Bed of Lies: ‘How we exposed our loved ones were liars sent to spy on us’

What would you do if your partner vanished one day without a trace? If they cleared their belongings out of the flat you shared while you were at work? Or told you they were going on holiday and then disappeared off the face of the earth?

That is the situation that confronts Rosa* in the latest episode of Bed of Lies (which you can listen to in the audio player above, and find previous episodes here). She had met Jim in 1999, when she was a 27-year-old environmental activist. Like her, Jim was vegan. He was also charming, with close-cropped hair and dark eyes. She thought he was her soulmate – and then he vanished.

But one day, after the couple had been living together for about six months, Jim said he needed to go away and clear his head. He had been struggling with his mental health and wanted to be alone.

“It was very painful initially,” says Rosa. “But ultimately, if you love someone, [you] set them free.”

Jim called Rosa from Turkey, but then fell silent. It was the year 2000. Mobile phones were a luxury and social media didn’t exist. With no way of contacting her boyfriend, Rosa’s mind raced with possibilities. He could be injured, caught up in something dangerous – or breaking up with her.

“I was concerned for him,” she recalls now, over Zoom from her home in the Welsh countryside.

Rosa decided to search for Jim, not giving up until she found him. Her determination set in motion a chain of events that would eventually unravel one of the biggest scandals in British policing.

Her story is featured in the new Telegraph podcast Bed of Lies, which charts how Rosa and a small group of women like her exposed dozens of undercover officers who had long-term romantic relationships with their targets.

It’s because of their investigative work that the headquarters of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) – a secretive branch of the Met Police founded in 1968 to monitor subversive Left-wing organisations – and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), established to monitor groups that could pose a threat to law and order, are now under scrutiny.

The Undercover Policing Inquiry, which started earlier this month, will investigate how officers in these units appropriated the identities of deceased children, spied on MPs and started families with people they were meant to be keeping tabs on. 

After Jim vanished in Turkey, Rosa went to the Foreign Office which instigated a missing person’s search. But she didn’t leave it there. She tried to find his family, whom she’d never met, to ask if they had heard anything. Bizarrely, though, she wasn’t able to find an address or phone number for them anywhere.

“I needed answers,” she says. “I needed to know what on earth was going on.”

The harder she tried to find Jim, the less she was able to find out about him – and clues began to emerge, suggesting he wasn’t who he said he was.

“He’d taken me around Cardiff, showing me his university halls,” says Rosa. But when she rang the university to ask what year he had left, they told her there was no record of a Jim Sutton having studied there.

“There was a falsification of identity in a way that alarmed me,” says Rosa.

Rosa knew Jim planned to hitchhike from Turkey to South Africa and work on a friend's vineyard - so she decided to fly there to confront him. When she was there, he sent her cryptic emails, saying that he "loved" her but it was "dangerous".

She learnt how to read IP addresses (which reveal the location of a computer) – and discovered Jim was, in fact, in England.

With the help of a private detective, Rosa tracked down the IP address to an industrial building in Camberwell, south London, which was dotted with security cameras. This, she discovered, was the headquarters of the SDS.

Two days later, on Bonfire Night 2001 – nearly 18 months after Jim had vanished, he reappeared and told Rosa that he was, in fact, Andrew “Jim” Boyling, a police officer.

“You talk about the Stasi in East Germany, that’s not how we understand our society,” says Rosa. “Any lie is more believable than the truth – that your partner never existed and you were being spied upon by the state.”

But it would be another decade before the scandal blew open. Because, in what Rosa now believes was a “containment exercise”, Jim told her he wanted to leave the police and go on the run with her. “I wasn’t impressed by him, but I felt a duty to help him,” she says. “And he was my partner, my loved one.”

Within two weeks, Rosa was pregnant with their first child and became trapped in what she describes as an abusive relationship. Jim never left the police. They never went on the run. Instead, Rosa says he isolated her from her friends and strung her along with promises he would quit.

She tried to get word out to her former activist friends about Jim’s real identity – believing other spies may have infiltrated the group – but it wasn’t until 2010, after she had managed to leave him, that the news finally spread.

In August that year, Lisa* was at Shambala music festival when she heard the rumour: an activist named Jim, who had been around them in the Nineties, was actually an undercover cop.

Lisa had recently been on holiday with her boyfriend of six years, Mark Stone, and discovered two things that concerned her. For one, his passport had a different name in it – Mark Kennedy. Second, she had read messages on his phone from two children, who called him “Dad”.

Mark had told Lisa a wild story – that he had once been a drug dealer and the children belonged to his criminal partner, who had been shot. She was suspicious – in the back of her mind was the news that Jim had been a police spy. “So I started to trawl the internet to see what I could find,” she says.

Lisa managed to track down a marriage certificate for Mark Kennedy and birth certificates for the two children. All listed his occupation as “police officer”.

“I was desperate for an explanation,” says Lisa, who was heartbroken. “I needed to expose the undercover police officer and break up with my boyfriend.”

News broke about Mark Kennedy’s real identity – an undercover officer for the NPOIU – after Lisa’s friends posted it online. By the beginning of 2011, it was on the front pages.

Lisa and Rosa weren’t the only women to have suspected that their ex partners were undercover police. Others soon came forward, including Alison*, who investigated her ex after he left a note on the kitchen table and vanished. In all, eight women joined together and, with the help of lawyer Harriet Wistrich – who later represented the survivors of black cab rapist John Worboys – brought a legal case against the Met Police. In 2015, the Met apologised for the “gross violation” and paid the women undisclosed compensation. Theresa May, then Home Secretary, announced a public inquiry.

Rosa, Lisa and four others have written a book, called Deep Deception: The Story of the Spycops Network by the Women Who Uncovered the Shocking Truth, which is due for release next year. But their hunt for the truth isn’t over.

“I want the inquiry to get to the bottom of what was going on and how deep this goes,” says Rosa. “I can’t get any closure without knowing what happened.”

*Names have been changed because of legal anonymity

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