I knew Kennedy and I know the people who exposed him. It's fair to say they weren't in a position to think of the possible strategic advatnages of the situation at the time, which is understandable in the crcumstances.
e2a: Kennedy did actually offer to switch sides at one point, but that was after he'd been exposed so it wouldn't really have been a double agent thing.
This has been bugging me for years now, so I'm just going to spit it out as I think the record needs to be set straight a bit on Kennedy, and the narrative that he managed to operate undetected for a decade until he was finally exposed in 2010.
Kennedy was first sussed out in 2005 before the stirling G8 protests, and AFAIK a significant portion of Dissent's main organisers were aware of these strong well founded suspicions. The problem being that these were based on the knowledge that one person among a small group of people was undercover, and only if you were sure that none of the others could be would you then be able to conclude by a process of elimination that Kennedy was undercover.
I was told at the time that this had been raised with members of his affinity group who defended him and made counter allegations that it must have been someone else, meaning that the whole thing was dropped as it wasn't possible to prove either way and was in danger of causing a big split at a crucial time.
He was kept away from key decision making and generally frozen out of anything other than driving minibuses as far as possible, and he was also being fed some false information aimed at ensuring the police kept their forces spread across Edinburgh, and Glasgow rather than concentrating them all on Gleneagles / Stirling.
It's not a coincidence that the only fight on site during the entire time involved him vs one of those who basically knew he was undercover plod, though I didn't witness exactly what was said to kick it off.
Fuck knows what went on afterwards, I walked away myself and lost touch with the others who'd sussed him, but I suspect that the 3 (or more?) undercovers between them were able to use their combined influence to effectively squeeze out those who'd had suspicions about him, and build their own powerbase within the movement. After Stirling most of those heavily involved were completely fucked financially and emotionally*, so most would have needed to withdraw a bit to sort ourselves out - not something that undercover plod need to concern themselves with as they are completely financially sorted and can jut go at it full time while the rest were trying to sort themselves out, or being too distracted by the efforts to set up social centres in their own areas to really concern themselves too much with what was happening in other areas... plus a feeling of not sticking their nose where it's not wanted, and a fair amount of mud also being flung in their direction (the best defence to an accusation of being a tout apparently being to attack your accusers).
Somewhere along the lines it seemed that most of those who were in the groups who'd directly been infiltrated ended up moving on to running the climate camps outside of Dissent, and those who'd had there suspicions of Kennedy were largely frozen out / decided not to get involved, so those suspicions just got forgotten about. I must admit that I'd just assumed that someone would have sorted it out if we'd been right, so didn't have the confidence to actually do something about it - also as I wasn't involved, I didn't realise he was still active, I'd thought he would have been pulled out after pretty much having his cover blown at Stirling.
The last couple of paragraphs are mostly speculation, but is my attempt at explaining how it was that we went from a situation where several people had identified Stone as undercover plod and were using this against the police to some extent into a situation where he was able to continue and extend his undercover work for another 5 years.
I don't know the specifics of exactly who was told what, but I'm pretty sure that at least some of those who were close to him in 20005 were warned about him, but didn't heed the warning and defended him instead. I might be wrong, but suspect that some of those who later exposed him probably had suspicions that stretched back to 2005 and been at least vaguely aware of the allegations against him from that point
so that's my alternative narrative, I've hinted at it several times before, but need to get it on the record while I can still actually remember it. I'm sure this will piss some people off and maybe I'll be accused of victim blaming again or something, I just think that if we don't know about the history then we're more likely to be condemned to repeat the mistakes again in future. Plus it narks me that the official narrative makes it look as if Kennedy pulled the wool over the eyes of the entire movement for a decade, when that's just not true.
Mistakes were made, and we should have had the courage of our convictions and properly exposed him back in 2005 - not just him actually, one of my mates had film footage of 3 undercovers who'd been targetting the free party scene in the run up to the G8, so we might have been able to expose 3 of them back then, though the footage was pretty dark.
