Informants, Infiltrators & Provocateurs

Infiltrators seek information on most radical groups. The return of mass mobilizations and radical actions in anti-globalization, anti-poverty, anti-racism and anti-police brutality demonstrations, as well as declarations to continue struggling in the streets and underground has drawn attention from the state's secret police. More infiltrators will be sent into our ranks to try to bribe, entice or manipulate individuals. The extent to which they are able to infiltrate our groups depends on our seriousness and responsibility in learning about, promoting, and working within a security culture.

Radical movements can learn to better identify covert enemies in our projects. Once identified, appropriate action is needed to undo, contain, or remove the danger.

This section is intended to arm you with information on how to spot and deal with informers, infiltrators, and provocateurs in our ranks.

WHO IS AN INFORMER?

There are actually two kinds of informers. The deliberate informer is an undercover agent on the payroll of government or industry. The second type is the activist-turned-informer. Both kinds try to infiltrate our ranks and are equally dangerous to our movements.

Let's discuss the deliberate informers first. They are often difficult to identify. Informers can be of any age and any profile, but they do have a few discernible methods or operation, or 'modus operandi'. These are:

The "hang around" type: they are persons who regularly show at meetings and actions but generally don't get involved. They collect documents, listen to conversations and note who's who. This observation role is relatively inactive.

The "sleeper" type: is similar to the "hang around" modus operandi, except that their absorption of information is used to activate their role at a later date.

The "novice" type: presents a somewhat more active role, but confines themselves to less prominent work. They don't take initiative, but the work they do is valued. This helps them build trust and credibility.

The "super activist" type: they come out of nowhere and all of a sudden, they are everywhere. Whether it's a meeting, protest, or an action, this person will be right in the thick of it. Keep in mind however that this can also be the mark of a new activist, whose enthusiasm and commitment is so strong that she/he wants to fight the power every minute of the day.

It should be said that with several of these modus operandi, the behaviour is hard to distinguish from a sincere new person's involvement. How do we tell them apart? Well, a planted infiltrator will ask a lot of questions about the direct action groups, individuals and illegal activities. She/he may suggest targets and volunteer to do reconnaissance as well as take part in the action. Infiltrators also try to build profiles on individuals, their beliefs, habits, friends, and weaknesses. At the same time, infiltrators will shield their true selves from other activists.

Anyone who asks a lot of questions about direct actions isn't necessarily an infiltrator, but they ARE someone you should be careful with. At the very least, they need to be informed about security issues. New activists should understand that direct action tactics can be risky (though some risks are worth taking!) and that asking a lot of questions endangers people. If the person persists in asking questions, there is a problem and appropriate measures must be taken. Activists who can't understand the need for security should be kept away situations in which they might incriminate others.

Some types of infiltrators stay in the background and offer material support, other informants may have nothing to do with the group or action, but initially heard certain plans and tipped off the police. Among the more active types of infiltrators can be a gregarious person that quickly wins group trust. Some infiltrators will attempt to gain key forms of control, such as of communications/ secretarial, or finances. Other informants can use charm and sex to get intimate with activists, to better spy or potentially destabilize group dynamics.

Active infiltrators can also be provocateurs specializing in disruptive tactics such as sowing disorder and demoralizing meetings or demos, heightening conflicts whether they are interpersonal or about action or theory, or pushing things further with bravado and violent proposals. Infiltrators often need to build credibility; they may do this by claiming to have participated in past actions.

Also, infiltrators will try to exploit activist sensibilities regarding oppression and diversity. Intelligence organizations will send in someone who will pose as a person experiencing the common oppression of the particular activist group. For example, in the 1960's, the Weather Underground ("Weathermen" - a white anti-imperialist armed struggle in the US) was infiltrated by an "ordinary Joe" informant with a working class image. Black war veterans were used to infiltrate the Black Panther Party.

A fresh example of police infiltration and manipulation tactics is that of Germinal, a group targeted for arrest two days prior to the April 2001 anti-FTAA demonstrations in Quebec City. Five months prior, the police set up a false transport company and specifically postered opportunities for employment in the vicinity of a Germinal member seeking employment. The trap worked. Tipped off by an initial informant, two undercover cops worked for four months in the group. This operation resulted in the media-hyped "dismantlement" of the group on the eve of the summit. Seven Germinal members were arrested, 5 of whom spent 41 days in preventive custody, only to be released under draconian bail conditions.

The police's covert action was in part about dismantling the group, but it was also about creating a media/propaganda campaign to justify the police-state security for the summit.

What are some ways of looking into the possibility that someone is an informer? Firstly, unless you have concrete reasons or evidence that someone is an infiltrator, spreading rumours will damage the movement. Rumours that you do hear of should be questioned and traced back. A person's background can be looked into, especially activism they claimed to have participated in, in other places. Do your contacts in those places know of the person, their involvement? Did problems ever come up? One important advantage of having links with far away places is that it makes it more difficult for informers to fabricate claims about their activities.

What are a person's means of living? Who are her or his friends? What sorts of contradictions exist between their professed ideals and how they live? One of our strengths as activists is our ideas and values, our counterculture, our attitudes towards the dominant society. Our sincerity in discussing these things is also a way of learning about each other.

When planning for new actions, care must be taken concerning who is approached. As little as possible should be said about the actual action plan until a person's political philosophy, ideas about strategy, and levels of risk they are willing to engage in have been discussed on an abstract basis. If there is a strong basis for believing this person might be interested in the action, then the general idea of an action can be run by them. Only when they have agreed to participate, do they come to the group to discuss action details.

During the trials of activists, police often reveal the kinds of information that they have gathered concerning our groups and activities. Note what revelations come out of these trials. What are the possible and likely sources of the information? Speak to persons that have been arrested and interrogated to see what they may have said to the police, or discussed in their jail cell.

Placing infiltrators in social justice and revolutionary movements is an established practice. It was done to the Black Panthers, AIM, the Front du Liberation du Quebec (FLQ), and the peace/ anti-war/and anti-nuclear movements on a large scale. Small groups, such as affinity groups, or working groups of larger more open organizations, need to be especially careful with new members. Direct action organizing is ideally done with longstanding, trusted members of the activist community.

This doesn't mean that no one else should ever be allowed into these groups. On the contrary, if our movement is to continue to grow, new people should be welcome and recruited; we just need to keep security in mind and exercise caution at all times.

But possibly an even greater threat to our movements is the activist-turned-informer, either unwittingly or through coercion. The unwitting informer is the activist who can't keep his/her mouth shut. If someone brags to you about what they've done, make sure this person never has any knowledge that can incriminate you, because sooner or later, the wrong person will hear of it. These activists don't mean to do harm, but their bragging can be very damaging. It is your responsibility to instruct these people on the importance of security culture.

The other type of activist-informer is the person who cracks under pressure and starts talking to save his or her own skin. Many activists get drawn into situations they are not able to handle, and some are so caught up in the "excitement" that they either don't realize what the consequences can be, or they just don't think they'll ever have to face them.

Keep in mind that the categories of "planted informer" and "activist-turned-informer" can, and have been blurred. In 1970, during the height of the FLQ's activities, Carole de Vault - a young Parti Quebecois (PQ) activist was drawn to the FLQ, but then became a paid police agent. Her "activism" was with the PQ; she disagreed with the heavier FLQ actions since it threatened the "legitimate" work of the PQ. Her involvement with the FLQ was as a planted police informer.

KNOW YOUR OWN LIMITS

We have to know the possible consequences of every action we take and be prepared to deal with them. There is no shame in not being able to do an action because of responsibilities or circumstances that make it impossible for you to do jail time at this point in your life. As long as capitalism and all of its evils exist, there will be resistance. In other words, there will be plenty of great actions for you to participate in when your life circumstances are more favourable.

If others are dependent on you for support, you aren't willing to lose your job, or drop out of school or ruin your future career, DON'T DO THE ACTION. If you are addicted to an illicit drug and/or have a lengthy criminal record, the cops will use this to pressure you for information. If you don't feel capable of detoxing under interrogation and brutality, or doing a hell of a lot more time than your comrades, DON'T DO THE ACTION.

Make certain that you talk with others in your affinity group about situations that make you uncertain whether you should be involved in particular actions, especially those that are at a high risk of being criminalized.

Remember - there is no excuse for turning in comrades to the police - and those activists that do effectively excommunicate themselves from our movements. We must offer no legal or jail support to those activists who turn in others for their impact on our movement is far-reaching and can have devastating effects.

COVERT ACTION OTHER THAN INFILTRATION

Covert (or "Special") Action from police and secret service is also done outside of the group, with or without infiltration. These efforts include: intimidation and harassment, blackmail and manipulation, propaganda, informing employers and security checks, as well as physical sabotage like theft and arson.

Intimidation and harassment can include visits from secret service agents, calling you or your partner by their first name on the street, thefts where obvious clues are left. Police will try to blackmail people if they want to recruit or neutralize them.

Police use propaganda in an attempt to poison the atmosphere and manipulate media and public opinion. In December 1971, when the FLQ was near its end and heavily infiltrated, the RCMP issued a false FLQ communique in the name of the "Minerve" cell. The communique adopted a hard-line position, denouncing the abandonment of terrorist action by a well-known activist, Pierre Vallieres, and urging the continuation of armed struggle.

A recent example of police manipulation through the media involved the arrest of a young Montreal man in April 2000. He was accused of threatening to blow up a police station. The article was well placed in the newspaper, and opened by identifying the accused as an activist with COBP, the Collective Opposed to Police Brutality. This information, which was completely false, originated from the police. Meanwhile, the accused man was being held in jail and could not be reached. COBP, with the help of a lawyer, pressured the newspaper to write a retraction. But the police insisted that the accused claimed he was with COBP and so the media, instead, focussed on this 'controversy'. The accused, when finally reached, denied having claimed such a thing. And according to his lawyer, the prosecutor didn't raise the issue.

In Genoa, Italy, police played an active covert role in trying to discredit black bloc anarchists during the July 2001 meeting of the G8. Several reports reveal that Italian police masked as black bloc members attacked demonstrators and small shops. With a lack of public information, the police help manipulate public discourse along the lines of "how do legitimate demonstrators isolate activist thugs?"

Slanderous propaganda can take the form of anonymous letters, or rumours aimed at the activist milieu. There are also examples where police will make uncorroborated, casual accusations to journalists that, to use two examples, a person is a drug dealer, or that at a demonstration, a person aimed a handgun at an officer. It is often for slanderous reasons that police charge activists with "weapons possession" for having a penknife, or charges of violence like "assault."

The growth of the anti-globalization movement has been accompanied by renewed anarchist-scare propaganda on the part of authorities. Politicians and police attempt to massage public opinion, preparing people for a crack down, in order to legitimate the use of heavier methods of social control, exclusion and repression.

Manipulative disinformation spread through the media needs to be denounced as lies. There are activist-friendly lawyers who can help us demand retractions and corrections. Speak to the journalists involved, call them on their sloppy, dishonest work, expose their hypocrisy, and complain to the journalists' ethics body. We can not rely on capitalist, private-media for any kind of fairness.

It is valuable for us to learn more about the covert actions of the police. There exists a long and documented history. Factual information about police covert activities also comes out as evidence presented in court. An important, too often neglected part of our strength is our knowledge of, and our protection from, police action against us.

As a clinician, Leymann made his priority the healing of post-traumatic stress in those most severely affected by mobbing. With the support of the Swedish health service, he opened a clinic for mobbing victims in 1994, and published detailed research on the first 64 patients treated there. That clinic no longer exists and Leymann himself died in 1999, but 200 patients are currently treated in a similar clinic that opened in Saarbruecken, Germany, this year.

Competent, well-informed treatment of the many mobbing targets who suffer mental breakdown is obviously in order, especially since they have often in the past been misdiagnosed as having paranoid delusions.

Psychiatric injury, however, is but one possible harmful result of being mobbed. Some mobbing targets keep their sanity but succumb to cardiovascular disease–hypertension, heart attack, or stroke. Most suffer loss of income and reputation. Marital breakdown and isolation from friends and family are also common outcomes.

When a problem is not understood, especially by outsides who might have a cold, calculating, or even dispassionate interest in the subject matter it’s easy to falsely label something that is not understood. Such as the people that are part of that phenomenon or the phenomenon itself.

Today the concept of workplace mobbing is well understood, and has become more normalised in society, thanks to research by credible professors such as K. Westhues. Himself a target of workplace mobbing, he was able to ward off what was happening to him, and spent the next decade studying the phenomenon and assisting other targets. He is now a widely respected researcher in the field.

With subject matters such as bullying, gang stalking, mobbing, mind control, because the outside world is often unaware of the devastating effect the harassment is having, it’s often up to the insiders of that community to bring knowledge and understanding to the forefront, and to the outside world at large.

10 years ago, bullying was not understood that well, but with the persistence of people like Tim Fields, it’s now a household word, and a very well understood concept.

We as a community in the Gang Stalking World are on the precipice, where the term is becoming more well known, but with limited understanding, and preconceived prejudices about gang stalking, by people in various fields and outside communities.

This might also have been recently complicated by being falsely termed as an extreme community. We are not so much an extreme community as a misunderstood community. We are about 3-5 years behind where our fellow counterparts were. We do need more research into the subject matter, but because what is happening to us, is being enacted by the very governments we trust, this further complicates exposing what’s happening to the general population, and then getting assistance, validation and understanding from the world at large.

We are at the crossing over stage, and for every move we do try to make forward, we have silent watchers in the background, from what the New York Times article stated, at times misdiagnosing our community, and mislabeling the members of that community, without giving any actual credence to the research being presented and the very real possibility that what we are saying is true, and that this is in fact really happening to us.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/fashion/13psych.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The key emphasis then still relies on mechanisms within the Gang Stalking community to prove our innocence, because we have already been declared by some as guilty, or rather mislabeled as paranoid, delusional, or mentally ill. There is strength in unity, we have seen this with our cousin community, yet this is still a key point that alludes our community due to several key internal factors.

In moving forward, there has to be more focus on maintaining a unified community, which is hard at times because we do remain fragmented in many ways. We still have to place key emphasis on Awareness, and exposure. There is a lot of good research coming out in high profile mediums and those should be used to bridge that gaps that have hitherto prevented us from crossing over to where our cousins in the mobbing community are.

As a clinician, Leymann made his priority the healing of post-traumatic stress in those most severely affected by mobbing. With the support of the Swedish health service, he opened a clinic for mobbing victims in 1994, and published detailed research on the first 64 patients treated there. That clinic no longer exists and Leymann himself died in 1999, but 200 patients are currently treated in a similar clinic that opened in Saarbruecken, Germany, this year.

Competent, well-informed treatment of the many mobbing targets who suffer mental breakdown is obviously in order, especially since they have often in the past been misdiagnosed as having paranoid delusions.

Psychiatric injury, however, is but one possible harmful result of being mobbed. Some mobbing targets keep their sanity but succumb to cardiovascular disease–hypertension, heart attack, or stroke. Most suffer loss of income and reputation. Marital breakdown and isolation from friends and family are also common outcomes.

When a problem is not understood, especially by outsides who might have a cold, calculating, or even dispassionate interest in the subject matter it’s easy to falsely label something that is not understood. Such as the people that are part of that phenomenon or the phenomenon itself.

Today the concept of workplace mobbing is well understood, and has become more normalised in society, thanks to research by credible professors such as K. Westhues. Himself a target of workplace mobbing, he was able to ward off what was happening to him, and spent the next decade studying the phenomenon and assisting other targets. He is now a widely respected researcher in the field.

With subject matters such as bullying, gang stalking, mobbing, mind control, because the outside world is often unaware of the devastating effect the harassment is having, it’s often up to the insiders of that community to bring knowledge and understanding to the forefront, and to the outside world at large.

10 years ago, bullying was not understood that well, but with the persistence of people like Tim Fields, it’s now a household word, and a very well understood concept.

We as a community in the Gang Stalking World are on the precipice, where the term is becoming more well known, but with limited understanding, and preconceived prejudices about gang stalking, by people in various fields and outside communities.

This might also have been recently complicated by being falsely termed as an extreme community. We are not so much an extreme community as a misunderstood community. We are about 3-5 years behind where our fellow counterparts were. We do need more research into the subject matter, but because what is happening to us, is being enacted by the very governments we trust, this further complicates exposing what’s happening to the general population, and then getting assistance, validation and understanding from the world at large.

We are at the crossing over stage, and for every move we do try to make forward, we have silent watchers in the background, from what the New York Times article stated, at times misdiagnosing our community, and mislabeling the members of that community, without giving any actual credence to the research being presented and the very real possibility that what we are saying is true, and that this is in fact really happening to us.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11.....mp;emc=rss

The key emphasis then still relies on mechanisms within the Gang Stalking community to prove our innocence, because we have already been declared by some as guilty, or rather mislabeled as paranoid, delusional, or mentally ill. There is strength in unity, we have seen this with our cousin community, yet this is still a key point that alludes our community due to several key internal factors.

In moving forward, there has to be more focus on maintaining a unified community, which is hard at times because we do remain fragmented in many ways. We still have to place key emphasis on Awareness, and exposure. There is a lot of good research coming out in high profile mediums and those should be used to bridge that gaps that have hitherto prevented us from crossing over to where our cousins in the mobbing community are.