‘He was paid to spy on and have sex with me for years’

Lisa’s partner was an undercover police officer hiding his double life from both her and his own wife and children. Ahead of a major documentary, Zoé Beaty hears her story

- Zoé Beaty

“Something I am still fighting to know is, why was it me?” Lisa* is speaking over Zoom, with her camera turned off a tool to protect her anonymity and take back a morsel of control more than a decade after becoming police property. Was he just given free rein? Was it his choice? Was I someone convenient? Was it that he really was attracted to me, so that it worked out? Was he given my name by someone else? Was I a target?”

Lisa, 50, was a target – though how exactly that played out in paperwork will perhaps never be known. In 2011, when she was 37, she discovered that her loving six-year relationship had been orchestrated by the Metropolitan Police; that her boyfriend, Mark Stone – real name Mark Kennedy – was an undercover spy. Everything she’d felt, and felt to be true, had been a lie.

She is one of 60 women who were victims of the “spy cops” scandal. Officers working for the National Public Order Intelligence Unit under the Metropolitan Police Special Branch ran a covert operation, spying on the lives of thousands of citizens for more than four decades.

Around 140 police officers were sent to spy on 1,000 political groups, concocting elaborate fake personas as committed activists to compile damning dossiers on mostly left-wing, progressive groups like Greenpeace; they even used the names of 80 dead babies to carry out their surveillance.