Undercover Police Officers Used Fake Identitites To Spy On Over 1,000 Groups
By Ben Kerrigan
Undercover police officers adopted fake identities to spy on more than 1,000 political groups, a judge-led public inquiry has revealed.
Undercover police spies have infiltrated political organisations for over more than four decades , but this has only been made public now. The list of groups include environmental, anti-racist and animal rights groups, left wing parties and the far right.
The number of infiltrated political groups was released by the public inquiry into police conduct set up by Theresa May during her time as home secretary..
May ordered the inquiry after it came to light that spies amassed information about grieving relatives like the parents of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, and deceived women into forming long-term relationships. In a worrying twist, police spies are also said to have stolen the identities of dead children to masquerade themselves and avoid detection.
Fake documentation such as driving licences provided by the state are also said to have been used by the spies.
Pretending to be political activists, they fed back information to their superiors information about the activities of campaigners and the protests ts being organised.
The revelations are stunning, although if the officers had a legitimate reason to masquerade themselves , they actions may still have been justified in some respects. One major problem that arises in when police officers spying then form sexual relationships with unsuspecting females who actually believe the officers to be who they claim to be as spies. This certainly appears to be very immoral, but occurred in at least one case involving a police spy in the 90’s.
IDENTIFIED
Sixteen of the spies have been identified following investigations by campaigners and journalists, giving some idea of which groups were spied on.
The initial groups infiltrated by the spies in the late 1960s and 1970s included campaigns against the Vietnam war and apartheid, and leftwing organisations such as the International Marxist Group. The operation was later expanded to target the extreme right.
In the 1980s, Bob Lambert, an undercover officer, masqueraded as an activist in the Animal Liberation Front and an environmental group, London Greenpeace.
SPIES
In the 1990s, Peter Francis, an undercover officer who became a whistleblower,was deployed to spy on anti-racist groups such as Youth Against Racism in Europe, and the Socialist party. Another spy, Jim Boyling, was embedded in environmental groups such as Reclaim the Streets. His colleague Mark Jenner infiltrated the Colin Roach Centre, a group in London that sought to expose police corruption.
Andy Coles spied on animal rights campaigns, including the London Boots Action Group. In May, he resigned as the deputy police and crime commissioner for Cambridgeshire after he was accused of deceiving a 19-year-old political activist into starting a sexual relationship while undercover in the 1990s. He is currently under pressure to resign as a Tory councillor in Peterborough.