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Talk About Going Undercover: U.K. Cops Slept With Targets Of Their Spying

New Scotland Yard, the headquarters building of the Metropolitan Police.
Akira Suemori
/
AP
New Scotland Yard, the headquarters building of the Metropolitan Police.

This sounds like a movie or detective tale. But The Guardian reports that it's for real:

"A police spy married an activist he met while undercover in the environmental protest movement and then went on to have children with her, The Guardiancan reveal.

"He is the fourth spy now to have been identified as an undercover police officer engaged in the covert surveillance of eco-activists. Three of those spies are accused of having had sexual relationships with the people they were targeting."

The undercover cops were members of London's Metropolitan Police force. Department officials tell the Guardian they are investigating, and that it's "never acceptable" for undercover officers to engage in such relations.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.