Terrorism Weekly: How Britain's Police Infiltrated the Environmental Movement (and Why It Will Continue)

"[O]ne Jones, of Tottenham, … accused (mistakenly) of being a spy, because of his violent resolutions which were alleged to be for the `purpose of entrapping the [London Corresponding] Society’. Jones (the genuine informer, Groves, reported with wry relish) complained: 

'If a Citizen made a Motion which seemed anyways spirited he was set down as a Spy sent among them by the Government. If a Citizen sat in a Corner & said nothing he was watching their proceedings that the might the better report it....Citizens hardly knew how to act.'" [E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class]

In Britain this week the story of an eco-warrior and professional mountain climber was front-page news. We learned of Mark Stone was a keen supporter of environmental causes and active in a variety of protest movements. Even better, he owned a van allowing him to transport his comrades to various gatherings.

So far, a tale of a dedicated activist. But Stone actually had a different job and a different name. Mark Kennedy was a policeman who had grown his hair long, left behind his wife and children, and gone deep undercover for seven years, travelling to 22 different countries, to infiltrate the environmental movement and solve the problem of "domestic extremism". He had spied on all those who thought he was a keen protector of the environment, leaving behind a profound sense of betrayal when the truth of his identity emerged.

This may be news in 2010, but as I point out in Snitch: A History of the Modern Intelligence Informer, there is nothing new about Kennedy’s story. E.P. Thompson’s opening quote describe state spying by an undercover individual in the first half of the 19^th century. And the tactic was old even then. 

Some of the best statistics demonstrating the extent of undercover operatives in democratic societies come out of the U.S. By the early 1960s, an estimated 17% of members of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) were on the FBI payroll. By the middle of the decade, an estimated 6% of Ku Klux Klan members also enjoyed payments from the Bureau.

With the burst of protest in the latter half of the decade, the FBI infiltrated the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the student protest movement. Some small chapters of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were only kept alive by the efforts of informers. Some of the Bureau's plants crossed the line from passive observers to active participants in protest and even in violence, despite such participation being against the spirit of FBI rules.  

Despite the chatter in the British press about enquiries, nothing will change with the revelations of the last week. Infiltrators are too valuable a tool for police forces and intelligence agencies to be cast aside or heavily restricted. They allow the state to target groups and individuals, including terrorists, who are perceived to represent a threat. Often the state organizations charged with doing the investigations lack intimate knowledge or even basic familiarity of those being targetted, hence the need to recruit from within those groups being spied upon or to send someone like Kennedy deep undercover.

There are other obvious benefits to such a tactic. There’s no need to have to go through a court to obtain a warrant as with electronic forms of surveillance. Most importantly, an individual like Stone/Kennedy can easily switch from passively observing targeted groups and individuals to directing them in specific, potentially destructive directions. Hence, the continuity between the experience of the London Corresponding Society about whom Thompson wrote about and today's friendly mountain climber with the van. 

(Steve Hewitt is Senior Lecturer in American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham and author of Snitch: A History of the Modern Intelligence Informer and The British War on Terror: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism on the Home Front since 9/11

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