It is inconceivable that Indymedia has not been infiltrated, not just by freelance, self-serving opportunists, and amoral, social climbing careerists, but by paid agents of a variety of various governments' intelligence services. Infiltration of alternative media is nothing new. Au contrair. By now, most modern activists have an at least passing acquaintance with the FBI's Sixties era dirty tricks campaign against the anti-war and civil rights movements, called COINTELPRO. Less well known is the CIA's Operation MHCHAOS. Since it was focused on domestic targets, it was technically illegal, and as such, was heavily covered up. It features prominently in Angus Mackenzie's Secrets: The CIA's War At Home, the definitive study of the CIA's resistance to the Freedom of Information Act, and a must read for any activist who wants to stay out of trouble and still be effective. IMCistas can learn much that is useful today from the history of how alternative media was infiltrated and manipulated back in the day. So let's examine one such case, that of the Quicksilver Times. As you read the following passage from Mackenzie's book, keep in mind how much more sophisticated their techniques must be, now that they have had four decades to refine them:

* * * * *

One of Ober's top agents, who excelled at analyzing divisions between political camps, was Chicago-born Salvatore John Ferrera, a diminutive young man with black hair, black eyes, and (according to his girlfriend of the time) a frightfully nervous stomach. He was recruited by the CIA while studying political science at Loyola University in Chicago. From his studies, he developed an ability to navigate the ideological, strategic, and tactical differences of the antiwar groups in the United States and abroad. Only a few bare facts of Ferrera's story as a domestic spy have surfaced, lines here and there in scattered news reports. The full story is still classified as secret, but what is now known provides a noteworthy illustration of Ober's operation at work.

Ferrera's first assignment was to infiltrate a group of antiwar activists who were setting out to publish a tabloid newspaper in Washington, D.C. Their leader was Terrence "Terry" Becker Jr., a former college newspaper editor and former Newhouse News Service reporter. Becker was struggling to assemble the first issue of Quicksilver Times when Ferrera walked up the stairs of a recently rented white clapboard house that was to serve the group as both home and office. With Ferrera was a friend, William Blum, who introduced Ferrera to Becker. Blum was an old hand in Washington's dissident circles. He had recently resigned from the State Department and in 1967 helped found the Washington Free Press. Becker welcomed Ferrera as Blum's buddy, and Ferrera offered to help Becker with the task at hand: building frames for light tables. Once finished, they inserted the bulbs and got down to the business of pasting together the first issue of Quicksilver Times.

Ober was kept well informed about Quicksilver and hundreds of newspapers like it. According to CIA officer Louis Dube, Ober soon learned that Quicksilver was "just making it financially" and that the newspaper "was not receiving outside financial help, foreign or domestic." Again, however, despite the lack of any evidence of foreign funding, Ober kept investigating. At Quicksilver, Ferrera made himself indispensable as a writer and photographer. His articles and photographs appeared in nearly every issue, in more than thirty issues altogether. After writing one piece under his own name -- on June 16,1969, in the first issue of the paper -- he assumed a pseudonym, Sal Torey.

Ferrera made an ideal domestic CIA operative: young and hip-looking, with a working vocabulary of the Left. Born January 5, 1945, to immigrant parents who owned a Chicago restaurant/bar, Ferrera was raised in a four-story brick house on a tree-lined street, to which he would return on holidays between CIA, assignments. His appearance was reasonably modish, with a Beatles-style haircut. After earning a master's degree at Loyola University, he had moved to Washington as a doctoral candidate in political science at George Washington University. At Loyola, Ferrera had written his master's thesis on Marxism, with particular emphasis on the conflict between orthodox Marxists and the upstarts Fidel Castro, Che Guevera, and Aegis Defray, who had advocated a leap into guerrilla struggle. Ferrera had read Marx on economics, Castro on revolution, and North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap on military tactics and strategy. Probably he was more widely read in the literature of the Left than were many of the dissident writers he was spying on. Ferrera's studies also gave him a fairly astute understanding of ideological divisions within the antiwar movement, divisions that other agents would later exploit to weaken the movement.

One of Ferrera's early targets was Karl Hess. An influential conservative Republican, Hess had headed the party's platform committee in 1960 and 1964 for Barry Goldwater, but by the late 1960s he had strayed from his party into the ranks of antiwar radicalism. He was editing a libertarian-anarchist newsletter, The Libertarian, and was about to launch a new publication, Repress, intended to document the growing repression of liberty in the United States. Hess was especially interested in uncovering police espionage and surveillance. Repress was never published, but Ferrera spent quite a lot of time working on it, all the while reporting back to Ober about Hess's activities.

Ferrera also sent Ober reports on the Youth International Party, better known as the Yippies. When the U.S. Justice Department indicted Yippie leaders Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and other antiwar activists for conspiring to cross state lines to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Quicksilver staff got parade permits for a protest march in front of the Justice Department. The subsequent "Chicago Eight" trial turned into a major courtroom confrontation between the Nixon administration and the antiwar movement. (The case became known as the "Chicago Seven" after defendant Bobby Seale was removed and tried separately.) Ferrera befriended the defendants and interviewed their lawyers, William Kunstler and Leonard Wingless, providing the CIA with inside intelligence about the most important political trial of the era. Ferrera's pose as a newsman allowed him to ask questions, take notes, and photograph his targets, and his pose as a friend of the movement let him insinuate himself into meetings where antiwar actions and legal strategies were planned.

Ober and FBI counterintelligence chief William Sullivan employed one special agent, Samuel Popish, just to carry thousands of daily reports by hand between FBI and CIA headquarters, and at least seven FBI informants were deployed around Becker, Ferrera, and Blum at Quicksilver. New volunteers at Quicksilver's staff meetings sowed op- position to the paper's founders, which led to a shutdown of the newspaper at a critical moment. Several of the supermilitant newcomers took control of the Quicksilver office and literally hurled Becker's allies out the door and down the stairs. A white female supporter of Becker was called a white racist by the black leader among the newcomers, who threw her to the floor and hit her in the face. Becker's allies did manage to get some of their production equipment out of the building, including their homemade light tables, and moved everything to another apartment building, but publication had to be suspended just as Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia. The answering protests were a high-water mark of the antiwar movement. College students conducted a nationwide strike at more than three hundred campuses, but Quicksilver was unable to print one word on the action.

In an FBI report about Quicksilver, since declassified, the FBI special agent in charge assured headquarters that he was continuing to use his agents to create dissension within protest groups. In his words, he was "continuing attempts to develop plans to utilize sources to promote political differences in New Left organizations." He also re- ported that he was planning to produce a newsletter to counter Quicksilver.

On May 8, 1970, Quicksilver Times resumed publishing and Salvatore Ferrera sent Ober several reports on the reconstituted newspaper commune. Terry Becker had been shaken by the earlier influx of disruptive volunteers. Because of the democratic form of Quicksilver meetings, meetings, the newcomers had each been accorded one vote and so were able to overthrow him. But now Becker was beginning to suspect this had been a government-directed coup, and he took steps to tighten his control of the paper and keep out dissenters. Becker would no longer accept people who simply showed up on his doorstep, posing as helpers. As it turned out, Ferrera also was eased out, even though Becker had no inkling that Ferrera was a CIA agent. "We collectivized at that point," Becker says. "If you worked on the paper, you had to live in the house. No outside income. If you had outside income, you pooled it. No outside jobs. The paper paid everybody's bills. We were criticized for being too closed, but it was the only way to avoid a repetition of what had happened."

Ferrera wrote that the collective was so tense and introspective he found it difficult to tolerate: "No male or female chauvinism is tolerated. Both sexes at the Quicksilver collective assist in all aspects of the commune. There is . . . plenty of sex and this causes problems." Ferrera reported that one woman was spending less time with the father of her child and more with another man. Ferrera told Ober that he could not imagine living so close to the people he was spying on, day in and day out. "He wouldn't even consider staying there," a CIA agent later reported.

Intelligence Testing

During the cold war, the U.S. government adopted a potpourri of regulations designed to keep its secrets as critics tried to use the First Amendment to expose government wrongdoing. The rationale was that the critics were giving aid and comfort to the communist-inspired enemies and had to be stopped. The real reason was that these critics were exposing information embarrassing to the government.

But now a compelling case can be made that all the damaging secrets were given away by the people paid to keep them. These were the years when the government tried to block publication of the Pentagon Papers, a study ordered by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara on how the nation went wrong in Vietnam, and an article in The Progressive magazine that, the government charged, violated the 1954 Atomic Energy Act by giving away secrets on how to build the H-bomb. Those two incidents, in 1971 and 1979 respectively, marked the only times the U.S. government went to court to use prior restraint to block publication. During this period the CIA tried to stop publication of books critical of the agency by former employees and the government prosecuted a Pentagon official, who also moonlighted for Jane's Defense Weekly, for giving away a photo classified secret of a Soviet aircraft carrier under construction in the U.S.S.R. An American spy satellite had taken the photo. As embarrassing as those publications might have been, they did not do one bit of damage to the nation's security.

At the same time, Aldrich Ames, a high ranking mole in the CIA, earned $2.5 million from the Soviet Union and Russia, selling secrets that resulted in the roundup and execution of several CIA agents in Moscow, and G-man Earl Edwin Pitts earned more than $200,000 selling FBI secrets to the Russians. Ames was sentenced to life in prison, Pitts to twenty-seven years. Edward Lee Howard was hired by the CIA to work in the Moscow station and instead he defected to Russia. Ronald Pelton, a National Security Agency employee, was convicted of giving away material gathered by the NSA, the nation's top secret spy satellite and electronic monitoring system. John Walker, a Navy non-commissioned officer, and his son Michael, traded away Navy secrets for cash. Jerry Whitworth, a Navy man, swapped his country's secrets for a Rolls Royce.

But all of the government's attention on security violations during the period was lavished on the Vietnam war protesters, the civil rights advocates, the whistle-blowers in the government who tried to expose waste, inefficiency, and corruption.

 Angus Mackenzie, a free-lance investigative reporter, has told an important part of the story in Secrets. Unfortunately he did not live to hold the magnificent volume in his hands. Mackenzie died on Friday, May 13, 1994, of brain cancer. He was 43. The manuscript was completed and edited by his friends.

 Mackenzie had the fire burning in his gut that goads a reporter into challenging conventional wisdom, exposing dishonesty, and highlighting moral corruption. In years of work, he pieced together the story of how the U.S. government created a vast apparatus of thought-control police, infiltrators, agents provocateur, technicians, and bureaucrats whose mission was to block the dissemination of government information to the American people.

His story starts with the domestic activities of the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1950s and '60s, when the CIA covertly financed and led the National Student Association. Those activities were illegal, since the legislation that established the agency in 1947 forbade it from carrying out operations at home. The student organization aimed to counter the international communist movement in its Moscow-dominated drive to turn students throughout the world against so-called Western imperialism. Most of that episode was exposed first in 1967 by Ramparts, the leading alternative magazine of the day. The story was picked up by the establishment press and became a sensation.

 Coupled with an earlier disclosure of how the CIA was using Michigan State University to help train anti-communist police forces overseas, the disclosures were too much for the CIA to tolerate. Its leaders formed a special unit to show that Ramparts was financed by money from overseas communists. Instead the agency discovered that the money to publish Ramparts came from its publisher, Edward Keating, a wealthy philanthropist, who was deducting his magazine's losses from his income taxes. Undeterred, the agency started a propaganda campaign against Ramparts.

Mackenzie details how the CIA's little anti-Ramparts unit metastasized into a larger organization that investigated virtually all of the alternative papers at the time. It even planted at least one agent provocateur, Salvatore John Ferrera, on the staff of the Quicksilver Times to spy on it.

 Before long the unit became known for running a program called MHCHAOS, authorized by the legendary CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, to carry out domestic political espionage at a priority level ranking with the agency's Soviet and Chinese operations. By the time the program was exposed, by Seymour Hersh in The New York Times in December 1974, MHCHAOS had in its files dossiers on 10,000 Americans.

The Freedom of Information Act was passed in 1966, allowing Americans to compel the government to release information. Government agencies fought the act relentlessly and, as in too many cases even today, they refused to comply. But that wasn't all. The MHCHAOS group began an intergovernmental drive to sign all government employees to a contract prohibiting first the disclosure of classified information and later "classifiable" information as well.

The secrecy contracts spread out of the executive branch into the congressional branch. The contracts, which started in the Johnson administration and have continued through the Clinton administration, made it impossible to produce evidence in courts if the government said release would harm the national security.

 At its height in 1983-84, Mackenzie writes, four million government employees could have been forced to sign the contracts. A few, like former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and the famous whistle-blower A. Ernest Fitzgerald, refused to sign, and that helped to publicize the restrictions of the secrecy contracts. Presidents and other high-ranking former officials such as Henry Kissinger have generally ignored the restrictions in writing their memoirs. No action has been taken against them.

Mackenzie tells of the metamorphosis of officials like Sen. Daniel Moynihan, who at first approved of the need for strict secret-keeping measures but changed his view as he studied security classification. He became a champion of restrictions on classification (a view he still strongly holds today).

 Mackenzie's book contains some surprises. For example, he criticizes the American Civil Liberties Union and its one-time Washington office head Morton Halperin. Halperin was a Johnson administration Defense Department official who helped write the Pentagon Papers and a Nixon administration aide to Kissinger on the National Security
 Council whom Kissinger hounded out of government in the belief that Halperin leaked information about the bombing of Cambodia. Halperin helped organize the defense of Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Mackenzie faults Halperin for negotiating compromises in the 1980s that brought the CIA under control of the Freedom of Information Act but contained loopholes that would permit the agency to withhold information about its illegal domestic activities.

This book does not end with a whimper. Instead, Mackenzie went out with a clarion call:

"The United States is no longer the nation its citizens once thought: a place, unlike most others in the world, free from censorship and thought police, where people can say what they want, when they want to, about their government. Almost a decade after the end of the cold war, espionage is not really the issue, if it ever really was. The issue is freedom . . . . The issue is principle . . . . Until the citizens of this land aggressively defend their First Amendment rights of free speech, there is little hope that the march to censorship will be reversed. The survival of the cornerstone of the Bill of Rights is at stake."

Listen up everyone. Help to ensure that Angus Mackenzie may rest in peace.

Mackenzie also taught at the School of Journalism at the University of California. Along with David Weir he was a co-founder of the Center for Investigative Reporting, where he managed contracts with 60 Minutes, 20/20, CNN, CBS News, ABC News, and many other outlets.

Mackenzie was particularly interested in the covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. Over many years he accumulated evidence of the CIA's systematic efforts to suppress and censor information. Mackenzie discovered that this covert operations originated during the Cold War as the CIA instituted programs of domestic surveillance and agent provocateur activities. This included infiltrating organizations to setting up CIA-front student groups.

Angus Mackenzie died on 13th May, 1994, of brain cancer. The manuscript he had been working on for fifteen years was completed and edited by his friends. Secrets: The CIA's War at Home, was published in 1998.

(snip) 

Operation What?

Read the First Chapter

Two years ago, I met an F.B.I. agent with whom I shared an interest in certain Central Intelligence Agency shenanigans. He shook hands, smiled and said: ''I feel like I know you. I've done three leak investigations on you.'' Angus Mackenzie might have appreciated the moment. He was a man obsessed by the Government's legal and illegal attempts to control information.

Mackenzie was the long-haired great-grandson of the magazine publisher S. S. McClure, who gave the great muckrakers Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens their platform at the start of this century. In 1970, when Mackenzie was 19, he was arrested for selling issues of an underground newspaper he had founded, called The People's Dreadnaught. From this formative experience onward, he was like a man who pulls a loose strand from a thick sweater and keeps pulling until he has unraveled half a mile of wool.

He spent the rest of his life as a freelance muckraker, gathering information on Government secrecy and striving to finish this book. Left in draft form at his death from brain cancer three years ago, completed by his friends and family, ''Secrets'' is Mackenzie's legacy: a book obsessed. Like the man, it is an unruly piece of work, but it grabs you by the lapels and holds on.

Throughout the cold war -- and after -- the White House asserted that the President has a right to control and classify information as he sees fit. Mackenzie argues that such sovereign powers are for kings, not freely elected leaders.

''Secrets'' begins with the C.I.A.'s assault on Ramparts magazine in 1966, after that leftist journal disclosed some of the agency's secret campus programs. The C.I.A., barred by its charter from spying on Americans, quickly began sending the White House reports on the editors and writers of Ramparts.

This exercise in extralegal snooping grew into a much larger effort: prying into the unruly world of the underground press. And that grew into Operation Mhchaos, the biggest domestic spying caper in the C.I.A.'s history, aimed in essence against Vietnam War protesters. The exposure of Mhchaos during and after Watergate remains a low point in the agency's history.

Chastened but determined, the agency started going after books -- for example, censoring large swatches of ''The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,'' by Victor Marchetti, a former C.I.A. officer, and John Marks. (This, of course, guaranteed the book's commercial success.) Then the agency refined its tactics, winning in court the right to enforce secrecy contracts with its employees.

In the 1980's, as Mackenzie explains, the Reagan Administration expanded this into a grand strategy to impose secrecy restrictions on all Government workers, on the principle that Presidents, not the people, own the information that the Government generates.

Since Mackenzie's death, the Clinton Administration has let some light into the enormous secrecy bureaucracy, but it also wants secrets kept where it sees fit. It saw nothing wrong with the C.I.A.'s destroying the career of a State Department official who blew the whistle on the agency's malfeasance in Guatemala. The White House has placed the National Security Council's records beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act. And F.B.I. agents are still conducting scores of leak investigations on reporters and their sources.

More than a quarter-century ago, around the time that Mackenzie was arrested for peddling The People's Dreadnaught, Justice Hugo L. Black of the Supreme Court wrote in the Pentagon Papers case: ''The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.'' That, simply stated, is what Angus Mackenzie is trying to say in this good old-fashioned broadside.

Early in 1981, shortly after John Lennon's murder on December 8, 1980, I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for any files the FBI had kept on Lennon. The FBI released some documents in May. But of the 281 pages staff said they had reviewed, they withheld 199 (more than 70 percent) in their entirety. The documents were withheld mostly under three different FOIA exemptions: protection of the privacy of others named in a document, protection of the identities of confidential sources, and "national security."1

The documents that were released included one page that had Lennon's name at the top but was otherwise blacked out under the national security exemption (see p. 170);

(snip)

The CIA released one of its Lennon documents in September 1984-a teletype dated February 8, 1972, reporting on Lennon's plan for a "caravan of entertainers who will follow U.S. primaries and raise funds for local radical groups along the way" (see p. 157). About half of it was blacked out under the national security exemption, but one word in the heading was released: "MHCHAOS."

Rosenbaum and Marmalefsky agreed that the word rang a bell, and since I was the historian, I was dispatched to the UCLA Research Library reference room. The news indices there were clear: "MHCHAOS" was a secret, illegal CIA program of surveillance of domestic political dissent, a violation of the CIA charter that had been revealed in 1976. "MH" was a CIA code indicating worldwide area of operations. The CHAOS program had been launched in August 1967, under Director Richard Helms, by James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's chief of counterintelligence, and headed by Richard Ober, a counterintelligence specialist in the Directorate of Plans, Harvard '43. Ober's tasks had already included developing CIA strategy to respond to the revelation by Ramparts magazine in February 1967 that the CIA had been secretly funding the National Student Association for fifteen years. Under the CHAOS operation, the investigation of Ramparts was expanded to cover the entire underground press and given "highest priority." To keep the illegal activity from being leaked by CIA employees, the operation was housed in the basement of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in specially shielded vaults that blocked electronic eavesdropping.

The CIA sent Operation CHAOS domestic intelligence reports on political dissent first to President Johnson and later to Nixon, as well as to Henry Kissinger and John Dean, counsel to the president. Under Nixon, the CHAOS program was expanded to sixty agents, who, according to Angus MacKenzie, "became the Nixon administration's primary source of intelligence about the antiwar leadership."17

CIA Operation CHAOS was revealed in 1976 by Representative Bella Abzug's House Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights. The CIA director at the time was George Bush, who conceded in congressional testimony that "the operation in practice resulted in some improper accumulation of material on legitimate domestic activities." He defended the agency, declaring that "only a very small fraction of reporting on the activities of American citizens in the US was done by the CIA." Abzug proposed that individuals who had been targets of Operation CHAOS be notified by the CIA and given a chance to review their dossiers. Bush replied that notification was unworkable and proposed instead that the CIA "destroy . . . all the information which was improperly collected under the so-called CHAOS program." Because of congressional insistence, Bush agreed that the FOIA would make Operation CHAOS files available under the Act.18 Thus the appearance of the CHAOS memo here (see p. 157).

(snip)

* * * * *

Continued at:

Reposted from Infoshop.org

Repression is a topic that is often discussed in the revolutionary milieu, but unfortunately it is a subject that is not well understood. Because of democratic baggage, repression is often understood as simply an anomalous and outrageous violation of rights. What people fail to comprehend is that repression is part of the standard operating procedure of any class society. There are those that rule and those who are ruled, and to maintain this divide, a combination of coercion and accommodation is necessary. To preserve the social structure of our society then, it is necessary to recuperate parts of social movements, and to repress the other parts. Essentially, repression is a strategy for maintaining power by capitalist ruling classes within nation-states. Thus, since it is a long-term strategy, it is always in motion and not some occasional occurrence.

When repression strikes and comrades are arrested, such as in the “green scare,” the reaction of many is to disassociate themselves from those who are being attacked by the state. Liberals, progressives, and most activists draw up official statements denouncing violence, sabotage, and illegality, all in hopes of proving to the government that they are just good citizens who like to follow the rules and who are interested in “positive” social change. This spineless response is standard for the left, and serves to flank the state’s actions. Disassociation is not only a cowardly act, but is also based on faulty logic.

The underlying premise of disassociation is that the state has reacted to a specific occurrence and that those being persecuted are responsible for bringing repression upon themselves and everyone else. Certainly there are specific acts that the state responds to, such as actions of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), but this is not where repression stems from. In actuality, repression is a long-term strategy employed by the state regardless of specific illegal acts and is an attempt to maintain the status quo by any means necessary. Repression, then, is always present in many forms. It is the police, the courts, the prison system, the proliferation of security cameras, the immigrant detention centers and the like. If anyone needs further proof that the state doesn’t merely punish people for breaking its laws, and instead represses in order to destroy its opposition, one need only take a look at recent events.

A well-known example of state repression within the anarchist milieu is the infiltration of various conferences, protests and even affinity groups by one particular state agent: Anna Davies. Following the arrests of Lauren Weiner, Zachary Jenson and Eric McDavid in January 2006 for conspiracy to commit several acts of sabotage, the government revealed that one of the three’s comrades was in fact in the employ of the state. What’s more is that the government funneled money to Anna to rent a house where planning allegedly took place and to pay for supplies to commit these alleged acts. When this information was revealed, comrades across the country quickly posted photographs of Anna to popular anarchist and activist sites, and within days a picture of Anna’s activity was pieced together.

Rather than simply being involved with the three people arrested in California, Davies had been actively working for the FBI as far back as 2003. She has taken part in major protests such as the Democratic National Convention in 2004, the 2004 anti-G8 Protest in Georgia, the June 2005 Organization of American States protest in Florida, and the Bio-Democracy protest in Philadelphia, also in June of 2005. Along with major convergences, Davies attended anarchist conferences and gatherings in 2005 such as Feral Visions in the Appalachian Mountains and the CrimethInc Convergence in Indiana. On various Indymedia sites she also solicited photographs and video of protests under the guise of publicity, but it should be presumed that any information sent to her was added to the FBI’s intelligence base.

So the intention behind her infiltration was not to help solve a particular case, or to investigate one specific crime. Instead, she was employed as an infiltrator to gather information about the anarchist scene in general. It should also not be surprising that the case that she is currently involved in focuses on alleged acts that were planned to occur in the future, not ones that had already occurred. Based solely on the evidence made available to the public, it is not hard to see that the FBI was facilitating these alleged crimes by renting a house for Davies and the three arrested people and funneling money via Davies for supplies. In effect, the state was justifying their existence through aiding and abetting. In the US government’s latest terror war, arrests and examples need to be made; Weiner, Jenson, and McDavid have served this purpose quite well.

In addition to the case of Anna Davies is the 2003 infiltration of direct action anti-war groups in California. In July 2006, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California released a detailed report in which they documented a variety of instances in which local police departments, along with the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, placed officers into anti-war groups. First and foremost they infiltrated the groups in order to gather information, but more insidiously, the police hoped to steer the organizations in a direction more useful to the state. When asked why officers had been placed in the San Francisco group Direct Action to Stop the War (DASW), Captain Howard Jordan of the Oakland Police Department stated: “if you put people in there from the beginning, I think we’d be able to gather the information and maybe even direct them to do something that we want them to do.” Clearly the state’s perspective is one of infiltrating in order to undermine.

This strategy manifested itself on multiple occasions. In April of 2003, DASW organized a picket at the Port of Oakland in opposition to the war in Iraq. At least one shipping company at the Port was handling war supplies, and the group organized to shut the port down for the day. Nearly 500 demonstrators took part, splitting into smaller groups to picket the various entrances to the port. The Oakland Police Department, however, was prepared. Through surveillance, police had already gathered information about the protest, and in this instance, they also brutally attacked demonstrators with rubber bullets, tear gas, and wooden dowel shots causing scores of injuries. In response to the police crackdown, DASW organized an anti-police brutality march in May of 2003. What members of the group did not know was that they had elected police infiltrators to plan out the route for their march. No one, not even the police, could fail to see the irony of that situation. While in their report the ACLU decries the actions of the police as evidence of misconduct, these acts should more importantly be viewed as evidence of the state’s attempts to undermine and destroy opposition to it.

As shown by FBI infiltration of anarchist demonstrations and events and local police infiltration of protest groups, it is easy to see that they were not investigating crimes that had taken place, but rather they were investigating possibilities of concrete resistance, which by necessity, generally break the law. This shows that there are plenty of examples, and certainly many that we may never know about, which demonstrate that repression already exists and is underway. It is not intermittent, and does not always respond to particular violations of the law; it is a long-term strategy of the state to destroy opposition. This strategy, however, has wider implications beyond the bounds of the radical milieu and affects the exploited as a whole.

The New Repressive Strategy

Author Kristian Williams, in his book Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, examines fundamental changes in the repressive strategy of the United States government. His main observation, which he thoroughly documents with official papers and statements, is that following the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, the state switched to a strategy of permanent repression, or as he calls it, counter-insurgency. Learning from their past failures, the police developed a preemptive model of repression which sought to prevent insurgency before it happened. Williams outlines two major components functioning hand in hand: militarization and community policing.

Militarization is one of the most obvious changes within police departments in the United States. In city centers across the US, police departments are well armed and equipped for urban warfare. Not only has their weaponry been upgraded in a variety of ways, but also newer and more powerful firearms are available. Armored personnel carriers (APCs), helicopters and even tanks are at their disposal, as are a multitude of so-called non-lethal weapons such as tasers, tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper spray, which are known to kill and permanently injure people. But it is not only the tools, but also the manner of organization and the scope of the mission that define militarization.

Organizationally, many police departments were restructured along military lines into squads and platoons, and paramilitary units were created as well. Special Weapons and Tactics units, better known as SWAT teams, are a manifestation of militarization in terms of organization, armament, and dress. Created in the late 1960s, their first missions involved raids on Black Panther Party headquarters and on the hideout of the Symbionese Liberation Army. SWAT teams were also mobilized dozens of times in relation to the activities of the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee. Now however, SWAT teams aren’t simply used for “extreme” situations or in the case of potential shootouts; they are also used for routine patrolling in the ghettoes of many major cities. In this way, paramilitary units –equipped with machine guns— targeting people for ID checks, loitering, and even traffic violations, has become a normal part of life for the most exploited members of this society. This is but one part of the state’s counter-insurgency campaign.

Community policing is the friendly face, and perhaps the more insidious side, of the new repressive strategy. Community policing developed in response to the state’s inability to predict and control urban uprisings in the 60s and 70s and was designed, “to build a bond between the police and the public in hopes that this would increase police legitimacy, give them better access to information, intensify penetration of community life and expand the police mission.” This is not the same as infiltration because it is an overt attempt to work with civic organizations, churches, homeowners, and the general public in order to transform people into the eyes and ears of the state. Some of the tactics employed include: neighborhood watch groups, public forums, meetings with religious and civic leaders, foot and bike patrols, a focus on minor offenses, citizen volunteer opportunities, and police sponsored community activities such as Night Out Against Crime. This is how the police and the state worm their way into the social networks of various neighborhoods in order to gain legitimacy. Therefore when force is used, it is presented as being validated by “community support.”

Community policing has also expanded the role of the police from simply dealing with violations of the law to an overall focus on “public order” and “quality of life.” This is based on the Broken Windows theory which argues that small issues such as rundown property and juvenile loitering eventually contribute to an ever-growing sense of disorder in the neighborhood and consequently, to greater violations of the law. This means that rather than simply focusing on serious offences, the police also focus on many smaller crimes that supposedly lower the quality of life and eventually snowball into great social disturbances. Quality of life issues include ridding neighborhoods of graffiti, breaking up homeless encampments, and dealing with noise complaints; this focus essentially promotes a zero-tolerance approach to crime. The underlying premise is that any amount of lawbreaking, whether it is jaywalking or kids hanging out on corners, contributes to ever-greater lawlessness.

The confluence of community policing and militarization amounts to nothing less than a consistent campaign of counter-insurgency. Penetrating communities and including common people in the state apparatus, in combination with paramilitary units and a war-based conception of crime, are part of a strategic shift to preempt any major disorder or uprisings. Poor neighborhoods and districts, especially black and Latino ghettoes, which were the source of much insurgency during the 1960s and 1970s, are hit particularly hard by this preemptive strategy. Undoubtedly, since the exploited pose a permanent threat to the social order, there is a direct connection between this daily repression and the repressive activity focused specifically on radicals.

If we begin to understand repression as a strategy of the state that is continually in operation, then we must transform our way of dealing with it. In the US, radicals deal with it in a reactive way: first the state strikes, then we come out with posters, leaflets, statements, and attempts to raise money for our imprisoned comrades. This is of course assuming that repression is even responded to; most choose to look the other way as long as it poses no threat to themselves or their acquaintances. Unfortunately, the mentality of some is that those being targeted by the state are responsible for bringing repression upon themselves. Without simply repeating the usual principles of revolutionary solidarity, we feel the need to reaffirm that it’s important to start using our heads and thinking about what can be done outside of the usual support campaigns. Comrades in Spain, once again, have given us some examples to learn from.

On February 9, 2006, two anarchist comrades, Ruben and Ignasi, were arrested in Barcelona for an arson attack on a prison labor company and for vandalism at a bank. The anarchist response to the arrests was immense. Graffiti and propaganda covered walls in many neighborhoods in Barcelona, and dozens of acts of sabotage were carried out in solidarity with them. Individuals attacked banks and ATMs across Spain, a satellite signal antenna was destroyed in Barcelona, and the offices of real estate companies were targeted. Public demonstrations were held in support of the imprisoned comrades, and on a few occasions in Barcelona, major intersections were shut down during rush hour, as banners flew and flyers were handed out to passersby. The acts of sabotage were not random; they were an extension of pre-existing fights against gentrification and the media’s repeated efforts to label anarchists and autonomists as domestic terrorists. Thus they served to intertwine and deepen the implications of their resistance. And in their resistance, comrades in Spain employed a variety of tools: posters, graffiti, sabotage, protests, and blockades. Perhaps more importantly they demonstrated a refusal to allow the state to kidnap their comrades without repercussions.

Outside of the scope of friends and comrades being taken by the state, there is the daily repression that is ever growing. We need to get in the habit of resisting the daily indignities that are imposed upon us by this regime of repression. They will push us to see how far we will bend, to make us bow and show respect to authority. They hope to police our every move, to make simple things illegal, for the sake of constantly having a reason to interfere with our lives. This is manifesting itself in a variety of ways: the proliferation of video surveillance devices monitoring public spaces, constant harassment for identification, more aggressive policing of demonstrations, random searches, and more importantly, the racist policy of mass incarceration. All of these changes are the result of the convergence of interests between states and businesses with mutually reinforcing agendas. One of the most nefarious aspects of this growing network of control is the way in which it is normalized over time. We get used to being watched, inspected, harassed, beaten and treated like prisoners. The media is complicit in this process by continually promoting a climate of fear –fear of pedophiles, gangs, immigrants, and eco-terrorists—that serves to build democratic support for repression.

There are some precedents for struggle against the slow creep of repressive technologies. In Britain there has been widespread sabotage over the past several years of speed cameras, which seek to catch drivers violating the speed limit. Hundreds of cameras have been destroyed across the country by chainsaws, burning tires, and rifles. The recent implementation of speed cameras in Australia has produced the same reaction. Surveillance cameras, however, are more prolific and more useful to police. In many cities across the world, surveillance cameras are routinely targeted with rocks, paint, and hammers. People generally use brightly colored paints to disable the cameras and draw attention to them. Cameras are only one part of the repressive web that threatens to envelop us, but are certainly a worthy target.

Also, anarchists and other radicals in many countries have initiated projects that focus on immigrant detention. In Australia in 2002, there was a direct attack on the Woomera detention facility by hundreds of people who tore down several layers of security fences. This allowed several detainees to escape. In Greece in December of 2004, anarchists held a solidarity rally with Afghan immigrants who had been tortured by the police. There, the demonstrators attacked the police station where the torture had occurred. In Lecce, Italy, a very determined struggle against the Regina Pacis detention center has been developing over the last three years. Riots have broken out in the facility, and sabotage and arson attacks were undertaken against those who manage and profit from it. As long as capitalism exists, it will ravage large parts of the world, sending people on forced marches across deserts, oceans, and national borders; thus these revolutionary projects of immigrant solidarity are worthy of close study.

If we hope to have any impact upon repression, we need to begin refusing their commands and disobeying their orders, and start thinking about ways we can meet face-to-face with others who are facing state repression. When the state hits us, let’s hit back. After all, like the police argue, a few broken windows eventually lead to full-scale disorder.

by Kellen Kass

Reposted from Infoshop.org

A Murder of Crows
PO Box 20442
Seattle, WA 98102

From the brand new A Murder of Crows #2

>Notes>

1. We are still unsure about whether or not Anna Davies is the informant’s real name, but for the article we will use that name for the sake of simplicity.

2. At this time, both Lauren Weiner and Zachary Jenson have taken plea deals and agreed to cooperate against Eric McDavid. For more information see: www.supporteric.org

3. State of Surveillance ACLU report, p. 13. Available online: www.aclunc.org/issues/government_surveillance/the_state_of_surveillance.shtml

4. Kristian Williams. Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. p 239

5. Williams p 237

6. Calling this strategy counter-insurgency is not in any way a hyperbole, because occupying armies in situations such as Algeria and Ireland primarily developed these strategies. While there is too much to go into here, William’s Our Enemies in Blue is an excellent resource for gaining a deeper understanding of this phenomenon.

7. For more information about the UK speed camera attacks, see http://www.speedcam.co.uk/, and for the Australian case, see “Speed Cameras: The War Begins,” available at: http://sydney.indymedia.org/node/38981

8. Also for information on anarchist activity against immigrant detention centers see “An Example of Struggle Against Deportation and Detention Centers for Immigrants” in the first issue A Murder of Crows

Also on this web site:
• The "Green Scare" One Year and Beyond: Looking Back, Moving Forward
• Green Scare defendants plead guilty but are not implicating others
• The Irrepressible Anarchists: federal infiltration and repression — what it means, what to do, what not to fear

To Overthrow the Government

02.02.2007 02:13

IMCer

(snip)

(snip)

According to a feature on Global Indymedia, the Athens IMC has been targeted by the Greek gov’t in its “anti-terrorist summer,” a program its using to persecute leftist political activists:

By the end of September, Indymedia Athens was among the groups targetted in the witch-hunt climate, with establishment journalists contending that the “site is supporting the terrorists; therefore it must be shut down and those responsible for it arrested.” Soon later, there was an attempt by the head of the Department of Cyber Crime of the Greek national police to infiltrate the editorial group of the Athens IMC. Athens Indymedia, however, has also seen support in favor of freedom of speech.

The Athens IMC editorial collective has issued a statement, and has further coverage in English.

Part Three

The similarities between the Phoenix Program and the OHS are obvious, and with its computerized database of terrorist suspects, Phoenix is certainly the organizational model for an OHS-style counter-terror program based on "intelligence coordination and exploitation." 3

But as everyone is aware, the threat of radical Islamic terrorism is not comparable to the insurgency in Vietnam. In that case America rushed to defend a hapless ally, thousands of miles away, much as we did in Kuwait. In the present situation, the OHS has been created to defend us from terrorists on our own turf. Its counter-terror function is equivalent to that of providing internal security, in so far as the Bush Administration defines "internal security" in political terms.

Historically, and ironically, the U.S. Government considered Native Americans as our homeland's first domestic terrorists, and various methods were devised to deal with the threat, such as the distribution of blankets infected with smallpox.

Abolitionists, whether peaceful or violent like John Brown, also were regarded as terrorists, and for decades the reactionary right wing of American civilization, and its unreconstructed representatives in the government (many of whom still hold office), regarded the Ku Klux Klan as a legitimate means of countering the terror of Emancipation. Indeed, until today, the reactionary right wing still considers a "genuine" American to be an active proponent of this ideology, with its repulsive mix of racial purity, patriotism, and Christian fundamentalism, with its divine savior nailed to the cross, a symbol of the spiritual terror that enabled our Founding Fathers to rationalize slavery in the land of free and the home of brave.

Segregation persisted as unstated policy, and by the late 19th Century, organized labor had emerged as our homeland's new breed of domestic political terrorists; and after private police forces proved ineffective in eliminating the unions, the U.S. Government created the FBI to nullify the threat labor posed to its Robber Baron patrons. The FBI quickly established that foreigners (mostly Jews, Bolsheviks and immigrants with no rightful claim to America as their "homeland") were controlling the labor movement. Over the years Communists replaced Bolshevists, and eventually Civil Rights and Anti-War activists were added to the hit list of domestic terrorists--all of which brings us the FBI's notorious Counter Intelligence Program.

Created in the late 1950s, COINTELPRO was designed to neutralize "radical" political movements inside the U.S. In its attempt to provide decent Americans with "internal security," the FBI employed agent provocateurs, conducted burglaries, engaged in black propaganda (disinformation), fraud, and perhaps in the case of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and several other black leaders, outright assassination. 4

But COINTELPRO failed to neutralize America's Anti-War and Civil Rights insurgency, and by 1967, President Johnson and the FBI were sensing the presence of foreign intelligence agencies. And the mere fear that the KGB was directing the Anti-War and Civil Rights movements provided the FBI with the pretext to enlist the CIA in domestic intelligence operations. The precipitating event was a February 1967 expose in Ramparts magazine, which revealed that the CIA had suborned the leadership of the National Student Association. The exposure of this illegal CIA domestic activity prompted even moderate students to join and support radical, alternative organizations like the Students for a Democratic Society. The Anti-War movement blossomed like never before.

The Ramparts revelation, and the resulting surge in anti-establishment activities, was deemed to be a Soviet provocation, and confirmed the FBI's suspicions that foreign agitators were fueling the Anti-War and Civil Rights movements, so Johnson ordered the CIA to investigate Robert Scheer, the author of the Ramparts article. Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms gave the job to veteran CIA officer Richard Ober, a Harvard graduate (1943), World War II veteran, and member of the CIA's counter-intelligence staff. And thus came Operation Chaos--which, with its counterpart organizations in the Justice Department and White House, enabled the CIA and political ideologues to get involved in "internal security" operations such as will be conducted by the OHS. 5

Ober's Counter-Intelligence, Special Operations Group (CI/SOG), codenamed MHCHAOS, was created in August 1967, concurrent with the Phoenix Program (and for a similar purpose), and existed until March 1974. Its initial mission, ostensibly on behalf of the FBI, was to collect intelligence information on radical domestic political groups, to discover if they were being manipulated by foreign intelligence agencies.

To coordinate Chaos and COINTELPRO operations, Johnson's attorney general, Ramsay Clark, created the Interdepartmental Intelligence Unit (IDIU) within the Justice Department's Internal Security Division. Ober became the CIA's representative on the IDIU, which (like the OHS) was managed by senior members from the White House staff. In other words, from its inception, CIA intelligence information on dissidents was reported to people whose primary interest was in politics, not internal security.

Upon assuming office in January 1969, President Nixon immediately grasped the partisan political potential of the IDIU, which he moved under the Civil Rights Division. In June 1969, through his advisor on Domestic Affairs, John Dean--and Dean's youthful assistant, Tom Huston--Nixon directed Ober to engage Chaos in covert actions against dissidents. Ober was assigned a deputy and a case officer whose names remain secret until today. The deputy and the case officer moved into Ober's suite of offices in a vault in the basement at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Among the rooms was a library where files were kept and where slides of suspects and potential recruits were viewed. Several female CIA officers managed the precious, super secret Chaos files.

Central to Chaos was its super-secrecy. Assignment to CI/SOG was considered a "command performance," and security was commensurate with the responsibility. Ober, at the direction of his immediate supervisor, Counter-Intelligence Chief James Angleton, devised a communications system exclusively for Chaos cables and couriers to overseas stations. These "back-channels" by-passed the geographical division chiefs and reached right into the stations, to trusted counter-intelligence officers. In some cases Chaos by-passed the station chiefs, and corresponded directly with its unilateral assets and representatives in a country. Chaos "traffic" carried the highest security classification, was restricted only to those involved in the operation (as were Chaos files), and was inaccessible even to the CIA's top administrators, often for their own protection.

Based on names provided by the FBI (and the CIA's Offices of Security, Domestic Contacts, Foreign Resources, and Domestic Operations 6 ) the Chaos case officer in October 1969 began recruiting double agents from within the Black Power and Anti-War movements. The case officer approached only those people with "radical" credentials. Only those who proved trustworthy (some were polygraphed, others given psychological assessments) were recruited. Recruits were given a training course in the clandestine arts, supplied with the proper technical equipment and sufficient funds, sheep-dipped (meaning their records were falsified), and then sent overseas. The case officer referred to his 40-50 double agents as "dangles," because their job was to operate as a dissident normally would, and hope that a foreign intelligence agent would make an approach.

With the approval of Nixon's National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, the Pentagon joined in the counter-terror effort through a secret committee formed under the aforementioned Tom Huston, and began leveling requirements on the Chaos unit. The Pentagon was intent on tracking deserters, and gathering information on foreign nationals who were attempting to persuade American soldiers to desert from military bases in Germany. Chaos dangles were sent to North Vietnam, North Africa and Cuba, and one Chaos agent, possibly Timothy Leary, was launched against Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria.

Here it is important to remember that Bush has granted the CIA unprecedented freedom to coordinate with law enforcement and military officials, through the OHS. Previous restrictions on CIA domestic operations have been waived. As Bob Woodward reported in the 21 October Washington Post, CIA covert action is now a key element in defending America from terrorist attacks. Every day the CIA provides the Bush Administration's top national security and intelligence officials--including OHS Director Tom Ridge--with current intelligence on possible bombings, hijackings or poisonings within the U.S. But other than the anthrax outbreak, which appears to be the work of the radical right, none of the threats has materialized, and there is no way of knowing if, as the CIA is wont to do, the anthrax outbreak has been manufactured for purely political and psychological warfare reasons.

It also is likely that the CIA, on behalf of the OHS, will start sprinkling Chaos-type dangles overseas, and within the United States, to tempt terrorists into exposing themselves. It is a chilling prospect, but these dangles may exist only on paper, with the sole purpose of contriving reasons to launch counter-terror operations against opponents of Bush Administration policy. Hundreds of businesses and institutions across the country have already been placed on the CIA's watch list. According to Woodward, one Bush official said that merely being on the list "could destroy the livelihood of all those organizations without a bomb being thrown or a spore of anthrax being released."

Loss of livelihood is perhaps the heaviest psychological hammer a security agency can hold over a middle class American's head. But that's what it's come down to.

You Don't Need A Weatherman

Incidental to their role as dangles designed to entrap foreign agents, Chaos agents reported on U.S. citizens. A folder, or hard file, was created for each suspected dissident the CIA targeted. The folder contained the dissident's 201 "personality" file, as well as Situation Reports about his or her radical activities. The 201 file included every scrap of biographical information about the person, from arrest records to report cards to surreptitious photos taken of the person with other suspects. Some 7-10,000 hard files were eventually assembled.

In May 1970, Chaos chief Richard Ober starting entering the information from his index cards and hard files onto IBM cards, and compiling them in a data base codenamed HYDRA, which ultimately contained the names of some 300,000 people. HYDRA was developed at the same time as the Phoenix computer system in Vietnam. A mail intercept program codenamed HTLINGUAL also was part of the Chaos operation.

Thirty years later, far more sophisticated databases exist in the United States, and so much information is already available on every American citizen, that a computerized, national ID card system isn't required to keep track of everyone. But the on-going anthrax scare, which may be a CIA provocation, could serve as the pretext to institute, under the OHS, a mail intercept program similar to HTLINGUAL. And OHS Director Tom Ridge already has a deputy, "cyber security expert" Richard Clarke, to monitor and ultimately censor all politically incorrect Internet information.

As is well known, the paranoid Nixon Administration--whose ideology is compatible with Bush's--was ruthless in the application of its executive authority to attack its domestic political "enemies" under the aegis of national security. To this end, the Nixon Administration formed the IDIU's secret Intelligence Evaluation Committee in December 1970 under Robert Mardian, the assistant attorney general in charge of Internal Security. Mardian reported directly to Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell. A major player in Nixon's illegal political and fundraising schemes, Mitchell was sentenced for his Watergate crimes in February 1975.

Bush's right wing attorney general, John Ashcroft, will be a major player at OHS, and can be expected to play the same partisan political role for Bush as Mitchell played for Nixon. Indeed, it is evident from the records of the 1975 Report by the President's Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States that Chaos agents, at the behest of White House officials, operated domestically, illegally, and that Chaos operations were directed against non-violent dissidents, including Daniel Ellsberg, the Berrigan Brothers, Tom Hayden, and others. Many of these activists had important political connections, and by association, Left politicians came under Chaos scrutiny. The coverage was vast, and in order to advance policies he wished to keep secret from the secretaries of State and Defense, Kissinger kept close track of the most critical Chaos operations, especially agent operations that might impact his secret peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese.

One of Chaos' most important agents played a critical though undisclosed role at the May 1971 anti-war demonstrations in Washington. DC. And at least one Chaos agent may have been involved in the Watergate scandal that brought down Nixon.

Yes, by 1971 Ober and the Chaos unit were working for Nixon's secret team of political dirty tricksters, the infamous Plumbers. Master Plumber G. Gordon Liddy, a deranged former FBI agent with a penchant for eating live rats, actually leveled requirements on Ober at the Intelligence Evaluation Committee. Before Liddy and his partner in crime, CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, were imprisoned for burglarizing the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, they directed Ober to spy on members of other government agencies, as well as on Nixon's political and bureaucratic "enemies".

Ober, who died earlier this year, is thought to have reacted negatively to this ultimate violation of the Constitution, and at least one researcher has suggested that he may have been Woodward's Deep Throat. But there's never any guarantee that any CIA officer will ever break ranks, and the threat of Nixon-style abuses loom large under the OHS and the illegitimate Bush Administration, with its fascist ideology and unprecedented, dictatorial emergency powers.

The Shell Game

Incredible power was concentrated in the Chaos office. Ober was the CIA's liaison to the National Commission on Civil Disorders and to the Ginsburg Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. He was the CIA's liaison to the protean Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, and to the Special Services units (Red Squads) of America's major metropolitan police departments. He reported directly to DCI Richard Helms (later convicted of lying to Congress about the CIA's major role in the violent coup that toppled the elected government of Chile, and resulted in the torture and murder of thousands of Leftists), and he sat on the Huston Committee, which was chaired by FBI Counter Intelligence chief William C. Sullivan (assassinated in 1977). 7

However, by mid-1972, CIA Executive Director William E. Colby was concerned that revelations of illegal CIA domestic political activities, on behalf of the Nixon Administration, might destroy the Agency. The big problem was Ober's association with rat-eater Liddy and his partner in crime, CIA officer Howard Hunt, and it is probably not a coincidence that the Chaos "case officer" was reassigned concurrently with the 17 June 1972 arrest of the five Watergate buggers. The IDIU was dissolved six months later.

By September 1973, Colby was the new Director of Central Intelligence, and had prepared a list of the CIA's "family jewels," an array of illegal domestic activities--now legal under the Bush Administration--which Colby felt should be revealed. The abuses included spying on politicians and government agencies, helping other agencies conduct domestic surveillance, and following U.S. citizens abroad. Colby blamed counter-intelligence chief James Angleton for the public relations disaster, and forced his retirement, amid much bitterness and rancor.

But Colby's "limited hangout" and scapegoating of Angleton were part of a clever shell game, and the Chaos staff continued to conduct name traces, and follow dissidents abroad, and respond to FBI and military requirements. Everything was exactly the same as before, including the ultra-secure communications system and restricted filing system, except now it was acceptable because it was done under the aegis of counter-terrorism.

Colby started the ball rolling in July 1972, when he assigned Ober a second job as Chief of the CIA's newly created International Terrorism Group (ITG). Ober told the Rockefeller Commission that his new responsibility was "setting up and running a central program" within the CIA of information on international terrorism and hijackings, and very possibly the penetration of terrorist training camps in Algeria, Cuba and other enemy states. The ITG also kept track of homeland-based black militants and white racists with international terror connections. ITG reports were, like Chaos reports, were sent to Kissinger at the National Security Council.

Ober's appointment as chief of ITG coincided with the establishment of Nixon's Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism, the first U.S. Government entity of its kind. But even after the official termination of Chaos in March 1974, the ITG continued to exist in the same suite of offices in the same vault in the CIA's basement.

In March 1974 Ober was assigned other duties and a new ITG chief (not named in the Rockefeller Commission Report) was assigned. The second ITG chief (perhaps Lawrence K. White), had no deputy or case officer, and was assisted by approximately ten female file clerks in what is described as basically an "analytical" capacity. But ITG operations still relied on the Chaos folders and computer tapes, which were maintained and updated. As of 1975, despite the recommendations of several Congressional Committees, no Chaos files had been destroyed, because the CIA could not adequately define a "dissident."

Senior CIA officer John Ryan became the third ITG chief in April 1975 and served until 1977, when he was replaced by veteran CIA officer Howard Bane.

While Chaos was evolving into the CIA's International Terrorism Group, the Phoenix Program--which did not expire with South Vietnam in April 1975--was being employed as the model for a worldwide anti-terrorism unit in the CIA's paramilitary Special Operations Division (SOD). Its main proponents, all veterans of the Phoenix Program, had climbed the corporate ladder and were in positions to turn their monster loose on all mankind.

Colby, the "father" of Phoenix and its staunchest defender before Congressional Hearings in 1970 and 1971, appointed his close friend, Evan Parker (the first Phoenix Director) as chief of the SOD in 1973. Parker awarded CIA officer Robert Wall (self-described as the "grandfather" of Phoenix, for his pioneering work on a pilot program in 1966) the first "terrorism account," and then began reorganizing the SOD to fight Communist insurgencies, using the Phoenix anti-terrorism model.8

The CIA's resident counter-terrorists found willing allies, invariably fascist military dictators, around the world, and gladly taught them how to terrorize entire nations into submission, through the arcane art of political and psychological warfare. Perhaps the CIA's greatest success, in this regard, was achieved in the midst of the Watergate scandal, under the supervision of Kissinger, Colby, and the CIA's Western Hemisphere Division chief, Theodore Shackley.

Donald Freed in Death In Washington (p 83-84) describes the CIA's covert action that resulted in the bloody right-wing military coup in Chile September 1973. Devised by the CIA's resident "black propaganda" expert, David Atlee Phillips, the plan used "classic depth psychology and behavior modification techniques to program individual Chileans toward a destiny of victims or executioners. The CIA aim was to "serialize" and atomize the Chilean people by using psychological terror to fractionate what had been growing popular unity behind (Allende's) government." Freed explains that, "Under the CIA program the middle classes had to be organized to "save freedom," the military to impose temporary controls, the workers to give up their drive for power."

The centerpiece of the CIA's Track II plan to overthrow the elected government of Chile, by terrorizing the middle class through incredible acts of violence, was the widespread publication of pictures of a man who was allegedly "quartered" by radical leftists--but who in fact was mutilated by the CIA's proxies in the Chilean secret service, DINA.

This ability to commit the most horrific acts of terror, and successfully blame them on its enemies through black propaganda, is what makes the CIA's inclusion in the OHS so dangerous. This one-two punch, in conjunction with the CIA's expertise at "provoked responses" and "false flag recruitments," also makes the CIA itself a prime suspect in the terror attacks of 11 September, and the current propaganda campaign being waged in America now, as a pretext to threaten terror against the Bush Administration's domestic political opponents, as well as to win support from the terrified middle class for the illegitimate Bush regime.

Homeland Insecurity Continued in Part Four:
The Terrorism Account Goes Underground

Douglas Valentine writes frequently for CounterPunch. He is the author of The Phoenix Program, the only comprehensive account of the CIA's torture and assassination operation in Vietnam, as well as TDY a chilling novel about the CIA and the drug trade.

http://www.publiceye.org/liberty/Feds/cointelpro.html.
 Below are a
few excerpts from a 1978 article by Mark Ryter.  I have also included
some excepts from the article's introduction, which was written by
Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky's introduction is interesting because in it he talks about the
engineering of consent via the direct use of force, as opposed to the
use of public propaganda campaigns.  While certain people in
privileged positions may be free to speak out in America, that is
decidedly not the case for those Americans who are extrajudicially
targeted for clandestine life-destruction.  Chomsky relates the story
of one of his former students who was fired from his university job
due to FBI smear tactics, and who was also "the target of an
assassination attempt by a secret terrorist army organized, funded,
armed and directed by the FBI."

As Chomsky's example makes clear, the FBI's methods were not simply
juvenile pranks (just as the beatings, rapes, murders, and other acts
of physical and psychological torture at Abu Ghraib were much more
than just a few Iraqis forced to wear panties on their heads and
listen to Barney the Dinosaur repetitively).  This "ridicule factor,"

though, is very American.  The US has a culture of ridicule.  I call
the exploitation of this tendency in order to minimize US abuses and
further humiliate victims "the American clown suit technique."

Note that Chomsky's example also illustrates the FBI actively running
a proxy terror group, denying it, and protecting its members.  Many
victims of current cointelpro-style harassment campaigns report
suspiciously similar things.  Whether or not the FBI is actually
running and directing the current cointelpro-style harassment
operations, it definitely turns a blind eye to them.

Chomsky also points out that COINTELPRO remains little-known and that
its effects on the culture tend to be left out of historical analyses.
That is quite true, and even Chomsky himself could stand to deal more
directly with the state's covert use of violence in suppressing
dissent.  The lack of knowledge and discussion about such techniques
helps to perpetuate their use in ongoing and future cointelpro-style
operations.  Even back in 1978 Ryter pointed out that COINTELPRO did
not actually end as promised.  Mark Felt, or "Deep Throat," was later
pardoned for his COINTELPRO crimes:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/02/1445253.

When John Lennon complained of being under surveillance, some people
called him paranoid.  Years later, after his death, his FBI files were
released and it was revealed that he had indeed been under
surveillance.  That is how the system is designed to operate: with
deniability.  People's lives are covertly destroyed from behind a wall
of secrecy and denials, aided by a societal taboo against
acknowledging that such things even happen.  What little information
(if any) does get released tends to represent the tip of the iceberg;
the most severe crimes remain redacted -- or else never were recorded
and filed in the first place.  The FBI actually had a "do not file"
procedure for certain cases.

The US now has far more official secrecy than could have been imagined
back in the MHCHAOS days.  But even back then, COINTELPRO (a
documented government conspiracy) only got exposed because of the
political climate and because some activists (in a commendable act of
civil disobedience) stole all the documents from the FBI's office in
Media, Pennsylvania and sent them to the media.  (See, for example,
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Democracy/Crackdown_Dissent.html

and
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/FBI/COINTELPRO_Paranoia.html.)
 Even
so, the official investigations were nothing but a limited hangout.
As mentioned before, COINTELPRO also never actually ended.  It was
renamed, trimmed back for a while, and it became more secretive.

Today's FBI has more powers, more secrecy, and greatly advanced
technology compared to 30 years ago.  The same goes for other law
enforcement and intelligence agencies.  Even Nixon did not actually
come out and essentially support the use of torture, as the current
administration has.  The Orwellian-named PATRIOT Act makes a mockery
of many of the basic protections in the Bill of Rights.  The major
media outlets are now owned by fewer billionaires than ever.  For the
time being the internet is one of the few bright spots, where a
variety of information and opinions can still be found.

Cointelpro-style operations *are* happening now.  What do you think
modern cointelpro looks like?  It is not your grandfather's
COINTELPRO, although it is a direct descendant.  For example, I'm
literally being harassed right now, in my home, by some pig using a
blatantly fake-sounding but deniable "voice-to-skull" device.  The
Army's abbreviation for such devices is "V2K," BTW.  The FBI
considered beaming the fake "voice of God" to Koresh at Waco, so they
know quite well about such technologies.  They have held classified
nonlethal weapons conferences that include far more than just
discussions of tasers.  Other credible victims all across the country
have been reporting similar abuses for years.  At the very least these
claims need to be seriously investigated rather than denied, treated
with ridicule, or dismissed via the Soviet-style abuse of psychiatry.

     "The first lesson in activism is that the person that offers to
     get the dynamite is always the FBI agent."
         -- Judi Bari

Of course it was not just the FBI which was exposed in the 70s as
having trampled the rights of American citizens.  The CIA and military
intelligence agencies were also involved.  Here is a link to excerpts
from the "Military Intelligence" chapter of the 1976 book _The Lawless
State: The Crimes of the U.S. Intelligence Agencies_ by Morton
Halperin, Jerry Berman, Robert Borosage, and Christine Marwick:

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/NSA/Military_Intelligence_LS.html.
This is a good reminder of some of the documented abuses which were
carried out domestically by military intelligence units -- especially
since the domestic role of military intelligence is being expanded
again.]


---------------------------------------------------------------


The FBI and the Engineering of consent
http://www.publiceye.org/liberty/Feds/ci-chomsky.html
 From Public Eye Magazine, Volume One, Number Two
by Noam Chomsky
March 12, 1978

It has often been observed that the United States is unusual, among
the industrial democracies, in the narrowness of the spectrum of
thought and political action, sharply skewed to the right as compared
with other societies of comparable social and economic structure.
Complex theories have been advanced to explain this intriguing
phenomenon. No doubt subtle issues are involved, but it is important
not to disregard some quite simple factors. For one thing, American
business has been engaged for many years in massive organizing
propaganda campaigns directed to what leading practitioners call "the
engineering of consent." The scale is vast and the impact - on the
media and school texts for example - quite substantial, far beyond
anything to be found in the other industrial democracies.  Another
central element in the picture is the role of the national political
police, the FBI, which for over half a century has been devoting major
efforts to engineering of consent in a more direct way: by force. The
character and scale of this enterprise is only now beginning to come
to light, and the story that is being pieced together is quite a
remarkable one.

[...]

In other cases the FBI went a few steps further. A former student of
mine, also active in the peace movement, was teaching at San Diego
State College in 1971. According to a report submitted to the church
Committee by the ACLU, the FBI provided defamatory information about
him to the college administration (and also gained access to
confidential college records). Three public hearings were held under
college auspices. He was exonerated each time, then summarily
dismissed by the chancellor of the California state college system,
Glenn Dumke, one of the numerous examples of the treachery of the
universities in those years. During this period the same student was
the target of an assassination attempt by a secret terrorist army
organized, funded, armed and directed by the FBI, which concealed
evidence of the crime and prevented prosecution of the FBI agent in
charge and the FBI infiltrator who led this organization in its
rampage of fire-bombing, shooting, and general violence and terror
aimed at the left, all with the full knowledge and cooperation of the
Bureau.

In this case, the intended victim of the FBI assassination attempt
escaped injury, though a young woman was seriously injured. Others
were not so lucky.

[...]

It is striking that the major revelations concerning FBI criminal
activities appear precisely at the time of the exposure of the
Watergate episodes, frivolous in comparison. It is interesting to
contrast the concern accorded to Watergate and to the crimes of the
national political police - which I stress again were incomparably
more violent, far-ranging and significant in their effect on the
cultural and political climate of American life. History has provided
us with a controlled experiment to determine whether Nixon's critics
were motivated by a concern for civil and human rights, or by the fact
that Nixon, like Joseph McCarthy before him, was directing his weapons
at the powerful, always an illegitimate target. The results of this
experiment are quite clear-cut and leave little doubt that the furor
over Watergate was largely an exercise in hypocrisy.

Quite generally, what Halperin et. al. correctly call "the crimes of
the U.S. intelligence agencies" have been ignored or dismissed, even
by analysts who focus on the period of the worst excesses and who are
particularly concerned with dissent, activism and its limited impact
in the United States. To cite one example, Godfrey Hodgson's much
acclaimed 500 page study American in Our Time (Doubleday, 1976) has
two trivial references to the FBI and no references at all to
COINTELPRO, though he devotes much attention to the fortunes of the
civil rights movement, the peace movement, and the American left in
general. This unwillingness to take seriously the major role in the
repressive forces of the American state is quite typical. It bears
comparison to the general reaction to the discovery that the CIA had
repeatedly attempted to murder Castro (among other) and was
responsible for poisoning of livestock and repeated terrorism directed
against Cuba, after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. One can
imagine the outrage had it been discovered that Castro was responsible
for anything remotely comparable. But when the victims are Cubans and
the perpetrators American planners and their agencies, it can all be
relegated to (admittedly silly) fun-and-games.

[...]


---------------------------------------------------------------


COINTELPRO: What the (Deleted) Was It?
http://www.publiceye.org/liberty/Feds/ci-ryter.html
Public Eye Magazine, vol. one, number two 1978
by Mark Ryter

[Government] documents on COINTELPRO, the FBI's grand scheme to
annihilate organized dissent, [have forced] major changes in
perspectives on America's recent political history. The 53,000 pages
in the public domain show a daily mapping of a once secret program
which played havoc with any group actively opposing American policy
through much of the Post World War II era. They reveal a program which
manipulated so many events, political processes, and national
institutions, that it must be considered one of capitalism's chief
editors over the last two decades which did everything possible to
erase Left politics from the historical record.

Though most evidence of flagrant illegality like burglary and
wiretapping has been blotted out, the 15 year COINTELPRO record is an
o'erbrimming bag of dirty tricks. Whatever it took to discredit a
group short of "embarrassing the Bureau" was fair game. Informants
told of personal and political disputes, natural in themselves, which
the FBI then inflamed with selective anonymous mailings.

[...]

Integral to COINTELPRO's virile anti-communism was its subtle yet
sophisticated propaganda operation, designed to keep the left
squabbling and the public polarized. The voluminous documents point to
an even larger amount of paper churned out by the FBI in cooperation
with right wing groups, "friendly" media contacts, and private
intelligence-gathering groups to keep the names and doings of
political people constantly suspect. Tens of thousands of anonymous
letters, some containing the worst examples of scurrilous
rumor-mongering, were also sent out to deliberately distort opinions
and, in massive effort, sabotage the opinion-making process itself.

[...]

In addition to its disruptions of the New Left, COINTELPRO continually
tried to shape public opinion, largely through the Bureau's extensive
contacts in the press. It is here where the Left's history was
literally written to the FBI's liking. As communicated in numerous
memos, offices from coast to coast cultivated "reliable" sources
throughout the print and broadcast media. On April 28, 1965, a three
page note to the Director confirmed 25 of the FBI's "friendly" sources
in the Chicago area. They include the Daily News, the Sun Times the
Joliet Herald, NBC, CBS, and WGN. By planting articles, briefing
reporters, and playing one newspaper off another, the FBI created a
new class of propaganda consumers.

[...]

Informers were copious infiltrators of many groups, doing their dirty
tricks in such high proportions to bona fide members that the commonly
cited ratio of agents to membership in the CP once reached 1 to
5.7. But the truly astounding fact is that government spies so often
achieved top positions in their penetrated groups. Informers were high
up in the Illinois CP, the Socialists Workers Party, the Black
panthers, and many New Left groups. At one point, a memo gleefully
anticipated an upsurge in derring-do at the University of Colorado
where an informer had just been elected to SDS's Steering Committee.

[...]

COINTELPRO was a war not just on dissent but on human diversity
itself. Many of the tactics used to fracture political coalitions
directly interfered with the basic process by which people of
differing backgrounds, races, and political inclinations organize
themselves. To keep its legion enemies off balance, the Bureau
constantly whispered resentment of the different and unorthodox into
the ears of college administrators, political comrades, anyone who
might use such misinformation for disruptive purposes.

[...]

The [COINTELPRO] documents are shot through with evidence of a far
reaching campaign to narrow the spectrum of though by extensively
manipulating major American institutions. Besides the communications
and educational process, the Bureau also covertly influenced labor
unions, state legislatures, office of the governor, and other federal
agencies. Though far right groups might seem to be the Bureau's
natural allies, the FBI fooled with some of them, too. In the case of
Breakthough, a group described by the Bureau as "militantly
anti-communist" was covertly re-molded to fit the FBI's designs. To
wit: "Operation Breakthrough was a plan to "take over and disrupt" the
group.

[...]

Through Operation Ridicule, the Bureau institutionalized its
pranksterism and saw an opportunity to widen the much heralded
generation gap into a chasm by portraying student activists as
youthful profligates in newspaper articles and letters to the
students' parents. But the rise of anti-establishment norms among the
young went beyond the political, presenting a special challenge to
COINTELPRO. One agent wrote:


"It is felt that the nonconformism in dress and the use of
obscenities and drugs tend to negate any attempt to hold these people
up to ridicule. The American press has been doing this with no
apparent curtailment of New Left activities. It is not felt just plain
immorality means anything to them."

[...]

COINTELPRO was nothing if not vast. In terms of its tactics arsenal,
the number of groups targeted, its manipulation of certain major
American institutions, and simple longevity of the program, COINTELPRO
has few equals in the annals of domestic secret police forces.

[...]

But COINTELPRO did not end on April 27, 1971 as the FBI promised. The
documents themselves prove it, such as the one dated a month later
which reported that the New haven Black Panthers could be arrested at
any time. Now, almost seven years later, organizations like the
Panthers and the American Indian Movement are still enmeshed in legal
wranglings with COINTELPRO overtones. The memos announcing
COINTELPRO's end also allowed for its perpetuation. The program was
discontinued, said the memo to all SACs, "to afford additional
security to our sensitive operations,. Recommendations will be
considered on an individual basis."

January 22,1981 Manchester, New Hampshire

The moment he walked into the courtroom, Kevin Lawless knew something was odd. The latest Clamshell Alliance trial was about to begin, but for some reason, the Clamshell lawyer, Jan Schlictmann, was sitting at the defense table in silence, lips pursed, staring ahead. The local prosecutor didn't look very happy, either. And as Lawless looked around at his antinuclear colleagues, he realized someone was missing.

Lawless was one of the founders of the Greater Newburyport chapter of the Clamshell Alliance, and the small-town antinuclear group had become the center of his personal life. The other members were his closest friends. the meetings were often as much social as political. The chapter stuck together and made all its decisions by consensus; when twenty-two members had been arrested several months ago at a demonstration at the headquarters of the Public Service Company, the prime sponsor of the Seabrook nuclear power plant, all twenty-two had decided to fight the charges in court. Over the past few weeks, all twenty-two had participated in legal strategy sessions with Schlictmann.

But on the day of the trial, only twenty-one defendants had shown up in court. The man they all knew as Lucas Macdonald had suddenly disappeared.

Before Lawless could ask Schlictmann why one member was missing, judge Louis Wyman ordered the attorneys for both sides to meet with him in chambers. When they emerged about half an hour later, the judge looked out at the defendants and solemnly informed them that the charges were dismissed. He gave no further explanation.

The news that reached Jan Schlictmann early that morning was the stuff of defense lawyers' nightmares. One of the Clamshell defendants, who sat through every confidential legal strategy session, received copies of all Schlictmann's private legal memos, and knew every last detail of the case the defense would present, was really an undercover cop.

The infiltrator had reported everything he heard to the New Hampshire State Police and had shared a lot of it with the security department of the Public Service Company. Copies of some of his reports also went to the office of the state attorney general.

All of this, it turned out, had been going on for quite some time.

Lucas Macdonald, whose real name was James Nims, was assigned by the state police to infiltrate the Clamshell Alliance back in 1980. The bearded young officer took full advantage of the open atmosphere of the Newburyport Clamshell chapter. He started showing up at the regular weekly meetings, held at the local YMCA. He told everyone he lived in Hampton, a town just over the New Hampshire border. He worked at a gas station during the day, he said, and was trying to get his degree from the University of New Hampshire the Seabrook at night. He said he was worried about nuclear power, especially plant, and wanted to do something about it.

Lawless, one of the founders of the local Clamshell chapter, remembered him as a polite, respectful, working-class guy, always eager to help. He seemed like exactly the sort of person the alliance was trying to attract. Before long, Macdonald was dating a woman who was part of the Clamshell inner circle, sometimes spending nights at her place in Newburyport. He came to potluck dinners and birthday parties. Everyone accepted him into the Clamshell crowd.

But he was also taking careful notes on everything the organization did. At the annual Clamshell Congress in 1980, he even made a point of quietly walking around the parking lot outside the hall where the members were gathered, taking down every license plate number.

In May 1980, some of the Newburyport activists decided to split off from a demonstration at the plant site and try to occupy the Manchester head- quarters of the Public Service Company. The decision was made quickly, and the action was planned with less than a day's notice. The idea was to catch the company by surprise.

But when the protesters, dressed in business suits, showed up in small groups at the high-rise office building, the place was surrounded by cops. PSCO security seemed to know every move in advance. By the time the Clamshell members had assembled outside the seventh-floor office of the company president, dozens of state police and security officers were on hand. Twenty-two protesters, including Macdonald, were arrested quickly; downstairs, a booking team and a fleet of paddy wagons were waiting.

Kevin Lawless and his Newburyport friends were baffled. They were baffled even more eight months later when Macdonald didn't show up for trial.

When Schlictmann hastily explained what had happened, the confusion turned to shock. The prosecutor had learned at the last minute that one of the defendants was an undercover cop, and had informed Schlictmann and the judge. Judge Wyman agreed that the informant's presence in confidential defense strategy meetings violated every legal canon and constitutional principle on the books and deprived the defendants of a fair trial. So he had to dismiss the charges.

Lawless left the courtroom with one of his best friends, the woman who had become Lucas Macdonald's lover. She was as confused as anyone, and a bit worried, too: nobody seemed to have any idea where Macdonald had gone. Whatever had happened, she told Lawless she still cared about the man, and she wanted to talk to him.

Before they left the building, the woman happened to glance down the hallway, toward the offices of the district attorney. To her astonishment, the missing defendant was walking casually out of a prosecutor's door, and heading in her direction.

As he approached, she called out his name, the only one she knew. But James Nims walked right by, as if she didn't exist.

-- pp 269-271

(snip)

. . . police involvement is crucial to the launching of the first French anarchist journal to have seen the light of day since the Commune, La Revolution sociale. The Paris prefect of police, Louis Andrieux, had made his name a decade before, by taking on Bakunin and the Lyon Communards. In his Memoirs he explains and accounts for his initiative. He opens with a startling argument that to this very day raises a lot of questions: "We know that the perpetrators of political crimes, when they remain unknown, are always agents provocateurs, and that it is always the police who are at the back of it."! Disturbed by talk of propaganda by deed and by the plot to have the Palais Bourbon (Chamber of Deputies) blown up, and briefed on the anarchists' problems in bringing out a newspaper, he seized this opening to infiltrate those circles and "place Anarchy on the payroll." As this case is a model of the genre, let us quote the juicy story of this provocation at some length:

The comrades needed a backer: but fiendish Capital was in no hurry to respond to their appeal. I shook that fiendish Capital by the shoulders and managed to convince it that it was in its interest to encourage the publication of an anarchist newspaper. One does not stamp out teachings by preventing them from springing forth, and the teachings gained nothing from being made known. Giving the anarchists their newspaper was like installing a telephone link between the plotters' back-room and the office of the prefect of police. One does not keep secrets from one's financial backer, and, day by day, I would be kept abreast of the most mysterious schemes. The Palais Bourbon would be spared: the representatives of the people could get on with their deliberations in peace. Do not think, also, that I crudely offered the encouragements of a police prefect. I sent along a well-dressed bourgeois to seek out one of the most active, most intelligent of them. My agent explained to him that, having made his fortune in the drug business, he wanted to devote a portion of his income to assisting anarchist propaganda. This bourgeois entering the lion's den aroused no suspicion among the comrades. Through him, I placed a security with the state funds and so the newspaper La Revolution sociale made its entrance.

It was a weekly publication, my generosity not stretching to the expense of a daily newspaper. Mlle. Louise Michel was the star attraction of my editorial panel. Needless to say, "the great citizen-ess" was oblivious of the part in which I had cast her, and it is not without a measure of confusion that I own up to the trap I had set for the innocence of some comrades of both sexes.

Every day, around an editorial table, the most respected representatives of the party of action would assemble: together, they would scan their international correspondence: they would consider the steps to be taken to do away with "man's exploitation of his fellow-man": the recipes that science was placing in the revolution's service were passed along. I was always represented at these councils, and if the need arose, I would put in my two pennies' worth, more than once acting as a lightning conductor.'

Instructive indeed! Note that "one of the most active and intelligent of them" was Emile Gautier, a leading light of the Paris movement at the time, a doctor of law and superb orator, but somewhat more gullible than the cobbler Jean Grave who had a better "nose" in this connection. Whenever Andrieux's agent, the Belgian Spilleux alias Serraux, turned up to put this "stroke" to Grave he at first hesitated, then made to agree under certain conditions, that is, that the paper was brought out but Serraux was soon sent packing. The "wheeler-dealer," in this instance, Andrieux, smelled a rat and concentrated instead on Gautier. The latter nonetheless was alerted by the sight of the names and addresses of French anarchist groups and their members in the columns of the paper. By then the game was obvious and that led to the demise of La Revolution sociale, after 56 issues and almost a year on the scene. The role of "lightning conductor" mentioned by Andrieux is also worth looking into: in this instance it took the form of a sham anarchist outrage. After having considered the Banque de France, the Elysée Palace, the prefecture of police, and the Interior Ministry - all of which targets were easily ruled out by Serraux, Andrieux's man - the statue of Thiers recently unveiled in Saint-Germain was chosen "as a practice run." Let us have a look at the exact circumstances, as related with easy humor by Andrieux:

The comrades set off for Saint-Germain, carrying the infernal machine: this was a sardine can packed with fulminate and carefully wrapped in a handkerchief. I was aghast to learn of this plot: I knew what time they would be setting off for Saint-Germain: I knew what time the intended crime was scheduled for. What was I to do? The act had to go through if a crackdown was to be made possible. I had no hesitation in sacrificing the liberator of the nation in order to save the Palais Bourbon. Men night fell, the comrades slipped into the darkness through the ageless trees: they followed the rue de la Républeque as far as the rue de Poissy, where the statue loomed larger and heavier than life in a little square. The pale moonlight brightened the face of the bronze old man who looked down upon the plotters with a sardonic gaze. One of them lifted the sardine can on to the plinth of the statue, between the legs of the armchair where a seated Mr. Thiers was unfolding something that must have been a geographer's map along his left thigh.

A long fuse trailed from the pedestal. One of die comrades set it alight, while his colleagues scattered revolutionary proclamations on the ground: then, as the flame began slowly to edge along the fuse, the comrades took to their heels, racing down the hill: and as they raced on across the flat ground they clambered over the railway barriers.

Upon their arrival back in Paris they impatiently awaited the news from Saint-Germain. They had not stayed to watch the spectacular destruction they had wrought they had no idea of the extent of the damage.

How disappointed they were when they learned they had, at best, rudely awakened a few peaceable inhabitants of the quiet town of Saint-Germain. The statue was untouched: the fulminate had failed to damage the bronze: a broad black stain was the only trace left by the outrage. I knew the names of the plotters: I had made the trip with them, by proxy at least: I had seen everything, heard everything.

Unmasking these narks would be so easy if all comrades were prepared to use a little common sense in their reasoning. But for many of them plain common sense goes out the window where propaganda matters are concerned. They drag in a host of elements unconnected with the issue, merely complicating and muddying it. . . . if you dare to attack 'their' chap, it must be out of jealousy or because he does not see eye to eye with you.

Grave here is upbraiding those "Christian-minded" anarchists who refuse to think ill of anybody." For all that, Grave has a tendency to play down the influence of narks upon the evolution of the movement, which appears a bit paradoxical of the man who had been so disparaged in anarchist circles for flicomanie (having cops on the brain). And yet, there were notable police plants at the time: in 1882, at the time of the riots in Montceau-les-Mines, the agent provocateur Brenin was unmasked: in Lyon, center of the libertarian movement at the time, an agent of the prefecture, one Valadier, managed to infiltrate the editorial panel of the anarchist newspapers, which were in any event subject to permanent censorship harassment since a single newspaper was obliged, for instance, to change its name seven times in under two years!

Police plants have never been exclusive to anarchists, as some once attempted to have us believe - far from it! All revolutionary organizations of any importance have always been infiltrated by provocateurs and traitors. Starting with Grisel who "blew" Babeufs Conspiracy of the Equals in 1796: then even the great Blanqui, the "Old Lag" who spent 33 years of his life behind bars, was compromised by the Taschereau document, uncovered in police archives in 1848, in which he denounced Barbés and his colleagues from the abortive rising in 1839 (unless this was only a ploy on his part designed to get rid of his rivals). During the 1848 revolution, the incoming prefect of police, Caussidière, was stupefied to discover that his own deputy, Delahodde, appointed secretary of the prefecture, as well as the captain of his guards, Chenu, were agents of the police of Louis Philippe planted inside the revolutionary secret societies years before; Delahodde had even served time in prison, the better to play the stoolie among fellow inmates who could scarcely distrust such a "pure" revolutionary.

Inside the Russian revolutionary movement renegadism, treachery or provocation amounted to what might be described as an often honorable tradition. We might start by mentioning Utin, the man who slandered Bakunin and was an unconditional supporter of Marx: quickly disappointed by the lack of prospects in Europe, he sought a pardon of the Tsar and went back to Russia. Leon Tikhomirov, one of the most prominent populists, did likewise in the 1880s. Yevno Azev, the head of the Social Revolutionaries' terrorist fighting organization, was a direct agent working for the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police. The Bolshevik paper Pravda was founded in 1912 by another agent provocateur, Zhitomirsky. Furthermore, Malinovsky, leader of the Bolshevik faction in the Russian Chamber of Deputies or Duma, although "beloved" by Lenin, was another Okhrana agent and was shot as such in 1918. Thus all these agents were often well placed and as a result had a crucial influence upon their organization or the course of events. Moreover, there is no reason to be startled by this, for all is fair in war: the bourgeois state protected itself however it could.

(snip)

A new data-mining service is making it possible to check anonymous Wikipedia edits, confirming that yes, the US Government is editing Wikipedia, with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) apparently making changes to entries about itself, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Richard Nixon, and Pope Benedict XVI. On a lighter note, it appears that someone at the CIA also made changes to entries about Secret societies, Fortune cookies and the Beatles.