Merrick Badger Talks Undercover Police Officer Betrayal and Any Means Necessary

photo: Dave Parry

How did you become involved in environmental and ecological politics?
I grew up in the eighties, when every young person believed they were going to die in a nuclear war. Even though it didn’t happen, dreams were stolen. It was easy to see that the people in power can’t be trusted and don’t have your interests at heart when it comes to social justice. The Tories had plans to create new roads through the countryside and there had been protests against them for several years – I just thought it was brilliant. I stopped working full-time when the Newbury bypass campaign started: I went down one day to check it out and stayed for three months. Once you’ve really lived your campaign, there’s no going back.

You’ve been an advisor for the play Any Means Necessary. How did that come about?
A number of women had relationships with undercover officers, including friends of mine, and they banded together to take action against the police. Kefi Chadwick, the playwright, was at the court hearings when she was just starting the project. I got talking to her and it was clear she wasn’t someone who wanted to write a soap opera – she had a firm moral basis and social justice agenda.

Having known a lot of people who were spied on, and having done a lot of campaigning and researching, Kefi was asking me about the archetypes and patterns. It’s based on Mark Kennedy, but she’s taken from a lot of different people’s stories. Kennedy was portrayed as a rogue officer, but there’s nothing he did that wasn’t done by others before him. Their love letters read very similarly – that’s strategy and training. It was established and had been for a long time.

Have you seen the show yet?
I saw an early draft and thought it was excellent. Several of the women have been involved, and the play’s based around those relationships – the most shocking element. Someone making notes at the back of a meeting of people who want to overthrow the state is one thing, but coming into the lives of people... it’s actually illegal in some countries. It’s that depth of integration into people’s lives, forming plans and devising a future with them. Even if you believe that spying on political activists is essential, there can never be any justification for the relationships.

What was your relationship with Mark Kennedy? Or Mark Stone, as you knew him.
He started going out with a friend of mine, Kate Wilson. She just won her case after four years of police obstructions. The relationships serve two purposes for them: one is to get them into a social group. You’re straight in there. Then, at the end of deployment, they cheat on that person, so nobody likes them and doesn’t ask why they don’t see them anymore.

Mark started going out with Kate soon after he got involved with the environmental movement in 2003. I first met him there. Two years later, he started seeing another close friend of mine, Lisa Jones, and he was with her until we caught him. Mark and I had a very brotherly relationship. He could be quite blokey, but gave the impression it was a front and he was sensitive underneath. We were really close. We had a joint birthday party for our fortieth.

photo: Dave Parry

How did you find out he was undercover?
Often when they are going to leave they feign a breakdown. It was so utterly convincing; he was jumpy, jittery, depressed, twitchy. He left his house and we had to clear his stuff out for him. I’ve seen people having proper breakdowns, and he absolutely was that. This was at the end of 2009. We now know he’d left the police then.

He eventually came back, maintained being Mark, and was now working for a private firm called Global Open. He developed a sudden interest in animal rights because that’s where the private money is and what Global Open specialise in. He didn’t have a handler and he was a bit adrift. I don’t think he had a plan. He didn’t have any ID in his fake name, and Lisa found a passport in his real name.

He had his excuses and his stories ready, but there was stuff that just didn’t ring true. We looked him up and there was no Mark Stone, but we found a Mark Kennedy that fit. We found the birth certificates for his children, and the occupation was Police Officer. Even then we thought this might be another Mark Kennedy.

We got him to come over, but didn’t tell him what we had found. We just said “There are all these things that don’t add up, please come and explain it.” He gave his bullshit stories that were insulting to our intelligence that included some factual stuff, and we could see that he couldn’t tell the difference between what was true and false. I haven’t seen him since then. That was October 2010.

You said you had a brotherly relationship, how has the experience personally affected you?
You never expect that kind of betrayal from your mates or from your government. These people are trained to make you like them as a comrade. They can intuit what you want them to be and then they become that. He was exactly the kind of friend I wanted. The women all say the same thing – they’ve never loved like it before. When Mark sold his story to the highest bidder, the Mail on Sunday, and was talking in copper speak about fucking us over, that rinsed me of the shards of friendship that had been left.

It’s been inferred that he helped scupper the protest drama, is that true at all?
The story that the trial collapsed because he was about to testify for the defence is completely untrue. One of the Ratcliffe defendants rang him because they were worried he wasn’t going to take the stand. Mark, trying to be what the person wanted, said “I’m really sorry, I’ve hurt too many people”. In the middle of that conversation, he said “I would like to help in any way I can”. That got pulled out, put on Newsnight and made into “he offered to testify for the defence”. He did no such thing. He has stabbed every back he could, except for his mum, dad and brother.

The trial collapsed because he was one of the people arrested and we had caught him out. There were two lots of defendants; twenty of them said they did it but were justified by law. They got convicted. There were six deniers who said that at the time of arrest they hadn’t decided whether they would go through with the protest or not. They saw twenty go down, and decided to mention Kennedy and the fact that the prosecution has a duty to disclose any evidence that may help the defence.

Mark Kennedy will have made notes and recordings, so we wanted to see his report. Rather than disclose those to the defence, the state just dropped it and walked away. It wasn’t him offering to help friends, it was actually his diligent work as a police officer in providing those reports and recordings that made the trial collapse.

Do you think Mark gained any kind of sympathy towards the politics, beliefs and ideologies of the group?
It’s quite possible. Looking at other officers, that does seem to have happened. I don’t know what Mark was thinking when he was with us. You’ve got to be in the moment and they never break character. These people drink to the point of room-spinning drunk, not once giving anything away. You have to become it. Actors say parts are difficult to shake off in the evening. It’s a ten-year acting job.

All the ones who really immersed themselves got divorced after their work ended, and Mark Kennedy was one of them. It ruins them. It changes them and their life doesn’t make sense when they come home. When he left us he had no mates, no family, no job and no idea what he actually thought about anything, I presume. They knew they were going to do that to him and they will do it to the next lot. If you’re talking social justice with people and having to be enthusiastic about it, it’s going to become you.

photo: Dave Parry

The police have categorically stated that Special Demonstration Squad Police are not allowed to enter into romantic relationships. He doesn’t seem to have been punished in any way, though...
You can’t try to get a police officer into a jail cell. I am angry about it but not surprised. The Crown Prosecution Service said that to prosecute for malfeasance in public office it would have to be understood that the officers had initiated the relationships themselves. If it were doctors abusing patients, they would be in jail.

If you were to meet Mark now face to face, what would you say?
Nothing. There are a lot of answers I would like to have about what went on, but he can’t give them. He lies about little things as well as the big things – in the documentary he said he was a vegetarian, or vegan even, I think. Mark never pretended to be veggie. I don’t think there are any answers to be had from him. Maybe I’m wrong and he is going to come to the public inquiry, name names and actually do some justice. I pray that I’m wrong and he does that but I very much doubt it.

The prosecution in the Ratcliffe case quoted that £400,000 was spent on the operation. The police said it was £300,000. Is there any reason you can think of that would justify being spied on, with that amount of taxpayers’ money being spent?
Nothing I was involved in. Power inevitably turns towards corruption, so the more you concentrate power somewhere, the more transparency and accountability you need. These units become a law unto themselves. As for people who are more dangerous politically, I don’t trust them to be investigating it.

People are always saying, “What about the terrorists? What about the paedophiles?” and it’s like, have you seen their definition of politically dangerous? There is a running file on Jenny Jones [Green Party politician] that began after she was elected. When she asked for her file they shredded two thirds of it. I don’t trust their definitions of domestic extremism, I don’t trust their lack of transparency, I don’t trust their motivations and I don’t trust their track record. They have proven themselves unworthy of trust.

Mark was in a unit called the National Public Order Intelligence Unit. It had two sister units, one of which advised companies and illegally shared information – because we were a threat to their profits – and one that ran the database. In 2007, the National Co-ordinator for Domestic Extremism, Anton Setchell, who ran the three units, wrote a page to support Mark’s renewal of authorisation. In that he said Mark was infiltrating climate activists, and these people sit in the priority area for domestic extremism in the UK. We were the priority, climate activists, not because we were a threat to life and limb but because we were a threat to political change.

In a leaked email, his successor Adrian Tudway said the EDL were not domestic extremists. So organised racist violence on the streets is okay because we have always had that. We were a definite deliberate target. One officer was infiltrating anti-racists, campaigners and the socialist party. He had three relationships while undercover – one of them he lived with, proposed, talked about having children. Imagine – the person you’re living with was only ever in your life as a paid agent, to undermine you, betray you and your friends, and the things you value the most. 90% of the officers who work for these units are still unknown.

At the moment, the big environmental campaign is fracking. Do you think the police will continue their sustained surveillance on people protesting against it?
At present talks in schools, they call the people who occupy runways and anti-frackers domestic extremists and terrorists, but we know what we’re up against and we are winning. I’ve been doing environmental campaigning for twenty years and I’ve never seen a campaign that looks more of a winner than fracking. Plus, you’re not taking on the government with this one, you’re taking on these tiny start-up companies. They’re little germinating seeds that you can squish quite quickly.

Because the trial collapsed at Ratcliffe, they had to give us all the stuff back that they would have had destroyed otherwise – all the kit for shutting down a power station. Fifty people went and shut down West Burton power station with it. There was no copper in the middle of that one. We knew what we were looking for. A couple of people we went to and said, “We want to talk to you about something – we’ve never met your family and you work away, can we meet your mum?” Before Mark, it would have been so offensive, I’m accusing you of being the worst thing ever. Now, it’s like, yeah I see what this looks like. Finding out the truth about this has made us stronger. 

Any Means Necessary premieres at Nottingham Playhouse on Friday 5 February 2016.

Nottingham Playhouse website