Moment woman realised partner of six years was actually an undercover cop with a completely different life
Finding out that the love of your life is an undercover cop sounds like you're waking up from a terrible dream, but for Lisa it was a reality.
Lisa was in a six-year relationship with married police officer Mark Stone (which wasn't his real name, btw) before she discovered the harrowing truth.
During his deployment, he was with as many as 10 other women, whilst operating as one of the half a dozen undercover officers from the Met’s National Public Order Intelligence Unit or its 'sister unit', the Special Demonstration Squad.
Mark - who had been sent to spy on activists as part of the NPIOU - was with Lisa for six years before she found out.
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"I stopped being able to see clearly," Lisa told The Mirror following a new podcast Undercover: The Skycops by the BBC.
"We were on holiday in the Alps and it felt like the mountains were swimming - I felt like I was losing my grasp on reality.
"I started looking around for a bit more information and found a phone that didn't have much battery left but it did have messages from two children calling him dad.
"You can't be in a relationship with somebody for six years and find out they've got children you didn’t know about - that's not normal."
Lisa said the moment she found out came after checking her partner's passport and noticing the different name - Mark Kennedy and not Mark Stone.
“When he went back to work, I was suddenly left on my own and had time to reflect,” she explains. “I went to visit a friend who just so happened to be doing some ancestry research and I remember asking him ‘can you look anyone up?’
“I felt like I’d been fractured into many tiny pieces and I really didn’t know who I was anymore.
“I was absolutely in love with him.
“Finding out he was a police officer turned my whole identity upside down.
"It felt like an explosion had gone off - nothing has been the same since. It rips the bottom out of your world.”
After seven years undercover, Kennedy was unmasked in 2010 after environmental activist Kate Wilson - who was deceived into a nearly two-year relationship Mark - was awarded almost £230,000 compensation after winning a landmark tribunal case against the Metropolitan Police for breaches of her human rights.
Helen Ball, the Met’s Assistant Commissioner for Professionalism, said: “We recognise the gravity of the judgment in this case, which outlined a series of serious failings that allowed Kennedy to remain deployed on a long-term undercover deployment without the appropriate level of supervision and oversight.
"This resulted in Ms Wilson’s human rights being breached.
“In entering into a sexual relationship, Kennedy’s actions went against the training and guidelines undercover officers received at the time.
"However, the tribunal found that the training was inadequate and more should have been done to consider the risks of male undercover officers forming relationships with women. We accept these findings.”
Anish Vij