A locksmith with ready cash and expensive tastes, Carlo Neri proposed to Donna McLean on New Year’s Eve, just three months after they met. She said

Infiltrating the Family

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2024-07-05 11:00:06

A locksmith with ready cash and expensive tastes, Carlo Neri proposed to Donna McLean on New Year’s Eve, just three months after they met. She said yes. That same night, talking to some of the male activists who were part of McLean and Neri’s shared social circle, he made an unusual suggestion: why not firebomb a charity shop connected to the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, an Italian fascist organization?

“Carlo Neri,” in fact, was an agent of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), a covert unit of the Special Branch. He was a spy for the police.

For decades in the UK, police infiltrated the trade union movement, environmental groups, antiracist organizations, community centers, animal rights organizations, antiwar groups, feminist collectives, nuclear disarmament campaigns, and even the youth wing of the Liberal Party. Infiltration was not merely a matter of attending a few meetings or demonstrations. Instead, officers insinuated themselves into the intimate, romantic, familial, and comradely spaces of those on whom they spied.

The rituals of romantic love and family life could be used as part of an officer’s cover. Spy cops attended weddings, birthdays, and funerals as the partners of the women they spied on. Many years after their relationship ended, McLean came to the awful realization that Neri’s gesture of devotion had in fact been a distraction to conceal his other proposal later that night—an understanding that hit her “like a fist in the face.”