Undercover police: how 'romantic, attentive' impostor betrayed activist

I feel angry and violated, says woman apparently used as cover by officer who was trying to infiltrate Animal Liberation Front

• Rob Evans and Paul Lewis
• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 23 October 2011
  


Bob Lambert posed as a radical activist named Bob Robinson.

They met by chance one night at a party in Tottenham, north London. The man she would come to know as Bob Robinson was standing on his own. Jenny (not her real name), a 24-year-old who had come to the capital to find work, was intrigued by the slim man with the endearing smile, who was slightly older than her.

They fell easily into conversation and before long, Jenny was smitten. The love she felt for him rolls easily off her tongue. He was, she says, "polite, considerate, very romantic, attentive, charismatic". He smiled a lot and was non-judgmental. And he was cute.

"I thought I had found my Mr Right. He was very charming and I thought I could take him to meet my parents," she says.

They had an 18-month relationship and one of his characteristics struck her in particular: "I thought he had a high moral code."

But now she feels very different about him. It turns out that there was a lot more to Bob Robinson than his impassioned campaigning and shoulder-length hair, which gave every impression of a rebel with many causes.

He was, in fact, the opposite. Bob Lambert today admits he was an undercover police officer who had created the fictional persona of Bob Robinson to spy on political activists.

The special branch officer was one of a group of police spies in a covert unit who have been infiltrating and disrupting the activities of political campaign groups across Britain for decades.

Jenny and others only discovered his true identity more than 20 years after they first met him. The discovery has left Jenny feeling that he deceived her about the bedrock of any relationship – his identity. She is very hurt that he duped her about who he was. "I was cruelly tricked and it has made me very angry. I feel violated," she said.

As she was trying to persuade him to set up home and have a family together, he was resisting, claiming he had to flee abroad as he was being pursued by special branch because he was a dangerous radical activist.

The sorry episode has left her wondering if he loved her at all. Today, Lambert admits that "as part of my alter ego's cover story, I had a relationship with 'Jenny', to whom I owe an unreserved apology".

So far, seven undercover police officers who infiltrated political groups have been exposed – and most have admitted or have been accused of sleeping with activists they were spying on. They have faced claims that they did so to glean intelligence about the activists and the protests they were organising. A growing number of women say they have suffered terrible trauma and damage from the betrayal of having a relationship with a person they later found out was a fake.

Police chiefs claim that undercover officers are forbidden from having sex with their targets "under any circumstances" as it is "unacceptable and unprofessional". But Pete Black, an undercover officer from the same unit who infiltrated anti-racist groups in the 1990s, said sex was widely used as a technique to blend in and gather intelligence. He said there was an informal code in the unit that the spies should not fall in love with the women – or allow the women to fall in love with them.

An investigation by the Guardian has shown that Lambert was no ordinary police spy. His skills of deception would earn him legendary status in the elite ranks of the covert unit known as the special demonstration squad (SDS). "He did what is hands down regarded as the best tour of duty ever," said Black.

Lambert admits that in the 1980s, he "first built a reputation as a committed member of London Greenpeace, a peaceful campaigning group [on environmental issues]". He did so "as part of my cover story" to "gain the necessary credibility to become involved in serious crime".

His aim was to penetrate the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), which he says was "then engaged in incendiary device and explosive device campaigns against targets in the vivisection, meat and fur trades".

In the 1990s, he drew on the techniques he had learned undercover to become the head of operations in the covert unit, running a network of spies.

It was May 1987 when Jenny met Bob. Very quickly they were spending most of their free time together. Bob said he was a gardener, doing cash-in-hand jobs in well-heeled places such as Hampstead. He told her that he was also earning a living by driving a minicab, although he was touting illegally for customers.

But politics was really his thing, he said. He told her how he was deeply involved in campaigning for animal rights and the environment.

Bob confided that he was heavily active in the ALF. But she was not interested. "He was always asking me to go to meetings. He introduced me to lots of activists. I did not realise what the ALF was."

But why did Lambert have a relationship with Jenny when she had never been an activist ? "I have no idea. It's a great mystery," she says.

It seems from his admission today that he was using her as his girlfriend so that he could portray himself as a fully rounded person with a private life to the rest of his political and social circle. Activists, eternally on their guard against police spies, are suspicious of people who, for example, turn up at their meetings out of the blue without any discernible evidence of friends or a family. Taking her along to the pub or parties with other activists was a neat way of deflecting those suspicions.

Jenny was working at the time as an administrative assistant at the state-owned Central Electricity Generating Board. But she kept quiet about her job as she feared the activists would take against her because the CEGB was running nuclear power stations.

She was keen to develop her career and have a family. She lived in an east London house with eight other friends, but none of them were politically active, other than having a general antipathy to Margaret Thatcher's government.

They spent most nights together at her house, although he lived in what she called a "grotty flat above a barber's" in Hackney. He had a "single man's room with a shared kitchen" but with very little in it. "He claimed to be not interested in possessions," she said.

A few months into their relationship came the episode that was to seal Lambert's reputation as one of the best undercover operatives the SDS had ever had.

In the summer of 1987, Lambert had been undercover for three years and had worked his way into the inner recesses of the animal rights movement. The Animal Liberation Front operated through a tightly organised underground network of small cells of activists, making it difficult for spies to get among them. Police chiefs were on the hunt for sorely needed intelligence after three incendiary bomb attacks on Debenhams shops in Harrow, Luton and Romford. Activists had planted the bombs because the shops were selling fur products. The attacks had reputedly caused millions of pounds' worth of damage.

Lambert identified the perpetrators to his handlers. The intelligence was so precise that the police caught them red-handed. The Old Bailey heard how police raided a flat in Tottenham and found two activists sitting at a table covered with dismantled alarm clocks, bulbs and electrical equipment for making four more firebombs.

The prosecution told the court that Andrew Clarke, then 25, and Geoff Shepherd, then 31, were wearing gloves to conceal their fingerprints. The bombs were made in large matchboxes, with a warning: "Do not touch. Ring police. Animal Liberation Front." Shepherd was jailed for four years and four months, and Clarke for more than three years.

But his feat also went down in SDS legend because Lambert had skilfully disguised that he was the source of the tip-off, managing to throw the suspicions on to others within the small ring of activists who knew about the attacks. So well had he retained the trust of the activists that Jenny remembers that he went, with her, to visit one of the accused in jail while they were awaiting the trial.

Jenny remembers that after the arrests, Bob would often say that special branch was hot on his and other activists' trails. There was, he says, a "big crisis" because the animal rights campaigners suspected that there was an informer in their midst.

A bizarre incident happened at about that time. By 1988, Jenny had moved into a Hackney flat with two others, who were not politically active. One day, special branch detectives raided Jenny's home, letting slip that they were "looking for Bob". He was not there. She remembers that one of the detectives picked up a pair of shoes and asked who owned them. They belonged to Jenny. The raid, the Guardian understands, was orchestrated by police to bolster Lambert's cover story.

After more than a year together, Jenny felt that Bob had given her the right signals that he was interested in having children with her. He had been to see her parents three times. But when she broached the question, he said no, upsetting her hugely. She wrote in her diary that it was a black day. "I remember crying a lot that day. I was just so shocked."

Soon afterwards, she says, Bob began to tell her that he would have to go on the run abroad to escape the special branch. Over the last few months of 1988, they discussed what to do. She said she wanted to go with him, but he said she should not.

According to Jenny, he argued that she should not waste her life on the run, constantly looking over her shoulder, and that she deserved better – a rewarding career and a family. "He said he was not good enough for me."

He left his flat and stayed for a couple of weeks in what she called a "safe house" with one of her friends in London. She remembers meeting him once there: there was "still a lot of electricity between us".

In December 1988, Bob and Jenny spent a week alone together in a friend's house in Dorset to say goodbye. "I was heartbroken. Even when he left, I could not imagine that it had finished because we loved each other so much. I wanted to go on the run with him. I was prepared to do that for him."

But his sacrifice in not taking her with him made her admire him even more.

He said he was going to Spain. In early 1989, she received a long letter from him in Valencia, saying he was not coming back but raising the possibility that she could join him there. "Even then I could not believe it," she says. It was the last she heard from him.

The drawn-out goodbye was a ruse. His trip to Spain and the postmark on that letter was genuine, but the reasons were not. Bob's undercover tour was ending and he needed to leave the activists without arousing suspicions. Using standard tradecraft, he had created the perception of a convincing reason for his departure – that special branch were after him. The Spanish bolthole was far enough away to deter activists from going to see him, and avoid the risk of their bumping into him.

Inside the Surveillance State: How Peaceful Activists Get Swept Up onto "Terrorist" Watch Lists

There appears to be no end to the appetite for data to be stored and mined, and all sorts of agencies want a share of the action.

September 15, 2011 | Alternet

Ten Years Later: Surveillance in the "Homeland" is a collaborative project with Truthout and ACLU Massachusetts.

How little - yet how much - has changed in the last 40 years. The COINTELPRO papers sound distinctly 21st century as they detail the monitoring of perceived threats to "national security" by the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency (NSA), Secret Service, and the military, as well as the intelligence bureaucracy's war on First Amendment protest activity.

The Church Committee investigation concluded in 1976 that the "unexpressed major premise of the programs was that a law enforcement agency has the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order."

In addition to massive surveillance, assassinations and dirty tricks "by any means necessary" included the creation of NSA "watch lists" of Americans ranging "from members of radical political groups, to celebrities, to ordinary citizens involved in protests against their government," with names submitted by the FBI, Secret Service, military, CIA, and Defense Intelligence Agency. The secret lists, which included people whose activities "may result in civil disturbances or otherwise subvert the national security of the US," were used by the NSA to extract information of "intelligence value" from its stream of intercepted communications.

We learned that there was, apparently, no easy way to get off the FBI's "security index." Even after the criteria for fitting the profile of a "subversive" were revised in the mid-1950's, the names of people who no longer fit the definition remained on IBM punchcards, and were retained in field offices as "potential threats." A card would only be destroyed "if the subject agreed to become an FBI source or informant" or in another way indicated a "complete defection from subversive groups."

The Advent of the Surveillance Society

Written by Nancy Murray and Kade Crockford Thursday, 08 September 2011 Surveillance in the Homeland

Surveillance now is everyone's business, as the line between intelligence-gathering and crimefighting rapidly fades and the public is conditioned to play its part.

The work of Deputy Police Chief Michael Downing of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) exemplifies the new surveillance paradigm. The head of the 750-strong counterterrorism force within the LAPD, he is on the hunt for "people who follow al-Qaeda's goals and objectives and mission and ideology." He says his officers collect intelligence and practice the "essence of community policing" by reaching out to Muslims and asking them to "weed out" the "hard-core radicals."

He adds that he is pleased that many Muslims have adopted the LAPD's iWatch program and are prepared, along with the general public, to call in tips about suspicious activity. With "violent Islamists" as his main target, Chief Downing is also keeping track of "black separatists, white supremacist/sovereign citizen extremists and animal rights terrorists." If threats materialize, he can draw upon the LAPD's "amazing" backup capacity - SWAT units, direct-action teams, air support, counterassault teams and squads that specialize in disrupting vehicle bombs.

Here we see several of the components of the new surveillance society. A militarized police force no longer leaves intelligence work to federal authorities. It seeks out information about anything that can be connected to "suspicious" activity and is keeping track of certain individuals and groups whether or not there is evidence that they are engaging in criminal activity. Police are expected to chase down unsubstantiated tips from the public, and not just to pursue evidence of wrongdoing. A new notion of "community policing" has emerged, where monitoring communities - with all the trust issues that this implies - has taken the place of winning community support by being accountable to residents and solving crimes.

The LAPD is one of some 3,984 federal, state and local agencies now collecting information about "suspicious activity" that could be related to terrorism. The Washington Post's "Top Secret America" series states that 854,000 people now hold "top-secret" security clearance. We estimate that's about one for every 215 working-age Americans. An additional 3 million people reportedly hold "secret" security clearance.

The federal government spends more annually on civilian and military intelligence than the rest of the world put together - $80 billion is a conservative figure, according to the October 28, 2010, Post. This is in addition to the $42-plus billion allocated to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the spending on intelligence activities by the LAPD and other state and local police forces. The homeland security industry is flourishing, with lucrative contracts being awarded to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and other major defense contractors.

What exactly is being built with these funds?

The "Information Sharing Environment"

Essentially, the "total information awareness" assumption that the nation can be made safe by applying advanced technology to massive databases has been married to the call for a "unity of effort in sharing information" issued by the bipartisan 9/11 National Commission. The commissioners had recommended a fundamental change in how the nation's 16 intelligence agencies carried out their business. They urged that the "need to know" culture be replaced with a "need to share" imperative, with information being transmitted horizontally among agencies, not just vertically within agencies. They further recommended that the FBI be equipped to assume prime responsibility for domestic intelligence-gathering, that it incorporate a "specialized and integrated national security workforce," and that it form collaborative relationships with state and local police for this purpose.

To construct a new domestic surveillance network, theIntelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004mandated the creation of an Information Sharing Environment (ISE) under the director of national intelligence. Defined as "an interrelated set of policies, processes and systems," ISE was intended to facilitate the sharing of terrorism-related information with stakeholders at all levels of government and the private sector. Eventually, foreign governments are supposed to be brought into the ISE loop. The ISE requires the standardization of information systems and technology to provide access to the burgeoning number of databases that serve as its connective tissue, the enlistment of mission partners across federal, state, local, and tribal agencies and the private sector to keep the databases supplied with the information that is its lifeblood, and the use of "analysts, operators and investigators" from "law enforcement, public safety, homeland security, intelligence, defense and foreign affairs" to extract, analyze and disseminate timely intelligence.

Fusion Centers and Suspicious Activity Reports

The nerve centers of the ISE are the nation's 72 regional and state fusion centers, which were in part a response to the FBI's reluctance to share threat information with state and local law enforcement because of turf and security clearance issues. With considerable variation in what they do and how they do it, fusion centers were established over the past seven years with DHS funding to "fuse" and analyze information from a wide variety of sources and databases and facilitate information-sharing among themselves through the FBI's eGuardian database. The secretive fusion centers represent a significant departure from traditional law enforcement objectives and methods, with few legal limits on what they can and cannot do, little respect for long-established jurisdictional boundaries between local, state, federal, military and private entities and a notable absence of accountability mechanisms. Given the scarcity of domestic terrorism plots, it is not surprising that most fusion centers almost immediately changed the focus of their data collection from fighting terrorism to a broad "all crimes, all hazards" mission. Many now use federal counterterrorism funds to collect, store and share data that has little or no relation to terrorism and, often, no relation to actual crimes.

According to DHS head Janet Napolitano, along with fusion centers, the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiativeserves as the "heart" of the government's effort to keep Americans safe from "homegrown terrorism." The idea behind the initiative is to collect as much data about anything "suspicious" that just may (or may not) be related to criminal activity. Or, to quote the government's own alarmingly broad definition: a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) is "official documentation of observed behavior that may be indicative of intelligence gathering, or preoperational planning related to terrorism, criminal, or other illicit intention."

SARS programs, piloted by the LAPD, Boston and a handful of other cities, vary from place to place and are often in competition with one another for federal dollars. Today some 800,000 state and local law enforcement officers are encouraged to file SARs on even the most common everyday behaviors, such as looking through binoculars, taking pictures of buildings, taking notes in public and espousing "radical" beliefs.

The ISE program manager recommended that SARs are reviewed within the police department before being sent to a fusion center for further review by an intelligence analyst. If it "meets SAR criteria," it is then entered into the ISE for wide distribution and "fusion with other intelligence information." But a January 2010 evaluation of the ISE and National SAR Reporting Initiative has shown little uniformity in how SARs are being collected, vetted and shared, and how much personably identifiable information is being aggregated and disseminated through the fusion center network and sent to the FBI’seGUardian system, which is now serving as "an ISE/SAR shared space." In an effort to address criticisms voiced by civil liberties groups, ISE adopted a policy requiring that only behavior indicating some kind of connection to criminal activity or terrorism should be shared among federal intelligence agencies. But this civil rights protection does not apply to sharing by state and regional fusion centers.

A New Policing Paradigm

In addition to writing up SARS, police departments, often working directly with the FBI through its multi-agency Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs), sift "tips and leads" provided in field reports, through public tip lines, by private entities, by confidential and anonymous sources, or culled from media sources. Time that used to be spent investigating reasonable suspicion of criminal activity is now allocated to assessing randomly collected information to decide whether it is credible enough to be deposited in the Information Sharing Environment (ISE) and sent to the FBI’s eGuardian database for preliminary analysis before being sent to fusion centers for further analysis and wide distribution.

When local police work with the FBI in JTTFs, they become federal officers who are no longer under the supervision of and accountable to their local departments and communities, and instead must act in conformity with the FBI's guidelines on domestic investigations - regulations that are now so loose that they allow agents to conduct "assessments" involving monitoring of meetings and people, infiltration of groups, and personal interviews with no suspicion of wrongdoing - some 11,667 assessments were conducted just in the four-month period beginning in December 2009, with only a fraction leading to full investigations. And when local police participate with fusion centers in information collection and the building of personal files about activities that can be wholly innocent and may be constitutionally protected, they are integrated into a domestic surveillance network that is national in scope, beyond accountability, and far removed from community policing and public trust.

In the process, the line between traditional crimefighting and terrorism detection has been erased and something new has been born: a concept of policing that is no longer primarily reactive and focused on solving crimes or on collecting concrete evidence that a crime might be about to be committed. In "predictive policing,"local police officers serve as a resource for gathering information on a range of potential threats and situations on the assumption that criminal activity can be stopped before it develops. They are trained to use advanced technologies and tools, including powerful surveillance cameras provided through DHS grants, to monitor broad sections of the population, looking for indicators of future crimes before they are committed.

When the net is cast so wide, everything and anything begins to look like "terrorism-related activity," forcing police officers to waste time checking out dead-end tips. It is not surprising thatleaks from fusion centers have revealed that files compiled on individuals and groups are full of inaccurate information and focus on activities that may be both entirely innocent and constitutionally protected.

Constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein, a former associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration, told Congress in 2009 that fusion centers and SARs were worthy of the Soviet Union's KGB and East Germany's Stasi, and should be abandoned: "To an intelligence agent, informant, or law enforcement officer, everything unconventional or unorthodox looks like at least a pre-embryonic terrorist danger."

Earth First! Newswire Publishes Giant List of Informants

This is a new feature on the EF! Newswire to keep you abreast on the whereabouts and status of informants and ‘snitches’ who are cooperating with, or working for, the state in effort to monitor and/or repress ecological resistance movements, as well as other liberation struggles. Sadly, the names on this list are people who can never be trusted again to work in activist circles or resistance movements. The page is currently very centered on North American informants. We appreciate any assistance in broadening this to cover a more international scope.

This is by no means a complete list. Please get in touch with possible updates or corrections. We only post information on this page that can be verified to the greatest extent possible through public documents—in most cases, their plea agreements. We have aimed to present short summaries of the individuals below, so that they would be consolidated in a single location. There is very likely more information, including photos, to be found for each individual through online search engines and resources designed to gather personal information on people (some of which cost money). We hope that this page will serve as a useful starting point for those seeking to take their research further. Posted 9/5/11

Currently walking free

*Justin Clayton Samuel (DOB: Dec. 31, 1978) from Snohomish, WA. Cooperated with government by testifying against Peter Young. Both were charged with cutting fences and liberating mink from a series of fur
farms in October 1997. Samuel was an electrical engineering student at the
University of Washington in Seattle before dropping out in 1997. Samuel
was sentenced to two years in federal prison plus a year supervised
release and ordered to pay $364,106 in restitution in exchange for his
cooperation.

He was released on 11-28-2001, and has gone into the computer security field, working for Firefox as of 2010. He is currently a PhD student at UC Berkeley.

Height: 6’ 0″. Weight: ~165 lbs. Place of birth: California. Hair: brown.
Eyes: hazel. Race: white.

His school department profile:
www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jsamuel
And twitter:
twitter.com/#!/jstnsml
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*Angela “Angie” Marie Cesario (DOB ~1979): took a cooperating plea deal, pointing the finger at Tre Arrow to reduce her sentence. This was a departure from earlier testimonies, when both Cesario and Rosenbloom did not name Arrow as the instigator, but Jake Sherman. All three named Arrow in exchange for sentences of 41 months. She was released on 12-22-2006.
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*Jeremy David Rosenbloom (DOB ~1977): took a cooperating plea deal, pointing the finger at Tre Arrow to reduce the sentence. This was a departure from earlier testimonies, when both Cesario and Rosenbloom did not name Arrow as the instigator, but Jake Sherman. All three named Arrow in exchange for sentences of 41 months. He was released on 12-22-2006.
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*Jacob “Jake” David Bardwell Sherman (DOB ~1982) of Portland, OR: convicted of arson of logging trucks and a front-end loader near Eagle Creek in 2001. Sherman “immediately began to cooperate” with investigators after his arrest, according to court documents. Sherman was boastful and told several girlfriends (two of whom also provided information to the government), in detail, his version of the events that took place that night. Sherman had also not been an especially careful saboteur. His mother’s vehicle smelled of gasoline and he dumped his clothes in the trash bin when he returned that night at 2:00 am, asking his brother to tell his parents that he had returned home at 10:30 pm. Sherman’s father, contacted the FBI telling them he believed his son
was involved in the arson. During FBI questioning, Sherman pegged Arrow as the ringleader in exchange for a sentence of 41 months.
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*Darren Todd Thurston (DOB: ~1970), aka “Goat,” of Canada, took a cooperating plea agreement, charged with conspiracy to commit arson and destruction of an energy facility east of Bend, OR in 1999. Thurston was given a sentence of 37 months in prison
after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy and arson in the 2001 fire at the Litchfield, Calif., U.S. Bureau of Land Management wild horse corrals. He was released on 8-14-2008. As of summer 2010, he was running his own computer security firm (http://www.hard-mac.com/blog/) out of Canada. He goes by “rad_boy” and “hard_mac”.
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*Zachary Jensen (DOB: ~1986) of Monroe, WA, Zach Jenson was arrested on January 13, 2006, along with Eric McDavid and Lauren Weiner. He was charged with a single count of conspiracy to destroy by arson or explosives public and private property. His arrest was the direct result of a paid FBI informant, known as “Anna,” who spent over a year and half befriending and entrapping the trio. Zach plead guilty to a lesser charge on July 18, 2006 and was released on bail later that month. The terms of his plea agreement required full cooperation with the government against Eric McDavid at trial, as well as in any and all other investigations in which the government deemed him useful. Zach received time served (which amounted to about 6 months) at his sentencing on December 4, 2008. His supervised release is set to expire in December 2011.

Zach has a medium build, with brown hair and brown eyes. He stands at about 5’5’’. His last known place of residence was Seattle, Washington. He fancies himself a writer and claimed to have been working on a book about his experiences (and warning others against following a similar path) during the time of his sentencing hearing. He has also claimed an interest in Buddhism, yoga and other “spiritual” pursuits. He is normally withdrawn and quiet and eager to please whatever company he might be keeping.
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*Lauren Weiner (DOB: ~1986) of Pound Ridge, NY, was arrested on January 13, 2006, along with Eric McDavid and Zachary Jenson. She was charged with a single count of conspiracy to destroy by arson or explosives public and private property. Her arrest was the direct result of a paid FBI informant, known as “Anna,” who spent over a year and half befriending and entrapping the trio. Lauren was released on bond in early February 2006 and later plead guilty to a lesser charge on May 30, 2006. However, there is evidence that Lauren was cooperating with the government months before the plea agreement was signed. The terms of her plea agreement required full cooperation with the government against Eric McDavid at trial, as well as in any and all other investigations in which the government deemed her useful. Lauren received time served (which amounted to about 3 weeks) at her sentencing on December 11, 2008. Her supervised release is set to expire in December 2011.

Lauren has a heavy build, with brown hair and brown eyes. She stands at
about 5’1’’. Her last known place of residence was Pound Ridge, New York
(Westchester County). Lauren attended art school and is quite skilled in
pottery and various other art forms. She is outspoken and often lies or
engages in hyperbolic speech to impress those around her. Stories have
surfaced about her attempting to attend fundraisers for Green Scare
defendants after her release on bond.
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*Lacey Phillabaum (DOB: ~1975) from Spokane, WA: Phillabaum took a cooperating agreement, pleaded guilty to conspiracy, arson, and use of a destructive device at the University of Washington’s Center for Urban Horticulture in 2001. The university spent $7.2 million to rebuild the center. She is very intelligent, calculated and manipulative. Phillabaum is a former Earth First! Journal editor, known for her role as the narrator of the underground documentary film Breaking the Spell, which advocates property damage and examines the 1999 Seattle WTO riots from the perspective of anarchists in Eugene, OR. In 2005 she moved to Charlottesville, VA, to take reporting position at C-Ville Weekly. She turned herself in to federal agents sometime around early 2006. In 2008, Phillabaum was sentenced to three years in federal prison and three years’ probation.

She was released on 4-21-2010 and is currently out after transitioning via a halfway house in Spokane, WA. She is thought to be living at her parents’ house in Pheonix, AZ and reportedly seeking work as a para-legal.
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*Sarah “Kendall” Harvey Tankersley (DOB: ~1977), originally from Ohio, the daughter of two attorneys, was arrested while living in Flagstaff, AZ; Charged with arson and attempted arson of U.S. Forest Industries in Medford. Kendall received a 3-year, 10-month sentence. Judge Ann Aiken sentenced Tankersley to five months less than she agreed to when she pleaded guilty to arson at the U.S. Forest Industry’s office in Medford in 1998 because she cooperated with the state and left the conspiracy immediately after the arson. Tankersley, then 28 and preparing for medical school, pled guilty in 2006 to charges including conspiracy to commit arson from 1996 through 2001. Left Eugene around 1999, attended Humboldt State and graduated with molecular biology degree in 2004.

She was released on 9-17-2010.
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*Suzanne Nicole Savoie (DOB: ~1977), aka “India,” of Applegate, OR: charged with arson at Superior Lumber Co., in Glendale, OR. She was sentenced to more than 51 months in prison for her role in two arsons. She turned self in to FBI agents in mid-January 2006. Savoie made statements against Nathan Block and Joyanna Zacher and was given a sentence only 8 months less than expected because of her cooperation with investigators. She has been in a Seattle halfway house with a projected release date of 3-24-2011. [UPDATES NEEDED]

Currently serving time:

*Jennifer Lynn Kolar (DOB: ~1973), aka “Diver” originally of Spokane and
later Seattle, WA, took a cooperating agreement pleading guilty to charges in connection with the firebombing at the University of Washington. Kolar has worked for a variety of animal rights and environmental causes throughout the years, including an effort
to prevent the reestablishment of native whaling practices in Washington State. She was often the ‘computer security expert’ for the groups she worked with. For the past six years she has spent much of her time sailing and racing a yacht, Manta Ray, an Olson 911 SE sail number 45, she co-owns. She is a chair of the Corinthian Yacht Club (CYC) of Seattle Large Boat Racing Fleet. She pursued doctorate degree at the University of Colorado, but turned self in to federal agents in Washington sometime around early 2006. She is currently held in USP Hazelton and scheduled to be released on 2-02-2013.
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*Chelsea Dawn Gerlach (DOB: 1977) of Sweet Home, and later Eugene, OR:
charged with arson at Childers Meat Co. in Eugene; arson at a Boise
Cascade office in Monmouth, OR; toppling of a Bonneville Power
Administration tower; arson at the Eugene Police Department West
University Public Safety Station; attempted arson at Jefferson Poplar
Farms in Clatskanie. Gerlach pleaded guilty to conspiracy and arson
charges in a string of 20 fires that did $40 million worth of damage in
five states, including a 1998 fire at the Vail ski resort in Colorado.
After the group disbanded in 2001, Gerlach went underground and became a
DJ in Portland, OR. At the time of her arrest, she was selling drugs in
Portland with her boyfriend Darren Todd Thurston. Thus far, drug charges
are not pending with either Gerlach or Thurston. Gerlach was extremely
helpful to the prosecution, although she defends herself against being
villified as a snitch and says she cooperated both to shorten her sentence
and ‘for the movement.’ Gerlach made statements against Nathan Block and Joyanna Zacher. She convinced Thurston to turn informant, unsuccessfully attempting to get Zacher, Block and McGowan to turn as well. She led the prosecution on several field trips to previous arsons and a buried cache of guns, ammunition and fake passports allegedly belonging to William “Avalon” Rodgers. She was sentenced to nine years in prison, is currently held in Tallahassee FCI and is scheduled to be released on 10-10-2013.

Chelsea’s parents are environmentalists and she became active around age
15. She attended Evergreen University for a year. She identifies herself
as good with words and computers in an interview she did from prison with
Outside Magazine in 2007. She developed an interest in Buddhism while
incarcerated.
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*Stanislas “Stan” Gregory Meyerhoff (DOB: ~1977) of Charlottesville, VA.:
also went by “Jack.” Meyerhoff was the first of the group called “The Family” to be sentenced, and the first
to snitch once arrested. Charged with May 1999 arson at Childers Meat Co. in
Eugene; 1999 arson at Boise Cascade office in Monmouth, OR; toppling of a
Bonneville Power Administration tower; arson at the Eugene Police
Department West University Public Safety Station; arson at Superior Lumber
Co., in Glendale, OR; arson of sport utility vehicles at a Eugene car
dealership; arson of Jefferson Poplar Farms in Clatskanie. He admitted guilt in his first hearing in front
of an arraignment judge. Meyerhoff eventually pleaded guilty to conspiracy
and arson charges in a string of 20 fires that did $40 million worth of
damage in five states, including a 1998 fire at the Vail ski resort in
Colorado. After the group disbanded in 2001, Meyerhoff enrolled in college
in Virginia, where he studied engineering. Meyerhoff, who admitted to
fashioning the devices to start the fires, was sentenced to 13 years in
prison. He is currently held at USP Terre Haute and is scheduled to be
released on 7-08-2015.
—————————————
Frank Brian Ambrose (DOB: ~1975): Ambrose pleaded guilty to conspiring to
set a fire and explosion that caused more than $1 million in damage to the
offices of Michigan State University’s Agriculture Biotechnology Support
Project on New Year’s Eve 1999. Ambrose became a paid FBI informant after
his arrest (for disposing of evidence of actions in a dumpster that were
found and law enforcement notified). Ambrose has provided information on
“15” other people allegedly involved in ELF/ALF actions, including ex-wife
Marie Mason. Court documents reveal that Ambrose was being used by the FBI
not only to gather information on ELF/ALF activities but general movement
organizing as well (specifically organizing against I-69 and Cincinnati
Earth First! organizing). He “traveled outside of Michigan seven times at
the FBI’s direction, often working extremely late hours; he made repeated
trips from Detroit to Grand Rapids; he made 178 consensual recordings of
telephone conversations and in-person meetings with investigative targets;
and he participated in lengthy interviews with the FBI’s Behavioral
Analysis Unit and otherwise assisted the FBI’s efforts to improve its
intelligence-gathering protocols related to, and its understanding of,
underground environmental and animal-rights extremist groups and
movements.”

In sum, his cooperation with investigators after his arrest
has been substantial and rather extraordinary. He was sentenced to 9 years
in prison in 2008. He also received a lifetime of supervisory release
after prison and was ordered to pay $3.7 million in restitution to the
University and for other sabotaged sites. He is currently being held at
Rochester FMC and has a projected release date of 9-26-2016.

Ambrose, moved to Bloomington after graduating from Purdue University with
a degree in biology. At Purdue, the 190-pound six-footer was a varsity
swimmer.

There is speculation of an additional informant in Ambrose’s case (listed as another confidential source in official documents.) Confirmation and details on the identity of this person are currently pending.

—————————————-
*Kevin Tubbs (DOB: ~1969), originally from Nebraska, but had been living
in Springfield, OR. Tubbs cooperated three weeks after his
arrest and that his cooperation was substantial, after he learned of three
snitches against him: Ferguson, Meyerhoff and Kolar-in that order. Tubbs’
testimony was sufficient enough to get Jonathan Paul indicted. Tubbs was an animal rights activist charged with arson of Oakridge
Ranger Station; arson of Cavel West horse slaughterhouse in Redmond, OR,
on July 21, 1997; attempted arson at U.S. Forest Industries in Medford,
OR, in December 1998; arson at Childers Meat Co., in Eugene; Sept. 6,
2000, arson at the Eugene Police Department West University Public Safety
Station; Jan. 2, 2001, arson at Superior Lumber Co., in Glendale, OR;
using a destructive device to set fire to sport utility vehicles at a
Eugene, OR, car dealership in March 2001; arson at Jefferson Poplar Farms
in Clatskanie, OR, in May 2001. In 2007, he
was sentenced to nearly 12 years and 7 months in prison with 3 years
supervised release. Tubbs is currently held in USP Lompoc and has a
projected release date of 11-23-2016.

Tubbs attended Humboldt State University and was once editor of the Earth
First! Journal. Despite his status as an informant, he still has an active support page at: www.supportkevintubbs.com

——————————————
*Jacob “Jake” Todd Ferguson: After a roommate assumed he had stolen her
truck after an argument, reported it stolen and filed a restraining order
against him he was on the police radar. Using heroin by 2003, feds
contacted Ferguson and told him that people within the community had
linked him to the Romania fire and other arsons. And that, ostensibly, is
when Ferguson agreed to cooperate. Court records indicate that by spring
2004, Ferguson was wearing a hidden recording device in an effort to bait
others, into incriminating themselves. He admitted in 2007 that he set
fire to the U.S. Forest Service Ranger Station in Detroit, OR and a
government pickup in 1996. He admitted to being granted immunity plus
$50,000 for his cooperation, and received 5 years probation. Ferguson,
searched out others and had them recount experiences while he was wearing
a recording device. The recordings provided investigators the evidence
that they needed to convict Daniel McGowan, Jonathan Paul, Joyanna Zacher
and Nathan Block (who all received sentences of 5-7 years). Ferguson wore
the hidden recorder to an annual Earth First! gathering, to the Public
Interest Environmental Law Conference at the UO, and to meetings with six
of his partners in crime, by then scattered across the country.

He was never indicted for the over 15 acts of sabotage he admitted to and
was residing in Eugene, OR until being incarcerated for violating probation. He may also have been financially compensated for his cooperation. He is recognizable by a pentagram tattoo on his forehead.

—————————————-

*Ian Wallace: Formerly of the Twin Cities and recently attending college at Stony Brook (NY), was sentenced to three years in prison, beginning June 1, 2009, for his role in placing two failed firebombs at US Forest Service buildings where tree research was being conducted on the campus of Michigan Tech University in 2001. Walllace and another traveled from Minneapolis to upper Michigan for the action, according to the cooperating plea agreement he signed on September 5, 2008. He faced a maximum of 10 years in prison.

In the plea agreement, Wallace also admitted involvement in three other acts. Two were in Saint Paul: sabotage of a building and vehicles at a US Forest Service research station in 2000 (loss $25,186), and arson of the construction site of what is today the Cargill Building for Microbial and Plant Genomics on the University of Minnesota campus (loss $630,000). He also admitted to involvement and named three other activists responsible for the destruction of 500 research trees in Rhinelander, Wisconsin: Bryan Lefey (who took a non-cooperating agreement) and was sentenced to 3 years in prison for the Rhinelander action, Katherine Christianson (who took a cooperating agreement) was sentenced to 2 years, and Daniel McGowan, serving a 7 year sentence currently. Aaron Ellringer, who drove the activists to the Rhinelander site, cooperated with the government and was sentenced to four days in jail. Please contact us with any further information on Christianson or Ellringer. Source

————————————–

*Brianna Waters: former non-cooperating ELF prisoner, decided to take a cooperating plea deal in the prosecution of two 2001 ELF acts of arson. She had been released earlier this year after a mistrial and is expected to testify against former boyfriend Justin Solondz, who was captured as a fugitive in China, is now in US custody and as of July 29 is awaiting trial for his alleged ELF activity.

—————————————

International informants:

[this section is awaiting further information]

Mark Kennedy and Mark Jacobs are both UK-based international informants.

How a Radical Leftist Became the FBI's BFF

Illustration: Jeffrey Smith

To many on the left, Brandon Darby was a hero. To federal agents consumed with busting anarchist terror cells, he was the perfect snitch.

—By Josh Harkinson Mother Jones Magazine September/October 2011 Issue

For a few days in September 2008, as the Republican Party kicked off its national convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, the Twin Cities were a microcosm of a deeply divided nation. The atmosphere around town was tense, with local and federal police facing off against activists who had descended upon the city. Convinced that anarchists were plotting violent acts, they sought to bust the protesters' hangouts, sometimes bursting into apartments and houses brandishing assault rifles. Inside the cavernous Xcel Energy convention center, meanwhile, an out-of-nowhere vice presidential nominee named Sarah Palin assured tens of thousands of ecstatic Republicans that her running mate, John McCain, was "a leader who's not looking for a fight, but sure isn't afraid of one either."

The same thing might have been said of David McKay and Bradley Crowder, a pair of greenhorn activists from George W. Bush's Texas hometown who had driven up for the protests. Wide-eyed guys in their early 20s, they'd come of age hanging out in sleepy downtown Midland, commiserating about the Iraq War and the administration's assault on civil liberties.

St. Paul was their first large-scale protest, and when they arrived they were taken aback: Rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, tumbling tear-gas canisters—to McKay and Crowder, it seemed like an all-out war on democracy. They wanted to fight back, even going so far as to mix up a batch of Molotov cocktails. Just before dawn on the day of Palin's big coming out, a SWAT team working with federal agents raided their crash pad, seized the Molotovs, and arrested McKay, alleging that he intended to torch a parking lot full of police cars.

Since only a few people knew about the firebombs, fellow activists speculated that someone close to McKay and Crowder must have tipped off the feds. Back in Texas, flyers soon began appearing at coffeehouses urging leftists to beware of Brandon Darby, an "FBI informant rat loose in Austin."

The allegation came as a shocker; Darby was a known and trusted member of the left-wing protest crowd. "If Brandon was conning me, and many others, it would be the biggest lie of my life since I found out the truth about Santa Claus," wrote Scott Crow, one of many activists who rushed to defend him at first. Two months later, Darby came clean. "The simple truth," he wrote on Indymedia.org, "is that I have chosen to work with the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

Darby's entanglement with the feds is part of a quiet resurgence of FBI interest in left-wingers. From the Red Scare days of the 1950s into the '70s, the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program, a.k.a. COINTELPRO, monitored and sabotaged communist and civil rights organizations. Nowadays, in what critics have dubbed the Green Scare, the bureau is targeting the global-justice movement and radical environmentalists. In 2005, John Lewis, then the FBI official in charge of domestic terrorism, ranked groups like the Earth Liberation Front ahead of jihadists as America's top domestic terror threat.

FBI stings involving informants have been key to convicting 14 ELF members since 2006 for a string of high-profile arsons, and to sentencing a man to 20 years in prison for conspiring to destroy several targets, including cell phone towers. During the St. Paul protests, at least two additional informants infiltrated and helped indict a group of activists known as the RNC Eight for conspiring to riot and damage property.

Brandon Darby. Courtesy Loteria Films

But it's Darby's snitching that has provided the most intriguing tale. It's the focus of a radio magazine piece, two documentary films, and a book in the making. By far the most damning portrayal is Better This World, an award-winning doc that garnered rave reviews on the festival circuit and is slated to air on PBS on September 6. The product of two years of work by San Francisco Bay Area filmmakers Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega, it dredges up a wealth of FBI documents and court transcripts related to Darby's interactions with his fellow activists to suggest that Darby acted as an agitator as much as an informant. (Watch the trailer and read our interview with the filmmakers here.)

The film makes a compelling case that Darby, with the FBI's blessing, used his charisma and street credibility to goad Crowder and McKay into pursuing the sort of actions that would later land them in prison. Darby flatly denies it, and he recently sued the New York Times over a story with similar implications. (The Times corrected the disputed detail.) "I feel very morally justified to do the things that I've done," he told me. "I don't know if I could have handled it much differently."

Darby "gets in people's minds and can pull you in," one activist warned me. "He's a master. And you are going to feel all kinds of sympathy for him."

Brandon Michael Darby is a muscular, golden-skinned 34-year-old with Hollywood looks and puppy-dog eyes. Once notorious for sleeping around the activist scene, he now often sleeps with a gun by his bed in response to death threats. His former associates call him unhinged, a megalomaniac, a manipulator. "He gets in people's minds and can pull you in," Lisa Fithian, a veteran labor, environmental, and anti-war organizer, warned me before I set out to interview him. "He's a master. And you are going to feel all kinds of sympathy for him."

The son of a refinery welder, Darby grew up in Pasadena, a dingy Texas oil town. His parents divorced when he was 12, and soon after he ran away to Houston, where he lived in and out of group homes. By 2002, Darby had found his way to Austin's slacker scene, where one day he helped his friend, medical-marijuana activist Tracey Hayes, scale Zilker Park's 165-foot moonlight tower (of Dazed and Confused fame) and unfurl a giant banner painted with pot leaves that read "Medicine." They later "hooked up," Hayes says, and eventually moved in together. She introduced him to her activist friends, and he started reading Howard Zinn and histories of the Black Panthers.

Some local activists wouldn't work with Darby (he liked to taunt the cops during protests, getting them all riled up). But that changed after Hurricane Katrina, when he learned that Robert King Wilkerson, one of the Angola Three—former Black Panthers who endured decades of solitary confinement at Louisiana's Angola Prison—was trapped in New Orleans. Darby and Crow drove 10 hours from Austin towing a jon boat. When they couldn't get it into the city, Darby somehow harangued some Coast Guard personnel into rescuing Wilkerson. The story became part of the foundation myth for an in-your-face New Orleans relief organization called the Common Ground Collective.

It would eventually grow into a national group with a million-dollar budget. But at first Common Ground was just a bunch of pissed-off anarchists working out of the house of Malik Rahim, another former Panther. Rahim asked Darby to set up an outpost in the devastated Ninth Ward, where not even the Red Cross was allowed at first. Darby brought in a group of volunteers who fed people and cleared debris from houses while being harassed by police, right along with the locals who had refused to evacuate. "If I'd had an appropriate weapon, I would have attacked my government for what they were doing to people," he declared in a clip featured in Better This World. He said he'd since bought an AK-47 and was willing to use it: "There are residents here who have said that you will not take my home from me over my dead body, and we have made a commitment to be in solidarity with those residents."

But Common Ground's approach soon began to grate on Darby. He bristled at its consensus-based decision making, its interminable debates over things like whether serving meat to locals was serving oppression. He idolized rugged, iconoclastic populists like Che Guevara—so, in early 2006, he jumped at a chance to go to Venezuela to solicit money for Katrina victims.

Darby was deeply impressed with what he saw, until a state oil exec asked him to go to Colombia and meet with FARC, the communist guerrilla group. "They said they wanted to help me start a guerrilla movement in the swamps of Louisiana," he told "This American Life" reporter Michael May. "And I was like, 'I don't think so.'" It turned out armed revolution wasn't really his thing.

David McKay. Courtesy Loteria Films

Darby's former friends dispute the Venezuela story as they dispute much that he says. They accuse him of grandstanding, being combative, and even spying on his rivals. In his short-lived tenure as Common Ground's interim director, Darby drove out 30 volunteer coordinators and replaced them with a small band of loyalists. "He could only see what's in it for him," Crow told me. For example, Darby preempted a planned police-harassment hot line by making flyers asking victims to call his personal phone number.

The flyers led to a meeting between Darby and Major John Bryson, the New Orleans cop in charge of the Ninth Ward. In time, Bryson became a supporter of Common Ground, and Darby believed that they shared a common dream of rebuilding the city. But he was less and less sure about his peers. "I'm like, 'Oh my God, I've replicated every system that I fought against,'" he recalls. "It was fucking bizarre."

By mid-2007, Darby had left the group and become preoccupied with the conflict in Lebanon. Before long, Darby says, he was approached in Austin by a Lebanese-born schoolteacher, Riad Hamad, for help with a vague plan to launder money into the Palestinian territories. Hamad also spoke about smuggling bombs into Israel, he claims.

Darby says he discouraged Hamad at first, and then tipped off Bryson, who put him in touch with the FBI. "I talked," he told me. "And it was the fucking weirdest thing." He knew his friends would hate him for what he'd done. (The FBI raided Hamad's home, and discovered nothing incriminating; he was found dead in Austin's Lady Bird Lake two months later—an apparent suicide.)

McKay and Crowder first encountered Darby in March 2008 at Austin's Monkey Wrench Books during a recruitment drive for the St. Paul protests. Later, in a scene re-created in Better This World, they met at a café to talk strategy. "I stated that I wasn't interested in being a part of a group if we were going to sit and talk too much," Darby emailed his FBI handlers. "I stated that I was gonna shut that fucker down."

"My biggest impression from that meeting was that Brandon really dominated it," fellow activist James Clark told the filmmakers. Darby's FBI email continued: "I stated that they all looked like they ate too much tofu and that they should eat beef so that they could put on muscle mass. I stated that they weren't going to be able to fight anybody until they did so." At one point Darby took everyone out to a parking lot and threw Clark to the ground. Clark interpreted it as Darby sending the message: "Look at me, I'm badass. You can be just like me." (Darby insists that this never happened.)

"The reality is, when we woke up the next day, neither one of us wanted to use" the Molotovs, Crowder told me.

When the Austin activists arrived in St. Paul, police, acting on a Darby tip, broke open the group's trailer and confiscated the sawed-off traffic barrels they'd planned to use as shields against riot police. They soon learned of similar raids all over town. "It started to feel like Darby hadn't amped these things up, and it really was as crazy and intense as he had told us it was going to be," Crowder says. Feeling that Darby's tough talk should be "in some ways, a guide of behavior," they went to Walmart to buy Molotov supplies.

"The reality is, when we woke up the next day, neither one of us wanted to use them," Crowder told me. They stored the firebombs in a basement and left for the convention center, where Crowder was swept up in a mass arrest. Darby and McKay later talked about possibly lobbing the Molotovs on a police parking lot early the next morning, though by 2:30 a.m. McKay was having serious doubts. "I'm just not feeling the vibe on the street," he texted Darby.

"You butt head," Darby shot back. "Text me when you can." He texted his friend repeatedly over the next hour, until well after McKay had turned in. At 5 a.m., police broke into McKay's room and found him in bed. He was scheduled to fly home to Austin two hours later.

Bradley Crowder. Courtesy Loteria Films

The feds ultimately convicted the pair for making the Molotov cocktails, but they didn't have enough evidence of intent to use them. Crowder, who pleaded guilty rather than risk trial, and a heavier sentence, got two years. McKay, who was offered seven years if he pleaded guilty, opted for a trial, arguing on the stand that Darby told him to make the Molotovs, a claim he recanted after learning that Crowder had given a conflicting account. McKay is now serving out the last of his four years in federal prison.

At South Austin's Strange Brew coffeehouse, Darby shows up to meet me on a chromed-out Yamaha with flames on the side. We sit out back, where he can chain-smoke his American Spirits. Darby is through being a leftist radical. Indeed, he's now an enthusiastic small-government conservative. He loves Sarah Palin. He opposes welfare and national health care. "The majority of things could be handled by people and by communities," he explains. Climate change is "a bandwagon" and the EPA should be "strongly limited." Abortion shouldn't be a federal issue.

He sounds a bit like his new friend, Andrew Breitbart, who made his name producing sting videos targeting NPR, ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and others. About a year after McKay and Crowder went to jail, Breitbart called Darby wanting to know why he wasn't defending himself against the left's misrepresentations. "They don't print what I say," Darby said. Breitbart offered him a regular forum on his website, BigGovernment.com. Darby now socializes with Breitbart at his Los Angeles home and is among his staunchest defenders. (Breitbart's takedown of ACORN, he says, was "completely fucking fair.")

"No matter what I say, most people on the left are going to believe what reinforces their own narrative," Darby says. "And I've quit giving a shit."

Entrapment? Darby scoffs at the suggestion. He pulls up his shirt, showing me his chest hair and tattoos, as though his macho physique had somehow seduced Crowder and McKay into mixing their firebombs. "No matter what I say, most people on the left are going to believe what reinforces their own narrative," he says. "And I've quit giving a shit."

The fact is, Darby says, McKay and Crowder considered him a has-been. His tofu comment, he adds, was a jocular response after one of them had ribbed him for being fat. "I constantly felt the need to show that I was still worthy of being in their presence," he tells me. "They are complete fucking liars." As for those late-night texts to McKay, Darby insists he was just trying to dissuade him from using the Molotovs.

He still meets with FBI agents, he says, to eat barbecue and discuss his ideas for new investigations. But then, it's hard to know how much of what Darby says is true. For one, the FBI file of his former friend Scott Crow, which Crow obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request last year, suggests that Darby was talking with the FBI more than a year before he claims Bryson first put him in touch. Meanwhile, Crow and another activist, Karly Dixon, separately told me that Darby asked them, in the fall of 2006, to help him burn down an Austin bookstore affiliated with right-wing radio host Alex Jones. (Hayes, Darby's ex, says he told her of the idea too.) "The guy was trying to put me in prison," Crow says.

Such allegations, Darby claims, are simply part of a conspiracy to besmirch him and the FBI: "They get together, and they just figure out ways to attack." Believe whomever you want to believe, he says. "Either way, they walk away with scars—and so do I."

Josh Harkinson is a staff reporter at Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. Email him with tips at jharkinson (at) motherjones (dot) com. To follow him on Twitter, click here. Get Josh Harkinson's RSS feed.

Violent infiltration in a peaceful revolution in Spain

by Oscar indybay.org
Saturday Jun 18th, 2011 8:17 PM

Peaceful demonstrators for real demoracy are depicted as violent by the press. Amateur footage exposes infiltration by the police. YouTube has blacked out some of the videos because they allegedly violate privacy. (Original video below.) The incident comes just days before a nationwide protest against economical austerity measures imposed by the government.

640_spanish-infiltrators....
original image ( 907x434)

On June 15 thousands of citizens from Barcelona gathered outside the parliament of Catalunya. They were protesting against austerity measures that were to be discussed that same day. These measures included cut-backs on education and health care.

The citizens of Barcelona defined themselves ‘indignados’, because of the fact that the banks responsable for the crisis benefited of hundreds of billions of euros in public credits while public services and citizens themselves were made to pay.

High unemployment rates, especially among young people, increased evictions of families unable to pay their mortgage, continuing speculation on real estate and widespread vacancy of housing all added to the people’s anger. They felt abandoned by a political class that was exclusively and transversally preoccupied with defending certain economical interests over the interest of the people they were supposed to represent.

Since May 15 people from Barcelona - and from all over Spain and many other countries - have given rise to popular assemblies to practice an example of what they want to reach.

Real Democracy Now.

The popular assemblies that have sprung up all over Europe are characterised by an atmosphere of peaceful exchange of ideas and constructive debate. They are aimed at reaching consensus through the use of collective intelligence. Non violence is the founding principle of the movement.

On the morning of June 16 the front pages of Spanish newspapers all brought the story of a fringe of protesters which had become violent. They were said to have attacked and insulted politicians who were being escorted through the crowd to parliament. No injuries were reported. It was emphasized that a large part of the politicians, including the president, had to be brought to parliament in helicopter.

The story did not match up with the facts documented by the people on the spot. (Links all posted below).

Amateur footage shows police attacking protesters and firing warning shots to disperse the crowd. It also shows a group of the supposedly violent protesters covering their faces and being escorted away by the police. Judging from their weaponry, these persons were likely to have been infiltrators from the Spanish national police.

Videos posted on YouTube documenting the infiltration where later blacked out. The man who posted them received a letter from the channel which stated that the footage violated the privacy of the infiltrating officers.

In his response, the blogger asserted that the films were shot at a public occasion, that no personal data were shown, and that the documented facts where all but a matter of privacy. They were a matter of public interest.

The blogger expressed his hopes that YouTube/Google was not in anyway acting as a result of pressure to censor this valuable material to the benefit of the official story as published by the mainstream media.

It would be odd if a company that tries to present itself as a defender of openness and the free exchange of ideas in closed societies as China was actively cooperating in censoring information on police violence among peaceful protesters in a Western nation.

Suspicions that the whole event was carefully orchestrated from the start until the ‘official version’ of the story came out, were fed by reports that the helicopter carrying the politicians was on stand-by long before protesters had sealed off the entrance to parliament.

In a statement issued afterwards the president of the Catalan parliament was not ashamed to say that the alleged aggression by peaceful demonstrators justified a posteriori the violent charge with which riot police cleared the Plaza de Catalunya three weeks ago, causing over a hundred wounded.

The Barcelona infiltration comes just days before an internationally coordinated protest, which is to take place in all Spanish cities on Sunday.

In the light of this recent attempt at provocation and misinformation by authorities and the press, the people of Spain will be even more determined than before to demonstrate their complete rejection of the this political class and the economic interests it represents.

They will make a lot of noise. They will respect their fellow citizens in uniform, but they will not fear them. They will be disobedient, but they will be peaceful.

And they will be vigilant.

For years our daily life has been monitered by camera’s, in private and public spaces. Wherever we go, we can expect to be observed. Today, Sunday June 19, will be no different. Everyone who commits violent acts can expect to be observed and exposed.

They will not represent a movement based on peaceful resistance.

***
Police violence and infiltration in Barcelona, June 15.
http://www.planetatortuga.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=3875
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z2Kr12lNmE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcmvzRvsf8g

Videos blacked out by YouTube for ‘privacy reasons' in Spanish
http://blogs.tercerainformacion.es/iiirepublica/2011/06/16/la-privacidad/

An English translation is available here as an appendix
http://spanishrevolution11.wordpress.com/2011/06/17/police-infiltration-covered-up-by-youtube/

The Long Con

The Stranger May 4, 2011

Anatomy of a Two-Year Undercover Sting and What It Has to Do with the law enforcement’s Habit of Wasting Large Amounts of Money on Investigating People for Their Social Habits and Political Beliefs

by Brendan Kiley

Andy Pixel

CAFE (UN)AMERICAN One of the parties in October of 2007. What they’re doing is legal if you drive 10 miles north or 20 miles south.

Because this story has to start somewhere, let's begin on any given night in early 2009. It's probably drizzling, and a cluster of people is standing outside the wooden apartment building on the corner of 11th Avenue and Pike Street, the one with motel-style exterior hallways and severely chipped paint. A lightbulb above one door is glowing green, a signal that visitors are welcome. When the lightbulb glows yellow, visitors are supposed to come back later. When the lightbulb glows red, they are supposed to keep away.

Sometimes when visitors enter the apartment, they're asked to hand over any weapons they might be carrying—hardly anybody ever is—and sometimes there's a cursory pat-down. Inside the apartment are a lot of artists, plus a military guy or two on a night away from the base. Some are sitting around a card table playing poker. Others are sitting on couches and chairs, smoking and drinking.

They're all being watched, but only one of them knows it.

There's Mia Brown, in the corner, who is into scuba diving and spends her days working with the homeless. There's Jake, a musician. There's Jimmy the Dwarf, an actor and model who works with a local circus troupe. There's Brady McGarry, who has devoted his free time over the years to political and environmental causes. There's DK Pan, a Butoh dancer, performance artist, and curator. There's Jaybird, a skinny kid in leather quietly trying to peddle small bags of cocaine. There's Thoren Honeycutt, who has a few priors for theft, including theft of a firearm. And there's Rick Wilson—tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a suit. This is Rick's apartment, called Rick's Cafe (un)American during Rick's after-hours parties.

For a time, some members of this crowd threw these after-hours parties at a place called the Cthulhu Building, just three blocks uphill from Rick's. Later, some members of this crowd will throw after-hours parties at a place in Belltown called Cafe Corsair. Attendees often referred to them as speakeasies, although the people running them merely thought of them as private parties in private places. Court documents would later call them "underground illegal gambling enterprises (concurrent with illegal liquor sales)." A lot of people went to these parties—they were big events with bands and burlesque dancers. Guests were encouraged to dress up and usually did. Sometimes it seemed like half the city was there in suits and vintage dresses: artists, activists, politicians, cultural bigwigs, musicians, computer programmers, soldiers, criminals.

A lot of these parties happened because Rick's good friend Bryan T. Owens had money and connections. Not everyone liked Bryan, but because he was Rick's good friend he was often around—drinking Maker's and Coke after-hours, playing poker, telling stories. He had a bald head and a goatee and a blustery bro-dude personality—one of the party regulars described him as a "mini–Fred Durst"—but he was a trust-fund baby and he was generous with his cash.

One day, Brady McGarry showed up at the Belltown space. The day before had been a long, weird day for him, and he and Bryan got to talking. Brady had been helping stage a protest at the Weyerhaeuser headquarters in Federal Way—a "lockdown" some friends from California had come up for. "It was mostly a symbolic protest," Brady remembers. "We blocked an entrance for an hour or so, just long enough to make the papers."

Brady had driven down in a car he'd borrowed from a friend, and on his way home, he got pulled over. "It was a state patrol officer, and he told me: 'I have a warrant for your arrest.' I said: 'Um, you haven't even asked for my ID—you don't know who I am yet.' Plus, I was driving my friend's car. It was weird." But the officer seemed to know exactly who Brady was and took him into custody. (This was not Brady's first time in jail. He had been hauled into custody a few times during his protest career. He also says it might have had something to do with some unpaid traffic tickets.) Brady bailed himself out for $1,500, which made him short on rent.

"Man, that sucks," Bryan said, according to Brady. "Cops fucking suck." Bryan offered to pay Brady's rent that month. After that, they started going to dinner together and became friends. Bryan kept pushing Brady toward more radical "real militant action," asked Brady to teach him how to make Molotov cocktails, and hinted that he wanted to "make explosives" and do some "property damage" at Weyerhaeuser or at CEOs' houses, Brady remembers. He wanted to talk about the Earth Liberation Front. Brady remembers telling Bryan to take it easy. "It weirded me out," Brady says. He gave Bryan some books to read and documentaries to watch.

On July 11, 2008, Brady and Bryan drove to Tacoma to meet some "young, stinky, and disorganized" punk-rock protesters—Brady's description—at a meet and greet for people going to protest at the 2008 Republican National Convention. Bryan ended up buying plane tickets for Brady, DK Pan, and himself to get to Minneapolis–St. Paul for the convention. But on the day of the flight, shortly after they'd boarded the plane and just before taxiing, Bryan was escorted off the plane by the authorities. The reason wasn't immediately clear: He had a pot pipe on him or a warrant out or something. (Several people remember Bryan bragging that he had a record and had been arrested for political action.) So Brady and DK went to the convention without the guy who was supposed to be paying for everything. While they were there, Bryan wired them $400 for food and expenses.

And it was Bryan who, after the Cafe (un)American and Cthulhu Building parties had run their course, pushed Rick and DK and Brady into renting a space in Belltown so they could throw more speakeasy parties. "At that point, everybody walked away—except Bryan," says Junior, another regular at the parties. "He kept saying, 'Let's do it again, let's do it again.'"

Bryan said he had some family connection with Martin Selig's real-estate company and that he could get a cheap space in Belltown, down on Third Avenue and Battery Street—the space that came to be called Cafe Corsair. Bryan would sign the lease and put up the money so they could build out one section for parties and another section for DK's art group, called the Free Sheep Foundation. "Bryan said, 'I can pay for it as long as I get paid back,'" Junior remembers. "Rent, paint, locks, lumber, drywall, new plumbing—it all came out of Bryan's pocket."

Junior shakes his head as he's remembering all this. Junior has met a lot of criminals in his life. Criminals who have double-crossed him, stabbed him, shot him—he shows me his scars, impressive burls of flesh—but he says he's never met a con artist like Bryan. "Bryan looked big and dumb, but he was a fucking grifter," Junior concludes, half admiringly and half begrudgingly. "Dude lived parallel lives," he says, and he did it well enough to keep up with a "large, shrewd" roomful of people.

Mia Brown, the scuba diver and DK's then girlfriend, remembers Bryan as a guy who "always ranted about how he hates cops" and who tried to talk an enlisted friend of hers—who was on his way to a tour in Afghanistan—into stealing weapons from Fort Lewis. But it wasn't until she visited Bryan at his apartment one night and found it nearly empty that she knew something was up. "When I went to the bathroom, there was nothing in there," she says. "You'd expect some soap or towels or something. I started asking how long he'd been living there, and he got all aggravated."

After that incident at the apartment, Mia told DK to stop talking to Bryan. When DK stopped answering Bryan's calls, Bryan tried to wheedle his way into her life by talking about scuba diving. Then Mia mentioned that one of her current dive partners was in the Seattle Police Department (SPD). "And he avoided me forevermore," she says. This only ratcheted up her suspicions. Bryan's no-show act at the Republican National Convention struck her as odd. Bryan's agitation about starting up a new speakeasy and insisting that it turn a profit (when everyone in the group had been taking losses for the parties) struck her as odd. And the thing about Bryan asking a friend of hers to steal weapons from Fort Lewis struck her as odd and dangerous.

Meanwhile, Bryan had been pushing Rick—and everyone in their social set—for years to help him buy ever-larger amounts of cocaine. Bryan started buying a gram here, a gram there. Then he tried to play on people's greed. "He's like, 'I can make you a millionaire,'" Rick remembers. "'I've got this inheritance, and you've got credibility with this underground economy of parties.' He said he would pay for the drugs and I would take no financial risk. I told him to go fuck himself. He kept pestering me. I did, to my eternal shame, help him out," Rick says. "I asked around to some people who asked around to some people who eventually gave him some."

One night, Mia tried to tell Rick she had a funny feeling about Bryan, but Rick wasn't having it. When Rick told Mia he'd just agreed to help Bryan out with a favor, they got into a fight. "Rick was going on about how he had to help Bryan," Mia remembers. "He was all, 'I know a lot of you guys don't like Bryan, but you don't know him like I do.'"

Bryan's brother out in Eastern Washington was under serious physical threat—life, limb, family—as Rick understood it. He'd been dealing drugs and doing it wrong, and he'd gotten himself into trouble. The only way out was for Bryan to complete a drug transaction here in Seattle to bail out his brother. Bryan said he didn't know these guys and he needed someone he knew and trusted to come along, to watch the deal from a distance and be on hand in case things went sideways. Could Rick just show up—just to get Bryan's back in case something bad happened? "At first I told him not to do the drug deal at all," Rick says. "He comes to me a dozen times with this 'I've got to stand with my family, I've got to stand with my brother.' Finally, he cracks me."

Bryan offered Rick $500 in cash for his help. Rick handed back $300, saying he'd just take $200 to help with his rent. Mostly he just thought of it as a favor for his good friend.

Mia remembers Rick justifying his helping Bryan by telling her: "We've become like brothers, and he's in a predicament and can't get out. And when it comes to brothers, you sink or swim together."

Mia shot back, "Your brother doesn't grab you by your ankles and pull you down! He doesn't drag you into trouble. What the hell is this guy getting you involved in?"

The following day, June 10, 2009, around noon, Rick is driving through Seattle in a borrowed car, thinking he's going to protect his best friend. The next thing he knows, he's swarmed by a SWAT team. They smash out the windows on both sides of the car and drag Rick onto the pavement. Rick has two loaded handguns in his possession, a .38 Special and a .357 revolver—both legal.

He is arrested, held for a while in a detention facility in SeaTac, and brought into an interrogation room to be questioned by detectives and FBI agents. At some point during the conversation, the revelation hits him: His close friend of two years, the friend he was risking his own life to protect, isn't who he said he is. He isn't a trust-fund baby. He isn't an activist.

He's an undercover SPD detective named Bryan Van Brunt.

"So Bryan's a cop," Rick says aloud in a grainy DVD of the interrogation, looking stunned and heartbroken while he recalibrates his understanding of his world. "Okay."

Rick Wilson sits in a chair, looking exhausted. During breaks in the interrogation room, he leans his head against a wall or rests it on the table. SPD officers and FBI agents come and go, trying to get him to talk.

I got to see (and take notes on) the DVD of the interrogation only once. It begins at 11:13 p.m., almost 12 hours after the arrest and after, according to Rick, extensive questioning about ecoterrorism.

At 11:13 p.m., the police read him his rights and tell him he can talk to a lawyer.

"Do you understand that right?" one of the officers asks.

"You're aware I've previously asked for an attorney," Rick says.

"You haven't technically asked for an attorney," the officer says. "Are you asking for one at this time? If you choose to do so—and you have that right—we can no longer speak to you."

It's clear that Rick and the officers are in the middle of a long discussion about Rick's long-term future. Rick grew up with a defense attorney for a father, who always told him not to talk to police without a lawyer present. ("Never miss a chance to shut the fuck up," Rick remembers him saying. "You give me four complete sentences from an innocent man, and I'll give you a conviction.")

But Rick is talking—carefully, but he's still talking. The officers want Rick to tell them about things (poker, drugs, corrupt city politicians) without calling for a lawyer. Rick clearly wants to call a lawyer, but he is intimidated by the officers' claim that he's looking at 35 to 40 years for showing up to a drug deal at Bryan's request. Rick's interrogators say that if he tells them the things they want to know, the law will go easy on him. But, they hint darkly, if he calls a lawyer, he's fucked—even though they keep mentioning that he has every right to call a lawyer. At some moments, the exchanges are almost comically contradictory. Officers reiterate that if he asks for a lawyer, they can't talk to him. "Aren't you already talking to me?" Rick mutters. "This is like a Kafka play."

FBI agent Dan Simmons says to Rick, "We talked about rash decisions, and I'm being put in a position where I'm gonna have to make a rash decision, whether to take these charges"—Simmons taps an imaginary stack of papers on the table—"and put them away, or whether to have the US Attorney's Office file them. I don't wanna do that. You don't wanna spend the next 40 years in prison."

"Are you telling me straight-up that tonight—and tonight only—is my only chance?" Rick asks haltingly, with a faint hint of panic in his voice. "And that any desire to negotiate cooperation through an attorney would void your willingness to cooperate, and that I'd be maliciously punished for seeking an attorney?"

"No, not at all," the agent says, exasperated. "I'm not gonna punish you. You're punishing yourself. You don't talk to me, I can't help you. This is mandatory federal time. There's no parole. We cut a deal, you'll probably get a little less than 35 years..."

"I'd consider cooperating," Rick says, "and I'd like to negotiate that through an attorney... You guys are professionals in here, and I'm an amateur. I'm underqualified... People mess up the first time they do anything—if you build a cabinet for the first time, you're going to mess up."

And so it goes, for hours and hours on the grainy DVD, while Rick tries to figure out just how fucked he actually is. His interrogators, Rick later remembers, were unusually interested in environmental groups and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), which totally bewildered him. Here he was getting hauled in for trying to cover a friend, and the police want to talk about radical politics?

Years earlier, Rick had been the singer for a protest band called ¡Tchkung!, which toured to places like El Salvador and had ties to radical, revolutionary causes with an emphasis on indigenous rights. In the ¡Tchkung! song "Solidarity," Rick sings: "Wealth and justice, great disparity/Stand together, answer the call/What we need is solidarity/Injury to one is an injury to all... What part of 'fuck you' didn't you understand?/There ain't no compromise, it ain't your land!"

Rick points out that even if the FBI had gotten to him eight years earlier, when he was closer to that world, he wouldn't have been much help. ELF operates in a fundamentally nonhierarchical, cell-based way so that nobody can flip anybody else whom he or she hasn't directly worked with on an action. A person doesn't join ELF with any kind of process or ceremony. A person commits an action (burning down a McMansion, spray-painting slogans on Weyerhaeuser headquarters, whatever) and then attributes that action to ELF (via a letter or graffiti), and boom—it's an ELF action. But the FBI, despite years of experience, tries to investigate, infiltrate, and bring down the group like it's an old-time mob.

"I wish I could say I was surprised," says Seattle attorney Amanda Lee when I explain this years-long investigation and all the futile effort that went into it. Lee is familiar with this kind of case, having argued several entrapment and radical- environmentalist cases during her career, representing defendants from Operation Backfire (a notorious FBI investigation against people associated with ELF by putting the screws to a guy facing narcotics charges) and a detainee at Guantánamo Bay accused of being involved with the 9/11 hijacking. But, she says, the FBI keeps trying to hammer at ELF through whatever tangential, specious means it can, following weak leads that cost it—and taxpayers—much time and expense.

"FBI domestic terrorism investigations," she says, "are frequently out of proportion to the danger of the crime involved."

The heart of the investigation, the search for terrorists and corrupt politicians, was a flop—a very intense, expensive, invasive flop.

Nevertheless, during Rick's interrogation, SPD officers and FBI agents reiterate that if Rick asks for a lawyer, he's facing certain decades in prison. "It's real simple: If you don't talk tonight, we don't negotiate, and discussions are closed," one interrogator says. Watching the video is like a 101 course in intimidation and interrogation tactics. In the background, another man in another cell is audibly weeping.

"You're it!" one of the officers says to Rick. "You're big-time tagged! I've got a lot more questions, and it will be obvious I'm giving you the opportunity to tag someone else... You ever hear the saying that the first to talk is the first to walk?"

The officers ask about other people who've been to the speakeasies. "Peter Steinbrueck?" someone asks eagerly, referring to the former Seattle City Council president. "Nick Licata?" someone asks, referring to a current city council member.

"This is undignified," Rick sniffs. "This is witch-hunting. This is undignified for you and me both."

And then the SPD officer and Rick have an unusually candid exchange, one that shows how costly and futile this whole investigation has been.

"The degree of surveillance and monitoring has been extremely expensive," the officer tells Rick, sounding equal parts intimidating and frustrated. "When you've gone to the QFC and Corsair and Tubs. Think over the last two years—everything you've done in private and on the streets, people you've talked to, what you've had in your possession, conversations, intentions, plans... I have to emphasize the level of surveillance we've run over the last two years. Tell us about all the drug deals in The Yard. You want me to tell you about the red cabinet where you keep the drugs? The cocaine? We have hundreds of hours of surveillance, wire, video..."

"That would seem to be an absurd waste of state financing and funding," Rick says. "And that actually scares me more than the charges... You guys aren't after anything bigger than this? This is it?"

Later, Rick asks them pointedly: "Didn't it, at some point in this investigation, get frustrating to discover that there's nothing?"

"We have enough to charge you with multiple crimes that could put you away for 30 to 40 years," the officer snaps back. Later, FBI agent Simmons says, "I hate to keep beating a dead horse, man, but we've been looking at you for a year at least."

"Well," Rick replies, "that must have been pretty unsatisfying for you."

The FBI agent doesn't answer.

The Seattle police seem to think that Rick's guns point toward some kind of guilt.

"Why the need to have so many weapons on the premises?" one of the officers asks.

"My home?" Rick asks, sounding flabbergasted. "That's my home. I own a small amount of firearms legally, most of which are locked in an extremely secure gun safe in an unloaded manner. I'm a man from Oklahoma," he continues, "and there's no such thing as a man from Oklahoma who doesn't own a firearm or two. Even the hippies own guns."

The agents sit silent, seemingly flummoxed. They've pursued this target for years, luring him into a bust that they hoped would scare him into giving up some valuable intelligence about domestic terrorists, or city politicians, or at least some drug dealers. But they've fundamentally misunderstood their own investigation.

This story fits into a national pattern of law enforcement going to great lengths to prosecute people who are perceived as serious threats to national security, but who are (for the most part) just people with big mouths and weird lifestyles.

Former Chicago Tribune reporter Will Potter, author of Green Is the New Red (just published by City Lights), says that after years of looking into these kinds of cases, he's never figured out exactly why the FBI is doing this: "The best explanation I ever heard was from a former FBI agent. She said: 'In the 1980s, it was drugs; in the '90s, it was gangs; and post-9/11, the institutional focus of law enforcement is terrorism.'"

Potter says, "This case you're looking into sounds like one of the extremes among the extremes." The Bryan/Rick investigation isn't an anomaly—not just a couple of crazy cops on a tear—and Seattle isn't the only community where the FBI and local law enforcement have teamed up to investigate people for what DK Pan's attorney David Whedbee calls "their beliefs and expressive conduct."

"This has happened quite a bit," Potter says. "I don't mean to be too glib, but if it can't find people committing so-called ecoterrorism, the FBI seems willing to create ecoterrorism and then arrest people for it. It sucks to put it in those terms because it sounds so conspiracy theorist, and I don't want it to sound that way. It's not the norm but it's increasing that the FBI is clamoring for these arrests and is willing to break the law in the process."

For example?

"At the very top of my list is the Eric McDavid case out of California," Potter says. After an FBI investigation of at least three years (from 2004 to 2007), during which McDavid developed a romantic attachment to "Anna," the alter ego of an FBI agent, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for "conspiring to damage or destroy property by fire and an explosive." Potter describes the sentence as "mind-bogglingly insane."

"The guy didn't do anything," he says. "At the worst, he hung around with a group of people who talked tough. In court, Anna actually complained that the group spent too much time hanging around and smoking pot." All the while, Anna was on the FBI payroll and was "supplying the group with bomb-making materials and supplies and traveling around on the FBI's dime."

The FBI, Potter says, has been playing this make-believe game with "domestic terrorists" off and on since 9/11, even though it has been directly criticized for it by the US Department of Justice.

The DOJ's 95-page audit report from 2003 opens and closes with the inspector general basically saying that the FBI has been doing a crappy job of protecting American citizens from terrorism because it's not good at sharing information with other agencies, and it's been too busy busting the likes of vegans, hippies, artists, anarchists, and other low-risk dissident American subcultures.

From page 63 of the DOJ report: "Frequently, the information being shared on terrorism could be described as background; often the subject of the FBI's communications is not the high risk of radical Islamic fundamentalist terrorism but social protests or the criminal activities of environmental or animal activists."

On the 11th page of the report's introduction, the DOJ suggests that the FBI concentrate on "actionable information on the high risk of international terrorism and any domestic terrorist activities aimed at creating mass casualties or destroying critical infrastructure, rather than information on social protests and domestic radicals' criminal activities."

In other words, the DOJ is telling the FBI to stop wasting its time with the vegans, the hippies, and the anarchists. They're fine—people are allowed to be weird in America. Those people aren't a threat, anyway. The FBI should spend its time looking for murder- minded international terrorists instead.

Colleen Rowley, who was an FBI agent for 24 years, says she saw a dramatic change in the agency after 9/11. "It's a repeat of the COINTELPRO programs at the end of the Vietnam War," she says. "They are targeting groups just for political dissent. It's history repeating." When she saw this shift after 9/11, Rowley became a whistle-blower—and very unpopular at the bureau. She retired in 2004.

She lives in the Twin Cities now and says she saw an incredible concentration of agents trying to infiltrate and target protest groups around the time of the 2008 Republican National Convention.

In retrospect, the plane incident with Bryan makes sense. The SPD was hoping those plane tickets to protest at the RNC would bolster its undercover officer's street cred among presumed radicals. Bryan said he'd go with them, but he had authorities stage an incident on the airplane that resulted in him being "detained" and unable to go. That was just one of the many bizarre (and expensive) stunts that local and federal law-enforcement officials put together to infiltrate their target of wild-eyed, drug-crazed, bomb-throwing terrorists with heavy connections at city hall.

But that target was a figment of their imagination.

A Cafe Corsair regular remembers Bryan asking him one night if a certain security guy was armed. "I said yes. He said, 'Good, we should encourage that,'" the regular remembers. "Now you have this cop who built this place, condoning and encouraging sales of drugs to an uncontrolled demographic of people and that they be policed with guns."

"Every person Bryan had friendships with, he had an agenda," Brady McGarry says now, adding, "I fell for it. In a way, I'm the luckiest guy in the world—if I had been a little more stupid or a little more weak, I might have actually done some of the shit he was trying to talk me into."

"Bryan was trying to get people to do shit they wouldn't normally do, things that were more dangerous, just to make his case," says Junior, who started sending me cryptic, urgent-sounding messages after Rick's arrest. A few people immediately flip out when Rick is arrested and insist it's unjust, but nobody offers specifics. Junior is the first to offer specifics.

He says he's hiding out in South Seattle. I agree to drive down and meet him in a public place (and to change a few identifying details about him). We move locations during our hours-long conversation because Junior is worried about who might be watching. He says he split town for some family business just a few days before the big bust went down and that he had nothing to do with anything, but he's worried because he's not sure who's suspecting him of what. Nevertheless, he thinks this whole thing stinks and he wants somebody to know it.

He hopes talking to me will help Rick out. "Rick likes to think he's a cross between Don King and Rick from Casablanca, but he really isn't," Junior says. "He's just a 38-year-old guy who used to be in a band... but he'll try to show off in front of the jury, and I'm here to keep him from shooting himself in the dick."

Junior tells me a little about himself. He says he began doing speed at the age of 8, when he started stealing his mom's asthma medication. By 11, he was scoring speed off the street, though he says he's been clean for a while. He says the authorities are trying to set Rick up as a drug kingpin. "A drug kingpin Rick was not. I don't care what the cops say. Look, here's what happened with the Hondurans..."

I will paraphrase Junior's version of what happened, since it took him many hours (and many digressions) to tell: His friend Rick likes a little coke and a little meth in a small-scale, personal way but has never shown any interest in serious dealing. Junior and Rick's mutual friend Bryan—some trust-fund kid who's always instigating bigger parties, more drugs, more everything—wants to make some big score. Bryan spends at least a year stymied by the limitations of his friends, because the drug users in Rick's social group are all pretty small-time. But then Bryan finally gets what he's looking for: Rick knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who might be able to help Bryan out.

This third-removed guy is named Marshall. And Marshall suddenly becomes the keyhole, the pot of gold, the one who justifies Bryan's whole card-playing, protester-haranguing, Maker's-and-Coke-drinking ruse—because Marshall happens to know some Honduran dudes who can sell a lot of drugs.

Marshall's part in this story is crazy and sad, Junior warns me. Marshall used to be an ace drug dealer. "What people say about being a drug dealer is all bullshit," Junior says. "With selling drugs, either you're born with it or not. It's not how good you are with money or how scary you are or how much of your own supply you do. That doesn't really matter. All that shit is a skill set that can be developed—but you need the DNA. And part of this DNA is the Jesse James factor, this Spidey-sense. Believe it or not, the most important thing is to be an empath, to know what other people are feeling."

Junior takes a look around the bar we're in. "And three things above all: Be on time, be polite, and have good product. You do that and you'll go far."

Marshall did those things, street lore says. He was careful. He got raided a few times, got chased a few times, but he always got away. According to one story, Marshall got to know some local Honduran drug traffickers simply because he had the guts to go straight to a crack house in the Central District and insist he could move kilos of cocaine very quickly. Another story says Marshall placed an order with the Hondurans for a quarter ounce of cocaine and got four ounces instead. When he told the Hondurans he couldn't move four ounces, the Hondurans said he'd better learn to move four ounces, and suddenly Marshall was a big-league drug dealer.

Either way, something unlucky happened, the story goes, and an unrelated drug bust interrupted Marshall's flow of cash and product. He went to the Hondurans and said he needed some time to get himself sorted out. The Hondurans said no. They had a schedule and a payment plan, and Marshall would meet it or face the consequences.

So Marshall, the legendarily canny drug dealer, starts putting together sloppy deals with people he doesn't necessarily know all that well. He hears that some guy named Bryan is desperate to buy. Marshall is desperate to sell.

This is the part of the story most people are familiar with, the cinematic moment: Having arranged to buy seven kilos of cocaine, three pounds of meth, and a Honda Accord tricked out with secret compartments for smuggling contraband—for a total of $217,000—Bryan meets Marshall (an Anglo) and the three other sellers, Carlos, Cesar, and Edwan (Hondurans), in the parking lot of a restaurant in South Lake Union. It's a moment that Bryan and his superiors have been anticipating for years. For them, all the trouble and expense of this investigation are about to pay off. They're about to catch Rick being party to a drug deal of such magnitude, he'll have no choice but to give up whatever he knows about the Earth Liberation Front, whatever he knows about getting guns, whatever he knows about the guys on the city council—everything.

All of the players tied to the day's drug deal (except for one, who thinks he's there to help his friend) seem to understand how serious the stakes are. At one point during the sale, the undercover detective makes a joke about not wanting the car to "die" on him. According to a police report, Carlos "did not laugh but said, fairly sternly, that he doesn't mess around."

Soon it's flashing lights, drawn guns, shouting, handcuffs. Once he's in custody, Carlos refuses to talk about the people he works for, saying that if he does, "they will kill me." He is sentenced to 10 years in prison. Cesar and Edwan are sentenced to five years in prison. Marshall gets three years and six months.

This drug bust will get spun successfully by the cops and the media—including a story in the June 18, 2009, issue of The Stranger—as a major accomplishment, but Rick had almost nothing to do with it. Marshall was several degrees removed from Rick. Bryan was lucky to meet Marshall and lucky that Marshall was desperate to sell and lucky that he had known Rick for so long that all he had to do was offer Rick a little cash to cajole him to show up. I haven't been able to find the documents that show how many agents and officers were listening in on the conversation when Bryan asked Rick for his big favor, but the amount of resources (that we know of) that went into tracking Rick's life and his friends' lives for two years is staggering.

We may never know exactly how much money the police and the FBI spent on Operation Big Slick, as they called their two-year surveillance of Rick and Cafe (un)American and the Cthulhu Building and Cafe Corsair, from at least August 2007 to June 2009, but the expenses include multiple SWAT teams, surveillance teams, two years of Bryan Van Brunt's salary (in 2009, he made $134,657 and $46,829 of overtime pay), Bryan's fake apartment that made Mia Brown suspicious, DK Pan and Brady McGarry's plane tickets to protest at the Republican National Convention, the speakeasy costs (rent and tenant improvements at the Cafe Corsair space), and meals (people say Bryan bought them a lot of dinners in those two years, sometimes at expensive steak houses).

On July 11, 2008, for example, when Bryan went with Brady McGarry to Tacoma to meet the "young, stinky, and disorganized" protest kids, at least seven other officers—plus a SWAT team, according to a vice-unit surveillance log acquired by The Stranger—monitored the situation. The officers named in the police report are Sergeant Ryan Long (who made $133,339 in 2009, with $28,805 in overtime), Sergeant Jim Kelly ($120,503, with $14,196 in overtime), Detective Todd Novisedlak ($109,888, with $15,158 in overtime), Detective Dale Williams (there are two detectives identified as "Williams, D" in city salary records, one who made $111,638 and $2,151 in overtime and one who made $115,086, with $17,748 in overtime), Detective Ron Brundage Jr. ($109,974, with $13,371 in overtime), Detective Trent Bergman ($137,274, with $44,296 in overtime), and Detective Rick Hall ($112,659, with $20,822 in overtime).

"Oh wow, oh my god," Brady says when I tell him how many police officers had been trailing him that day. "That's terrifying. That's terrifying. That was such a nothing day, such a disorganized, nothing meeting. Did you say the SWAT team was there? Why the hell was the SWAT team there? That's insane."

By the end of this investigation, Bryan Van Brunt will have won SPD's Distinguished Service Award, even though his investigation was largely a flop. The SPD was investigating the political-corruption side of the case, looking into city council members Peter Steinbrueck and Nick Licata, according to FBI special agent David Gomez, who runs the counterterrorism program from Seattle's field office. "With us," he says, "it was a domestic terrorism case." The FBI seemed to believe that Rick's apartment and speakeasy parties were in fact linked to radical environmentalists, including the Earth Liberation Front. "There was a sense that there was information that would've helped us, if it had worked out," Gomez says. "But I don't believe that it did."

The SPD thought it had a big corruption case, the FBI thought it had a big counterterrorism case, and a few folks in Seattle thought they had a friend in Bryan T. Owens.

Nobody got what they wanted—not the SPD, not the FBI, not the taxpayers, not Rick Wilson or his friends. But we have to give credit where it's due: Bryan did get the Honduran cocaine dealers, even though they didn't have anything to do with anything he'd been investigating. The Hondurans fell into Bryan's lap—they were his lucky break. Without them, this case would have been a total embarrassment.

Here's a little more math about the public resources that this investigation sucked up. According to documents acquired by The Stranger, during May and June of 2008, Bryan showed up to play cards at Rick's apartment eight times. For those eight card games (i.e., eight police shifts for Bryan), the investigation paid for 112 shifts by supporting officers: 9 officers one night, 5 officers another night, 11 officers another night, etc. One night, an FBI agent came out. Another night, a SWAT team was there. And that's just in a two-month window.

According to a source, SPD surveillance logs show that police were following the families of suspects, their sisters and mothers, and that some family members' homes (like the West Seattle home of Rick's sister, a veterinarian) were raided and turned upside down for evidence.

Some detectives, such as Sergeant Long and Detective Novisedlak, show up in the surveillance reports on dozens of occasions over the years, waiting and watching while Bryan played cards. In an interview, Rick told me about a friend of his who was paranoid that he was being followed. Rick says he sat the friend down and explained that he was being unrealistic, that he wasn't in the middle of a big government conspiracy that was investigating him. "But it was true!" Rick laughs. "This is the worst-case scenario for this guy's mental health."

During the interrogation following his arrest, Rick tried to put the parties he'd hosted in perspective. "Nobody's ever been hurt or harmed or mistreated or roofied," he said. "Women have never had hands laid on them, like at other clubs. There's never been anyone underage, to my knowledge, which you guys would know if you've been watching me as closely as you say you have."

"We do know that. Now let's focus on city officials," one of his interrogators said, turning to the topic of Council Members Steinbrueck and Licata.

Former city council member Peter Steinbrueck says he knew nothing about any of this. "The police were looking for what?" he says when I ask about the investigation into corruption and gambling and environmental terrorism. "It was just an after-hours party." He says he had been to some of the parties, but that was it.

Detectives got in touch with current city council member Nick Licata before I did, first dropping his name as a person of interest to a friend of his on the Allied Arts Foundation board. The detectives had come to warn this friend that DK Pan may have laundered money through the foundation. (The allegation is demonstrably false, as his group Free Sheep never got any money from Allied Arts but merely asked them if they'd be fiscal sponsors while they were considering nonprofit status. If this story teaches us anything, it's to never underestimate the misguided zeal of the SPD.)

The Allied Arts board member called Licata, who called then–acting police chief John Diaz. "Diaz said, 'This is really bad form, I don't know what's going on with these detectives,'" Licata remembers. Diaz told Licata he'd find out and call him back. Then two detectives dropped by Licata's office to question him. "They said, 'Well, you know, your name came up and we feel obligated to follow through,'" Licata says. "They ask me if I've ever been there, and I said, 'No, but it sounded kinda cool!'"

The Stranger filed a public records request with the department, asking for information about the length and breadth of the investigation, but SPD has not been very forthcoming about the resources it devoted to the case. The thin stack of documents the SPD sent back begins in September 2008, at least a full year after the investigation actually began—according to SPD spokesperson Sean Whitcomb, Operation Big Slick began in the summer of 2007—and includes information about only a handful of the officers shown on department surveillance logs.

Around 8:40 a.m. on March 30, 2011, four years after the investigation began, four men show up at the King County Courthouse to face charges for violating RCW 9.46.220, the state law regulating "professional gambling in the first degree." A few reporters are taking notes and tweeting the proceedings. They are here to see the "speakeasy defendants" who've been all over the local papers and blogs, guys arrested for throwing parties where people drank after-hours and played cards.

In the past 10 years, according to the prosecutor's office, King County has pressed charges against only one other person for violating RCW 9.46.220. It's a law that the government doesn't seem to care that much about. After all, from Seattle you can drive 20 miles south to Tukwila or 10 miles north to the Drift On Inn Roadhouse Casino on Aurora Avenue and gamble legally.

But these four men (all of them, I later learn, poor—if they really were "professional gamblers," they were lousy at it) are being prosecuted for the crime of playing poker somewhere between Tukwila and Shoreline with the wrong guy, an undercover cop.

The defendants are quiet, well dressed, and bewildered by the charges. One of them told me that the poker stakes were so low, he would lose or win $100 at most in the course of a night. ("All those guys were broke, broke as a joke," Mia Brown agrees. "They'd borrow five dollars from someone to go put on the card table. It was small and it was stupid.")

The defense lawyers will be bewildered by what they find in the discovery process—all the paperwork and evidence and audio and video surveillance accumulated by the two-year investigation that involved the FBI, SPD, SWAT teams, and federal firearms and immigration and customs agents. One defendant's discovery request turned up nearly 2,000 pages of documentation and over 100 CDs and DVDs, and even that defendant's attorney had to file extra requests because he said there were big gaps of time missing.

Why did law enforcement dedicate such massive resources to bust some penny-ante card players for charges that only one person has faced in the past 10 years?

One of the defendants, Brady McGarry, had a simple explanation: "If you spend that much time and money, you have to put somebody up on that cross."

In a prepared statement, David Whedbee, the defense attorney representing DK Pan, wrote:

It's puzzling that the Seattle Police Department would commit such law enforcement resources to punish people for playing poker. Our investigation is yet in its early stages, but our preliminary review of the records indicates, for instance, that from October 2007 to November 2008, Officer Van Brunt made more than 70 outings to these establishments. And each time, he was assisted by on average five or six other officers. We believe Officer Van Brunt continued to have such outings from November 2008 through June 2009, but documentation is incomplete. We have made a public records request to the SPD to figure out how extensive the investigation was in terms of money and man-hours, so we'll see what those records show.

It's also astonishing the number of days (and hence public resources) Officer Van Brunt dedicated to keeping tabs on the defendants and many, many others who were political activists, journalists, and established artists, and that he did so largely on account of their beliefs and expressive conduct.

Whatever the FBI and the SPD and Van Brunt were looking for—and whatever lengths they went to in order to find it—they've probably handed King County prosecutors the biggest pile of surveillance for gambling charges in state history. A few days ago, I asked an officer at the SPD about the extremes of the investigation and the paltriness of the charges.

"Yeah," he sighed. "This case was pretty low-yield."

The "journalists" in the "political activists, journalists, and established artists" part of Whedbee's prepared statement piqued my curiosity. What "journalists"? It turns out that my colleague Jen Graves, The Stranger's art critic, made the investigation reports (they mistakenly name her as "Jenna") because she wrote a profile of the Free Sheep Foundation in The Stranger. Free Sheep is a two-man arts organization (run by DK Pan and the painter NKO) that began curating arts events in 2007, starting with the Bridge Motel project, a collection of site-specific performances and installations in a soon-to-be-demolished motel on Aurora. Free Sheep has since worked for years with all kinds of legitimate arts institutions, including the Moore Theatre and 4Culture.

According to police reports and court charging papers, Free Sheep is nothing more than "a front" for a gambling operation that was "created only to generate plausible deniability to law enforcement, should suspicion arise."

But that's just not true.

I ask Graves if she had written about Free Sheep in The Stranger in order to "provide legitimacy" to a "front" for a criminal operation.

"How do I even answer that question?" she says. "It is completely absurd. Free Sheep was interesting and important artists in the city doing projects that really meant something to a lot of people. My first time experiencing them was the Bridge Motel project which was totally poignant and, frankly, one of the more meaningful public art projects I have ever seen."

I had also entered the investigation for my work covering the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis–St. Paul for The Stranger. According to the investigation reports, I was "a reporter covering the RNC during the day" so I could be "a protester at night." Which is so untrue that it's funny. I'm not the protesting type. I'm more of the stand-nearby-and-take-notes type. (But I do appreciate the robustness of the officer's imagination.)

The attorney Whedbee got a little shy about communicating with me when I wanted to talk to him about being in the police reports myself. "Is it possible," he asked, "that the police might be watching you?"

So. Here we have a local, small-stakes gambling case that involves just shy of two years of surveillance by multiple federal agencies profiling all kinds of people, including artists and journalists, for their social contacts—sometimes in ways that are sinister-sounding but in fact untrue, leading authorities to all kinds of dead ends about environmental activists, terrorists, and corrupt politicians.

"Look, I am not anti-cop," Rick Wilson tells me while sitting on a porch in West Seattle, a few days before leaving to begin his four-year prison sentence in Colorado. Rick, the main target in the two-year investigation, wound up sentenced to prison for an unrelated crime he committed years before the investigation began: buying guns (which is legal) to get them into the hands of Zapatista revolutionaries in Chiapas (which is illegal).

During the activist phase of his life, Rick sent aid to the Zapatistas, starting with medical supplies. He says it was "stupid" of him to buy guns for them but that he was moved to do so after hearing stories of government paramilitary soldiers killing women and children in Zapatista villages and men marching into combat with wooden facsimiles of guns. They didn't have the guns to defend themselves.

During Rick's sentencing hearing, even the prosecuting lawyer—US Attorney Andrew Friedman—pointed out that Rick "was not trying to make money" but was moved to help out of a sense of altruism. "In fact, he spent money doing this."

After Bryan's investigation, Rick says, the government needed something to charge him with. "We had to go charge shopping!" Rick says, laughing. "My lawyer was like, 'What have you done?' And I said: 'In my life, I've sold some untaxed cigarettes.' My lawyer was like, 'Good! That's great! How many?' I told him I'd sold a few packs and he was like, 'Boring, boring. That's not enough. Do you know about any unsolved murders?'"

Rick was eventually sentenced to 40 months in prison for agreeing to show up to that drug deal and for the Zapatista guns—"conspiracy to export firearms without a license." Conspiracy, says attorney Amanda Lee, is what the state charges you with when it doesn't have anything more robust. "Conspiracy law makes it very easy to rope in people on the periphery," she says, "and put them on the hook for something happening at the center."

In Rick's opinion: "Laws exist to protect people or communal things. If the state says, 'Don't dump toxic waste in that river,' I'm like, 'Go state!'" But, he asks, "is this what we want our government doing? Creating criminals to charge? Spending millions of dollars and years of officers' time to pressure someone to do something he'd never normally do?"

In a letter to a probation officer, prosecuting attorney Friedman admits that the government spent years trying to pressure Rick into doing something he'd never normally do. That letter is sealed by the court, but Rick's lawyer, Peter Offenbecher, summarizes its argument in the transcript of Rick's sentencing hearing: "In a real sense, and as Mr. Friedman accurately points out... Mr. Wilson had no role at all in negotiating the size of these transactions. He was simply an add-on, an extra person added to the sting... there are elements of entrapment... the local government spent two years insinuating a false friend to Mr. Wilson to the point where by the time he was arrested, Mr. Wilson actually thought this was his best friend, or one of his best friends... He had no clue. He was clueless."

"Bryan wanted me to go do radical stuff," Rick says. "He said, 'I've got the fire in my belly and my eyes are opened about how horrible the police are.' He wanted to do radical action. I sat him down and told him to cool his jets, gave him some books to read. I told him—in no uncertain terms—the pointlessness of indiscriminate environmental action. But he wanted me to burn things down."

Rick is smoking a pipe. He sets it down on the deck table and stares out at Puget Sound. "I'd like to line up all the people involved in this investigation," he says, "line them up in front of parents of missing children—of people who actually need law enforcement—and explain to them why they wasted years of officers' time on this when their kids are still missing. I want them to look them in the eye and see how good they feel about their fucking lives. I'm not that important. I'm really not. Society is no safer with me in prison."

Then he says something I've heard him (and DK and Brady and Junior and several others) say variations of before: "I didn't realize I was playing a chess game for my life with the FBI. They were playing chess, and I was off finger-painting in the corner."

The list of people who declined to comment for the record, either directly or through an intermediary, includes Detective Bryan Van Brunt and Sergeant Ryan Long as well as all the other police officers involved in the investigation; defendants DK Pan, Eric Sun, and Thoren Honeycutt; the soldier Bryan tried to convince to steal weapons from Fort Lewis; Rick Wilson's sister; real-estate mogul Martin Selig; Rick's attorney Peter Offenbecher; US Attorney Andrew Friedman; and Rick's sentencing judge, the Honorable Richard A. Jones, brother of internationally renowned jazz musician Quincy Jones.