Deep under [the] cover[s]

A load of Thunderballs: James Bond is fiction, not a police instruction manual | Jonathan Freedland | Comment is free | The Guardian

Well, I haven't paid much attention to this before:  there's a case running in the UK in which a group of women (and one man) are suing the police service for allowing undercover operatives to engage in sexual relationships with them.   As the opinion piece above notes, a judge has referred to what James Bond would be allowed to get up, much to the annoyance of some observers.

This line of work is (or should be, if you were raised right) an ethical minefield for those engaging in it.  At least, you might think, the relationships are over and done with in a relatively short time.

But that is what's really surprising:  some of these relationships gone on for a very long time -

Some may question how much the women involved really suffered: they were with a man long ago who was not what he claimed to be – OK, not nice, but move on. Such an attitude was hinted at in the remarks by a male activist who slept with an undercover policewoman in a tent at a "climate camp" and who told the Guardian he did not want to sue the police because the one-night stand was "nothing meaningful".

But for the others these were not one-night stands, they were relationships of long standing – six years in one case, five in another – that were enormously meaningful. Those involved tell of deep and genuine attachments, the men integrated into their lives as partners, living together, travelling together, attending family gatherings, sitting at a parent's bedside, even attending a funeral.

There are at least four children from these relationships, some of whom have only now, decades later, discovered who their father really was – and that they were born of a great act of deception.

The greatest pain seems to have come afterwards. Uncannily, most of the relationships all seem to have ended the same way: a sudden departure, a postcard from abroad, and then silence. Some women spent months or even years trying to work out what had gone wrong, travelling far in search of answers. Others found that their ability to trust had been shattered. If the man they had loved turned out to be an agent of the state, what else should they be suspicious of? Could they trust their colleagues, their friends? And the question that nags above all others: was it all a fake, did he not love me at all? One woman tells friends simply: "Five years of my life was built on a lie."

There was rightly an outcry about the News of the World's hacking of people's voicemail messages. But this was the hacking of people's lives, burrowing into the most intimate spaces of the heart in order to do a job, all authorised by the police. It is state-sanctioned emotional abuse.

Remarkable.