17. Infiltrated, Intimidated and Undermined: How Police Infiltration Can Mute Political Dissent An Interview with Verity Smith, from Cardiff Anarchist Network By Tom Anderson
In 2010 a long-term environmental activist using the alias ‘Mark Stone’ was confronted and revealed to be an undercover police officer called Mark Kennedy. Since then, the tactic of police infiltration has received increased public and media attention. However, much of the debate has focused on the rights and wrongs of this tactic in terms of what ‘intelligence’ was gleaned, whether it forms a cost-effective way of safeguarding law and order, and of whether these groups ‘deserved’ infiltration. What has been absent from the mainstream debate is an analysis of how police infiltration serves as a tool to undermine and even destroy activist networks, and to channel their actions away from forms of political activity which threaten capitalist interests. This article will examine the use of police infiltration to contain political dissent, and explore, through an interview with Verity Smith, an activist from Cardiff Anarchist Network (CAN), which was infiltrated by an undercover officer calling himself ‘Marco Jacobs’, how undercover police officers achieve these aims in practice. Before we look at the particular tactics used by ‘Marco Jacobs’ it is useful to set the context by exploring what has come to be known about the role of police officers in infiltrating activist groups. Although for obvious reasons exact figures are not available, it is fair to say that police infiltration of activist groups in the UK is more common than has previously been presumed and is certainly not limited to groups which engage in illegal activity. Indeed, when Mark Kennedy was outed he claimed that he knew of fifteen other undercover operatives, four of