Peace Researcher 38 – July 2009
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Mark Eden,
In December 2008, the
Sunday Star Times published a story
revealing that Christchurch man Rob Gilchrist had spent ten years as a Police
spy inside a range of activist groups around the country (14/12/08, “Police
Anti-Terror Squad Spies On Protest Groups” and “Crossing The Line: The Activist
Who Turned Police Informer”, by
A couple of months earlier,
Casting
A Wide Net
Rob collected information on animal rights groups,
peace groups, unions, environmentalists, human rights groups and anyone else
the SIG was interested in. The Christchurch SIG is made up of Detective
Rob admitted working for the Police for ten
years and it is probable that before 2004 he was reporting to the Threat
Assessment Unit (TAU), which is responsible for “collection, collation,
analysis and dissemination of intelligence on activist groups and potential
threats”[1].
See Rochelle Rees article, below, for
full details on the TAU. Ed. When Rochelle discovered her partner was a
Police informant she copied the contents of his computer and installed software
on his cellphone to record his messages. Rob’s computer records went back about
four years. In that time he was subscribed to many e-mail lists from all sorts
of campaigning groups. He sifted through these every day and passed on the
interesting/useful ones to the Police (upcoming events, interesting names and
addresses, details of disputes and debates etc). He was on the internal
discussion lists and forums of groups all over the country including many that
he wasn’t part of and should not have been on.
Rob attended protests, conferences and meetings
all over the country. The Police were paying all his travel, car rental and
motel expenses for these trips (sometimes up to $2,500 for a week long trip, on
top of his weekly $600 wage). He would often claim he was in town for a
business trip relating to his scanner business. After a trip or a major protest
he would write a report for the Police on all the groups and individuals he
met, including their sexual habits, private lives and personal gossip, profiles
of activists and predictions of future trends and plans.
The information on his computer was only a
partial record of what Rob was doing since he became a Police informant. He
first appeared around 1998 in
I first met him in 1999 when he travelled to
Agent
Provocateur
He got heavily involved in animal rights
campaigning and was active in organising protests and animal rights gatherings
around the country. He spent most of 2001 organising protests and establishing
himself as a trusted activist within the animal rights movement. He even
organised an illegal raid on a factory farm that was filmed by the Havoc and
Newsboy TV show. He was interviewed on camera wearing a full camouflage outfit
as he broke into the farm. By this time Rob had been active in all sorts of
groups around the country and was considered part of the activist “scene” in
By 2004 Rob moved to Wellington and was living
with his then partner, who had also been involved in animal rights activism for
a couple of years. He spent two years in
He was only interested in exciting or secretive
stuff (protests or dodgy snooping around) he didn’t contribute to meetings or
do any work at all unless it was sneaky or dodgy. At the same time he let
everyone know that he was a very important person who was always at the centre
of things. And at this time he approached several different people, including
me, on several occasions and asked us to plan illegal actions with him. Some of
the plans were for sensible things, and some were for stupid things. All of
them involved Rob taking people for a drive or a walk, secret meetings, and
planning out how the job would be done. Then Rob would suddenly lose interest
and abandon the plans. Everyone involved realised pretty quickly that Rob was
all talk and no action. We didn’t think he was a cop but we did think that he
was an egotistical idiot who was only interested in entertaining himself.
But we still tolerated him and were seen associating
with him so most people assumed he was one of the gang. For the next two years
he lived in
A lot of animal rights people around the
country had a major falling out with him in 2006 when we tried to organise a
series of hen rescues at battery hen farms. These “open rescues” involved us
breaking into factory farms, filming the conditions inside, and openly taking
battery hens and rehoming them. After years trying to convince us to commit crimes,
Rob finally had us all sitting in a room wanting to plan a burglary and he did
everything he could to prevent it going ahead! He convinced several campaigners
to pull out of the planned action and spread a rumour that a good activist was
an undercover cop. He was already considered to be difficult and disruptive by
some but this time he had gone too far. From then on, most of the animal rights
movement refused to have anything to do with him.
In 2007 he made several attempts to contact
several
The more I ignored it the crazier the stories got,
as he became more and more desperate to get back into a trusted position with
Double
Agent?
Early in 2008 he rang me with another scheme.
This time he said that TCIL had approached him to spy on animal rights
activists and he had decided to double cross TCIL by ripping them off. After
checking with other activists it turned out he was telling us all sorts of lies
about what was going on and was trying to sell info to TCIL for as long as
possible. We all assumed Rob was insane enough that TCIL really would approach
him to spy, and a lot of people pressured him to go public immediately. This
ended up being a story in the Sunday Star
Times where Rob exposed Thompson & Clark’s continued spying on the Save
Happy Valley campaign on behalf of (State coal mining company) Solid Energy (20/4/08; “Private Investigators Still
Digging On West Coast”, Nicky Hager, online at http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/377237.
For those of us who had known all along that Rob was a spy, this was a deeply
ironic situation, namely that of an undercover Police spy going very public to
complain that a private security firm had offered to employ him to do what he
was already doing for the cops. Perhaps Gilchrist had scruples about
privatisation, or maybe he didn’t like being sold on by his Police handlers.
Then again, it may have been an act to maintain his credibility with his
activist colleagues – on whom he was already spying. Ed.).
By this time he was in a relationship with
animal rights campaigner Rochelle Rees and had moved back to
As a close friend of Rob’s wrote afterwards:
“It's so painfully obvious in hindsight. Perhaps it was simply a case of not
seeing the forest for the trees, as he was in fact challenged on [his
disruptive behaviour, dishonesty, constant lies] – the problems just weren't
put together to make a whole picture. . . . but, since people were discussing
his authenticity since early on in his informant career, it’s obviously more
complicated than this. Rob had very effectively sown seeds of discord amongst
people and there was a lack of concrete evidence to call him out, but more
importantly he had established credibility and a variety of close personal
relationships which protected him”[2].
Fantasist
From the very beginning there were suspicions
that Rob was an informer, but never any evidence, and he just kept moving from
group to group, causing disruption and confusion wherever he went. Most of the
people who got to know him realised that he was very disruptive and interested
in shit stirring and showing off rather than hard work. In his personal
relationships he was emotionally abusive, paranoid, and possessive. He was
always hard to deal with, a lot of people didn’t like or trust him, especially
those who got to know him well. But he was very persuasive and charismatic in
the short term so he managed to get away with a lot of stuff by quick talking
and moving along before the lies caught up with him. Most of us thought he was
a nutter, and later a sad mentally ill nutter, but we tolerated him. And he was
very good at convincing people that everyone else trusted him. Even after most
people were avoiding him he told us sob stories about how depressed he was and
how he had no friends so we would feel sorry for him. Pretty much the only
thing he said that was true was the stuff about being mentally ill.
Was Rob’s disruptive behaviour deliberate? I
don’t think so. He wasn’t a master spy; he was and is a sad pathetic person
with serious mental issues. In fact his incompetence and disruptive behaviour
often protected him from suspicion, as surely a Police spy couldn’t be that
irrational. In hindsight of course, it seems the Police have to rely on nutters
and dodgy weirdoes because a normal person just wouldn’t want the job.
Rob was a deluded fantasist who bought SAS
memorabilia and decorated his house with it so visitors thought he was an
ex-commando (he may have served in the Territorials when he was young but was
never a fulltime soldier). He told me he had been arrested for stealing cars in
Timaru and investigated for benefit fraud before he got involved in political
groups. He said his arrest for car theft was the result of a friend informing
on him to the Police to escape a prison sentence, and ever since that day he
had hated Police informers! It’s probable that he was the informer in that case
and that’s how his career began. We may never know.
What
Can We Do About It?
We in the animal rights movement have caught
two very different spies in the last couple of years. Somali Young was a
Wellington Animal Rights Network member for two years and she spent the entire
time being a very quiet helpful background person. She never had an opinion and
was always happy to provide transport, take the minutes and do the dishes. All
the time she was reporting to Thompson & Clark Investigations Ltd, which
was working for various industries involved in animal cruelty (for details, see Peace Researcher 34, July 2007, “The Secret Policeman’s
Ball”, subheading “The Privatisation Of Spying”, by Murray Horton, online at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr34-146.html;
and PR
35, December 2007, “The Privatisation Of Spying, Part 2”, by
The animal rights movement in NZ has been lucky
in a way. We have unmasked a Police informant and a corporate private
investigator in the last few years without much damage to our movement.
Overseas the animal rights movement hasn’t been so lucky. In the
Police
See Activists As Potential Terrorists To Be Spied On
The NZ Police clearly regard animal rights
activists, and anyone else who threatens corporate profits or the State, as
potential terrorists who must be spied on. The Police Special Investigations
Group was set up to investigate terrorism, and so far their main interest has
been non-violent activist groups of various sorts. They paid Rob Gilchrist $600
a week to report on animal rights groups, anarchists, peace groups,
environmental groups and unions. They also spent hundreds of thousands of
dollars investigating peace activist Harmeet Sooden after someone tagged the
office of a company involved in arms dealing in
While there’s no guaranteed way of detecting
spies and informers there are a few things we can do to make it a bit more
difficult for the spooks. The worst thing we could do is become paranoid and
secretive, and to stop trusting each other. We do need to be far less tolerant
of people in our movement who cause trouble and infighting. Even if they aren’t
spies we are better off without them. Tolerating disruptive dickheads just
isn’t worth the bother.
We should be making sure that everyone in our
movements is aware of the way the Police operate. A lot of people without direct
experience of spying still think it can’t happen to them and don’t take it
seriously. At the other extreme some people have become so paranoid that they
have stopped doing stuff or are convinced they are being followed all the time.
We need to make sure our groups have a realistic (not naïve, but not paranoid
either) idea of what the Police are up to in NZ. They have always spied on
anyone they consider subversive and they have always lied about it, pretending
it doesn’t happen here. But, we shouldn’t ever get complacent and just accept
the fact that we are spied on in our so called democracy. We have to fight
them, by exposing them every time they stuff up and get caught.
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[2] The beauty of hindsight: Police informant caught after ten years http://de.indymedia.org/2008/12/237332.shtml