Previous Article: WHEN Brendan Smith takes up his new role as part-time justice minister next week one of the first letters he will receive will be from Labour TD Michel D Higgins demanding a statement on the government’s level of knowledge of rogue British undercover policeman Mark Kennedy’s activities in Ireland.
*The use of dead children’s identities to create aliases for undercover police officers was ‘common practice’, a senior officer has admitted.
But none of the families of the children had been contacted by police, Chief Constable Mick Creedon said.
He is investigating undercover policing, including the use of dead children’s names by Scotland Yard’s Special Demonstration Squad. (Follow Link).
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2272978/police-spies-stole-identities-80-dead-babies-birth-certificates-used-fake-identities.html
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2272978/police-spies-stole-identities-80-dead-babies-birth-certificates-used-fake-identities.html
Earlier this year it was claimed up to 80 identities were stolen over a 30-year period, without families knowing.
Officers used birth certificates from real people to create fake passports so that their aliases appeared genuine.
In one case, an officer infiltrating an anti-capitalist group took on the name John Barker, using the birth certificate of Philip John Barker, who died of leukaemia aged eight in 1968.
Sergeant John Dines used the identity for five years starting in 1987.
In February, Philip’s 81-year-old aunt Beryl Ramsell, said she thought it was a ‘sick joke’.
In a letter to MPs published yesterday, Mr Creedon, who is leading Operation Herne into undercover policing, said he was unable to say how many identities had been stolen.
His team of 23 officers and ten police staff has 50,000 documents yet to process.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=79Q5odNCQKU
The Kennedy case has convulsed the British media and police since he was publicly uncovered earlier this month as a deep-cover agent who had operated within the environmental movement for seven years. However despite numerous accounts of his participation, and allegations of him taking a leading “agent provocateur” role in Irish protests,
the Government has refused to comment or even acknowledge the issue, of what British police minister Nick Herbert has described as a covert operation which went “very wrong”.
the Government has refused to comment or even acknowledge the issue, of what British police minister Nick Herbert has described as a covert operation which went “very wrong”.
The Government’s claims of “no knowledge” are even more unusual due to the fact that for the seven years from 2003 that PC Mark Kennedy lived his double life as a long haired environmental radical, his two children and his now estranged wife lived in her home village near Kanturk and were frequently visited by the off-duty Metropolitan police officer. It is reported that in the local pub Mr Kennedy was well known as the “uncover policeman”.
Using a fake identity as a rock-climbing enthusiast Mark Stone, the undercover officer took part in protests in Dublin, Shannon airport and at the site of the controversial Shell Corrib pipeline.
Since the Irish Examiner first contacted the Department of Justice about PC Kennedy’s activities last October — when his true identity was uncovered by English environmental activists — officials have maintained that they “have no information on the allegations”. However, last week, Mr Kennedy, who is believed to be hiding in the US, gave an interview to a British paper in which he stated that he would travel abroad with fellow activists, and feed information back to his superiors to share with other nations.
“Activism has no borders,” he said.
“I would never go abroad without authority from my superiors and the local police.”
He added: “My superiors knew where I was at all times — my BlackBerry was fitted with a tracking device — and they sanctioned every move I made. I didn’t sneeze without them knowing about it.”
He said he was informed that some of the information he handed on in his daily communications with his handlers was directly relayed to then prime minister Tony Blair.
Several activists have attested to Mr Kennedy encouraging and taking part in illegal activity during Irish protests.
Activists have confirmed that at the May 2004 EU summit protests then PC Kennedy took a lead role breaking into a building on Dublin’s north side to be used as a base for visiting British anarchists.
He also brought a van from Britain containing crash helmets and offered to purchase broom handles to be used in combating gardaí.
“At the protest he was to the fore wearing a balaclava and violently attacking gardaí,” said one activist.
During a March 2006 visit to Corrib he met leading anti-shell campaigners and encouraged them to be “more direct” in their protests.
An activist who housed PC Kennedy during one of his visits to Ireland said: “He was always very supportive of ‘direct action’ protest. It’s disturbing that he would seem to have been acting as a ‘agent provocateur’ attempting to get people into trouble, the key question is who was he working for while in Ireland?”
Mr Kennedy who, was know as “flash” for his access to cash, was so trusted by Irish activists that his portable internet connection in his van was used by campaigners to upload photographs to the indymedia activist news site during anti-George Bush protests at Shannon in June 2004.
In Britain, investigations into the officer — whose operation cost more than €350,000 per year — are now being carried out by the Independent Police Complaints Commission with Nottinghamshire Police conducting an internal review.
In Germany there have been calls for a state inquiry into PC Kennedy’s activities there. Inquires are also being made whether the police officer broke the law by initiating sexual relationships with activists.
While his activities have led to the unmasking of two more British undercover officers inside the largely peaceful environmental movement and resulted in serious questions over the future of the covert National Public Order Intelligence Unit. Mr Kennedy is looking to turn the tale to his benefit having reportedly called on the services of PR guru Max Clifford as he prepares to sell the rights to his story.
Mr Higgins, the Labour foreign affairs spokesman believes the Kennedy case raises major issues for the Irish government.
“Kennedy’s activities are of grave concern and a reminisce of allegations of similar operations in the 1970s and 1980s,” Mr Higgins said.
However Historian Brian Hanley, who has written on the subversive intelligence world, said: “The Irish State has a very poor record in dealing with British subversive activity. In the early 1970s there was the infamous case of the Littlejohn brothers who instated armed robberies and fire bombed garda stations in the republic and later turned out to be working for British intelligence. In 1972, a senior garda in the forces’s intelligence unit was found to be passing on information to MI6. After three months detention, the officer and an MI6 agent were released and left for Britain.”
*The controversy over a police surveillance network embedded in the environmental protest movement has deepened dramatically after the Guardian identified a second undercover officer who spent years living a double life as an activist.
*The controversy over a police surveillance network embedded in the environmental protest movement has deepened dramatically after the Guardian identified a second undercover officer who spent years living a double life as an activist.
The woman's name has been known to a group of six activists since Mark Kennedy – the police infiltrator identified by the Guardian on Monday as having spent seven years inside the movement – claimed she was also a police officer when confronted by them about his own identity last October.
Senior police chiefs said they were concerned for the safety of the second spy, and a major operation involving several UK forces is now under way to identify other operatives whose safety may have been compromised by Kennedy.
The second spy spent four years living as an environmental activist in Leeds, gaining the trust of dozens of activists and playing a central role in planning a demonstration to shut down Drax power station in North Yorkshire.
Her deployment ended in 2008, when she told activist friends she was leaving town for personal reasons. The Guardian has established the identity of the officer, who is from a force in the south-east of England, but has decided, after representations from senior police officers, to refer to her only as Officer A, and to use pixellated pictures of her.
Meanwhile politicians across Europe demanded information about the activities of Kennedy, the first undercover operative identified, who was on Tuesday accused of having had several sexual relationships with activists while undercover. Senior police sources have described these relationships as "unacceptable".
His UK-based handlers have flown to the US in an attempt to find an agent now accepted to have "gone rogue".
Aside from questions over his conduct while undercover, Kennedy, a Metropolitan police officer, committed a serious breach of protocol when he told friends from the protest movement that Officer A was his colleague. A police chief with detailed knowledge of the deployments of undercover officers in the protest movement said Kennedy's breach of protocol could lead to the "relocation of a considerable number of people".
That included undercover officers currently involved in ongoing police investigations across the UK and their families. "This is serious stuff," the police chief said. "Lots of people are at risk – their lives are at risk."
Kennedy, who has expressed remorse over an operation he told friends was "wrong", now appears to have been a key player in a pan-European network of leftwing and environmental groups.
Using a fake passport, he travelled to more than 22 countries from his base in Nottingham. A parliamentarian in Germany said Kennedy had been "operating on the border of illegality" in the country, and demanded disclosure about the operation. Kennedy's activities in Iceland, Ireland and Italy are also coming under scrutiny.
Documents obtained by the Guardian also suggest that, after quitting the Met last March, Kennedy attempted to continue to use his adopted identity to infiltrate protest groups. In an indication he planned to turn his hand to corporate espionage, Kennedy, who is said to have had money problems, set up two companies. One is connected to an individual who previously worked at Global Open, a private security firm set up by a former special branch detective. The company specialises in keeping a "discreet watch" on protest groups.
Police chiefs discussed the unfolding crisis at a meeting of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) yesterday, which has limited company status and to which Kennedy and Officer A were seconded.
It is now believed several undercover police officers have been living long-term in the environmental movement, feeding intelligence back to the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), an Acpo body that runs a nationwide intelligence database of political activists. After concerns were raised about the accountability of NPOIU, police chiefs came up with a plan to move the unit to Scotland Yard. Subject to agreement, the unit will be taken over by Met officers next month.
However, a major review will now be under way into the oversight of officers such as Kennedy. Explaining why he and Officer A had spent so long undercover, the police chief said: "It is simply because of the environment. If you are a deeply ideologically motivated person … then getting close to you to understand your thought processes – and some idea of what you're doing – takes a lot longer."
He added that Kennedy's numerous sexual relations with women would not have been officially sanctioned. "That is conduct that is not acceptable," he said.
Events radical attended here
SOME events attended by Pc Mark Kennedy:
* Grassroots Gathering April 2004 — Dublin.
* Mayday 2004 EU Summit protest — Dublin.
* June 2004 Anti-Bush protest Shannon Airport.
* April 2005 — Clare and Shannon Airport where he addressed activists on how to take “direct action” against US flights landing at Shannon.
* Anarchist Bookfair March 2006 — Dublin.
* Corrib protests March 2006 — Mayo.
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