‘It was as if he set out to destroy my sanity’: how the spy cops lied their way into women’s hearts – and beds

Helen Steel: ‘There is no way that we would have consented to these relationships had we known who these men really were.’ Photograph: Mark Harvey/iD8Photography

With hindsight, the environmental activist Helen Steel, a key figure in the 1990s McLibel case, can see that her life with John Dines was suspiciously idyllic.

When they met, at a London Greenpeace meeting in the late 1980s, she was spending her free time protesting against nuclear weapons at Greenham Common, or staying in mining villages supporting striking miners. Soon he was enthusiastically joining her on hunt saboteur trips to disrupt grouse shoots in Yorkshire, or on demonstrations against the poll tax, and spending his weekends with her, helping to campaign against the environmental record of McDonald’s.