When Kate Wilson fell in love, she had no idea she was becoming part of a covert police operation. The man she knew as a charismatic fellow activist was in fact an undercover officer. The personal betrayal became a landmark legal fight, exposing policing’s hidden tactics and challenging the surveillance of peaceful protest
When Kate Wilson found out that her ex-partner Mark Stone was in fact an undercover police officer called Mark Kennedy, she was surprised by her own lack of anger. “[I didn’t feel] hatred or even really a sense of betrayal,” she says. “Mostly, what I felt was really sad. I had lost this really close friend. It was like he had died.”
A longtime environmental activist, Wilson had been aware of the risk of police surveillance. “Sometimes, someone incredibly socially awkward showed up to a meeting. They didn’t fit in, and just sat at the back and left without talking to anybody,” she recalls. “Everyone would think: ‘That was a cop’.”
In fact, the opposite was true, she says: “The cops were the really charismatic ones who were right in the centre of everything and made you feel good about yourself.” When Wilson met Kennedy in 2003 at the Sumac Centre, a community space in Nottingham, he was “really good fun”, she recalls. “He was very enthusiastic, an incredibly good listener, and he was very complimentary.”
Their romantic relationship lasted just over a year – during which time Kennedy became the first partner Wilson had ever lived with – and they remained in frequent contact. Then, while studying medicine in Barcelona in 2010, Wilson received a phone call from Kennedy’s girlfriend at the time, a close friend of hers known publicly only as ‘Lisa’, who had just discovered Kennedy’s passport with his real name.
Wilson’s life was “totally derailed” by the news. Unable to concentrate, she failed her university exams by one mark at the end of her first term. But she was determined to seek justice.
“[At first] fighting back was just getting out of bed in the morning,” she says. Then she and Lisa joined a group of women who had been deceived into relationships with Kennedy and other undercover police officers to bring civil actions against the Metropolitan police. Sharing conversations with these women about what they had all experienced was “an amazing process”, Wilson recalls. “[It made us realise] that this is a systemic problem.”
She initially remained anonymous and was referred to as ‘Lily’ in press coverage. But in 2015, Wilson found a tracking device under her car while attending an anti-surveillance and censorship conference in Spain. The realisation that she was still being spied on helped her to understand, she says, “that by keeping my identity secret from the people who might support me, I was isolating myself a lot”.
Wilson hopes that the ongoing national inquiry into undercover policing will continue to provide answers and expose wrongdoing, and she is optimistic about the strength of protest movements in the UK. Image: Hannah Busing
Besides, as a peaceful campaigner speaking out against the abuse of undercover policing, she wanted to show the public that she had nothing to hide: “I didn’t want there to be any questions about who I was or what I’d done, that would make people wonder: ‘Well maybe she did [something to] deserve this [level of surveillance]’.”
Assisted by an all-female legal team led by Harriet Wistrich – founder and director of the Centre for Women’s Justice – Wilson was one of eight women who settled their cases with the Met in 2017 with compensation and a public apology. She then brought a human rights claim against the Met through the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT). She was forced to leave her job as a nurse in Barcelona and represent herself for 12 months after her funding for legal support ran out. “It was scary at times, and I was working 100-hour weeks in the run-up to hearings. But I felt I had no choice.”
In 2021 she finally won: the IPT ruled that the Met had violated her human rights during an “unlawful and sexist” operation, and she was awarded compensation the following year. She became the only victim of the scandal to receive disclosure from the police – more than 5,000 pages detailing Kennedy’s undercover activities – a fact that has formed the title of her recently published book about the experience: Disclosure: Unravelling the Spycops Files.
Despite harsher sentencing, I find it inspirational that protest movements are still there, and that you can’t kill the spirit
Wilson is now looking forward to returning to work nursing in an A&E department, alongside campaigning with the group Police Spies Out of Lives. She no longer checks her surroundings for tracking devices. “But I make a point of singing very loudly and out of tune when I’m on my own in my car, just to annoy [anyone listening to the microphones],” she says with a smile.
Wilson hopes that the ongoing national inquiry into undercover policing will continue to provide answers and expose wrongdoing, and she is optimistic about the strength of protest movements in the UK. “Despite harsher sentencing, I find it incredibly inspirational that they are still there, and that you can’t kill the spirit. It’s a really powerful thing,” she says.
“I can’t say this form of undercover policing isn’t happening any more. In that sense we haven’t won; we’re still fighting.” But she firmly believes that if the police target non-violent activists, it is precisely because they are effective at achieving their aims. “If they are doing to you what they did to us,” she says, “it’s because you’re doing something right.”
Main image: Kate Wilson
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