I worked in my community allotment with asylum seekers

I worked in my community allotment with asylum seekers.

Some of the women who ended up in relationships with these undercover officers did not consider themselves to be “activists” or “organisers”. They weren’t involved in any of the groups the police wanted to collect intelligence about. They weren’t privy to those people’s plans and actions. But they were somehow on the periphery of the scene or movement that the police were interested in.

For example, I was a volunteer at my local city farm. I ran a gardening club, mostly with asylum seekers, refugees and other unemployed people. I spent most of my time growing organic salads and vegetables. I can’t think of a single piece of useful intelligence that the police might have got from me, despite putting an undercover police officer right into my life.

But, looking back, it seems that what happened to me is what they’ve been calling “collatoral damage” – I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, I was a convenient target and being in a relationship with me meant that nobody questioned him.

This appears to have been a common tactic used by SDS officers. They sometimes formed relationships with women purely to build up their ‘legend’. These women are only finding out (some of) the truth now, many years after they last saw their former “boyfriends”.