None of the watchful band of animal rights fanatics suspected the truth about the ever-helpful woman they knew as Christine. Recalled variously as ‘smiley’ and ‘chatty’ and someone for whom no task was too much trouble, Christine never missed a meeting or ignored a call to action, whether it involved confronting fox hunters or liberating animals. All agreed she was a recruit of rare dedication and no little zeal.
But Christine was also a spy – a member of a covert Metropolitan Police unit.
Only many years later, when obliged to revisit the events of the past, would some activists reflect that maybe she didn’t quite fit in after all; that maybe she was too inquisitive, often asking one question too many. Others, meanwhile, noted that her unchanging uniform of patchwork dungarees, tie-dye T-shirt and combat boots was perhaps a little too studied.
But this was hindsight talking. In truth, not even her most hyper-vigilant comrades had any inkling she was secretly feeding information about them to her Scotland Yard bosses.
Over the coming weeks the remarkable story of Christine’s secret mission will be scrutinised by the long-running Undercover Policing Inquiry in London that has heard shocking accounts of how her male colleagues, under the guise of a false persona, tricked their way into the beds of unsuspecting female political campaigners to shore up their cover stories. Some fathered children then disappeared.
Victims of what came to be known as the ‘spycops’ scandal would later speak of their devastation after learning they had unwittingly lived a lie.
In the most notorious case, Mark Kennedy, using the pseudonym Mark Stone, deceived several women into sexual relationships, with a tribunal ultimately finding that he ‘grossly debased, degraded and humiliated’ one of his victims.
Christine’s story inverts this now familiar narrative. For one thing, she was the only female undercover officer in the Metropolitan Police Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) to become intimate with an activist she was monitoring.
Members of the hardline Animal Liberation Front were infiltrated by Christine Green – the only female member of a covert Metropolitan Police unit
Mark Kennedy (pictured), using the pseudonym Mark Stone, deceived several women into sexual relationships during his time undercover
More noteworthy still is that her relationship with him – the leader of a London-based Animal Liberation Front (ALF) cell who was once jailed for headbutting a fox hunter and breaking his nose – did not end amid bitter recriminations like those of her male colleagues. Theirs was built, says a friend, on ‘genuine love’ and still endures today.
Indeed, The Mail on Sunday can reveal the police spy and the animal rights fanatic, both now 64, quietly left the UK and got married in Sweden where they now live a peaceful life on a remote island. ‘It is the perfect place from which to disappear from the world,’ said a neighbour last week. ‘People here tend not to socialise or ask too many questions.’
So intent on keeping their privacy is Christine that she has refused to give a witness statement to the latest leg of the inquiry, which has been running since 2014. Nor will she attend in person, though her legal representative will do so in her place.
Former colleagues have jokingly referred to Christine as the ‘Met’s Mata Hari’ after the Dutch dancer and courtesan whose name became a synonym for the seductive female spy.
But a friend says: ‘The truth is [Christine] never set out to seduce anyone, not like the blokes in SDS. It just happened, simple as that.’
Evidently, Christine has no wish to publicly explain her role with the SDS, the shadowy unit established in 1968 to infiltrate hundreds of protest groups from climate activists to trade unions.
Despite Christine’s reticence, the inquiry is determined to shine light on her activities.
Of her case’s importance, the inquiry’s lead lawyer David Barr KC said: ‘Far fewer women than men served as undercover police officers in the SDS, but [Christine’s] case illustrates clearly that the risk of… becoming involved in sexual relationships with those they mixed with undercover is not confined to men.’
Crucially, the inquiry wants to know when her relationship with the activist began and when she came clean about her role.
Christine Green (pictured) left the UK and got married in Sweden where she lives a peaceful life on a remote island with her animal activist husband
For years, SDS agents had adopted the identities of deceased children as a cover, but after that controversial practice ended Christine became the first officer to construct an entirely fictitious identity. And so, the legend ‘Christine Green’ was born.
A former Special Branch detective constable, Christine’s undercover deployment, which lasted five years, began in November 1994 against a background of intense activity by animal rights groups across Britain. Earlier that year, one such extremist, Barry Horne, carried out several firebomb attacks on the Isle of Wight, including one that destroyed a branch of Boots at a cost of £2.8 million.
Later in her deployment Christine would attend a meeting in support of Horne, who was by then on hunger strike in prison.
To begin with, though, she joined anti-fur protests in London and made tentative attempts to befriend prominent activists.
Paul Gravett, the leader of a group called London Animal Action, recalls meeting her in a vegetarian restaurant. ‘I suppose it was in role for her to want to get to know me, to give her more credibility,’ he said.
Telling her new friends she worked as a courier, Christine used her van to drive campaigners to meetings and demonstrations. Mr Gravett said she became ‘very active’ within the group and helped manage its finances.
Later she got involved with hunt saboteur groups across South-East England. Often hunters and saboteurs, or ‘sabs’, clashed fiercely. One saboteur, Walter, recalled: ‘She was always quite inquisitive whenever we were stood around waiting for the hunt to move off. That’s how I recall her. She would ask: ‘What are you up to? What did you do last week?’ That sort of thing.’
The Animal Liberation Front is a far-left decentralised movement which emerged in Britain in the 1970s. (Stock image)
Another saboteur said: ‘She was definitely considered one of us. I thought of her as someone committed to our aims.’
At some point during her deployment she became close friends with the activist who would become her husband, a prominent saboteur then in his 30s. Friends recall him as ‘fiercely devoted to the cause’.
A few years earlier, in 1993, he was jailed for an attack on a fox hunter during a confrontation with the Surrey Union Hunt.
He claimed he acted in self-defence after being punched in the ribs, but jailing him for three months, a judge told him: ‘You were convicted of assaulting a man by headbutting him, breaking his nose. In the circumstances… this assault could not be excused on the grounds of self-defence. I realise the circumstances were highly charged but it must be realised that while people have the right of peaceful and lawful protest…that right does not include the ability to cause serious harm to those with whose views they don’t agree.’
What Christine told her bosses about his activities after she infiltrated the ALF is not known.
But Mr Barr told the inquiry that her intelligence-gathering ‘covers a great variety of activism in the cause of animal rights. Some of it lawful and some of it decidedly unlawful.’
Mr Barr noted that there was ‘a watershed’ in her work around the spring of 1998. Her managers had complained about the quality of her intelligence and considered cutting short her mission.
But then came ‘a marked increase in reporting on Animal Liberation Front-type activity’ which, Mr Barr said, appeared to be due to her relationship with the activist. Mr Barr added: ‘There is no doubt that [Christine] became intimately involved with [him] at some point. She ultimately left her husband and resigned [from the Met] to be with him. What is disputed is when the intimate relationship began.’
A public inquiry will consider undercover cop Christine’s role in releasing thousands of mink from Crow Hill Farm in Ringwood in August 1998. Pictured: A farm worker recaptures a mink at the Hampshire farm
Her ex-husband said she confessed to him in about April or May 1999 that she was in a relationship with someone from the group, and that the activist knew she was an undercover officer.
Other witnesses, including Mr Gravett, are also convinced the relationship began during her deployment, saying it was ‘common knowledge they were a couple’. He added: ‘I’ve also got a memory of him … saying to me he was madly in love with her.’ In addition to her love life, of ‘particular concern’ to the public inquiry will be Christine’s role in the release of thousands of mink from Crow Hill Farm in Ringwood, Hampshire in August 1998.
Over several weeks, the mink spread across a 40-mile radius, killing pets, livestock and birds of prey and threatening the New Forest ecosystem. Campers were warned about the danger they posed and a shop was evacuated when an escaped mink darted through the door. Hundreds were shot or died on the roads.
ALF claimed responsibility but no one was charged.
The farm raid featured in the Undercover Policing Inquiry, during which Christine’s alias was made public in 2018. In apologising to their counterparts in Hampshire for not telling them that their spy had taken part, the Met confirmed that ‘Christine Green’ – who they knew as ‘Agent 26’ – was working for them.
At the time, Christine criticised the Met’s double standards for revealing her involvement, which unmasked her to the animal activist world, while concealing the identities of the senior officers who had authorised her to take part in the mink raid.
In a public statement, she said: ‘That the current senior management team at the Metropolitan Police has chosen to expose my role, knowing the vilification and furore that would follow in the ‘trial by media’ whilst being fully aware of my ill-health issues, is scandalous… it is the Metropolitan Police, not I, who should be holding its head in shame.’
Christine was involved with hunt saboteur groups across South-East England. Often hunters and saboteurs (pictured), or ‘sabs’, clashed fiercely
She described how she has had a ‘great deal of therapy and counselling over the years’ for the mental ill-health caused by her covert work.
Today, unanswered questions still remain about the mink operation, which the inquiry hopes to answer.
Mr Barr said: ‘[Christine] was authorised by her SDS managers to participate. The focus of our investigation … will concern the circumstances in which she was so authorised, the level of that authority and why local police were not informed either before or afterwards when the crime was being investigated.’
It appears Christine disappeared from the animal rights movement around 2000, telling activists she was going to Australia for a friend’s funeral and then going travelling.
In reality, her covert mission was coming to an end – a typical SDS undercover deployment lasted about five years – and soon afterwards she left the police and began living with her activist partner in Cornwall.
If she tried to mend his ways, it didn’t work. In 2003, then working as a bus driver, he was convicted of intimidating two women working on a project to cull hedgehogs in the Outer Hebrides.
A court was told he blocked a road with his car, intimidated the two Scottish Natural Heritage employees and placed them in a state of fear and alarm. He was found guilty of breach of the peace by conducting himself in a disorderly manner.
Christine used her van to drive campaigners to meetings and demonstrations and later got involved with hunt saboteur groups across South-East England. Pictured: Hunt Saboteur holding a hunting horn and homemade whip
All that is now behind the couple who live quietly with their three dogs in their Swedish hideaway.
They declined to comment when approached by The Mail on Sunday last week.
But in her 2018 statement, Christine offered her apologies to ‘those activists who I was closest to and who befriended me, opening their lives and homes to me’.
She said she had ‘made some of the best friends anyone could ever want, people who without hesitation put their liberty and sometimes their life on the line for me’.