Big Brother Undercover
Police Spies Out of Lives (PSOOL) is a campaigning support group working to achieve an end to the sexual and psychological abuse of campaigners and others by undercover police officers. We support the women affected by the issues to expose the immoral and unjustified practice of undercover relationships and the institutional prejudices which have led to the abuse. Together, we are calling for an unequivocal end to the practice, a full inquiry into the past and changes to prevent it ever happening again.
By Lindsey
You may have heard about the ‘Spycops’ scandal. It has had a fair amount of attention from mainstream media, but not nearly enough compared to the enormity of the issues that arise from it.
I’ll take you through the events as they unfolded for me, as I can most likely describe them best how I experienced them.
I have been, since my teenage years, politically minded and spent younger years striving for social justice, and a socialist society, as free as we could be from inequality, poverty and injustice. I naively assumed that’s how the vast majority of people would want to live, excepting those few who benefited from the wealth brought about by the inequalities this political system has built into it.
Jump forward to 2015. I was, and am still a political person, but it had been quite a few years since I actively fought for my beliefs in any meaningful way.
I had moved away from London, back to my home town, so I could bring up my young son in a place where a better standard and balance of life is easier to achieve.
I was home from dropping my son at school when I got a phone call from one of my oldest friends; we had shared flats together for many years in the distant past. She had a go at a usual bit of chat, but I felt that her tone wasn’t usual. She told me she had something she needed to tell me and it wasn’t easy.
Jump back to 2001. I hadn’t too long ago come out of a serious relationship that ended painfully. I had finished a degree and was casually working until I found something permanent to do.
Within a few months, I had met someone who I was interested in. He had become close friends with my old flatmate and other Socialist Party activists. In the few months he’d been around he had become an invaluable and trusted member of the group – easy going, humorous and self-effacing as he was, and as helpful as he could be in the cause of Socialist and anti-fascist politics.
We started seeing each other not long after we first met and it was quickly a brilliantly sociable fling. I had no intention of being in another serious relationship but as time went on he began to try to take the relationship to another level and showed so much consideration and attraction to me that I began to be drawn in.
We were viewed very much as a couple by the social circle we inhabited, and it was true, we saw a lot of each other, though we lived on different sides of London.
A few months after we met he booked us a surprise trip to Venice and I still recall how special that made me feel when he showed me the tickets. Even the plane journey turned out to be memorable – him telling me he loved me (for the first time as I remember).
Skip forward to late spring 2002 and he had, inexplicably, started to become distant. He told me his mum, (who lived in Italy) had become ill. He seemed less enthusiastic about meeting up and soon after he disappeared for the first time – for four days. That was the longest we’d been out of contact since we’d met.
To cut a very long story short, he came back and gave me a believable reason for being away, with his phone off. I relaxed again, but then another period where he was uncontactable came not long after. At this point, I knew our relationship needed to end as I didn’t trust him any longer.
It was a fairly abrupt end, but he kept saying ‘just for now’ as if there was a future for us. There wasn’t. We saw each other in company a couple of times after that, but generally, I made sure I wasn’t where he was.
So – back to 2015 and that phone call from my friend who had also been his friend. I had been aware of news stories about undercover police being in relationships with women who they were targetting for surveillance.
It seemed almost unbelievable that this was a thing – as political activists we always knew that phones were tapped and higher profile people knew they were watched - but long-term infiltrations, where police would live undercover for years, actually live amongst friends and partners that they reported back to Special Branch the whole time! It sounded almost fictional!
There were a number of women who had been in long-term relationships with men who had disappeared abruptly, and in such a way that they feared for their partners’ safety and searched for them – only to suspect that they were in fact employed as spies.
Then in 2010, proof was found that a well-known environmental activist was one of these officers. His long-term girlfriend and close friends for the last seven years confronted him and he admitted it when faced with their evidence.
One after another, officers were outed by their ex-partners and friends and by activist researchers and journalists. Patterns of the officers’ behaviour began to emerge. Activists learned lessons from discoveries of each new officer.
And now, in 2015, my friend was telling me that Carlo, who we had loved and trusted, was being investigated by a group of his ex-friends, as his behaviour (particularly his disappearance) fitted some of these patterns.
At first, neither my friend nor I believed it to be true. Carlo had been warm, kind, considerate – even though the end of our relationship had been brutal, I still thought of him with mostly positive memories.
But as time went on, these activists, along with the Undercover Research Group (a pivotal group of researchers) looked into Carlo’s identity and it became clear that he was in fact using a covert identity.
We thought he had been Carlo Neri - a locksmith, looking for a long-term relationship and with a political conscience - making close and deep friendships before he left the scene altogether.
He was in fact Carlo Soracchi – a married (with children), undercover police officer, who instead of sharing our political beliefs, saw us as dangerous extremists and reported us back to Special Branch and likely MI5, and who knows who else? Government?
The identity of two entire, highly secretive police units - their existence spanning five decades and responsible for spying on over 1,000 campaigning groups - had been brought to public attention. Just pause for a minute – 1,000 groups! That’s pretty much anyone who was doing anything politically, socially, environmentally surely? Anyone on the left of the political spectrum or anyone whose campaigns threatened to embarrass the police that is! Over 1,000 groups!
The list of abuses they committed is long and horrifying – and is growing still: Officers took the names of children who had died, often in infancy, to use as their cover identities. Families of those children have had that tragic past raked up again so they can give evidence to the public inquiry.
Family justice campaigns - often who had lost loved ones to police violence or the police had mishandled the investigations into their deaths – were spied on. Many of these murders remain unsolved and families have fought years for justice.
These officers passed information to the illegal blacklisting companies, aiding in denying work to those who fought for health and safety on building sites, or were trade unionists, or had political views, who may have been used to organise opposition to dangerous practises by companies who put profit before their worker’s safety. Blacklisted workers spent decades without substantial income after being placed on the blacklist. Families broke up and homes were lost as a result of economic pressures.
Many people were wrongly convicted of crimes, aided by the evidence of undercover officers. Some were imprisoned, others were hauled to court only to have charges retracted at the last moment, with all of the resultant anxiety that goes with the prospect of conviction. Over 50 miscarriages of justice have been discovered to date.
These officers spied on elected MP’s – we know of 10 so far - embedding themselves within their offices and election campaigns, and reporting their movements back to Special Branch and the security services. A flagrant abuse of democracy. Of course, all of the Members of Parliament are on the left-wing of politics.
And then there is the issue which dragged me and over 30 other women into this mess. Officers formed long-term sexual relationships in their cover identities, some having children with the women they were spying on (we know of three officers who fathered children so far). All of these officers were married – it was a requirement of the post, to have a ‘stable’ family life to return to after deployment – so not only are the women activists affected but similarly their wives and families. Rank misogyny we believe.
© PSOOL
A public inquiry – the Undercover Policing Inquiry- was called by Theresa May, in her role as Home Secretary, in 2014. Partly as a result of the women fighting to bring their cases to public attention (in tandem with Rob Evans and Paul Lewis at the Guardian) and partly because the only police whistleblower to date, Peter Francis, went on the record with his being tasked to infiltrate and smear the family justice campaign for Stephen Lawrence.
The Inquiry began in 2015 and spent five years dealing with anonymity applications from the police and legal wranglings about how to proceed. The police have kicked and screamed for the public inquiry to be held mainly away from public view, and the Judge (handpicked by Home Secretary Amber Rudd after the first Judge died) not surprisingly, is adopting much of what the police suggest.
We, as non-state participants to the Inquiry, have been disheartened and angered by past Inquiry decisions. We unanimously believe that we have a right to see our police files and that public inquiries should be held in full view of the public! It may seem ridiculous to have to state that belief, but it has turned out that we must state this, and often, so the public realises just how much remains secretive about this inquiry.
The Covid-19 pandemic has further decreased public access to proceedings. The only way any of us could view the hearings, as we would in the courtroom, was to watch a livestream to a hotel in central London, with room for only 60, socially distanced people. Out of the question for those of us who are in vulnerable categories of age and health, or who live in areas with high Covid rates (we were after all told it was irresponsible to travel from high to lower Covid areas).
The police have successfully fought for hearings not to be live-streamed (on the basis of security of the nation and their officers). So, after five and a half years of dense legal meetings and 80-page legal documents, we had the pathetic and infuriating situation of the first actual hearings being given to the majority of us by a rolling video of a typed transcript, and even this was hard fought for – the Judge wanted there to be just a bundle of documents, put online AFTER the hearings had finished.
It was a disaster – and Police Spies Out Of Lives took matters into our own hands by reading the transcripts live on YouTube, with the help of some fine actors – which aided people to access the transcript more easily, and to raise public attention to the injustices.
The battles continue as we prepare for the next hearings, which will likely happen in April/May. We will continue to fight for the Public Inquiry to be public. We look at the Hillsborough families and we know that their fight may well be a blueprint for ours. The police keep their secrets well.
At the back of all of this is MI5 and the security service infrastructure. The more we find out, the more we know they are the ones for whom this ‘intelligence’ was gathered. They are also the ones who are completely untouched by the Inquiry, and may continue as they always have, trampling on the human rights of anyone who dares to stand up for their right to protest, to free speech and to be free from torture or inhumane treatment. They have the new Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill – trips off the tongue doesn’t it? - to help them continue unchallenged.
We will get through, and we hope that people reading this will take some interest and keep an eye on what happens in the Inquiry. We want the news to spread and abusers held accountable, whatever reasons they give for that abuse. And we want it to stop. These officers have been part of an effort to squash any and all dissent; all attempts for family, societal and environmental justice. That can’t be right – or allowed to continue.
Places to find more info:
© Dave Mirzoeff