At least 25 undercover police officers who infiltrated political groups formed sexual relationships with members of the public without disclosing their true identity to them, the Guardian can disclose.
The total shows how women were deceived on a systemic basis over more than three decades. It equates to nearly a fifth of all the police spies who were sent to infiltrate political movements.
Four of the police spies fathered, or are alleged to have fathered, children with women they met while using their fake identities to infiltrate campaigners.
One woman, known as Jacqui, has said her life was “absolutely ruined” after she discovered by chance that the father of her son was an undercover officer, more than 20 years after his birth. The officer, Bob Lambert, abandoned them when the son was an infant, claiming falsely that he had to go on the run abroad to escape being arrested by police.
Other women had intimate relationships lasting up to six years with men who concealed the fact they were undercover officers who had been sent to spy on them and their friends.
More than 50 women are so far known to have been deceived by the undercover officers, although the total is unknown at the moment and is likely to be higher. They unknowingly shared their most intimate lives with the spies and some attended weddings and funerals with them.
The women were devastated when they discovered how the men had betrayed them, leaving them profoundly traumatised and unable to form trusting intimate relationships again.
The scale of the deception has been revealed as ITV starts to broadcast a major series on what has become known as the “spy cops” scandal.
Starting on Thursday, the series – made in collaboration with the Guardian – shows how five women pieced together disparate clues to expose the real identities of their former boyfriends. The identities of its covert officers is one of the British state’s deepest secrets.
The women scoured obscure archives and even travelled abroad to unmask the men after they abruptly vanished from their lives using what turned out to be fake claims.
Their detective work over many years led to a series of revelations that have exposed the highly secret undercover operations to infiltrate political campaigns and misconduct by the spies, forcing the government to set up a public inquiry.
The long-running inquiry – led by the retired judge John Mitting – is examining decades of undercover deployments. A key part of the inquiry is looking at how the women were deceived and who among those supervising the undercover work knew about it.
David Barr, the inquiry’s chief barrister, told a hearing last year that it was not scrutinising whether sexual deception was justified. “It was not,” he said.
Years of campaigning and legal action by the women have forced police chiefs to apologise and admit that the “abusive, deceitful, manipulative” relationships resulted from “a wider culture of sexism and misogyny” within the police. The police have also admitted that the managers supervising the officers – imbued with that culture – failed to prevent the abuse from happening.
The deceptive relationships were a frequent part of intensely secret operations that began in 1968 and lasted more than 40 years.
The relationships started in the 1970s and continued until 2010. Only two of the 25 officers were women. Many of the identities of the police spies remain secret, meaning there is an unknown number of women who may be unaware that they had been deceived into sexual relationships.
In total, about 139 undercover officers – employed in two covert squads – spied on more than 1,000 political groups. Tens of thousands of mainly leftwing and progressive campaigners were put under surveillance.
Many of the spies created aliases based on the identities of dead children after searching through archives containing birth and death records to locate suitable matches.
The officers typically spent four years pretending to be campaigners while they infiltrated political groups, befriending activists while simultaneously hoovering up information about their protests.
They routinely gathered huge amounts of information about the personal lives of political activists, such as their holiday plans, sexuality and bank accounts.
As well as the 25, there are a further three spies who deny they had sexual relations under their fake identity.
• The Undercover Police Scandal: Love and Lies Exposed airs on Thursday 6 March at 9pm GMT on ITV1, ITVX and STV.
