Undercover officer Mark Kennedy, under arrest in 2009

Officers from Britain’s political secret police lived for years among the people they spied on. They had to truly become activists, not just participating but instigating.

They made a personality trait out of berating people for not being hardcore enough, persuading comrades to take more serious action which was often organised by the officers themselves. They planned illegal activity, marshalled people to it, and were even prosecuted under their false identities.

None of this was meant to happen. In 1969, a year after the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) was formed, the Home Office issued explicit instructions; 

‘No member of a public authority or source (informant) should counsel, incite or procure the commission of a crime’.

They were just as unequivocal about the possibility of coming to court.

‘The police must never commit themselves to a course which, whether to protect an informant or otherwise, will constrain them to mislead a court in subsequent proceedings. This must always be regarded as a prime consideration when deciding whether, and in what manner, an informant may be used and how far, if at all, he is allowed to take part in an offence.’

Mark Kennedy was one of the small, tight-knit group that organised an attempt to shut down Ratcliffe on Soar coal-fired power station in April 2009. The night before the action, police raided the preparatory meeting and 114 people, including Kennedy, were arrested. Twenty were convicted before a further six were prosecuted in a separate trial.

In legal cases, the prosecution have a duty to disclose anything that may be helpful to the defence. By the time the Ratcliffe 6 came to court, Mark Kennedy had been exposed as a police officer, so they asked to see his evidence. Rather than hand it over, the state dropped the charges. The other twenty then had their convictions quashed.

A year earlier, Kennedy had been a driver for 29 people who had stopped a train of coal on its way to Drax power station in Yorkshire. They were convicted but have now also had their convictions wiped. This brings Kennedy’s personal total to 49.

If the other 150 or so officers have similar tallies, it means about 7,000 wrongful convictions are being left to stand. Even if we conservatively estimate just one false conviction per officer per year of service, it adds up to about 600. It may well be that spycops are responsible for the biggest nobbling of the judicial system in English history.

Some spycops went all the way to court themselves. They would swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and, from the first question asking their name, they lied and lied and lied. This fits anyone’s definition of perjury and perverting the course of justice.

OFFICERS PROSECUTED

Jim Boyling infiltrated Reclaim the Streets and was one of a group of people arrested on a protest at a Transport for London office in 1996. He was then in meetings with other defendants and party to the defence lawyer’s advice, a direct breach of lawyer-client privilege. Most of the group were acquitted but one, John Jordan, was convicted. After Boyling’s exposure in 2011, Jordan embarked on a three year battle to successfully clear his name.  Despite the victory, the judge refused to release any papers that explained why the conviction was overturned.

Following the 1997 court case, Boyling and Jordan went on to be part of the small, secret ‘logistics group’ who organised the tactics for the June 18^th 1999 Carnival Against Capitalism in the City of London which ended in substantial property damage. The police’s slow response on the day is baffling, given it is now clear that they knew – indeed, helped draw up – the plans.

Bob Lambert, an SDS officer who later went on to run the unit, admitted he was arrested ‘four or five’ times whilst undercover and that he appeared in court in 1986 for a ‘minor public order offence’, understood to be leafleting outside a shop. He bizarrely claims not to remember if he was actually convicted.

Among the raft of reports into spycops, one of the few that has any credibility is Mark Ellison’s review of spying on the family of Stephen Lawrence. In researching it, he came upon such compelling evidence of miscarriages of justice that he did a second investigation. He faced many hurdles – the report begins with a description of the police not supplying him with the necessary staff or even any office space.

Beyond that, Ellison faced problems with the files. The Metropolitan Police recently described their record keeping as ‘chaotic and dysfunctional’, and this is before we consider the fact that secret units by their nature did not leave paper trails, and the police do not like to admit their corruption. As Lambert told Ellison:

‘we were part of a ‘black operation’ that absolutely no one knew about and only the police had actually agreed that this was all OK’.

Even with the spycops’ pathological reluctance to write anything down and their enthusiasm for shredding, Ellison found records of 26 SDS officers being arrested on 53 occasions. He has ensured 83 people’s convictions will be reviewed.

WHO PROSECUTES THE PROSECUTORS?

The problem is that they’re going to be looked at by the Crown Prosecution Service, the agency who helped secure many of the wrongful convictions. Piecing together facts from two different reports into the Mark Kennedy/Ratcliffe debacle, it’s clear the police and CPS colluded to engineer a miscarriage of justice.

Rather than a crime being committed and the police passing evidence to the CPS, the CPS knew the details of the action before it happened, indeed before many of the activists themselves.

We know the case was overseen by Nick Paul, the CPS’ Domestic Extremism Co-ordinator. It’s alarming that they have someone with that job title, given that ‘domestic extremism’ is a term with no meaning in law, it’s just used for police convenience to smear dissenters with overtones of terrorism. Nick Paul was also the CPS’s chief for the Drax coal train miscarriage of justice. The CPS refused to answer a Freedom of Information request on what other cases he handled.

Bob Lambert has suggested that he might not have committed perjury when prosecuted as the court may have been secretly told he was a police officer and played along. Mark Ellison found this kind of thing had indeed happened. If this was standard practice it is even more worrying as it adds the courts to the list of agencies that have contravened their fundamental purpose to help entrap citizens.

Is this really the biggest corruption of the judicial system in history? We don’t know. We only have details of 17 exposed officers from the political secret police units. We have no idea what the other 90% did. The Kennedy cases are the only ones where we’ve secured significant release of papers and investigations, and they certainly point to blasé, systemic abuse.

The only way to find the truth is to publish details of all officers from the disgraced units. Only then can people come forward with their stories of being duped, cajoled and convicted. At the moment, the police flatly refuse to do so and the achingly slow public inquiry, delayed before it even begins, has not provided any new information. Justice delayed is justice denied.

Originally published by Real Media, February 13, 2017

Prosecutors have finally admitted that a defendant in a court case was an undercover police officer. Jim Boyling was a Special Demonstration Squad officer, deployed under the name Jim Sutton.

In 1997 he was on trial with a group of other Reclaim The Streets activists after being arrested a protest at a London Transport office. Having sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, he lied and lied and lied.

Whilst most, including Boyling, were acquitted, John Jordan was convicted. Last year the conviction was quashed but the Crown Prosecution Service refused to say why. Their given document of reasons was literally a blank sheet of paper.

The fact that Metropolitan police chief Bernard Hogan-Howe had already publicly declared that ‘Sutton’ was an undercover officer made no odds. They admitted that Boyling was a police officer but – farcically sticking to the crumbling policy of ‘neither confirm nor deny’ – would not concede that he was an undercover officer, as if he might have had the full time activist persona of Jim Sutton of his own volition as some sort of hobby.

But in August police were forced to say that Boyling and his former boss Bob Lambert had both been undercover officers. Late last month the Jordan case was back in court and prosecutors finally admitted that Boyling had been deployed as an undercover police officer throughout the trial.

To have a police officer be party to all the defence meetings, in a position to help formulate that defence, is an extremely serious breach of lawyer-client confidentiality. That the trial went ahead is a serious abuse of the judicial system.

A fortnight ago the Crown’s QC, Richard Whittam, told the court

Had the Crown Prosecution Service known that ‘Jim Sutton’ was an undercover police officer, there is a strong likelihood that John Jordan would not have been prosecuted.

Note the careful wording – the CPS is not saying that it didn’t know Boyling was an officer, just implying it. The court was specifically told that this wasn’t actually an admission of anything at all.

WE’VE SEEN THIS BEFORE

Certainly, we know that the CPS have colluded with police to hide the existence of undercover officers from courts before, and that they’ve insisted that arrested officers are primed for being charged alongside bona fide activists.

On 12 April 2009 a group of 114 climate activists gathered in Nottingham to prepare to occupy Ratcliffe on Soar coal fired power station, but they were all pre-emptively arrested. One of their number was Mark Stone, aka police officer Mark Kennedy.

After he was exposed 18 months later, two official reports looked into collusion between the CPS and police in the Ratcliffe case. The Independent Police Complaints Commission’s report found the CPS knew about the activists’ plan before it happened, before many of the activists themselves.

Ex-judge Sir Christopher Rose’s was also asked to investigate the Ratcliffe case. His report quotes an email to police from the CPS about how ‘we will always be vulnerable on disclosure, especially matters covert’ and that even the lowly local CPS office ‘are aware there is an asset involved’. The CPS’ Case Management Review Panel of senior lawyers discussed

risks regarding the “right” questions being asked by the defence regarding covert practices.

Tellingly, while many of the activists were told that they would not be prosecuted, Kennedy was still retained in the ‘charging pool’. In early July 2009, Nick Paul – the Domestic Extremism Co-ordinator in the CPS Special Crime Unit – was asked by a Detective Chief Inspector not to charge Kennedy, but Paul rebuffed him.

To feel able to overrule such a high ranking police officer shows the level of confidence in Nick Paul and illustrates the degree to which this CPS official was controlling matters. Three months after Kennedy’s arrest the CPS were stubbornly intent on on charging him, which indicates that the CPS are not as averse to such things as their recent claim about Boyling would have us believe.

Of the initial 114 arrested, 26 were called for trial (Kennedy was not among them). It was split into two hearings. Twenty admitted participation but said their actions were justified. A further six said they had not participated in the plan.

As ‘the justifiers’ court date approached, prosecutor Felicity Gerry was told about the existence of an undercover officer. She knew Mark Kennedy’s real identity a week before any activists did. For the six weeks before trial, and every second she was in court, she knew that a police officer had filed evidence on the case that the defence were unaware of, yet she failed to mention it to the court. The twenty were wrongfully convicted.

When ‘the deniers’ came to court in January 2011, they asked to see Kennedy’s evidence that they knew exonerated them. Rather than disclose it, the Crown dropped the charges and the trial dramatically collapsed.

In a further display of shadiness, the CPS were said they had found

Previously unavailable information that significantly undermined the prosecution’s case

but specifically said it was

not the existence of an undercover officer.

This is now known to be a lie. If they lie about that, what else do they lie about?

It’s a pattern we’ve seen again this week as the case against British Guantanmo detainee Moazzam Begg was dropped at the last minute because MI5 had failed to hand over relevant documents. Although, again, the CPS refuses to actually admit its reasons for not going to trial.

TWO BUCKETS OF WHITEWASH

Sir Christopher Rose’s inquiry did not speak to interview the man at the centre, CPS Special Crime Unit Domestic Extremism Co-ordinator Nick Paul. Rose – who, as a Surveillance Commissioner had the ultimate sign-of on the validity of Kennedy and co’s deployment and thereby suffered a conflict of interest – concluded that mistakes had been made but there was nothing untoward and ‘the failures were individual, not systemic’.

The Director of Public Prosecutions, Kier Starmer, went on Newsnight to defend the report. Paxman’s opening question was

Are you absolutely certain there are no other cases in which people have been convicted on the basis of the evidence of undisclosed undercover police officers?

He repeats the question three times in the opening minute and a half of the exchange but still doesn’t get an answer. Starmer merely says that Rose has decided there’s no systemic problem.

Yet, as was already well known, there had already been the Drax 29 case. In June 2008 another group of climate protesters halted a coal train bound for Drax power station in Yorkshire. Again, Mark Kennedy had been involved and, again, this had been kept from the court and another miscarriage of justice was engineered with all 29 convicted. This involved a completely different team of CPS prosecutors. The reality is that the problem is systemic.

That said, both cases were overseen by the same Domestic Extremism Co-ordinator, Nick Paul, in the London CPS office. He shared that office with the Director of Public Prosecutions, Kier Starmer, yet Starmer appears not to have asked Paul about the systemic problems of prosecutors and police withholding evidence in these cases. Soon after the Ratcliffe debacle was exposed, Paul left the CPS, going into private law practice at Doughty Street Chambers. After Starmer stepped down as DPP, he joined Paul there.

HOW MANY MORE? AND WHO DID IT?

The recent admission of Jim Boyling not merely supplying withheld evidence but actually being a defendant takes it all to another level.

If all this is what we know from the handful of secret police officers so far exposed, how big could the problem be? When Mark Ellison QC looked into the spying on the family of Stephen Lawrence, it was immediately apparent to him that wrongful convictions were a serious issue and what was known could be but a tiny fraction of what has occurred. He is currently investigating.

Whistleblower officer Peter Francis praised Ellison’s initiative and criticised

the so called ‘independent’ inquiry being undertaken by Operation Herne, which has so far proved ineffective and appears to be a damage limitation and containment exercise, rather than a proper investigation into past wrongs.

These miscarriages of justice were conducted because of the actions of my former colleagues in the SDS and also officers in the NPOIU and their superiors. I hope that the second inquiry being undertaken by Mr Ellison QC will prove far more robust and transparent in its investigation and findings.

Jim Boyling went through a trial in his undercover persona. He also gave a witness statement for another trial under his false identity (ironically the defence barrister was Kier Starmer). His mentor Bob Lambert admits that he was also prosecuted under his false identity (but says he can’t remember if he was convicted). If that isn’t perjury and perverting the course of justice, it would be interesting to know what is.

But more importantly this collection of cases, spanning different constabularies and eras, surely fits anyone’s definition of a systemic problem and indisputably rubbishes the conclusion of the Rose report.

Who is to blame? The police themselves or the Crown prosecutors who waved it through and, it appears, actively retained officers for prosecution against police wishes?

The CPS are still not saying why they quashed John Jordan’s conviction. It had previously been guessed that they were protecting the identity of Jim Boyling. Now that is known not to be the case, what possible reason is there for not saying what really went on in that case? Is this just force of habit, refusing to disclose anything until compelled? Or is there some other, more sinister and corrupt, reason?

Legal action by the Guardian, BBC and Press Association continues to try and force disclosure.

JUSTICE FOR A FEW, WHAT ABOUT THE MANY?

The Drax and Ratcliffe convictions have now been quashed. Had activists not exposed Kennedy, these convictions and the 20 from Ratcliffe would stand. The six ‘deniers’ would surely have also been convicted. Mark Kennedy was responsible for 49 wrongful convictions that we know of.

If the other political secret police officers have done the same, it means around 7,000 miscarriages of justice since these counter-democratic spy units were formed in 1968. Even if we conservatively estimate one per officer per year of service, it will be around 600. We could well be looking at the largest corruption of the judicial system in history.

The attention paid to the decision of the Crown Prosecution Service not to prosecute undercover police officers focused, rightly, on the invasion of privacy and bodily integrity in their sexual contact with women they spied on.

But in the same statement, the CPS ruled out several other charges.

MISCONDUCT IN PUBLIC OFFICE

In order to prosecute misconduct in public office, the prosecution would have to show that an officer knowingly abused their position in order to bring a sexual relationship about

The police have readily and unequivocally admitted such relationships are abhorrent and an abuse of their position. Speaking for the Association of Chief Police Officers, a body that ran several of the political policing units, Jon Murphy said

It is grossly unprofessional. It is a diversion from what they are there to do. It is morally wrong because people have been put there to do a particular task and people have got trust in them. It is never acceptable under any circumstances … for them to engage in sex with any subject they come into contact with.

In March this year the second Operation Herne internal report into undercover policing declared

there are and never have been any circumstances where it would be appropriate… Such an activity can only be seen as an abject failure of the deployment, a gross abuse of their role and their position as a police officer and an individual and organisational failing

So there we have a police report saying it’s a gross abuse of the officer’s position, but the CPS said there’s insufficient evidence that any officer knowingly abused their position.

Everyone admits the relationships happened and they were a gross abuse. If it is a gross abuse then there is a gross abuser. That must be either the manager who authorised it or the individual undercover officer who did it.

Whichever one it is, former officer Bob Lambert is culpable. He was an undercover officer who had a prolonged relationship including fathering a child with a woman he targeted. After he was promoted to running the squad he mentored Jim Boyling who did the same thing.

If Operation Herne is right and it is both an individual and organisational failing then we should see several officers held responsible for each relationship. Even if they blame the individual officer and claim they disobeyed their guidance, it is negligence on the part of the managers.

But if this came to court, we could expect to see officers from both roles blaming each other. That would be a whole lot of dirty laundry being done in public, and would be likely to point to further abuses. This scandal has already become far too large for establishment comfort. It’s no surprise that the CPS – who helped ensure Mark Kennedy’s evidence was kept from court in the Ratcliffe case, leading to a miscarriage of justice and 20 wrongful convictions – has decided to defy the police’s own admissions of misconduct and keep these officers away from court as well.

BREACH OF THE OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT

The CPS also said that

In order to prosecute a breach of the Official Secrets Act the prosecution would have to prove that the suspect in question disclosed information that would, or would be likely to, damage the work of the security and intelligence services

This is thought to be because officers have named colleagues to civilians. Jim Boyling told the activist he married about several other officers’ identities. This led her to tell Helen Steel that her partner John Barker had in fact been police officer John Dines.

Peter Francis

Additionally, when Mark Kennedy was confronted by activists who had discovered his true identity, he confirmed activist Lynn Watson had actually been a fellow police officer.

Whistleblower officer Peter Francis has been threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. The fact that neither Boyling nor Kennedy are to face charges for naming colleagues to the activists they targeted implies Francis faces something of an empty threat. The CPS appear to have declared it’s open season for him, and for any other officers who want to right some of their wrongs, to step forward and name names.

Two weeks ago the Crown Prosecution Service announced no charges would be brought against undercover police who had sexual relationships with women they targeted.

The fact that the women consented at the time is irrelevant. Consent can be negated if it is later discovered that there was serious deception involved.

The CPS cited three bits of case law it considered before making its decision. A court decided that Julian Assange’s failure to use a condom after he’d said he would could be rape and should be brought to trial. Another case where a man promised to withdraw before ejaculation, but failed to, was also decided as being capable of amounting to rape. This gives us an indication of the threshold of criminal sexual deceit.

If Julian Assange deserves a trial it is risible to say that these police officers do not. Is anyone seriously suggesting that their profound, prolonged sexual deception lasting years – even having a planned child – is not worthy of a court case, but they would prosecute Mark Kennedy if he had once failed to use a condom as promised?

Conversely, if Assange had been sent into the civil service by Wikileaks and spent many years in a life-partner relationship with a civil servant, solely as part of a spying operation, he would surely be prosecuted for the personal damage he inflicted.

The CPS also mentioned the Justine McNally case. She pretended to be a man in order to have sex with another woman and was jailed for three years in 2013. The Court of Appeal reduced it to a nine month suspended sentence and she was released after 82 days. The conviction stands.

McNally was not an isolated case. Gemma Barker developed three online male personas that she used to deceive young women into having sexual contact with her. In 2012 she was sentenced to 30 months in prison for two counts of sexual assault and three months for one count of fraud.

Trans man Chris Wilson did not tell two female partners of his previous gender before initiating sexual relationships. One relationship involved kissing, a second involved having sex. In April 2013 a Scottish court (whose Sexual Offences Act Scotland 2009 is slightly different to England’s Sexual Offences Act 2003) convicted him of “obtaining sexual intimacy by fraud” and put him on the Sex Offenders Register. He was sentenced to three years probation and 240 hours community service.

There can be no disputing that the secret police’s deceit was on a comparable scale – arguably a far greater one – than McNally’s, Barker’s or Wilson’s. They were not merely lying about their job or the fact that they were already married. They were not just concealing a fundamental truth about themselves that their partners believed they were the opposite of. They were only ever in these womens’ lives as paid agents to undermine and betray those women and what they held most dear. They were living a relationship that was controlled and monitored, perhaps even directed, by a committee of unseen superior officers. This cannot be informed consent. It is abuse.

Whether what the police officers did legally constitutes rape is unclear. Ben Fitzpatrick, Head of Law at the University of Derby, examined the idea from a legal perspective last year over a series of four articles. He concludes that there are several areas in which it is possible that there is a claim.

Clare McGlynn, professor of law at Durham University, is of a similar opinion.

It is not clear that English law would cover the sexual activities in these cases as sexual offences, and the undercover officers have not been prosecuted.

I do think they should have been charged and prosecuted for these activities. The women would clearly not have consented to sex had they known the men were undercover police officers. I think there is a level of deception in these cases which raises them above the ‘I love you’ sort of deception [where someone pretends to in love to convince someone else to have sex with them].

But, put simply, it is untested. The discussions around the definition are reminiscent of those that happened before rape within marriage was finally legally recognised in England in 1991. The CPS also considered charges of indecent assault against the police officers but, as that has the same consent test as rape, they decided not to prosecute.

What happened to the women deceived by police is rare – and its exposure rarer still – so it doesn’t squarely fit any common definitions based on previous, commonplace crimes. But there is no doubting the seriousness of the psychological and sexual abuse. The legal definition of consent and cases cited above mean there is surely a case to answer.

The inescapable conclusion is that if these men were anything other than police officers they would be prosecuted. The decision not to go ahead is a further part of the cover up of the gargantuan injustice of the political secret police.