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.”
