Minneapolis: Tales of an FBI Infiltrator
Posted by Mike E on January 13, 2011
"Karen Sullivan" (right) with her associate "Daniela Cardenas"
The following piece appeared in The Blotter.
Secret government informer “Karen Sullivan” infiltrated Minnesota activist groups
By Nick Pinto
The Twin Cities activists who had their homes raided by the FBI last September are starting to learn more about why they’re being investigated by a Chicago grand jury in relation to material support of terrorism.
Lawyers for the activists have learned from prosecutors that the feds sent an undercover law enforcement agent to infiltrate the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee in April 2008, just as the group was planning its licensed protests at the Republican National Convention.
Going by the name “Karen Sullivan,” the agent blended in with the many new faces the Committee was seeing at meetings in the lead-up to the RNC. But she stayed active afterward, attending virtually every meeting.
“She presented herself as a lesbian with a teenage daughter, and said she had a difficult relationship with her daughter’s father, which is one of the reasons she gave us for not being more transparent about her story,” says Jess Sundin, a member of the Anti-War Committee and one of the activists who has received a subpoena from the Chicago grand jury. “It was a sympathetic story for a lot of us.”
Sullivan told the group she was originally from Boston but that she had had a rough childhood and was estranged from her family. She said she had spent some time in Northern Ireland working with Republican solidarity groups.
Sullivan at first said that she didn’t have any permanent address in the area, but she eventually got an apartment in the Seward neighborhood. She claimed to be employed by a friend’s small business, checking out foreclosed properties that he might buy. The cover story of a flexible job schedule let her attend all the meetings she wanted to, and to have individual lunches with other activists.
“She really took an interest,” Sundin said. “It raised some suspicions among other members at first, but after the other undercover agents from the RNC Welcoming Committee came out, and no in our organization did, we figured we didn’t have any. Besides, we didn’t think we had anything we needed to be secretive about.”
Sullivan began to take on more responsibilities with the organization, chairing meetings, handling the group’s bookkeeping, and networking with dozens of other organizations.
In the summer of 2009, Sullivan joined two other Twin Cities activists in a trip to visit Palestine. Somehow, when they landed in Tel Aviv, Israeli security forces knew they were coming, and that they were headed to Palestine.
The three women were told they could get on the next plane back home or they could face detention. Sullivan took the flight. The other two women chose detention and were ultimately deported.
Attorneys for the activists have also learned that prosecutors are especially interested in a small donation the women intended to give to their host organization in Palestine, the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees. The group is registered as an NGO with the Palestinian Authority and not listed as a terrorist group by the United States.
Last fall, Sullivan disappeared from the Twin Cities, telling her fellow activists that she had some family business to take care of. She never came back. On September 24, the FBI launched a series of early morning raids on the homes of members of the Anti-War Committee and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
The FBI would not confirm or deny Sullivan’s identity as a government agent or comment on this story by the time of publication. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago has said it will not comment on anything related to the grand jury investigation.
Last fall the Justice Department’s Inspector General released a scathing report that criticized the FBI for invoking anti-terrorist laws to justify their investigations and harassment of groups including Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and the Catholic Worker.
“This is exactly what the Inspector General’s report was talking about,” Sundin told City Pages this morning.
“The FBI doesn’t have the right to spy on us. It’s an abuse of our democratic rights. We’re supposed to have freedom of association, not, ‘You can associate but we’re going to spy on you.’”
LS said
Much props to Kasama for prominently covering the exposure of an FBI agent that infiltrated the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee and Freedom Road Socialist Organization, which helped lead to the massive FBI/Grand Jury repression that activists around the country are now confronted with.
I hope that all activists study these things very closely to better understand the forms that state surveillance, disruption, and repression takes against our movements in the here-and-now.
I must admit though, I find it puzzling that the four stories published here have generated zero discussion and a total of only 2 comments, one of which was a comment by me simply providing links to more articles about it.
This is a bombshell of a revelation that I would think would hit close to home for any progressive activist in the U.S. I thought it would generate all kinds of discussion. But alas, so far nada. Any thoughts as to why?
Nelson H. said
LS, speaking for myself, I think I’ve been hesitant to talk about questions and potential insights because of the exact dynamic of surveillance, disruption, and repression you describe.
Thinking about the need for organizations to maintain a security culture comes to the fore among these thoughts for me. On this point I do not think that there is anything approaching broad agreement around even the need for security culture, let alone agreement with specifics with significant segments of the left we currently have, and discussion could prove useful. But it also seems counterproductive to give a thorough accounting of which methods of security culture folks have tried and what successes and failures they’ve had.
Also tied up with this, it feels crass, gossipy and counter-productive to ask folks “in the know” with this specific circumstance to share lessons at the present time.
mike e said
I agree: I think there is great interest, real concern, and strong feelings of solidarity around this.
At the same time, I feel like many people are reluctant to “drill down” in a forum like this. So don’t feel frustrated or dissed.
And — to be candid — there has been a rather stubborn line that rejects (or even ridicules) ongoing discussion of infiltration.
One view is the deeply pessimistic one: That we are “too insignificant” to draw attention, and that security culture is a sign of grandiousity and inflated self-image (and is tied to a legacy of hype from organizations like the RCP, which truly did have a legacy of hype).
First this is not true (i.e. the authorities do not view the antiwar left as insignificant in a time of colonial wars, and have clearly viewed such forces as something they consider disruptive and illegitimate — see Minneapolis, Richmond docs etc.) But secondarily, the recent history of entrapment has also involved the Federal authorities setting up people who were insignificant — for political purposes they were eager to invent and then prosecute “cells” that didn’t exist. And so they picked on small confused circles of Muslim men, and fanned their alienation into actionable conspiracies.
We are not insignificant. And (ironically) the federal authorities have proven quite willing to infiltrate, entrap and prosecute groups that were insignificant.
The other line I have seen is a view that the MAIN lesson from COINTELPRO days is that discussions of suspicious activity is a form of “cop-baiting” that should not be tolerated. The assumption is (apparently) that raising these things is largely paranoia — and quickly degenerates into unjust mutual accusations. So that raising questions of suspicious activity should (itself) be treated as a suspicious activity.
In COINTELPRO, the FBI did participate in a practice called “bad-jacketing” where police-originated rumors were spread about sincere and dedicated activists — accusing them of being informants. Stokely Carmichael was bad-jacketed as a CIA agent. Geronimo Ji-Jaga was targetted. And so on. Maoists were often accused (from within CP-Soviet oriented circles) of being CIA agents or cops.
There is an important lesson — on the importance of careful avoidance of bad-jacketing, a distrust of baseless rumors, a rejection of casual police baiting of left opponents, and the sober requirement for real evidence to back up suspicions.
But it would be a mistake to reject a discussion of justified suspicions based on reckless, dangerous or inexplicable activity of certain people.
Finally, I have now seen the view expressed several times that infiltration does little damage — and that the main approach of revolutionaries is to put such spies “to work” (on the assumption that they will do lots of hard work, help the cause, and do little damage by informing). I am curious how such an idea got widespread currency — but I have (believe it or not) heard this said a number of times now by widely separated people.
In fact, the infiltrators can do serious damage — and in particular, they have played a role in setting people up on charges involving bogus narratives of “material support” (copied over from the Bush-era persecution and entrapment of Muslim circles in the U.S.) This argues for alertness and a sharp sense of current legal frameworks for left political activity (which have been morphing due to ominous policies of the Bush and Obama administrations) — not for a passive attitude of “we can’t stop them, and they can’t hurt us.”
Monte Letourneau said
There is another factor working against discussion of these issues that I feel is very important and has some legitimacy. It’s not just that infiltrators themselves are among the first to cast such aspersions, so one also cast an aspersion upon oneself, and that the conversation is fragmentary and boils down to he said she said, and that you either get it or it’s hard to imagine, and for all these reasons it seems hard to imagine much good coming out of it. The biggest issue is that all of these things are tied up in the political contexts of natural divisions among people working together. I found out a long time ago that when you are working to change racism, sexism, et cetera-isms, that is of little help saying “you are racist” to someone who is trying to not be a racist. In constructive terms it is more productive to speak in terms of “behaviors that seem racist to me” and “why those behaviors seem racist to me”. In this manner we discuss what racism is and I am more likely to understand why you are seeing racism, and not just being a racist in return. I am also more likely to understand that such a behavior might have motives besides the racist motive I ascribe to it.
Ultimately the point is being able to talk together allows us to work together, and the prime function of infiltration, IMAO, is to sow discord and disrupt.
As there is plenty of motive to sow discord for legit reasons, it is never a good tactic among the politically astute to inpune your opponents’ motives, for you can’t really know the mind of another, and being political opponents guarantee you don’t see things the same and have the same motives.
In short, the best reason for such accusations (shy of very unlikely direct evidence) is to achieve the same goals as an infiltrator: obfuscation, diversion, dissent, discord, disruption.
Most people disrupt for what they think are good reasons, they are not more likely to respond positively after being accused of working against group interest. It can be fair, in extremis, to point out that one is being disruptive, or that one seems simply to be sowing discord. It is legit to privately say to someone that they might as well be an infiltrator, or that someone else might as well be, but we so seldom have evidence of actual motive, and infiltrators do do a lot of work to gain trust, just like anyone who wants to be an effective member of the team.
In short, there is little difference between opposing an infiltrator and opposing a legitimate political difference. One may as well stick to the issues and ensure that group actions do not need to be keep secret.
In a similar way, not having leadership, and not doing violence, make powerful outside opposition impotent.
However, there is a place for secrets, for leadership, and violence, but I feel it’s place is smaller and less significant every day.
Violence leads to reprisal and that leads to a need for speedy reaction and action. This leads to a need for leadership. In this way the thing that militates the most against pacifism and democracy is militarism itself. One may not fight war to make peace, and neither this planet, nor people, benefits from war.
In the same vein, we do not struggle against the infiltrator, for we must struggle against struggling between ourselves.
The main reason not to discus infiltration is that it really doesn’t change anything. As long as your plans are tactically sound, in that they are resistant to disruption, one may simply assume there will always be a plant, and simply move on.
However, we must resolve our differences and create effective action, hence we need to talk about these things so everyone understands the importance of praxis ramifications, like being leaderless, being transparent, and wearing masks when intending civil obedience.