Easter weekend 2009, 114 environmentalists gathered near Nottingham to plan an audacious action at Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station. Their intentions were disrupted when police raided and arrested all present. Charges against most the 114 were dropped, leaving 26 to be sent to trial in two tranches at the end of 2010. Just before the first of those trials, in October 2010, it was discovered that one of those arrested, Mark Stone, was in reality Mark Kennedy, an undercover police officer with the National Public Order Intelligence Unit. The second of the trials collapsed in January 2011 when the six in court sought to call Kennedy as a witnesses. This moment launched the spycop scandal into the public consciousness, causing the immediate closure of the NPOIU and ultimately leading to the Undercover Policing Inquiry.

The collapse of the trial generated various official reports and reviews as to what went wrong. The second trial also saw disclosure of material relating directly to Kennedy’s infiltration, shedding rare light on the NPOIU’s activities. A number of the public reports and that disclosure can be found at this page. Of the redactions in the disclosure, that in black was done by police; those in grey was been done by those campaigners who obtained the files.

For some analysis of the material see Operation Aeroscope at Powerbase.info.