RED SQUADS ON THE PROWL
Burkholder, Steve
Red Squads on the Prowl Still spying after all these years BY STEVE BURKHOLDER The Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent who called on Gary Washington at his Atlanta home on April 16, 1986, was...
...Her warning evidently has worked...
...The department had a "criminal predicate" for the probe, says Orlando police captain Robert M. LaBreck...
...Resurgence means something stopped and then it started again...
...As in Chicago, police need specific authorization for the work...
...He said he kept asking the police, "What are they doing wrong...
...Boyd then questioned Washington about fellow board members and about any plans to use violence against nuclear power plants...
...I doubt that there is a resurgence" of domestic spying, says Richard Tulisano, co-chairman of the Connecticut General Assembly's Judiciary Committee...
...However, the ACLU doesn't oppose the use of police informers in all cases: "The ACLU takes the position that informers may be employed only in organizations that may engage or may be planning to engage in the commission of serious criminal acts...
...The Handschu Authority upheld police denials of the "black desk" and found no violations of the guidelines...
...Seattle's ordinance forbids the collection of "restricted"—that is, political and religious—information unless it pertains to a person reasonably suspected in a crime...
...Boyd told Washington that the Campaign had not submitted its annual report to the Georgia secretary of state, as required by law...
...Beth Rapps, of the Florida Coalition for Peace and Justice, says one of the deputies asked her not to photograph them at the encampment...
...Following an expose by New York Newsday in July 1987, activists complained that the New York Police Department operated a "black desk" that listened in on a black radio station's call-in show and monitored black leaders in the wake of the 1986 Howard Beach homicide...
...There are already glimmerings of a potential FBI partnership with local units in the monitoring and harassment of critics" of U.S...
...Philadelphia activists won an injuncJONATHON ROSEN celebrated the Constitution by violating it.' tion against further deterrence of anyone wearing buttons, carrying signs, leaflet-ting, or collecting signatures at Independence Hall...
...Unfortunately, it appears that the police are still unlawfully monitoring citizens, and our liberties are not secure...
...Bullerjahn publicly apologized for taking liberties with the man's name...
...People attending a speech by Louis Farrakhan at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, in April 1985 were photographed by Connecticut State Police...
...His writings have been cited by the Bureau as being crucial in the FBI's controversial probe of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES...
...Pure rubbish...
...In one alleged "terrorist" connection described in the Freeze Campaign file, McClary detailed the movements of a guest speaker from West Germany's Green Party during the weekend of October 22 and October 23...
...That claim—that they're there to protect the target of the surveillance—is worn thin...
...The Georgia Bureau of Investigation's apparent fear of Libyan hit squads justified the inquiry into the Campaign...
...He's really in demand...
...McGavin's phone number yielded a "hello line...
...A fifteen-year-old suit against the department was settled in 1986 with a consent decree that created the Handschu Authority, a police-civilian panel established to oversee police conduct in surveillance cases...
...Eventually the police gathered thirty feet of intelligence files that were shared with a variety of police agencies...
...The letter says to us that every time we have a major media event, it's okay to do that kind of stuff," responds Crew...
...Washington is an employee of the Mead Corporation and a union and civil-rights activist...
...This is a matter that should have been settled and laid to rest," says the New York Civil Liberties Union...
...This spring, a pair of plainclothes deputies from the sheriffs office in Brevard County, Florida, walked into an encampment of peace activists on the eve of a Mother's Day rally at the Kennedy Space Center...
...If this had been in Detroit in January, this wouldn't have been as exciting...
...Boyd has been unable to substantiate any illegal activity," he wrote in a memo...
...But the very next day, that very person was taking videotapes of the demonstrators," Rapps says...
...Concern about terrorism also led to the spying, says Ray Tomlinson, McClary's commanding officer at the time...
...The penalty: $ 10...
...Hearing of DanCor's lecture topics, some officials—notably in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and in Boston—have turned down his offers of seminars...
...It was the whole use of 'brother this,' 'brother that,' to get me comfortable, which made me uncomfortable," Washington says...
...Boyd of the antiterrorism squad, played on the fact that both he and Washington were black...
...City, county, and state police are back in the dirty business—if they ever left it— of placing their own citizens under direct surveillance...
...Research for this article was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism...
...The action followed revelations of police use of informers, agents provocateurs, infiltration of unions, and electronic eavesdropping...
...The agency's "prompt inquiry" into the Campaign "was important in light of the international situation," he added...
...The surveillance occurred despite the apparent lack of potential for violence...
...A suit on the infiltration is pending, but last fall Mayor Wilson Goode beefed up police-surveillance rules...
...If the Government can command silent obedience simply because of fear of speaking out, the people have lost their ultimate control over arbitrary governmental power," ACLU policy states...
...Bowers discounts the chilling-effect argument...
...They should wear their uniforms and not be sort of trying to play like they're someone who they aren't," Gagnon says...
...In 1983, as reported by The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, agents monitored death-penalty protesters and even took part (with undercover Atlanta police) in a vigil on the eve of an execution...
...It was just the logical thing to do to keep on top of the events that most likely will affect us later in some way," Schmitt explains...
...dercover probe made headlines and the owner of the wallet threatened to sue, police chief U.F...
...An independent auditor reviews all authorizations and reports violations to the subject, who can sue...
...Throwing a broad net, police profiled ninety-five groups, including organizations that the FBI said "have caused serious crowd-management problems in the past, but who are essentially nonviolent"— such as the Livermore Action Group and CISPES...
...On the other hand, I would not want to be the victim of violence that occurred as a result of a failure of surveillance...
...In his account of a March 1983 vigil at Martin Marietta, McClary named an agent who had "infiltrated the group as a sympathizer" while McClary "posed as a freelance photo-journalist photographing all of the participants...
...This wasn't the first instance of dubious surveillance by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation...
...Carrying his message south, Davis spoke at a terrorism seminar sponsored by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in May 1987...
...Supreme Court case, Laird v. Tatum...
...Police have to show probable cause—and get agreement on the finding from at least two members of the Police Commission—to start an undercover probe...
...But just a year later, the city's finest were filming a peace rally in the Loop, thereby violating the consent decree...
...Freeze Campaign leader Bruce Gagnon remembers a man who called himself Jim McGavin and introduced himself as a Vietnam vet and working pilot...
...I doubt if anything's changed...
...Members of the gay Catholic organization, Dignity, say New York City police videotaped churchgoers engaged in "activist prayer" during several cardinal's masses last fall and winter at St...
...But while veteran protesters may not be deterred by the surveillance, others might...
...He quotes a source on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence as saying: "There is a concern [among members] that there has been a return to the red squads and the use of local resources in an improper way...
...Activists and civil libertarians deplore the domestic spying...
...He did a motor-vehicle check on the car parked in the driveway...
...Says Loomas, "He totally blew it...
...There were links that kept getting stronger," says Tomlinson, who no longer is with the police...
...It wasn't there in this case, he recalls...
...They just wanted to go in and see what was going on...
...They said they had orders to monitor the activists...
...We celebrated the Constitution by violating it," says Barry Steinhardt of the Pennsylvania ACLU...
...As long as you have no intent to violate the law, and the only thing these folks are doing is observing, what is there to fear...
...But he knew, as a former prosecutor, the kind of evidence that should have been needed before surveillance could be used...
...It also recommends controls on police photography and videotaping, but stresses that the use of those methods at political demonstrations for noninves-tigatory purposes does not violate the guidelines...
...The last two years are ushering in a new period that's gradually moving from manageable civil dissent to unmanageable major civil disorder," Davis gamely predicted at a 1985 seminar in Connecticut...
...Interstate spying also is in fashion...
...At the same time that the FBI was monitoring CISPES and the Pledge of Resistance, police officers in Orlando and Philadelphia infiltrated the Pledge group and in Chico, California, joined the local CISPES chapter...
...Their motive is to chill First Amendment rights...
...The next day, Boyd took photos of Washington's home...
...These crimes must be limited to those commonly known as major crimes...
...Special Agent C.S...
...Two years later, Orlando police assigned an undercover officer to spy on another group, the Pledge of Resistance...
...In 1980, Seattle's city council shaped similar rules into an ordinance, the nation's first...
...And this June, the Authority tightened the guidelines governing intelligence operations by police...
...In Puerto Rico, thousands of names have reportedly shown up in "subversive" files held by commonwealth police, according to an article in the Columbia Journalism Review...
...Police pan their video cameras across peaceful crowds, often for hours at a time...
...Cameras became an issue...
...Police Chief John F. Reid later apologized, and one of his deputies called the picture-taking "a stupid mistake...
...We're going to be criticized for not being there when a problem does occur, as it did in Forsyth County," said Georgia Bureau of Investigation spokesman John Bankhead...
...They wouldn't give me any facts to qualify the investigation criminally," McShane says of investigators at the interagency Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation (MBI...
...District Court Judge Susan Getzendanner told the officers, adding that another violation would cost them...
...policy in Central America, writes Frank Donner in his forthcoming book, Legacy of Haymarket...
...The excuse of ignorance works only once," U.S...
...The Campaign was formed in 1983 to intervene in often tedious proceedings before the state Public Service Commission, and it opposes the Vogtle nuclear power plant in eastern Georgia...
...To strengthen their powers of surveillance, local police agencies cooperate with each other and even cross jurisdictions...
...policy in Central America...
...Renne mentioned that the police "acted only to preserve the peace and protect the public" during a "major national media event...
...Bruce Gagnon of the Freeze Campaign is also a member of the Pledge...
...Members of right-wing organizations also come under surveillance...
...Four groups of New York City plaintiffs have contempt motions pending against police...
...Even their names reflect this shift...
...Activists and civil libertarians suspect an FBI role in encouraging or coordinating local and state police-intelligence operations around the country...
...At recent meetings of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and local police have set up roadblocks and "videotape everybody going through, stop Sometimes the police are brazen—and inept— in their surveillance...
...Law-enforcement interest in the anti-nuclear movement" was sparked by concern "for the potential of civil disobedience," according to an internal memo of January 5, 1984, to Orange County Sheriff Lawson L. Lamar...
...The High Court held that "the collection of information about public activities that were thought to have at least some potential for civil disorder" is permissible...
...But McGavin's stories "didn't fit together," Gagnon says, and Freeze members became suspicious...
...Wendy Loomas, a peace activist in Cocoa, Florida, says that when a caller prepared to leave a number on her answering machine, he was recorded asking someone, "What's our hello number...
...But a year later, that decree was put to the test...
...I think it is silly to spy on the American Civil Liberties Union," Louis Giraudo, president of the San Francisco Police Commission, told The San Francisco Chronicle after police surveillance at the 1984 Democratic convention was revealed this year...
...Sometimes, the police are brazen—and inept—in their surveillance...
...The Board of Police Commissioners has veto power over the finding...
...Shortly after his stint ended, he made a call to the Central Florida Nuclear Freeze Campaign to warn it that it was being watched...
...The underlying problem is that they've got people spying on the ACLU—under any stretch of the imagination not a violent group...
...Many also dabble in moviemaking...
...It also speaks out on such issues as farmland preservation and mass transportation...
...At one protest, police jotted down license-tag numbers of fourteen parked cars...
...Within the last five years, local and state police-intelligence squads have placed peace activists and social-change groups under surveillance, expending crime-fighting resources on activities protected by the First Amendment...
...John Rees publishes Information Digest in Baltimore, a small-circulation journal for police officers, FBI agents, and right-wing groups...
...It is our obligation to maintain information on various groups throughout the state that have the potential for violent activity...
...Many activists are used to a police presence, officers say...
...The Police Department is barred from disclosing the information you requested to the extent that it might identify individuals or confidential sources," San Francisco city attorney Louis Renne wrote to Crew...
...The files reveal Steve Burkholder, a former criminal-justice reporter for The Hartford Courant, is a free-lance writer in Middletown, Connecticut...
...We keep names of people who are potential civil disrupters...
...S.B...
...I'm happy to tell you that there is no evidence of any political spying in Chicago by the Chicago Police Department," says Richard Gutman, an attorney who represented activists in their 1974 lawsuit against the Subversive Activities Unit of the Chicago Police Department...
...Citizens protesting U.S...
...We all have PCs," says Tim Hetz, a reserve deputy in the sheriffs office in Orange County, Florida, and a spokesman for the state attorney's office in Orlando, where a Martin Marietta plant making Pershing missiles is an object of protests...
...McShane discounts this reasoning, pointing out that the charges typically stemming from civil disobedience are misdemeanors...
...Jim Davis is in and out of here quite a bit," says Dale Wise of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement...
...Police deny that they are trying to intimidate political activists...
...Burton J. Green, president of the ACLU chapter in Brevard County, Florida, asks: "Do they ever go into the boardrooms of corporations that are polluting the environment or plotting to put out shoddy products, or go to corporate picnics" to overhear shady deals being made...
...Only card-carrying members of the university community could hear the speech, and they had to pass through metal detectors at the hockey rink where Farrakhan spoke...
...After the unCurbs on Police Spying Political activists in Chicago breathed easier in April 1981 after a judge issued a consent decree curbing police spying...
...In detailed reports released by the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation, McClary related paragraph upon paragraph of details about the Freeze Campaign...
...Terrorism has replaced communism and subversion as the raison d'etre of police-intelligence units, many of which first saw action as "red squads" in the 1920s and 1930s...
...In Philadelphia last year, police infiltrated groups that authorities apparently believed might mar the bicentennial celebration of the Constitution...
...What is there to fear from...
...Terrorism seminars for police officers abound...
...Hamrick wrote on October 20, 1986...
...Boyd asked him about the Campaign for a Prosperous Georgia, a consumer group on whose board Washington serves...
...Representative John Lewis is a director...
...State and local police seemed to have forged partnerships with right-wing citizens and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in their surveillance efforts...
...He told The Orlando Sentinel in 1985 that the Pledge of Resistance had vowed to occupy the offices of two members of Congress if aid to the contras was approved...
...that Boyd's assignment was to investigate the Campaign...
...Martin Stolar, an attorney for the plaintiffs in the Handschu case, called the Authority's report a whitewash...
...Schmitt, who was familiar with protests at the Electric Boat shipyard in Groton where Trident submarines are built, says he acted as an on-the-scene adviser at the invitation of the local sheriff...
...The Campaign for a Prosperous Georgia "is about as straight a citizens' organization as you could ever dream of," says Tim Johnson...
...Jim McClary, an agent of the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation, had joined the freeze group under an alias in May and stayed until mid-December 1983, when The Orlando Sentinel broke the story...
...Gagnon is not happy about undercover attendance at his meetings...
...That's a pretext," counters Frank Donner, an attorney and author of The Age of Surveillance...
...You don't go in and investigate misdemeanors before they happen," he says...
...Attached to the memo was a newspaper story quoting Johnson speaking critically of the Department of Energy...
...Officers stress they attend demonstrations—often in plain clothes—to keep the peace, protect demonstrators, or gather information to prevent crime...
...Police used heavy-handed tactics in removing the churchgoers, Dignity members say...
...Some phone numbers prove to be nameless "hello lines" at the detective bureau...
...every car, ask for identification," says Guerrero of the Georgia ACLU...
...She agreed...
...Then, in some station houses, officers place photos, addresses, license-tag numbers, arrest records, newspaper clippings, and other background material into dossiers and computers...
...Police say since the meetings are open to the public, their attendance is appropriate and legal under a landmark 1972 U.S...
...Gay and lesbian groups, along with labor coalitions, were also closely watched, as were the ACLU and Catholic Charities of Oakland...
...In New York City, police compliance with a consent decree has been spotty...
...Last November, the Authority admitted that police had attended meetings of the New York City Civil Rights Coalition and had violated the decree's guidelines...
...Gay and lesbian groups are one favorite target of police across the country...
...The protest was also filmed by a Colonie detective posing as a free-lance photographer...
...Many civil libertarians strenuously object to the videotaping...
...Gene Guerrero, director of the Georgia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and another Campaign board member, says the notion that the group would use violence is "hogwash...
...They also blocked from the party on Independence Mall members of the Pledge of Resistance and other citizens who carried signs or wore politically suspect buttons...
...I would not want to be the object of official surveillance," he says...
...In Boston, Capitol Police officers in mufti sat in on meetings of the city's Lesbian and Gay Political Alliance and Mass Act Out to gather intelligence, a practice defended by public-safety officials who cite state-house protests that ended in arrests...
...In Los Angeles in 1984, a lawsuit brought by 131 plaintiffs was settled with a $ 1.8 million payment to victims of police spying and resulted in some of the "toughest restrictions in the country," says Linda Valentino, a longtime opponent of surveillance...
...Rees is a veteran FBI and police informant and contributor to the John Birch Society's Review of the News...
...Restricted data cannot be collected on associates of suspects or on those who hold similar views...
...From Boston to San Francisco, undercover officers or informants have attended the meetings and potluck dinners of such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union, Catholic Charities, the Central Florida Nuclear Freeze Campaign, Pledge of Resistance, the New York City Civil Rights Coalition, Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence...
...Police infiltration of the central Florida peace movement did not stop in 1983...
...Infiltrators going by false names leave background information and telephone numbers that don't check out...
...There are people who are still worried about their jobs, people being intimidated by authority," says Wendy Loomas, the Cocoa, Florida, peace activist...
...They should wear their uniforms and not be sort of trying to play like they're someone they're not,' says one peace activist who was doubly spied on...
...It's really an absurd waste of taxpayers' money to follow us around the country, if in fact that's what they were doing," says Joanne Sheehan, the War Resisters League's New England coordinator, who spotted Schmitt and Electric Boat's security chief at the Cape...
...Anyone associating with black or Puerto Rican nationalists risks being photographed by state and local police...
...The ACLU condemns the widespread and uncurbed use of police spying as violations of the First and Fourth Amendments and the general right of privacy...
...Infiltrators going by false names leave background information and telephone numbers that don't check out...
...When John Crew, an attorney with the ACLU of Northern California, asked this spring for police files on the ACLU, he was turned down...
...Red Squads on the Prowl Still spying after all these years BY STEVE BURKHOLDER The Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent who called on Gary Washington at his Atlanta home on April 16, 1986, was acting "real familiar," Washington recalls...
...McShane took heat for the anonymous tip he provided...
...In a memo dated October 10, 1983, McClary described the Green Party in the following manner: "Political party in West Germany which is currently responsible for large-scale protests and civil disorder in Western Europe____has strong ties with the Baader-Meinhof RAF...
...Goode is demanding a report of "potential criminal threat" and review by a police committee before any infiltration...
...And he took snapshots of the Campaign's former office...
...From what we can tell, the ordinance is working pretty well," says Kathleen Taylor, director of the Washington branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU...
...policy in Central America...
...At demonstrations, police officers and sheriffs' deputies sharpen their photographic skills...
...Hell's bells...
...Occasionally, even some officials get fed up...
...Independent and department audits of such probes are to be carried out...
...I don't think they should be doing it unless there's actual criminal activity going on," says Richard Tulisano of the Connecticut General Assembly...
...Whoever heard of a misdemeanor investigation...
...Neil McShane, a Florida attorney, acted as legal adviser to a police investigative task force in Orlando in 1983...
...Sheehan smelled junket...
...I have a lot of trouble with that suggestion," he says...
...DanCor has conducted terrorism workshops for state and local police on such topics as "Peace and Anti-nuclear Power Groups," "60 New Leftist Front Groups," and "Civil Disorder...
...Puerto Rican citizens, as well as stateside attorneys and mainstream journalists, have found themselves on the list...
...By June 4, after exchanges with a lawyer for Washington and Johnson, Boyd asked to close the case...
...Murray Bookchin, a professor emeritus at New Jersey State College and an expert on the Green Party, says of the alleged link between the Greens and the Baader-Meinhof gang: "That is utter, pure rubbish...
...In Los Angeles, the police department's notorious Public Disorder Intelligence Division was reborn several years ago as the Anti-Terrorist Division after a costly lawsuit...
...Georgia Attorney General Michael Bowers does not rule out further surveillance...
...However, the Authority said it was inappropriate for police to prepare summaries of the call-in show containing speakers' comments...
...A fear of bombings and other violence that have rocked the island is the apparent rationale for such runaway record-keeping...
...After Boyd's visit, Tim Johnson, director of the Campaign, issued a complaint and won the release of the files on the Campaign that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had compiled...
...policy in Nicaragua and El Salvador have also attracted police cameras...
...He has the distinction of being doubly spied on...
...In Chico, California, a police officer joining the local CISPES chapter borrowed the identity of a man whose wallet sat in the police lost-and-found...
...The Florida Department of Law Enforcement, armed with a new statute, formed a counter-terrorism unit in 1986, as did the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in 1983...
...James Schmitt, a police detective from Groton, Connecticut, traveled to Cape Canaveral in January 1987 for a rally where 186 people were arrested while protesting the test-launching of a new Trident missile...
...To substantiate his point, he referred to the incident last year in an all-white county where Ku Klux Klan members and supporters attacked black and white marchers...
...Patrick's Cathedral...
...The agent, C.S...
...At the 1984 Democratic Convention in San Francisco, the, police department set up a command post, complete with computers...
...Confronted by a group of women chanting "We want you to leave," the male deputies stayed...
...The city of Groton picked up the tab for Schmitt's Florida excursion...
...A popular lecturer is James R. Davis, president of DanCor Ltd., of El Ca-jon, California...
...Last fall in Colonie, New York, an Albany police detective showed up at an arrest-free protest against U.S...
...In Albany, New York, an officer snapped pictures of four women and their supporters leaving police court last September after an appearance on charges stemming from a protest against U.S...
...Intelligence Division members are now prohibited from attending either public or private meetings of groups engaged in lawful political activity, except with specific authorization pursuant to the guidelines," the revised policy states...
...On March 10, 1986, Boyd had been ordered by the state's antiterrorism chief to begin an inquiry into the "Campaign for Prosperous Georgia Anti-Nuclear Group" to determine "if this group's views were to advocate violence of nuclear sites which would endanger the general public," Boyd wrote in a memo...
...Their motive is not law enforcement...
...The Chicago decree bars police from starting a probe that might impinge on protected activity unless they have a "reasonable suspicion" that they are tailing a crime suspect...
...In some cities, such as Albany and San Francisco, officials have admitted error...
...Georgia is not an isolated case...
...That suit, which prompted the consent decree, ended in 1985 with a ruling by Getzendanner against the police...
...Because of the conflict between the United States and Libya earlier this year, terrorism and the potential for a terroristic attack on a nuclear facility was on everyone's mind and certainly of grave concern to the GBI," Bureau Director J.R...
...Standard FBI procedure, when starting a case with extensive FBI field-office involvement, includes going to local police with a request for help...
...According to the consent decree framed in the suit, investigations shall not occur without "a reasonable and articulated suspicion" of the planning or performance of "a significant disruption of the public order...
Vol. 52 • October 1988 • No. 10
