan Police Special Branch ran a covert operation, spying on the lives of thousands of citizens for more than four decades.
Around 140 police officers were sent to spy on 1,000 political groups, concocting elaborate fake personas as committed activists to compile damning dossiers on mostly left-wing, progressive groups like Greenpeace; they even used the names of 80 dead babies to carry out their surveillance.
To anyone listening to Lisa’s story – the long years she spent in a relationship with Kennedy, which drew out over the course of her thirties, and over significant, painful events in her life – the basic details are shocking enough. Kennedy accompanied her to her father’s funeral, where he met and lied to her entire family, playing the supportive boyfriend that he never was. They were, Lisa believed, in love – a simple thing, and Kennedy’s cruellest weapon, all part of the plot. “Actually, I didn’t have the free will to be in love,” she explains.
None of the women involved did. In fact, they were manipulated into intimate, sexual relationships, their lives invaded and forever changed by a government-endorsed tactic to spy on political groups who posed no real threat to the state at all. Undercover officers, most of whom – like Kennedy – were married, were “encouraged to sleep with activists”, a landmark tribunal case brought by one victim, Kate Wilson, heard in 2021.
This week, five of the women involved will speak on camera for the first time, in a new documentary by ITV and ITVX, The Undercover Police Scandal: Love and Lies Exposed. They’re a formidable group, bound by terrible secrets and shared trauma who, together, tell a chilling story that they say is far from over.
Lisa first met Mark when she was 29, when he became involved with a social community centre for environmental campaigners she was part of. Her friends trusted him so, naturally, so did she. Their tight-knit lobby group became social – he came to parties at her house, they went on climbing trips together and began seeing each other a short time later.
She loved him “totally, completely, more than anyone”, she’s said in the past. “I thought I knew him better than anyone else knew him.” He would often be away on weekends or on long trips, sometimes for three months at a time “for work” – but, still, they were closer than close and rarely argued.
Lisa later learnt that undercover police like Kennedy were given training from a textbook to learn how to manipulate women like her: “It was only afterwards that I heard the word ‘mirroring’,” she says. Kennedy would imitate her interests, body language and values to gain trust. Any common ground was ultimately hollow, any conflict artificially resolved.
When they did argue, it was “when he wasn’t able to be around, when I needed him”. Kennedy heartlessly accompanied her to her father’s funeral, but weeks later told Lisa that he couldn’t be by her side to scatter his ashes. In disclosure documents she has seen during the long, ongoing inquiry into the scandal, “I’ve since seen authorisations given to him about attending my father’s funeral,” she explains. “When I wanted him to come and help me with my dad’s ashes, his authorisation was refused.”
The mundanity of their lives together is all documented in official police files. Anyone with whom Kennedy happened to form a basic relationship during the course of his “investigation”, like Lisa’s friends and family, was coldly marked up as “collateral intrusion”. She recalls a time that Kennedy told Lisa he was going to watch the Tour de France, and came back with a set of Le Creuset pans for her, which prompted a “whole discussion between him and his handler about giving me this present,” she explains.
“Had I liked it? Was it useful? Did it ‘work’ to convince me? For one thing, I just kept thinking about the police budget that’s being spent on this,” she continues, adding, “I’ve still got some of those pans.”
It wasn’t until the pair were on holiday, travelling around Italy in a van in July 2010 that Lisa pulled the first thread that would eventually unravel their idyllic life together. When he went out on a cycle ride, she happened upon his passport, which named him as Mark Stone. It also included information about his child. Nearby was a mobile phone he rarely seemed to use, which she unlocked. It contained emails from two children, both of whom were calling him “dad”.
Lisa didn’t say anything straight away – and when she did, a few days later, Kennedy eventually broke down and came up with another elaborate lie about his past as a drug runner. He told Lisa that during this time, his best friend was shot in front of him and he’d promised to look after his child. He was emotional, and Lisa desperately wanted to believe him, despite her gut telling her otherwise.
They put it behind them – but Lisa’s subsequent suspicion that he was undercover police remained. The discovery of his son’s birth certificate, by a friend who was researching ancestry online, confirmed it: his occupation was recorded as “police officer”, he had a family in Ireland all along. With a group of carefully selected friends, she confronted him.
Shortly afterwards, Lisa told her story on Indymedia, a networking site for grassroots campaigners and “alternative media activists”, which blew the “spy cops” scandal’s epic proportions wide open. A trial for a separate case, in which Kennedy tipped off police about a plot by climate change activists to “disable” a power plant in Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire, collapsed in the wake of Lisa’s revelations.
Journalists began investigating and uncovering the overwhelming extent of officers’ deception, and slowly, more women came forward with eerily similar stories and chilling patterns. Most of the relationships ended the same way – a sudden disappearance to move abroad, an apologetic letter. In 2011, eight began landmark legal action to sue the police for emotional trauma; Mark Kennedy was said to have had relationships with three of the women involved. In 2015, they won an apology from the Met Police. The same year, Peter Francis, a whistleblower who exposed how police had spied on the campaign for justice for Stephen Lawrence, spoke up in 2015 and a public inquiry was called.
Today, more than a decade later, the weight and reverberations of what Lisa has been through and carried with her for more than a decade since her story broke the “spy cops” scandal wide open are ever-present. She has had to come to terms with the fact that Kennedy took away her chance to decide if she really wanted to have children; she says she’s struggled to have a relationship since.
For her, the devil truly lies in the details – in the chilling realisations and unending quest for truth. “I’ve possibly wasted quite a lot of years trying to think about whether his feelings may or may not have been genuine,” she says. “You can tie yourself up in knots. I have done so.
“Actually, the most harrowing thing is this: you don’t just find out that your partner’s been lying to you, but you find out that I was his job. He was being paid overtime for nights spent with me, for example. The thing that really kept me awake at night for quite some time was the question of how many people were in our relationship – when I was speaking to my boyfriend on the phone late at night, were there other people on those calls?”
The Met Police has issued a fresh apology to victims of the scandal in light of ITV’s documentary release for the “legacy of hurt” caused. But victims and campaigners say that not enough has changed – and legislation still allows inordinate freedom of power to undercover police. The women are now campaigning for gaps in legislation that essentially allow for officers to form sexual relationships with “targets” to be closed. “Meanwhile, laws on protesters have been tightened,” says Lisa.
Now she wants the public to understand the extent of the “rot” of a system rooted in misogyny that allowed her and so many others to be so cruelly abused. “What I want people to know is: this could have happened to anyone. It could happen to anyone. It could be happening to anybody who’s reading these words now, or somebody’s daughter or cousin or friend,” she says.
“It’s not like we were a strange group of outliers. I think everybody should be concerned. Not because of what they did to us necessarily, though that is a warning. But because of what they could be doing to anybody, right now, right this second.”
*Name changed to protect her identity
‘The Undercover Police Scandal: Love and Lies Exposed’ airs on 6 March at 9pm, on ITV1, ITVX and STV