Big Brother's Little Helpers: Private Intelligence Networks

by Mitzi Waltz

Big Brother's Little Helpers

By Mitzi Waltz

When the proverbial knock comes at the door, it's not always representatives of the state security service. In many countries the most feared political enforcers are those who operate outside the law: armed political gangs, "death squads" and other bully boys who use information gathered privately or funneled to them by sympathetic cops to harass, intimidate and target activists. Could it happen here? It has. And it has happened with the help of police who, like the Portland Police Bureau, do detailed political surveillance of local dissidents and then spread this confidential information to private organizations, legally or illegally, and/or use such organizations to collect political information on private citizens.

In the past, many police agencies have forged unholy alliances with right-wing groups to fight suspected communists. In one of the best-known examples, Chicago cops fed information from their Red Squad files to the ultra-conservative Legion of Justice, which then administered beatings to and harassed activists in the '60s and '70s. In Detroit, it was a private group called Operation Breakthrough. In Houston, the Secret Army Organization hassled anti-war activists in collusion with the FBI and local police.

And while these Vietnam War-era groups may be gone, they have plenty of would-be imitators, though nowadays most operate with a bit more finesse. Why use a truncheon when a well-placed call to an employer, a zap to a credit database or an entry in the local renter blacklist can do more lasting (and discreet) damage? Information is power, as the saying goes, and in the right political climate it can create serious problems for activists. For example, a new database set up this January by the American Coalition of Life Activists, whose leader Andrew Burnett lives in Portland, will collect names and histories of abortion providers intended for use in future trials of the doctors for their "crimes against humanity," according to a January 20, 1996, story in the Oregonian. "We hope it causes the people involved to realize that their actions may have repercussions that will follow them the rest of their lives," Burnett was quoted. Pro-choice activists may also be among the targets of this database, which could obviously have uses in the here and now. The ACLA has called shooting abortionists justifiable homicide and applauded clinic bombings. And since CID files include the names of organizations and people participating in demonstrations, including those for and against abortion rights, they would certainly be of interest to Burnett and his pals. The American Coalition of Life Activists is unique only in that it publicly announced the existence of its database and the intended use for the information it's collecting.

Cops Spy.

In the past two issues, PDXS has taken a look at the case of Douglas Squirrel vs. City of Portland, in which a local anarchist activist took the city to court over politically motivated spying by the Portland Police Bureau's Criminal Intelligence Division, and won. In Squirrel's case, the judge ordered CID to destroy some illegal political data it had been keeping. Unfortunately, as other Portland citizens had already discovered when their names were mistakenly entered in the city's Gang Enforcement Taskforce database, the Bureau shares its files with dozens of public law- enforcement and record-keeping agencies, making the destruction of local files an almost futile gesture when it comes to clearing one's name of a false or illegal police report (See "Dangerous Data," PDXS, Feb. 9).

But that's not the worst of it. Law enforcement agencies are also sending confidential information to private organizations, which are exempt from Freedom of Information requests. In at least a few cases, this has been done so that illegal spying can continue without public oversight. When police are ordered to destroy illegal files or not to gather political information at all, they may instead store such data in private databases (or even at an officers home), and access it later as they please.

"We've heard rumors," about police use of private databases in Oregon, says Dave Fidanque, executive director of the ACLU of Oregon. "But I don't have any specific information about that actually happening, where the information is sent elsewhere, then is being retrieved."

Database Dangers.

In a textbook case of how intelligence gathering by police and private groups working together endangers public safety, the Los Angeles Police Department spied on local leftists and kept copious records. These files were stolen by cops and ended up in a private garage, where a "tickler file" on what could be found in the collection was created and then shared with the Western Goals Foundation.

Western Goals had a stellar cast of shady board members, including retired Maj. Gen. John Singlaub of the neo-fascist World Anti- Communist League (his name should ring a bell with anyone who followed the Contragate scandal), and John Rees, a long-time contributor to John Birch Society and other far-right publications. According to a 1988 Singlaub interview, Western Goals wanted to build a computer database on the leadership structure and membership of every left-wing group in the country. No one knows how far this project got, although Western Goals was believed to have about 6,000 files (a relatively small number compared to those once held by the conservative Church League of America - a huge collection last seen moldering in the basement of Jerry Falwell's Virginia college - or those kept by the ostensibly liberal Southern Poverty Law Center). The Southern California ACLU sued Western Goals, but was forced to settle out of court. It also sued the LAPD over its illegal political spying in 1984, and won a $1.8 million settlement on behalf on 144 left-wing organizations or groups who had been targets of surveillance. During its life, Western Goals fed its information to dictatorial governments abroad and to domestic intelligence operatives. It is extremely likely that lists produced by Western Goals found their way into the hands of overseas death squads, who then killed activists or their family members in retaliation for U.S. political activities.

Western Goals' Rees began his career as an infiltrator of left-wing groups in the '60s and '70s, and has since launched his own political intelligence-gathering operation in Baltimore, Md., probably starting with Western Goals' leftovers. Rees is one of todayOs big names in far-right research. He's joined in that honor by groups like the Council for Inter-American Security, which relies on former staffers from conservative student papers, concentrates on Central and South America issues, and once had Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan on its advisory board; various private groups that make up the American Society for Industrial Security and concern themselves with spying on the environmental and anti-toxics activists; the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, another anti-environmentalist organization linked with the so-called "Wise Use" movement that produces seminars, position papers and publications on the "eco-terrorist threat"; private security firms that specialize in unionbusting; Lyndon LaRouche's intelligence network, which has links with the Wise Use movement and various right-wing groups; and the Maldon Institute, a new group also headed by Rees. With the demise of Communism as the global bogeyman, the right wing has had to create a new spectre: international terrorism, including "narco-terrorism" and "eco-terrorism" along with the traditional political variety.

In addition, certain fundamentalist Christian groups have their own databases on alleged enemies in the "Culture War," including homosexuals.

Researcher Tarso Ramos of Portland's Western States Center pointed toward industry-funded legal powerhouses like the Mountain States Legal Foundation and the Pacific Legal Foundation as another source of surveillance data on environmentalists, along with corporate public relations departments. "There's a whole other thing that goes on out of the PR industry that's distinct from, but related to, this Wise Use business," Ramos noted, "there's lots of dirty tricks stuff that goes on right out of corporate PR in the natural resources industry." Like Western Goals, may of these groups don't maintain huge file rooms. In the new computerized world of private intelligence, thatOs not necessary, explained senior analyst Chip Berlet of Cambridge, Mass.-based Political Research Associates. "With the advent of desktop computers, you donOt need to ship the files around. You have a bunch of privatized file dumps all around the country, and all you share is the 'tickler file'," he said. "If they learned anything from the lawsuits we filed against them in the seventies, it was not to leave a paper trail," Berlet continued. "Since the seventies you saw the growth of public-private interaction and the privatization of the files themselves, so they were out of the reach of any public inspection. It's a back-door effort by people who have a kind of counter-subversive view of the world."

From Information to Action.

It's generally illegal - and certainly unethical - for local police forces to spread confidential files outside of the law-enforcement community. However, the FBI (and other Federal investigative agencies, of which there are about 30) has no such restrictions, and its use of private intelligence-gathering operatives is likely to result in frequent quid pro quo exchanges. Executive Order 12333 specifically allows the FBI to enter into secret contracts with private intelligence groups. The Bureau need not ask how "any information, property or materials furnished by individuals' action on their own initiative" were obtained under that order, opening the door to illegal private wiretapping and surveillance, not to mention break-ins and dirty tricks campaigns.

This way of getting around official limits on the FBI's behavior apparently works well. In November 1986, for example, the offices of the Center for Development Policy (a group critical of the U.S.' role in Central America) were broken into and documents relating to arms-for-cocaine flights carried out by CIA-linked airline Southern Air Transport were stolen. The director of CDP, former U.S. ambassador Robert White, said he believed the break-in was carried out by anti-communist vigilantes. "There's a whole network that's been building up to reinforce what Oliver North has been doing," he said at the time.

Fringe Intelligence.

Lyndon LaRouche, that crank you may have caught on cable-access who goes on and on about "neo-Platonic" government and world conspiracies, is another one to watch. When LaRouche was busted for criminal financial malfeasance in 1987, some people believed it had been done largely to get government hands on the rooms full of files his organizations have collected. Intelligence is one of the ways LaRouche earns his living: he hawks magazines, newsletters and consulting services to corporate clients who pay big bucks to find out what those dastardly political and environmental extremists are up to.

LaRouche first got into the dossier business to control his own followers by manipulating them according to their psychological profiles. The same sort of intelligence proved eminently useful for screwing with his political enemies, and for snaring new financial supporters. Finally, he launched publications, and their security staffers began giving or selling information to domestic and foreign governments.

According to Berlet, LaRouche "maintains a vast international intelligence network - he's a player. Of course, before he went to jail he had much better connections, including the CIA and the National Security Agency," he added. Those relationships were apparently damaged when LaRouche didnt jump on board the Reagan administration's Contra support bandwagon. Other law- enforcement agencies have been less picky: lawsuits against some police departments have discovered LaRouche material in active files on terrorism and subversion.

Former Reagan advisor and National Security Council senior analyst Dr. Norman Bailey once called the LaRouche network "one of the best private intelligence services in the world." Other observers, however, say LaRouche's data is hopelessly tainted by his conspiracy-nut tendencies. Intelligence provided by "LaRouchies" has certainly proved dangerous, and perhaps deadly, for foreign individuals named in LaRouche-linked organizations' reports.

Its impact in the U.S. is unknown, although the Western States Center's Ramos said many of the tactics used by the Wise Use movement are LaRouche-inspired. "In many ways what we're seeing with this whole 'eco-terrorism' thing is a tactic that the LaRouchians pioneered with their pro-nuclear groups," including setting up pseudo-grassroots ("astroturf") groups that advocate the industry position. There are direct links as well: for example, Barry Claussen, a controversial Seattle private investigator who works with the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, publishes an "eco-terrorism watch" newsletter with LaRouchite investigator Rogelio Maduro.

"Liberal" Intelligence Connections.

More recently, law enforcement agencies have forged links with supposedly liberal or civil-rights-oriented groups to spy on right- wingers. In the early 1990s, for example, the Portland Police Bureau was found to have shared information on suspected neo- Nazis with a range of "human rights" organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. Portland police memos were discovered in the files of Tom Gerard, a retired San Francisco cop who had apparently been a longtime intelligence asset for the ADL. The files included names, addresses and descriptions of alleged skinheads, racists and Posse Comitatus types, many of whom were not accused of committing any crimes.

At the time, former Oregonian columnist Phil Stanford raised hell about the practice. "[O]ne good way to look at it - especially if you're one of those people who thinks of him or herself as a member of the 'progressive community' - is to substitute the word 'Communist' or 'hippie' or 'anti-war activist' whenever you see the words 'Aryan Resistance' or 'Skinhead,'" Stanford wrote in the May 12, 1993, issue of the Portland daily.

The problem with Gerard's database was not that he was helping to alert the ADL, which was founded to fight anti-Semitic violence and prejudice, about dangerous skinheads who actually intended to or had harmed Jews. Self-protection makes sense. But Gerard's reports - and the Portland Police Bureau reports that he drew upon - made no distinction between people who simply held reprehensible views and those who acted on them criminally. The ADL wasn't just interested in right-wing anti-Semites, either. It also sought information about pro-Palestinian and Arab student groups, left-wing groups that it believed supported the Palestinian cause, even Jewish groups that decried Israeli human-rights abuses in the occupied West Bank. Gerard eventually began selling intelligence directly to some Israeli allies, including apartheid-era South Africa, that had nothing to do with the ADL's mission at all. And the names and descriptions in those reports may well have led to deaths when activists were targeted by death squads run by the South African police and paramilitary groups.

There's an interesting connection between Douglas Squirrels case and ADL spy Tom Gerard and Officer Larry Siewert of Portlands CID. Siewert was the Portland Police Bureau's contact with the ADL. In a 1993 PPB internal affairs memo obtained by PDXS, Siewert said he provided the ADL with Portland information in return for its data on skinhead and white supremacist activities. In another 1993 PPB memo that featured an interview with Siewert, the officer denied that CID kept tabs on several Portland leftist groups after files on them were also found in the San Francisco cop's computer. However, Siewert's name appears on almost all of the exhibits in the Squirrel vs. City of Portland file as the officer assigned to monitor leftist activity, and his testimony was some of the most damaging at the trial. (Sergeant Irv McGeachy, who also testified at Squirrel's trial about CID activities, was interviewed in the course of the ADL investigation as well.)

In 1993, Multnomah County District Attorney Michael Schrunk looked over the ADL files in question. He concluded that the police bureau had not broken any laws, saying that most of the reports were merely summaries of routine encounters with local Skinheads - not secret political files. Schrunk said the summaries were public records, and could be legally shared with anyone who requested them, like the human rights organizations. (Strangely, local reporters had never heard of these summaries before they turned up in Gerard's files.) But according to OAR 137-90-130-(1a), confidential police information like CID investigative reports is only supposed to be shared among law-enforcement agencies, and then only on a need-to-know basis.

Another group well-known for its anti-Nazi work, the Southern Poverty Law Center, also keeps information on an entire spectrum of "extremist" groups, as do its local and regional allies, the Coalition for Human Dignity and the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment. These ostensibly liberal groups are known to receive information from the Portland Police Bureau through official channels. It is unknown if the Bureau shares data with right-wing database-keepers as well - although individual officers who share their ideology might swap CID documents on the sly, or the groups might be able to purchase or steal the same information from one of the other public or private sources that the Bureau shares with.

In the end, once political data is gathered and stored at the local police level it's only a matter of time before it finds its way outside. And once it's gone, there's no telling where it may end up and what uses it may be put to.

Along with preserving the basic rights to privacy and to the political beliefs of one's choice, that's an excellent argument for not gathering non-crime-related political intelligence at all.

Thanks for research assistance and source materials are owed to Ace Hayes, Chip Berlet, Steve Schultz, the Oregon and national offices of the American Civil Liberties Union, NameBase NewsLine/Public Information Research, The Center for Constitutional Rights and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

[Originally published by PDXS, Portland OR, Vol. 5, No. 23 - February 23-March 7 1996]