When members of the Clamshell Alliance held a demonstration at the Manchester headquarters of Public Service Company of New Hampshire, the lead builder of a nuclear power plant 40 miles away in Seabrook, they expected to get arrested. What surprised them was to learn that one of the participants in their May 26, 1980 action was actually an officer with the New Hampshire State Police. The undercover cop, James Nims, even participated in the group’s meeting with their lawyer and passed on what he learned to prosecutors.
It was not the first time Clamshell members discovered they were being surveilled and infiltrated. One of the 180 No Nukes activists arrested at the Alliance’s second civil disobedience action, August 22, 1976, was an undercover cop. And just prior to a major demonstration in 1978, Clamshell members discovered a State Police van with a camera trained on the office where a planning meeting was being held.
Governor Meldrim Thomson, who called the Clamshell a “terrorist” group after members of Lyndon Larouche’s U.S. Labor Party “briefed” State Police officials (really), considered contracting with a private security firm to spy on the Alliance. Instead, the company made a deal with Public Service Company to provide “a general plan on how a facility would handle various emergencies,” a representative told The Real Paper, adding, “that could include anything from nuclear terrorism to political demonstrations.”
The Clamshell Alliance wasn’t the only No Nukes group to have its actions disrupted by spies and infiltrators.
As reported in a 1978 article in The Real Paper, the Atlanta Journal had found that as early as September 1977, “the Georgia Power Company was engaged in a massive anti-nuclear surveillance program, with a $750,000 annual budget and nine full-time undercover agents, taken from the ranks of such public agencies as Army Intelligence, the Treasury Department, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.” The Journal’s sources revealed “a national network exists to circulate information on so-called dissidents.”
Following a 1977 demonstration at the Diablo Canyon nuclear plants, the Abalone Alliance discovered that two of the 47 people arrested had been cops. “The undercover agents were the only ones who ever even mentioned the possibility of violence,” observed an Alliance member quoted in The Real Paper. “One in particular seemed to want to incite it. He tried to smuggle wire-cutters onto the site, and attempted to get us to change our route at the last minute.”
Whether infiltrators in radical groups are simply passing on information to whomever hired them, or actively trying to provoke actions to de-legitimize the groups, activists should be prepared. That’s the point of “How Agents Provocateurs Harm Our Movements,” a new report by Steve Chase published by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.
The use of agents provocateurs “by power elites and movement opponents to weaken the unity of civil resistance movements, discredit them in the eyes of the wider public, and justify greater and more draconian repression by police and security forces” is an old practice, not limited to the United States. Chase not only dips into the well-documented history of the African American freedom movement, which saw FBI spies high in the ranks of the Black Panther Party and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but also provides examples from Guatemala, Thailand, India, Poland, and the UK.
Part of the problem, as the Abalone Alliance example illustrates, is that it is often the agents who propose the most “radical” seeming actions within movements and encourage behavior harmful to their cause. Of course, there are also sincere activists who advocate a “diversity of tactics,” including low-level violence, despite ample evidence that disciplined nonviolence is generally more effective.
That evidence comes from scholars Chase cites, such as Omar Wasow, Sharon Erickson Nepstad, and Erica Chenoweth, who have shown that movements which rely on disciplined nonviolence are more effective at reaching their goals than movements which employ or tolerate violence. Chenoweth correlates the declining effectiveness of recent nonviolent civil resistance campaigns with “a higher proportion of primarily nonviolent uprisings [which] tolerate, embrace, or fail to contain violent flanks.”
“Indeed,” Chase emphasizes, “the power elites that hire agent provocateurs clearly understand that undermining a movement’s nonviolent discipline and encouraging low-level violence makes movements easier to defeat. If this was not the case, how likely would it be that oppressive regimes all over the world would continue to spend significant time, human resources, and money trying to get activists in social movements to engage in such violent activities?”
It’s counter-productive to assume that all advocates of physically aggressive tactics are covert agents. (One can also imagine infiltrators among a movement’s conservative elements, counselling “go slow” approaches.) Chase looks to activist Lisha Sterling for advice. “In the end,” Sterling says, “there may well be some people whom you never figure out are infiltrators until long after everything is over. The best solution to the problem of the unknown infiltrator is not to distrust everyone, but rather to avoid this potentially disastrous tension altogether by adopting and enforcing a clear code of conduct for all participants. If you isolate people who refuse to maintain your agreed upon security protocols or who break your code of conduct, then you will have effectively defeated the enemy in your camp.”
Chase, a longtime organizer, educator, and writer who is currently the Assistant Director of Solidarity 2020 and Beyond, provides a number of other tips, including:
• Stating a clear collective commitment to nonviolent discipline in all our calls for action and avoiding the rhetoric of “diversity of tactics;”
• Providing trainings before major resistance actions explaining why maintaining nonviolent discipline increases movement effectiveness;
• Encouraging the formation of smaller movement affinity/support groups as cells within a larger action to help maintain effective behavior, increase personal accountability, provide mutual aid, and help people deal with their emotions in the face of violent repression and provocation; and
• Using trained peacekeepers at our actions to help well-meaning activists not take the bait to engage in impulsive, but unhelpful, movement behavior.
He also calls for “challenging macho posturing within our movement culture and encouraging the full participation of women in the leadership of people’s movements (which research indicates usually improves nonviolent discipline and movement effectiveness considerably).”
Marla Marcum of the Climate Disobedience Center says the No Coal, No Gas Campaign, which seeks the shutdown of New England’s last coal-fired power plant, has on more than one occasion observed people believed to be infiltrators in their trainings and at their actions. It’s one reason the campaign puts a priority on community building. “We assume that we will always have infiltrators in a publicly announced mass action,” Marcum says. “The way we did this last one with encampment required for anybody who was risking arrest kept our numbers lower, but we also believe that someone in the core team knew every person who showed up at camp. This doesn’t preclude infiltration, but it does raise the bar.”
Steve Chase says, “By developing our capacity to resist the marketing of movement violence, we can make our movements more successful and inoculate ourselves from the harm caused by agent provocateurs and agent provocateur-like behavior.”
When I ran the New Hampshire office of the American Friends Service Committee, I hung a plastic bug from the ceiling to remind us that someone could be listening. It was no joke.
Click here to order or download a copy of “How Agents Provocateurs Harm Our Movements.”
Thanks, Arnie, for your article giving additional instances of governments planting agent provocateurs, and the value of Steve Chase’s new book. I recommended your article in my comment at the bottom of my WagingNonviolence article.
George