Activists outside the High Court as part of their long fight for justice Picture: Guy Smallman
Kate Wilson was in her mid-twenties when she met a man called Mark Stone at an activist meeting in Nottingham in 2003.
Kate had a year-long sexual relationship with Stone and they stayed friends, taking part in anti-capitalist and environmental protests together. Six years, later she found out Mark Stone was really Mark Kennedy, an undercover cop. He was married with children and had relationships with at least ten women while undercover.
Was it a hard book to write?
Actually, it was easy to write, in some ways it wrote itself. I had 20 years of experience, 20 years of accumulated material. I wrote the book for myself—I had a need to make sense of it all. Writing it down was a way of getting back to the past.
What happened to me destroyed my sense of biography. You look back and large chunks of your life were not what you thought—that’s incredibly damaging. I had spent years going through all the material, and my court case was over, so I started writing. It was only later that I thought it might be interesting for others to read.
You write descriptions of events from the past, when you were known as Katja, and put them together with formal police reports of the same events. It reads like a powerful thriller. Why did you choose this structure?
I also jump between writing about Katja in the third person and writing about myself in the first person.
I had to tells various timelines—the events of the past, the court case and the public inquiry. It’s really hard to write about yourself in the past, without suggesting things you didn’t know then.
There is what I thought was happening. And there is this parallel police account of what they were doing.
I wanted to stick to a chronological timeline—but even that was difficult because they didn’t release all the documents to me in chronological order.
You stress throughout the book that the spycops were not a few rotten apples but were part of what you call a “bureaucracy of evil”.
The public inquiry now going on started with events back in 1992 and the next phase will consider policing up to 2008. And that is powerful because by starting so far back, it’s easier to see the institutional abuse and the fundamental problem of undercover policing in all its forms.
There was no supervision of the undercover police spies—and they were part of a baseline culture which, let’s be honest, isn’t exactly great. They saw anyone who came into contact with progressive movements as legitimate targets.
The Socialist Workers Party is one of the most spied on group of all. The police described the Stop the War Coalition as “extremist”.
They really hate anti-military movements, and anti-nuclear campaigns. They think that people who want to stop babies being killed are dangerous radicals.
I was horrified by your descriptions of predatory undercover cops hanging around trying to identify women they could target
They weren’t just sexist individuals—they were part of an underlying culture in the police. Misogyny in society in general is a problem—but in the police it is amplified and toxic. I don’t know whether it’s the kind of people who join, or the institutional culture in which they are trained and nurtured.
Officer after officer uses the same excuse. When they are asked about the effect of their actions on women they deceived, or about stealing the identities of dead children, they say the same thing “No-one was supposed to know.”
There is a specific problem with undercover policing compared with other forms of surveillance.
Undercover police get new identities, a new name, a mask. They are away from their families, their friends, their social circle—all the things that constrain their behaviour. Going undercover divorces people from their moral code—if they have one. It creates monsters.
You argue that there are limits to the power of the police to undermine protest movements.
There are lots of regimes around the world where protest is illegal—but people still fightback. People fought back in Nazi Germany, so yes, there are limits to the power of the police.
I didn’t write the book to scare people, or to put them off campaigning. I was involved in civil disobedience. Lots of the things we did 20 years ago were not illegal then, but they are illegal now.
Now you’re not allowed to disrupt things—but protest is absolutely about disrupting business as usual. But we have to keep doing those things, but illegal doesn’t mean wrong.
Are you still optimistic about the possibility of change?
I care about being on the right side of history. A lot of the coverage of the issue focuses on sex and personal relationships. But this is about sustained police interference in our political system, and in our democracy.
I personally would support defunding the police. The Met police are beyond redemption—they are racist, sexist and corrupt. It needs to be closed down, and then we could have a discussion about what could replace it.
