Undercover lifts the lid on British state espionage and one of the government's best-kept secrets since 1968. It exposes a government programme to covertly monitor political activists - a world of wire taps, private investigators, surveillance units, vehicle tracking devices and secret databases listing forensic details about all citizens who take part in peaceful protests. It tells the gripping human stories of six police spies, part of a covert team of agents that for four decades have had license to break the law and sleep with the enemy. Chief among them is PC Mark Kennedy, whose audacious seven years living a double-life as an environmental activist were made public in January 2011, in the worst scandal concerning undercover policing in British history.
This is the definitive account of Mark Kennedy and undercover policing, written by the award-winning investigative journalists who brought the scandal to the world's attention. They are the only people who have spoken to Kennedy in hiding and have uncovered secret databases of 'domestic extremists'. As the formal inquiries into the scandal approach, this book provides the gripping inside track on a story that is far from over.
