https://www.vice.com/en/article/epxbpj/kate-wilson-mark-kennedy-undercover-cop-sex-with-activists?utm_source=reddit.comKennedy was part of a team tasked with making that happen. “I came up with the suggestion to bury wire cutters around the perimeter fence,” he later told Channel 4. The plan was for activists to slash holes in the fence, run inside the coal plant, and temporarily force the plant to close. But when activists got to the fence on Aug. 31, they were ambushed by a squadron of riot police—Kennedy, according to an interview he did with the Daily Mail, had tipped them off.
But as the months and years went on, some climate activists still had trouble putting their faith in him. It was the day-to-day things that made him seem out of place. His seemingly endless supply of cash was suspect. Kennedy ate meat and kind of talked like a bro. “I never trusted him because he was macho as ,” Jay Jordan, a climate organizer who worked occasionally with Kennedy during this era, told VICE World News.
By 2009, Kennedy was using that trust to work with a small group of climate activists on a top-secret mission. Their target was Ratcliffe-on-Soar, another massive coal-fired plant, this one south of Nottingham, the city where Kennedy had first begun his deployment. They figured if they could recruit dozens of activists from around the country, break into the facility, turn off the generator, and occupy the power station for a week, it would create a media spectacle that would embarrass the UK government and create public pressure to move the country off coal.
Kennedy was involved almost from the start. He drove a few of the activists in the planning committee on a scouting mission around the plant. But they had no idea that Kennedy had been ordered by his superiors to prevent the protest from happening. A confidential document from the National Public Order Intelligence Unit cited in Undercover stated that if activists successfully shut down Ratcliffe-on-Soar, it could cause “severe economic loss to the United Kingdom and have an adverse impact on the public’s feeling of safety and security.”
Some interesting quotes
Crucially, after Kennedy and Wilson broke things off, Kennedy quickly got into another long-term relationship with a woman who goes in public by the pseudonym Lisa. Jordan believes these relationships were crucial for Kennedy’s undercover work. “If he hadn’t been with the women he was with… I don’t think he’d have been able to do the work he was doing,” Jordan said. “He totally used [them] as a way in and to gain trust.”
