From: The Guardian
By Paul Lewis and Rob Evans, The Guardian
Friday, March 1, 2013 11:15 EST
Mark Jenner lived with a woman under a fake name. Now she has testified to MPs about the ‘betrayal and humiliation’ she felt
He was a burly, funny scouser called Mark Cassidy. His girlfriend – a
secondary school teacher he shared a flat with for four years –
believed they were almost “man and wife”. Then, in 2000, as the couple
were discussing plans for the future, Cassidy suddenly vanished, never
to be seen again.
An investigation by the Guardian has established that his real name is Mark Jenner. He was an undercover police officer
in the Metropolitan police’s special demonstration squad (SDS), one of
two units that specialised in infiltrating protest groups.
His
girlfriend, whose story can be told for the first time as her evidence
to a parliamentary inquiry is made public, said living with a police spy
has had an “enormous impact” on her life.
“It has impacted seriously on my ability to trust, and that has
impacted on my current relationship and other subsequent relationships,”
she said, adopting the pseudonym Alison. “It has also distorted my
perceptions of love and my perceptions of sex.”
Alison is one of four women to testify to the House of Commons home affairs select committee last month.
Another woman said she had been psychologically traumatised after
discovering that the father of her child, who she thought had
disappeared, was Bob Lambert, a police spy who vanished from her life in the late 1980s.
A third woman, speaking publicly for the first time about her six-year relationship with Mark Kennedy,
a police officer who infiltrated environmental protest groups, said:
“You could … imagine that your phone might be tapped or that somebody
might look at your emails, but to know that there was somebody in your
bed for six years, that somebody was involved in your family life to
such a degree, that was an absolute shock.”
Their moving testimony led the committee to declare that undercover
operations have had a “terrible impact” on the lives of innocent women.
The MPs are so troubled about the treatment of the women – as well as the “ghoulish” practice in which undercover police adopted the identities of dead children – that they have called for an urgent clean-up of the laws governing covert surveillance operations. MORE
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