One of the undercover police officers who infiltrated various protest groups was last night said to have first joined activists in Brighton.
The Guardian said that “Officer B” was known to fellow activists as Mark Jacobs, also known as Marco Jacobs, although this is not thought to be his real name.
He told activists that he was a 44-year-old landscape gardener and long-distance lorry driver.
The news follows the collapse of a trial involving Mark Kennedy, also known as Mark Stone, who spent seven years pretending to be an environmental activist.
According to various newspaper reports, four officers have now been exposed in these roles, with three of them having had sexual relationships with those under their surveillance.
The Daily Mail said that one of the officers had even fathered two children with a protester.
Mark Jacobs is one of the officers accused of crossing the line and becoming too involved after he began attending activists’ gatherings in Brighton in March 2005.
He went along to meetings of Dissent! as protesters were being prepared for the G* summit at Gleneagles in July 2005.
He moved to Cardiff a year later, according to The Guardian.
The newspaper quoted a 29-year-old former girlfriend last week saying that she had an affair with Jacobs for three months in the summer of 2008.
She told The Guardian: “I was doing nothing wrong. I was not breaking the law at all. For him to come along and lie to us and get that deep into our lives was a colossal, colossal betrayal.
“I am incredibly angry. Obviously to do that to anybody is pretty low, but to do that to somebody who trusted you and cared about you is just unspeakable.”
The newspaper said that, by 2009, friends had become suspicious of him and he was increasingly being left out of sensitive discussions.
He left claiming to have found a job in Corfu as a gardener and his former friends never heard from him again.
