CPS weighs criminal charges against 12 former spycops officers
The Crown Prosecution Service is reviewing evidence that 12 former undercover officers committed misconduct during decades of political spying. The case centres on Operation Montrose, linked to officer Mark Kennedy.
Criminal charges possible for a dozen officers in spycops inquiry
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is reviewing a file of evidence to determine whether 12 former police officers should face criminal charges for their conduct during covert undercover operations, The Guardian UK reports.
The potential charges relate to the offence of misconduct in public office. Details of the alleged wrongdoing by the 11 officers beyond the central figure in the case — Mark Kennedy — have not been disclosed publicly.
The file was submitted to the CPS by the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC), which has overseen Operation Montrose since 2015. That internal police investigation examined whether Kennedy and others engaged in "inappropriate sexual relationships" while deployed undercover.
Kennedy spent six years infiltrating environmental and leftwing groups, including Earth First! and Climate Camp, between 2003 and 2009. Working for the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, he constructed a false identity — complete with long hair and tattoos — to pass as a committed activist. He was one of 139 undercover officers who collectively monitored tens of thousands of mainly leftwing activists across more than four decades of covert operations running from 1968 to at least 2010.
He deceived multiple women into intimate relationships while concealing his true role as a police spy. The precise number of women affected is unknown but is believed to run into double figures. Among them was Kate Wilson, a campaigner with whom Kennedy maintained a two-year relationship. In 2021, a tribunal ruled that police had grossly violated her human rights. The judges found that senior officers overseeing Kennedy "either knew of the relationship, chose not to know of its existence, or were incompetent and negligent in not following up" clear and obvious signs of it.
Covert surveillance files later revealed that police had secretly monitored and recorded Wilson's personal activities throughout the relationship — logging overnight stays, visits to her parents' home, trips to the cinema, a museum, a concert, and a college she had previously attended.
Kennedy's cover was broken not by his own handlers but by a fellow activist. A social justice campaigner known as Lisa Jones, who had been in a six-year intimate relationship with him, uncovered his real identity in 2010 through her own detective work.
That exposure triggered the wider spycops scandal and set off a chain of disclosures that revealed the breadth of misconduct across the undercover units. Officers had routinely deceived women into sexual relationships, given false testimony in court while operating under assumed identities, and used the identities of dead children to construct their cover personas.
The revelations prompted a long-running public inquiry into the management and activities of the undercover units, alongside a series of internal police investigations — of which Operation Montrose was one.
Should the CPS authorise prosecution of any of the 12 officers, it would mark the first time that participants in the undercover operations faced criminal charges for conduct that was not sanctioned by their managers.
Kennedy's lawyer said he did not wish to comment.
Source: The Guardian UK