Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Having been warned in advance, the police arrived quickly to remove the Buckley demonstrators. They wore riot gear, but didn't need it -- the protesters, including Hurley, were arrested without incident, and the whole thing was over in an hour. All 19 arrestees were taken to a holding cell, where the activists say Hurley seemed nervous. Nancy Peters, a 56-year-old protest organizer, recalls trying to comfort her, but Hurley didn't say much. While the rest of the group exchanged stories, Leichner says, Hurley was "noncommittal." When they were released, she didn't attend a meeting the activists had to plan legal strategy, but according to Peters, she asked to be kept informed.
None of the activists found out that Hurley was an Aurora police officer until the discovery phase of their trials last spring.
By then, though, their lawyers had reason to be suspicious. A month after the Buckley protest, the Colorado Coalition was infiltrated again, by an undercover officer from the Arapahoe County Sheriff's Office, which is also part of a Joint Terrorism Task Force. This time, the group realized something was up.
On April 14, the activists planned to meet with Republican Sen. Wayne Allard, a supporter of the war, and ask him to present a "peace resolution" to Congress. Several of the activists planned to refuse to leave his office unless he acceded to their demands, which no one expected him to do.
Peters, who was arrested at Buckley, was one of the organizers of the Allard action and was going to be on hand to bail out activists taken to jail. Again, the Colorado Coalition held a nonviolence training session the day before for those planning to be arrested.
Peters remembers unloading her car outside the church where the training was held when she saw a couple walking by, looking like they were "killing time" before finally going inside. The man, a muscular guy who looked to be in his 30s, introduced himself as Chris Taylor and said the woman with him was his girlfriend. In fact, his name was Darren Christensen and he was an undercover officer, as was Liesl McArthur, the woman he was with. As the Rocky Mountain News reported in December, much of his usual undercover work involved "being solicited on line for deviant sex."
Unlike Hurley, Christensen immediately made the activists nervous. "A couple of people from the group came up and said, 'Who are they? Do you know them from any other events?'" says Peters. "He was pumping for information, asking questions about whether there was a group that was more radical and had a different focus, more like the black bloc or the anarchists."
At the time, though, it didn't occur to anyone that the police would be interested in spying on them. So they let Christensen participate, even after he made what Peters thought was an outlandish suggestion.
"It was in the evening when we were trying to figure out our general plan," she says. "We didn't know whether the police would be blocking the entrance to Allard's office." They were discussing whether the six people planning the sit-in should go in as a group, or one by one, in order to evade attention. "[Christensen] said, 'Look, why don't we just walk right through their line?' We were like, whoa, nobody wants to get their heads blown off," says Peters. "We are peaceful, nonviolent group. We're not trying to storm a building."
The next day, the group met beforehand to coordinate. Everyone who planned to get arrested gave Peters bond money, except for Christensen, who said his girlfriend would bail him out. The six entered Allard's office at 1 p.m., and by 5 p.m. they'd all been arrested.
"I raced over to the jail," says Peters. "There were several people there, including his 'girlfriend.' I was trying to find out who'd been booked and what their bail was, but none had been put into the system yet."
Peters was standing in the jailhouse lobby and talking on a pay phone when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Christensen walking out the door. "He had a phony story about how his girlfriend got him out," she says. "I asked, 'Can I see your summons?' He didn't have one."
Peters passed her concerns on to her group's pro bono defense attorneys, who soon found that although six people had been arrested, only five had been charged. Then, while reviewing the Buckley case, they noticed that while 19 people had been arrested there, only 18 were charged. Eventually, by subpoenaing police records, the attorneys figured out that police had sent the undercover agents to infiltrate the group.
Once exposed, Hurley turned up in court to watch the protesters' trials.
"When she came to court, she just seemed so arrogant," says Ellen Stark, a 57-year-old preschool teacher who is part of the group arrested at Buckely. "She was not at all apologetic about her activities and the fact that she had lied to us. She just looked at us with disdain." None of the activists have been able to get any answers from officials about why they were being watched. "I couldn't interest anybody on the Aurora City council to even meet with me," says Stark. "Nobody would talk to me."
America has seen this kind of thing before. Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover ran COINTELPRO, a program of surveillance and sabotage against political dissidents. COINTELPRO watched violent groups like the Ku Klux Klan and, later, the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers, but it also spied on and harassed thousands of innocent people, including Martin Luther King Jr.
COINTELPRO's abuses came to light in 1971, when a group of activists calling themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI office in Media, Penn., and stole several hundred pages of files.
In his recent history of COINTELPRO, "There's Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan and FBI Counterintelligence," David Cunningham writes, "These files provided the first public disclosure of a range of Bureau activities against targets such as the Black Panther Party, the Venceremos Brigade, the Philadelphia Labor Committee, Students for a Democratic Society, and college students with 'revolutionary' leanings."
Eventually, damaging revelations about COINTELPRO led the FBI to adopt reforms designed to prevent a repeat of Hoover's excesses. Attorney General Edward Levi laid out a set of standards for FBI domestic surveillance. "These so-called Levi Guidelines clearly laid out the criteria required for initiated investigations, establishing a standard of suspected criminal conduct, meaning activity (rather than merely ideas or writings, which had been adequate cause for targeting groups and individuals as subversive during the COINTELPRO era)," Cunningham writes. "The guidelines also stipulated as acceptable only particular investigative techniques, making it considerably more difficult to initiate intrusive forms of surveillance."
The Levi guidelines didn't end all political spying -- in the 1980s, the FBI targeted the Committee in Solidarity With the People of El Salvador, or CISPES. As the ACLU reports, "Strong evidence suggests that CISPES was targeted for investigation because of its ideological opposition to then-President Reagan's already controversial foreign policy in Latin America. The FBI persisted in an intensive six-month investigation of CISPES in which it often reported the group's activities to the Department of Justice in a prejudicial and biased manner." Yet most civil libertarians believe that even if the rules were occasionally broken, they still worked to protect First Amendment rights.
Contrary to the claims made by defenders of Bush administration policies, the Levi guidelines would not have impeded an investigation of al-Qaida. As Cunningham points out, cases "with suspected ties to 'foreign powers' were not subject to this criminal standard." Nevertheless, after Sept. 11, Attorney General John Ashcroft issued new rules gutting the Levi guidelines. Thanks to Ashcroft, FBI agents are now allowed to monitor public meetings even if they don't have any reason to suspect that there's any criminal activity being committed or planned.
"Now, that means if there is a rally of people who are criticizing the United States and its policies and saying that the United States will someday perhaps be destroyed because of that, the FBI agent can go and listen to what's being said," Ashcroft told CNN's Larry King in May of 2002. In other words, merely arguing that U.S. policies may result in the country's destruction justifies FBI snooping. This gives the FBI investigative license far beyond even that it enjoyed during the COINTELPRO period, let alone under the Levi Guidelines.
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