Ex-undercover officer Christine Green has been living with campaigner for more than a decade after leaving secret squad

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

A police spy quit her undercover deployment and has had a romantic relationship, lasting more than a decade, with one of the prominent political activists she had been sent to monitor.

The spy, who used the fake identity of Christine Green, met the activist while she spent five years undercover infiltrating the animal rights movement.

Since the end of her covert deployment, more than 15 years ago, she has been living with the activist Tom Frampton in remote cottages in Cornwall and Scotland.

Frampton had been a leading anti-foxhunting campaigner and had a criminal record over his conduct at protests. He was jailed for three months in 1993 for headbutting a foxhunter, according to court reports.

It is unclear at what point Green disclosed to her boyfriend that she had been sent to spy on animal rights activists. Recently the couple lived in a secluded cottage in a forest in Scotland. Frampton made no comment when the Guardian visited last year.

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A public inquiry led by a judge, Sir John Mitting, is examining how undercover officers tasked with infiltrating political groups frequently started long-term relationships with activists.

Green is unusual because she is the first female undercover officer who has been revealed as having begun a long-term intimate relationship with a campaigner.

The inquiry was set up following a series of disclosures about the activities of undercover officers, including the collection of information about grieving families and concealment of evidence in trials.

Green was unmasked following investigations by the Guardian and campaigners.

Donal O’Driscoll, of the Undercover Research Group, a network of activists who have investigated Green, said campaigners sought an honest explanation from the couple about what had happened.

Green started her undercover deployment in 1995 after she joined the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), a secret Metropolitan police unit.

Undercover SDS officers adopted fake identities and infiltrated hundreds of political groups during the unit’s 40-year existence, usually spending several years pretending to be dedicated political activists.

Green concealed her covert role from the activists she was sent to infiltrate. According to campaigners, she said she worked for a courier company. She had a van and often used to drive campaigners to meetings and demonstrations.

Paul Gravett, an animal rights campaigner, said: “She had quite a serious and aloof personality although she could be friendly to people she wanted to know.”

Robin Lane, another campaigner, said he went to her flat in Streatham, south London, because she was helping to post newsletters to protesters.

Activists say Green joined groups campaigning for animal rights and helped manage the finances of one of the groups, London Animal Action. She was also involved in protests that sought to disrupt foxhunting across south-east England. The hunters and protesters, known as saboteurs, or sabs, were often involved in unruly confrontations.

One activist who did not wish to be identified said he regularly went hunt sabbing with Green. “She was very active on a regular basis, at least weekly for several years. She was definitely considered one of us. I thought of her as someone committed to our aims.” She could be fiery in confrontations with the foxhunters, he said.

During Green’s deployment, she became close friends with Frampton, a well-known hunt sab, then in his 30s, who had been an active protester since the early 1980s.

The court heard that Frampton broke a hunter’s nose during the confrontation that led to his imprisonment in 1993. He claimed that he had acted in self-defence. According to press reports, he told the court he had lodged an appeal against his conviction, but the outcome is not known.

Green appears to have disappeared from the animal rights movement around 2000. According to Gravett, she said 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 Frampton in Cornwall.

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The couple have remained friendly with animal rights activists, who, although there had been suspicions, were unaware of Green’s covert past. An activist said he visited the pair socially at their Cornish cottage in the mid-2000s and did not know she had been in the police.

Another activist said that rumours of her undercover role came up about five years ago in a conversation with Frampton, who told him he did not wish to discuss them. Frampton said at that time that he and Green were living happily as a couple, he added.

Frampton was still involved in animal rights protests in the early 2000s. He travelled to the Outer Hebrides with other activists in 2003 and was convicted of breaching the peace during a demonstration to save threatened hedgehogs.

Now in his 50s, he is also understood to have worked as an undercover investigator for the animal rights campaign Animal Aid. It covertly installed secret cameras in abattoirs in 2010 to record footage that it said showed pigs being kicked, stamped on and inappropriately stunned.

Lawyers for the abattoirs alleged Frampton had installed the cameras and that he had trespassed in doing so, but Animal Aid declined to identify the investigator.

Frampton and Green later left Cornwall and lived in Scotland until last year. Their current whereabouts are unknown.

O’Driscoll, of the Undercover Research Group, said: “Speaking to people who knew them, there is a sense of sadness rather than anger. These two were good friends to campaigners who, I think more than anything, just want honesty and answers, an explanation of why this happened.”