By Any Means Necessary
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This is a woman we're calling Lindsay. Her real name is legally protected. In 2001, she was 30, living in London, and had recently gone through a bad breakup. She and her boyfriend had lived together for two and a half years. He proposed to her, but then changed his mind. When they broke up, Lindsay decided to take herself on a trip. She traveled around the United States for 10 weeks, mostly alone.

I really came back a changed person after that. I was just happy to just go along with the next chapter in my life, to be honest. And I really wasn't looking to be tied down again to another relationship. And then she met Carlo. Carlo had met a few of Lindsay's friends while she'd been away. He fit right in. It was a politically active group, and some of them were involved in the Socialist Party. Carlo had just started to get involved in socialist politics.

Everybody was really accepting of him very quickly and considered him a friend very quickly. The way he came across was quite humorous, self-effacing, intelligent, quite knowledgeable. But, you know, it was the self-effacing kind of quite modest personality. He wasn't very loud and overbearing, you know.

So, yeah, very quickly he had won over this incredibly discerning group of people, actually. You know, they didn't just, you know, attach themselves to anyone. And Carlo, after arriving on the scene, made it very clear that he was unhappily single. And so I'd been kind of primed, if you like, that this lovely man

who was political, you know, shared similar politics apparently, was actually looking for a partner. So, yeah, I was kind of interested. And so I was in a pub with my really long-standing friend and Carlo was there. And we, you know, we kind of vaguely flirted.

And yeah, but I really can't remember the details of our first conversation. That's terrible. About a week later, they went on a date. And, you know, we just launched ourselves immediately into a fun relationship. Were you kind of thinking to yourself, you know, I wonder if I can trust this guy? You know, I just got over that relationship and I would, you know, that is this going to happen again?

Well, you know, I was looking for a bit of fun at first. I wasn't looking for something serious in any shape or form. I just wanted a laugh. And he had the type of personality that very quickly would open you up, you know. It's like he seemed a very open guy who I trusted pretty quickly. Lindsay says he told her very early on that he had a child from a previous relationship.

And he was estranged from this child because the relationship with his ex-partner had gone really sour. And he kind of sought my opinion about whether or not he should re-establish contact with his son, who he showed me pictures of about 18, 12 to 18 months old at the time. And I said, of course, this is your son. You know, you have to re-establish contact. And

But he said he'd just told me and he wanted me to keep it from the rest of the group, the rest of our group of friends. He like took me into a confidence, you know. And I felt a lot closer to him automatically because we shared this secret together. Did you remember a moment where you thought to yourself, you know, this is going to be good. This is going to be good for me, this relationship. I would say probably it was a few months after we met that

It was my birthday and I was going back to my home city and my friends and family had organised a surprise party for me, which obviously I didn't realise until I got to the venue and there they all were.

And also there was Carlo who had travelled all the way from London. He looked exhausted, actually. And I got very drunk, unfortunately. And I was almost, you know, I was almost out of it at one point. And he was very, I remember him being really caring and really gentle and really taking care of me. And I think it was at that point I just thought, well, actually, this is going somewhere. And he really does care. It's not just words, you know.

Carla would bring her gifts, a nice camera, a set of bongos, books, and they either talked, texted, or saw each other every day, even though his work as a locksmith kept him busy. They spent the night at each other's apartments two or three times a week. I had keys to his flat in North London, but he would more often, I think, stay with me in South London.

My flat was a lot nicer than his. So we often socialised in the group of people who I'd met him with. We were together with that group of people as much as we were alone, you know. But he never introduced me to friends outside of that group and he never introduced me to family. His family were apparently in Italy.

the closest family were in Italy and the family that were in the UK had various problems of their own. And so, you know, that's why he didn't want to take me into that environment. And his friends who he worked with, apparently his fellow locksmith friends, he would play football with. And that's why they would get together to play football. You know, we weren't, we didn't live in each other's pockets as they say.

Because I certainly didn't want that. You know, after living with somebody, I didn't want to see somebody every day. Just before Christmas, Carlo surprised Lindsay with a trip to Venice. He just said, I've got us tickets and I've got us a room in Venice. Let's just go. And I was just so bowled over by that thoughtfulness and that generosity. I didn't realise Venice would be so cold at that time, but...

I've just got certain images, like us flying to Venice together. And we were just holding each other the whole time. We were telling each other we loved each other. It was a really romantic flight over, actually. Because by that point, I was like, yes, this person definitely cares for me. When we were in Venice, it was beautiful because there weren't thousands of people there, you know. So sometimes we were walking around fairly empty streets,

And I was so happy. And it wasn't that many weeks after we came back from this beautiful Venetian holiday that he was suddenly uncontactable. So not answering texts, not answering the phone. And I didn't really think anything of it for a day or two. But then it was four days that he was completely uncontactable for. And I really started to stress and worry. So I worried that something had happened.

to him or a family member or, you know. And I also selfishly kind of worried that, you know, this lovely man who was giving me lots of love and attention wasn't around, you know. So, yeah, it had a really negative impact emotionally. And then suddenly after four days, he reappeared. I mean, what did you think? I mean, that's... I didn't know what to think. I didn't want to just... I didn't want...

To completely freak out, you know, I didn't want to completely lose it emotionally. And I didn't want to make a massive fuss either, like some really clingy person, you know. But when he recontacted me, I was incredibly relieved. And I told him I was incredibly relieved and obviously asked him where he'd been and told him I'd been worried and he...

He said he'd been with a friend who'd really needed him. So he said a friend was having a really hard time and he had been with this friend, making sure their friend was all right and he was comforting this friend. And I thought, well, you know, what a wonderful man, you know. You know, to make himself available like that, to get somebody through a rough patch in their lives, I just thought, yeah, what a guy.

It made me feel better that he'd given this explanation. And then he disappeared again. I tried to contact him and his phone would be on, but no one would pick up. And then I would try to ring again. He wouldn't answer texts in the interim either. But then I would try to ring again and his phone would be off. And then...

No answer to text. In the meantime, I would try to ring again and his phone would be on, but he wouldn't answer. So that really, really set alarm bells ringing. And I guess it was partly because of my sad ending of my previous relationship that I started to think that it was a deliberate signal to me, really, that he wanted to distance himself now.

So I really, I took it very badly indeed. I was incredibly upset and I had keys to his flat, as I said, and I made my way on a night bus in London, which I spent probably...

two hours and this is like in you know one o'clock in the morning or whatever getting over to his flat in north london fully expecting to find him there and and you know i wasn't planning to make a scene and scream and shout i was just wanted to know what was happening was he okay were we okay you know so um i got there and there were no lights and his car wasn't there and

I had a key to his flat but I didn't have the key which double locked his door which was like the security lock. I didn't have one of those keys because those keys are very expensive. So it was deadlocked, the door was deadlocked and I couldn't get in. I couldn't use the key. By this point I was kind of inconsolable and I got back on the an hour and a half, two hour night bus journey back to South London in floods of tears. So I, you know,

I just forgot about how embarrassing that was. And I just cried in public all the way back to my flat. And I just had this awful anxiety, this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach that this was the end of our relationship. But then, after being gone for about five days, Carlo came back. I'm not sure I really gave him much space to give an explanation. I'm not even sure he tried. I can't remember an explanation that he gave me.

I was not only upset, but I was actually quite angry. I'd lost trust in him and that was kind of the end of it. But you see, he kept, he was very, in hindsight, knowing what I know now, it was very smart the way he dealt with the end of that relationship. So it was his actions which pushed me to bring the relationship to a close.

And then he kind of kept me in reserve, if you like. He kept saying to me, you know, this is just a pause, you know, it's just for now that we kind of cool things off. He kept saying for now, just for now. And then he rang me, apparently from Italy, over the summer to tell me his dad was unwell. And that kind of rekindled my feelings for him and my hopes that actually...

I was flattered that he'd rung me to tell me something emotional. So I wrote him a letter basically saying, I can't just fall out of love with people. I'm not that type of person. I don't know how. The next time she saw Carlo was at a mutual friend's 40th birthday party. And Carlo was there with a woman who I learned was his new partner. And I ended up leaving the birthday party early.

Lindsay didn't try to reach out to him again. And then, almost 15 years later, in 2015, Lindsay got a call from the friend who had introduced her to Carlo. The friend asked if Lindsay had time to talk. There was something she needed to tell her. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. Thanks to Squarespace for their support.

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In July of 2010, a woman named Lisa was on vacation with her boyfriend of six years, Mark Stone. They were traveling around Italy in a van. One day, Mark went on a bike ride in the mountains while she stayed behind. She was looking for a pair of sunglasses in the glove compartment when she found a passport. It had Mark Stone's photo, but a different name, Mark Kennedy. Then she found a phone.

And when she started looking through it, she saw emails addressing Mark as dad. She later said, I remember feeling that the world was suddenly a really long way away. I just remember that the mountains were swimming around me. When Mark got back from his bike ride, she didn't say anything. After almost two days of feeling sick and not being able to sleep, she asked him about what she'd found. Mark told her that he'd been a drug runner.

and that someone he'd worked with had been shot in front of him. Mark said he'd promised to look after his children, and they now thought Mark was their real father. Lisa remembers Mark cried when he talked about it. Over the next couple of months, Lisa says she sometimes had the feeling that there was something that wasn't quite right about Mark's explanation. But every time she asked him about it, he had an answer. One day, she was visiting a friend who was doing some ancestry research online...

And Lisa asked her to look up Mark Stone's birth certificate. When they couldn't find anything, Lisa started to do a little more digging and eventually found a birth certificate for Mark Kennedy's son, which listed his father's occupation as police officer. Lisa confronted him with some friends, and Mark eventually confessed. His real name was Mark Kennedy. He had two children, and he had been an undercover police officer. He'd been spying on Lisa and her friends for years.

And he told them that he wasn't the only one. Mark Kennedy was part of a secret unit in the UK formed by the Metropolitan Police in 1999 to gather information about threats arising from domestic extremism or protest activity. When Lisa met Mark, she'd been involved in environmental and anti-capitalist activism. Her friends were also activists.

Mark's unit was called the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, and it wasn't the only secret police unit gathering information about activists. Another one, at one point called the Special Demonstration Squad, had been set up in 1968 in response to Vietnam War protests. Its mission was to provide, quote, sufficient and accurate intelligence to enable the police to maintain public order, and its unofficial motto was, quote,

Undercover officers were known as deep swimmers and would transform themselves to blend in with the people they were surveilling. They got new passports and would change their appearance, growing their hair long and getting tattoos. One of them has said, I made sure my fingernails were always dirty and cracked.

It's been reported that undercover police officers spied on over a thousand groups, including the anti-apartheid movement, Youth Against Racism in Europe, the Socialist Workers Party, the Animal Liberation Front, and Greenpeace. After Mark admitted he'd been spying on her, Lisa wrote about it on a networking site for activists. Other women who had had similar experiences began speaking out and launched a legal case in 2011.

The story became huge news in the UK and came to be known as the Spy Cop Scandal. Some of the relationships had lasted for years. At least one undercover officer had a child with the woman he was spying on. He disappeared completely when his son was two. The woman he'd been in a relationship with only found out who he really was when she saw his picture in a newspaper article about his undercover work 25 years later.

Lisa has said that discovering that Mark had been working for the police, quote, is finding out that your most personal relationship was being controlled by the state without your knowledge. There are a group of people whose names I will never know, who I will never meet, who had control over what time we spent together, who ultimately decided when my relationship was going to finish. All of these kinds of decisions were being made behind the scenes.

by a team of people who had intimate knowledge of myself and my life, and I had no idea of their existence. Mark Kennedy has said he was really in love with Lisa. He said the relationship was the realest thing I ever did. He later sued the police, saying they'd failed to protect him from falling in love. We reached out to the Metropolitan Police, who told us his lawyers didn't move his claim forward, and it's been dormant since 2014.

The women who launched a legal case in 2011 suing the Metropolitan Police for emotional trauma received an undisclosed financial settlement and an official apology in 2015. Here's the Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner issuing a statement. Thanks in large part to the courage and tenacity of these women in bringing these matters to light, it has become apparent that some officers...

acting undercover while seeking to infiltrate protest groups, entered into long-term intimate sexual relationships with women which were abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong. I acknowledge that these relationships were a violation of the women's human rights, an abuse of police power and cause significant trauma. I unreservedly apologise on behalf of the Metropolitan Police Service and I wish to make a number of matters absolutely clear.

Most importantly, relationships like these should never have happened. They were wrong and they were a gross violation of personal dignity and integrity. It was almost 15 years since Lindsay had last seen Carlo. She says she hadn't really been paying a lot of attention to the news about the scandal until she got the call from her old friend, the one who'd introduced her to Carlo.

The friend told her that some of their activist friends had started to suspect that he was part of it. But I didn't believe it. It was true. And then this friend and another really lovely, close Karen friend came to visit me because they wanted to be with me as they told me that they had found definitive proof that this Carlo had been an undercover police officer.

Activist groups noticed that many of the undercover officers seemed to use remarkably consistent techniques. The officers' behavior was so similar that the activists were able to put together a list of 15 questions to determine if someone had been with an undercover officer. Some of them are fairly mundane things.

But if you answer yes to quite a few of these questions, there's a fair chance that the person you knew needs more investigation. So it's things like they have a car in amongst a group of people who weren't particularly wealthy and didn't have cars at that point. They had a job that took them away for days at a time, so they would kind of disappear. But, you know, perfectly legitimate as far as you were concerned. They had an excuse. They...

were excellent drivers, so really skilled drivers. Not only did they have a car, but they could really drive well. They had a bit of extra money. They had, you know, they were very generous and had a bit of extra money to throw about. Very important one, they all disappeared without trace. So no matter how many years they'd been deployed amongst groups of people and how close they'd become to many people as partners and friends...

They just disappeared completely at some point. Having feigned a nervous breakdown or some kind of emotional trauma that had brought about a kind of change in personality, enough for them to then disappear, you know, to give them an excuse to disappear. Some of the other questions were, are their politics underdeveloped or stereotyped?

Have you spotted oddities, like characteristics that indicate some formal training, such as the way they do their boots, or not knowing enough about something they claim to be into, particularly a soccer team? Has anyone ever met their family? Lindsay says it all sounded familiar. He matched all of them, every single one of them. So he was the only person with a car, and he would put his car...

and then van. He had like an estate car and then he had a van. He would put those vehicles at people's disposal at the drop of a hat. He was incredibly generous with his resources. And again, generous with gifting things. So, you know, I received some lovely gifts from him. He would buy people drinks. He'd take people out. You know, he was generous with his finances. Lindsay's friends finally confirmed that Carlo had been an undercover officer since

When they found his children's birth certificates, listing his occupation as police officer, what did you find out about the real Carlo? So I haven't found out very much. We know his real name. He's a British-Italian, and he joined the police as a fairly young man and seemed to have done quite well, and that's why he was picked.

as an undercover officer in this unit. He was also married during the time he and Lindsay were together. They were all married, pretty much. There was the odd officer here and there that wasn't, but generally they had to be married to be part of this unit because the theory was that if they had a family to go back to, then they wouldn't go rogue and actually, you know, join the protest groups, the activists who they'd been deployed against for all of those years.

Lindsay says she also found out that the toddler in the picture that Carlo had shown her was actually his son. Who was living just a few miles up the road from where we spent a lot of nights together in his undercover flat. And he used his son's real name as well.

Did you just go through every single moment of your relationship trying to see if you picked up on anything or? Yeah, I didn't sleep for days. I ran over things again and again in my head. I tried to remember because it was, you know, there were 15 years between the end of our relationship and me finding out. And a lot had happened in my life since then. So I was trying to remember stuff again.

And part of me didn't really still believe it. It took quite a while to sink in. Do you ever wonder whether part of his feelings were genuine? I think part of me did think, well, he must have cared, you know, because you can't act for that long and, you know. But I really don't think there can have been any genuine care in there because you couldn't do that to someone that you cared about. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Quince.

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Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea. You know that point in the afternoon when you just hit a wall? You don't have time for self-care rituals or getting some fresh air, so maybe you grab a beverage to bring you back. But sometimes, you don't have time for that.

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The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf iced tea. Time for a tea break, time for a Pure Leaf. How did you first get involved in activism? I think I was 14 the first time, 13 or 14, the first time I went out hunt saboteuring. This is Jessica. Her real name is also legally protected.

Hunt saboteuring often involves putting out things like citronella or garlic powder so that hunting dogs can't find the scent of a wild animal. And sometimes they use hunting horns to confuse the hounds and lead them away. Or they use a speaker to play a recording of hounds barking like they're following a scent. Jessica says she was bullied a lot growing up and preferred animals to people.

She got into animal rights activism after volunteering at an animal rescue. Eventually, by the time she was 18, she was able to drive to hunt sabotages and go into London for protests. And in 1992, after she turned 19, she moved into a house in London with other animal rights activists. It was the first time I'd left home, and, you know, it was sort of, it just felt quite grown up. And then you met Andy. Yes, Andy.

Jessica says that she and Andy went to some of the same demonstrations, and she'd see him at Hunt's sabotages. The people she was living with knew him too. He had a habit of turning up at our house sort of later on in the evenings, and it was a little bit difficult to sort of strike up a conversation. And, you know, he was hard work. And, yeah, the conversation in our house was, well, you know, well, I didn't invite him around. You know, this is your fault.

And then the other people would say, well, I didn't ask him around. I thought you'd asked him around. And going around everybody in the house, you know, no one had invited him around. He'd just turned up. You know, but we let him in and we were always friendly. You know, we would never have given him to think that we, you know, didn't really want him there. We were always polite.

And one particular night when I was sat in sort of, it was in one of my housemates rooms and I was sort of sat in her room with him watching TV. And either I had turned to speak to him or he'd spoken to me and I turned to answer him. And he just sort of like, he just like lunged straight at me and kissed me.

It was just, it was so awkward. It was just, you know, excruciatingly embarrassing. I didn't just, you know, this had never happened to me before. And it was just, you know, all I can sort of remember thinking, I mean, I remember, you know, my hair just, oh my God, oh my God. Yeah, it was so, so awkward. Was this the first time you'd kissed someone? Yes, yes, like that. And somehow from...

And he was there to spy on Jessica and her friends.

They even called him Andy Van. At one point, he actually planned a raid on a battery farm that housed chickens in pretty appalling conditions. So he organized the place where we would go and other activists to do it. So we went under the cover of darkness, and we'd got all the crates and sacks ready for the chickens and chickens.

you know broke into this place and rescued the chickens and you know so that was sort of the most like that was one of the biggest things I'd done sort of as an activist and it was him that planned it so you know and obviously it was you know it was breaking the law but you know I mean I didn't realize at the time but you know that was sort of an active police officer breaking the law.

Andy has denied planning the raid, though he has confirmed that he participated in it. Jessica says that Andy would sleep over and that he came with her when she went to visit her parents. A few months after they started seeing each other, Jessica got a job in France, and she and Andy decided they would stay together in a long-distance relationship. They wrote letters, and Jessica says she called a lot, but a lot of times he wasn't home.

When her job in France ended, Jessica moved back to England and split her time between her parents' house and Andy's. But she says it never really felt like she and Andy had strong feelings for each other. Eventually, Jessica met someone she really did like and ended things with Andy. But they still saw each other around. You know, he would come round to my friend's house and, you know, so we still see him quite a lot.

Jessica remembers hearing a couple years later that Andy was moving to the Czech Republic to teach English, and then nobody really heard from him after that. And then in 2017, Jessica got a Facebook message from someone she'd known in 1992 when she was dating Andy. Just, you know, hi, do you remember me? And, you know, we were in such and such a group together and, you know, a little bit of catch up and then...

You know, he said, have you heard about spy cops? And did you realize that, you know, we had some in our group? And I hadn't. I came back to him and said, you know, I said, a what? You know, what's spy cops? You know, I'd not even heard of the term. And so he sent me a link to his Facebook page and said, oh, yeah, you know, these are undercover police. They were deployed into our groups and, you

you may have known some of them. So I went straight sort of to the, you know, to the Facebook page and just as I'm scrolling through and, you know, probably took about 30 seconds and there was a picture of Andy there. And yeah, that was sort of the clock kind of stopped. And yeah, that was, I think probably within like the space of maybe five minutes or something, there was, you know, I'd heard of Spy Cops and,

And then, like, I realised I'd been in a relationship for a year with one of them. Suddenly, a lot of things made sense. So, you know, there's sort of the passionless relationship. And I'm thinking, well...

Yeah, because he was more than likely married at the time. And also he was, you know, where I thought he was. I mean, I was 19 when this relationship happened. I was 19. I thought he was 24. But in actual fact, he was 32. And I have to say that was the thing that probably hit me the worst. Everything about it was wrong.

After an internal investigation, the Metropolitan Police found credible evidence that Andy deceived Jessica into a sexual relationship. Andy has denied it and called Jessica's claims, quote, lurid. The Metropolitan Police Service has said that they do not accept his denial. Last December, Jessica testified in a public inquiry into undercover policing that

She described her relationship with Andy and answered questions for hours. Andy also appeared before the inquiry and answered questions, and still denied having an intimate relationship with Jessica. The inquiry had already confirmed that Andy had been an undercover officer, and in 2018 publicly released a document called the Tradecraft Manual, which Andy had written.

And it's, by all accounts, there was sort of like a binder which had, you know, sort of information from previous officers about, you know, this is how you find your identity, you know, telling them how to go basically to St. Catherine's house and find the birth certificates of dead children, you know, a dead child around similar age to you with the same first name. And this is who you'll pretend to be in your undercover persona.

And then sort of everyone explains, you know, sort of this is where you get your vehicles. This is how you find your flat. You know, it's like it's just a handbook of how to...

be an undercover officer. And it's quite, you know, it's pretty hideous reading in particular places. I mean, like when he's talking about finding the identities of dead children and their unspectacular deaths. The language is just awful, you know. There's no respect whatsoever. It makes really hard reading. But basically, yeah, he collated this information and then wrote his own parts to it.

There's a whole section about sexual liaisons. It says, in part, while it is not my place to moralize, one should try to avoid the opposite sex as long as possible. However, if you're doing your job properly, men and women in the field will experience occasional approaches from males and females, straight and gay. While you may try to avoid any sexual encounter, there may come a time when your lack of interest may become suspicious.

If you have no other option but to become involved, you should try to have fleeting, disastrous relationships with individuals who are not important to your sources of information. It's just, you know, he's pretty much giving them the green light, you know, sort of have a fleeting and disastrous relationship with someone. There's a section on appearance. It recommends that men grow a beard and wear an earring, and it says...

Being a little untidy, smelly, and rumpled is a natural state for many of the people in our target groups. There's a section that warns that the work can be boring, that you should be prepared for, quote, mind-numbing discussions on political theory. There's another one on what to do if you're arrested, one called Living on Your Wits, and a heavily redacted one called Withdrawal, about exit strategies.

Have you seen any of the reports that he was writing while you were dating? Yes, yeah. There's, I mean, there's one particular report. It's a two-page special branch report about me having a haircut in 1992.

And it just highlights to me how ridiculous this whole spying on activists was. You know, this two-page report and then it's saying, you know, I've had my hair cut, it's now quite short. There's nothing in there that warrants...

the intrusion into everybody's lives. You know, there's nothing in there. You know, they've made it look more than it was because they're trying to justify their job. They got quite a lot of overtime. You know, what they didn't say is that a lot of this overtime was spent in activists' beds. It feels like I've not only had a relationship with him, it's however many Metropolitan Police officers, you know, being in the relationship with us.

Andy Coles retired from the Metropolitan Police in 2013, before the public inquiry into undercover policing began. But the inquiry has said that if he had still been a police officer, he would have faced a disciplinary hearing for gross misconduct, a charge that would likely have gotten him fired. We reached out to Andy Coles and to Carlo through their lawyer. Both of them declined to specifically comment, but we reached out to Andy Coles and to Carlo

with their lawyer saying that they have been and continue to cooperate fully with the inquiry. The attorney general has stated that no one will face prosecution based on evidence given at the inquiry. Several women have brought civil claims against the police, some of them using the Human Rights Act. Many of them were settled out of court, and some are still ongoing. In one woman's case, a tribunal ruled that senior officers at the Metropolitan Police Department

either knew of the relationship, chose not to know of its existence, or were incompetent and negligent in not following up on clear and obvious signs. The ruling also said that the senior officers likely had a lack of interest in protecting women from breaches of their human rights. She was awarded almost £230,000 in compensation.

At least one woman has pursued criminal charges, but the director of public prosecutions decided not to prosecute. We contacted the Metropolitan Police to ask whether this type of undercover work is still happening today. A deputy assistant commissioner sent a statement that said, in part, I want to make it clear that undercover policing has undergone significant reform over the decades since this happened.

Today it is a practice underpinned by strong governance and oversight, and with clear ethical guidelines and a legislative framework. We are committed to being as open and transparent as possible in this very sensitive and complex area of policing, and we pledge to use each stage of the undercover policing inquiry, which we are fully cooperating with, as an opportunity to reflect on how to learn and improve further.

The inquiry is currently expected to end in 2026. They've released an interim report in the meantime, covering the years 1968 to 1982. In it, the former judge overseeing the inquiry wrote, The question is whether or not the end justified the means. I have come to the firm conclusion that it did not. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.

Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Zajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter.

We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal, This is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr, talking about everything from how we make our episodes to the crime stories that caught our attention that week to things we've been enjoying lately.

To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com slash plus. We're on Facebook at This Is Criminal and Instagram and TikTok at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. ♪

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Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea. When you find yourself in the afternoon slump, you need the right thing to make you bounce back. You need Pure Leaf Iced Tea. It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine. You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized, so you can be ready to take on what's next. The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf Iced Tea. Time for a tea break? Time for a Pure Leaf.