Helen Steel was in her 20s and deeply in love with a man who told her he would “like to spend the rest of his life” with her.
She and John Barker had just moved into a new flat and would share long walks in the countryside, where they hoped to one day buy a cottage using money he had inherited.
“I had never felt this intensity of love for someone before,” she says. “Although we’d had a few small arguments … John and I had been blissfully happy”.
One day he surprised her by suggesting that he wanted children with her. “I was a little startled and asked how many he had in mind,” she says. “Six,” he replied.
But it was all a lie – even his name.
In reality he was an undercover police officer who had been sent to spy on her and her political allies.
She was a social justice and environmental campaigner, and would go on to be one of the defendants in the celebrated McLibel case.
Now John Dines, who had used the fake name of Barker during his four-year undercover deployment, has said he never loved Steel. He has told the public inquiry into undercover policing that during their two-year relationship, he used Steel to bolster his fake identity and collect “as much useful and valuable intelligence as possible” about leftwing protesters.
“In other words, cold, calculating emotional and sexual exploitation,” said David Barr, the inquiry’s chief barrister. Dines has given the inquiry two statements but has refused to be questioned.
On Thursday, ITV is due to broadcast the first in a three-part series on the so-called spy cops scandal. The series, made in collaboration with the Guardian, tells the stories of a group of women, including Steel, who were devastated after they were deceived into long-term relationships by undercover officers.
The women used ingenious methods over many years to discover the true identities of the men who had abused them.
In a long-running covert operation that stretched from 1968 to at least 2010, about 139 undercover officers spied on more than 1,000 predominantly leftwing political groups. In deployments typically lasting four years, they adopted fake identities and pretended to be campaigners as they hoovered up information about the political activities of the groups.
The Guardian has calculated that at least 25 of the officers – nearly a fifth of the total number of spies – formed sexual relationships with members of the public, while concealing their real identities. In other words, it was frequent.
For six months, Dines pretended to Steel that he was having a mental breakdown. He tormented her by telling her that he loved her but could not continue their relationship as he needed space to sort himself out. He would disappear for periods and then reappear. It was “erratic and alarming”, she says.
In 1992, he told her in a letter that he was going to South Africa as he felt hopeless. “I was distraught, out of my mind worrying about him but unable to do anything about it. I fell apart and cried uncontrollably,” Steel says.
Like other undercover officers, Dines was feigning a breakdown to end his deployment. He returned to work at Scotland Yard.
It took 18 years, but Steel managed to expose him as a police spy. From the state archives of births and deaths certificates, she discovered that he had been using the identity of a dead child. “John Barker – the man I’d loved, the man I’d planned to spend the rest of my life with – didn’t exist. He never had,” she says.
Dines had let slip clues about his real family when he had told her that he had grown up in New Zealand. She used public archives in New Zealand and London to establish that he had been married, and on his marriage certificate he had declared that he was a police officer.
Unknown to Steel, another woman had been going through a similar ordeal. Alison, a leftwing campaigner, had lived with a man she knew as Mark Cassidy for five years.
Alison describes them as living together “as man and wife”. “We’d soon settled down into a life of domesticity, and I hadn’t felt this happy for years … We enjoyed our evenings watching TV or hanging out with friends.”
He met her relatives at family gatherings. But she never met his family. He told a sad tale of bereavement and family dysfunction: a drunken driver had killed his father when he was eight, he did not get on with his mother. She once went to meet his grandfather but he happened to be away on a church outing.
In 2000, he told her that he was going to Germany after months of depression. It was a familiar tactic of the undercover officers as they sought to extricate themselves from their covert work. He too used another tactic of the undercover spies: sending her letters or postcards postmarked from abroad that were designed to deter her from coming looking for him.
But she soon suspected that he was an agent of the state. She hired a private detective who established that he had used a fictional identity.
Cassidy had also made a crucial mistake while living with her: he had a credit card in the name of M Jenner which she had found. Back then, he claimed that he had stupidly bought it off a bloke in a pub. But she remembered it and was able to establish that was his real name.
Another activist, Lisa Jones, had a six-year relationship with Mark Kennedy, who infiltrated environmental campaigners. She loved him “totally, completely, more than anyone”.
“The person who knew me better than anybody else. I thought I knew him better than anyone else knew him,” she says.
But by 2010 she had begun to suspect that he was not who he said he was.
She had known him as Mark Stone. But on a holiday in Italy, she made a chance discovery: in the glove box of their van, she came across his passport but in the unfamiliar name of Kennedy.
“The thing that made my stomach come into my mouth was seeing that he had a child. The character of Mark Stone wasn’t one that would have had a child.”
More detective work led her to confront him, compelling him to admit that he was an undercover officer.
The exposure of Kennedy triggered the spy cops scandal in 2011, leading in turn to revelations about the scale of the covert operations over the decades and the misconduct of the spies.
