Plane Stupid, climate campaigners treated as terrorists

The building, in a ubiquitous leafy street in south-west London, is unremarkable, but this Fulham house is at the centre of a controversial plot that reads like something out of an Ian Fleming spy novel.

It is the home of Toby Kendall, an employee of the ‘special risk management’ and security consultancy C2i International, who went undercover to spy on members of Plane Stupid, a group tackling the aviation industry head on. Operating under the pseudonym Ken Tobias, Kendall, 24, spent a year covertly gathering information on Plane Stupid, attending meetings and participating in protests. Kendall’s infiltration was exposed when Plane Stupid fed the Oxford-educated ‘activist’ false information that found its way back to the aviation industry and journalists.

He wasn’t in when the Ecologist visited – sources say he is currently in China, though still on the payroll of C2i International – but the affair is the latest in a series of attempts to thwart the UK’s fast-growing climate campaign movement.

Plane Stupid and other climate campaigners have increasingly found themselves on the receiving end of a disturbing pattern of legal threats, injunctions, dawn...

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