Secret Manoeuvres in the Dark: Corporate and Police Spying on Activists

Secret Manoeuvres in the Dark

This book is a joint project of

SpinWatch in the UK

www.spinwatch.org

and

Buro Jansen & Janssen in the Netherlands

www.burojansen.nl

First published 2012 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by

Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

Copyright © Eveline Lubbers 2012

The right of Eveline Lubbers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 3186 7 Hardback

ISBN 978 0 7453 3185 0 Paperback

ISBN 978 1 8496 4640 6 PDF eBook

ISBN 978 1 8496 4642 0 Kindle eBook

ISBN 978 1 8496 4641 3 EPUB eBook

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd

Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England

Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America

For Felipe Rodriquez

Thanks

Geert Lovink for guiding me through the wilderness, Buro Jansen & Janssen for all those years, David Miller and Will Dinan Dienke Hondius, Monique Verrijcke, Sheila O’Donnell, Andy Rowell, Maja van der Velden, Rob Dover, Rick van Amersfoort and all the other friends who knew that I was going to get there. The ladies’ gym for their support and courage,

and of course, most of all, to Marq, my love, and Castor, Franka and Renzo, my kids, for making this possible and still loving me, and everybody at Omega and Villa Spijker for taking so much weight off my shoulders.

Contents

Preface: Corporate Spying Today

1. Introduction: The Waste Paper Man

2. Covert Corporate Strategy in the Past

3. Rafael Pagan, Nestlé and Shell: Case Study

4. McSpy: Case Study

5. Cybersurveillance and Online Covert Strategy: Case Study

6. Hakluyt and the Jobbing Spy: Case Study

7. The Threat Response Spy Files: Case Study

8. Conclusion: Secrecy, Research and Resistance

Appendix 1: Manfred Schlickenrieder Documents

Appendix 2: Evelyn le Chêne Documents

Notes

Bibliography and References

Index

Preface

Corporate Spying Today

The exposure of Mark Kennedy as an infiltrator of activist groups made headlines in early 2011. Confronted by friends and fellow campaigners in the UK, Kennedy admitted to having been a spy for seven years. Using the name Mark Stone, he had embedded himself in the environmental movement, while widening his scope to protests against the summits of world leaders, anti-fascism campaigning and animal rights advocacy. His nickname was ‘Flash’ because of the money he had available. He offered transport to set up climate camps and volunteered his climbing skills to add spectacular effects to, for instance, the occupation of power plants.

The Mark Kennedy case could have been a chapter in this book. It is an exemplary case, with the infiltrator providing transport and money, and sometimes crossing the thin line between facilitator and agent provocateur. It is an extraordinary case, not only for the span of the operation, the many years, and the amount of countries in Europe. The coverage in the press was huge, and as a result of public pressure, half a dozen official reviews are now under way.

The fact that he was a police spy would not have made a difference. On the contrary, the Kennedy case reveals the increasingly blurring boundaries between public and private policing and puts the grey area of corporate intelligence in the spotlight. The set of secret units Kennedy worked for was founded explicitly to satisfy the needs of companies targeted by activists. What is more, the companies involved – such as electricity suppliers and airline companies – also hire former police and intelligence staff to deal with security issues.

The fact that none of the official reviews into the Kennedy case investigates the aspects of corporate spying underlines the urgent need for a book putting the spotlight on similar secret manoeuvres in the dark.

BLURRING BOUNDARIES

The exposure of Mark Kennedy put the spotlight on secret police units making a profit from selling information, and showed that the police cooperate with private security services founded by former intelligence staff with long track records in monitoring activist groups.

As an undercover agent, Kennedy reported to a secret unit founded to deal with ‘domestic extremism’ run by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO). Its organization reflects the culture of secretiveness and the aversion to any public scrutiny of intelligence work. The unit Kennedy worked for was one of three. His was the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, created in 1999. The other two ACPO branches are the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit, set up in 2004, which advises thousands of companies on how to manage political campaigns, and the National Domestic Extremism Team, added in 2005, which pools intelligence gathered by investigations into protesters across the country. The units report to ACPO’s Terrorism and Allied Matters Committee. Although it is responsible for some of the more sensitive national operations, ACPO is not a public body of any sort.¹ It is a limited company, sharing its data with clients such as energy companies running power plants and airline companies involved in the expansion of airports and flights. In its 2008 ‘statement of purpose’, ACPO vowed ‘to develop our business activities to ensure that the ACPO brand name is recognized globally as a mark of excellence in policing’ (ACPO, 2008). A Daily Mail investigation into its activities and assets revealed that ACPO was selling information from the Police National Computer for up to £70 – even though it pays just 60p to access those details. It offers, among other services, so-called police certificates that reveal whether someone has a criminal record – a service over which it has a monopoly. For a ‘not-for profit’, the company accounts show a significant annual surplus, still according to the Daily Mail, with £15.8 million in assets, including £9.2 million ‘cash at bank and in hand’ (Lewis, 2009). In a response, the organization defended their activities, claiming that ‘all funds to ACPO are employed in the interests of public safety and the police service’ (ACPO, 2009).

The national infrastructure for dealing with ‘domestic extremism’ was set up with the backing of the Home Office in 1997 in an attempt to combat animal rights activists. It started in Huntingdon, as a section of Special Branch, the Animal Rights National Index (ARNI). At the time, the Home Office was ‘getting really pressurized by big business – pharmaceuticals in particular, and the banks’ about the ‘extreme criminal behaviour of some people within the animal rights movement’, according to Superintendent Steve Pearl, head of National Extremism unit. Later, the units incorporated ARNI altogether (Evans, Lewis and Taylor, 2009; for more background, see Mobbs, 2009). Since the criminal activity associated with these groups has receded, the secret units have expanded their remit to incorporate campaign groups across the political spectrum engaged in peaceful direct action. Special Branch colluded with private investigators hired by McDonald’s to spy on activists in the 1990s, as Chapter 4 shows. More recently, according to Pearl, the focus shifted to the Climate Camp and Plane Stupid campaigns because environmental protesters had started ‘shutting down airports and coal-fired power stations’. A freedom of information request by the Liberal Democrats in 2009 revealed that the police and the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) exchanged information with E.ON over the Climate Camp demonstrations at Kingsnorth power station. According to correspondence between civil servants and security officials at the company (seen by the Guardian), police intelligence and the Department’s strategies on protesters, including their names and whereabouts, were passed to E.ON. ‘David Howarth MP, who obtained the emails, said they suggested that BERR had attempted to politicise the police, using their intelligence to attempt to disrupt a peaceful protest. It is as though BERR was treating the police as an extension of E.ON’s private security operation,’ he said (Taylor and Lewis, 2009).

While some of the information gathered comes from police spies like Kennedy, the ACPO database also contains ‘information supplied by companies that hire private investigators to spy on protestors, sometimes by infiltration’, according to the national co-coordinator for domestic extremism, Anton Setchell (Evans, Lewis and Taylor, 2009).

For instance, Kennedy secretly taped the discussions of a group of people from all over the UK to take over the Radcliffe-on-Soar power station the next day, on Easter Monday 2009. Just before everybody went to sleep, a large police force surprised the group and arrested 114 people.

However, the energy giant E.ON, which runs the Radcliffe-on-Soar plant, also turned to private security firms. The energy giant claimed that it happened ‘on an ad hoc basis as its executives wanted to know when environmentalists were going to demonstrate at or invade its power stations and other premises’ (Lewis and Evans, 2011a).

One such firm was Vericola, which worked for several companies targeted by climate campaigners, such as Scottish Resources Group, Britain’s second biggest coal producer. Their information on activists also went to Gordon Irving, security director of Scottish Power, one of the UK’s largest electricity generators. He joined the firm in 2001 after 30 years with Strathclyde police, where he had been head of Special Branch.

The other security firm hired by E.ON was Global Open, a company that, according to its website, ‘maintains a discreet watch on groups that may present a risk to a corporation’s reputation or safety’ and offers to assist in ‘intelligence gathering’. Its clients include BAe, England’s largest arms producer, whose spying operations feature in Chapter 9.

Global Open’s director is Rod Leeming, another member of the so-called old boys’ network. He left the police, where as head of the Animal Rights National Index he regularly infiltrated undercover operatives into protest groups, in 2001 (Evans et al., 2011). With the ACPO unit’s history of countering animal rights activism and its subsequent shift of focus towards climate campaigners, the extent of its link with companies like Global Open remains relatively unknown.

Mark Kennedy was also connected to Global Open. In February 2010, he set up Tokra Limited, acting as ‘logistics officer’ and sole director. The company was registered to the address of Heather Millgate, a director of Global Open at the time. Kennedy started using Tokra contact details in the period after he stopped working for the police, but before he was exposed as a spy. He did so at an Earth First! gathering in August 2010, taking part in a workshop on resisting police infiltration. Mark was by far the most vocal and enthusiastic contributor (Gifford, 2011).

Whether Kennedy pursued a career in corporate intelligence to continue his spying work after the police had pulled the plug, or whether the contacts with private security started earlier on, is not known. As we have said, the official reviews of the Kennedy case have failed to investigate the links between the special police units, the heads of security of the companies involved (such as power plants and airports) and the private agencies providing corporate intelligence. Mapping out these links is crucial to understand the current version of old boys’ networks – male and female today – and their formal and informal sharing of information. Secret Manoeuvres provides the first collection of case studies in activist intelligence and corporate counterstrategy, depicting close cooperation between public and private forces.

NOT UNIQUE

With the many surprising twists in the story still unfolding, it is easy to forget that the Kennedy case is in no way unique. On the contrary: it is just the latest exposure in a long line of similar stories of intelligence operations in the UK and elsewhere, conducted either by the police or by private contractors. Several infiltrators have been exposed since; their stories show just how difficult it is to find out for whom they were working.

Just a few years ago, in 2007, someone calling himself Ken Tobias joined the protests of Plane Stupid, a loose network that takes action against the aviation industry’s climate impact. He spent a year covertly gathering information on Plane Stupid, attending meetings and participating in protests. Tobias’ infiltration was exposed when Plane Stupid fed the Oxford-educated ‘activist’ false information that found its way back to the aviation industry and journalists. When he was confronted, he denied being a spy, but failed to produce a passport or a photo ID. Following up his supposed Oxford connection, students shown a photograph recognized Ken as Toby Kendall, an Oriental Studies student from Wadham College. A quick Google search then revealed that Ken claimed to be an analyst at C2i International, a company advertising itself as ‘Specialists in Security Crisis Risk Management’ with ‘aerospace’ at the top of the client list. However, since BAA denied any contacts with C2i, it remains a mystery as to who paid for Ken Tobias’ spying (Webster, 2008).

C2i was founded by Justin King, another example of an ex-police officer now working with his former colleagues. He had been a helicopter pilot in the Special Forces, and was trained to ‘British police special operations standards’ in surveillance and counterespionage. The agents for the company – now called Lynceus Consulting Ltd – are ‘hand-picked from Special Operations at New Scotland Yard’, according to the company website.

After Plane Stupid Scotland had managed to close down Aberdeen Airport for a day in March 2009, several activists were approached for information on the group’s activities. Among them was Tilly Gifford. She was offered cash in return by two men, of whom one claimed to be a detective constable, the other an assistant. Plane Stupid decided to expose the police’s recruiting tactics in the media, using a spy-cam and recording conversations on a mobile phone. Gifford recorded almost three hours’ worth of talks with the two men before she ended the contact.

In an attempt to identify the two spies, Gifford has been locked in a bureaucratic maze ever since. Strathclyde Police confirmed that the names of the two police officers did not feature on their databases at the time they approached her. After Gifford’s request for the officer’s date of commission in the Strathclyde force was refused, her case went all the way to the Scottish Information Commissioner, but she still does not know who the men were or even if they were police officers (Gifford, 2011). Her lawyer, Patrick Campbell, is not sure whether the covert operation is being run with Strathclyde police, or just using its name. Either way, he says, ‘the methods employed are disturbing, and more worrying yet is the lack of any clearly identifiable body responsible for this’ (Lewis, 2009).

As it turned out, Gifford was not the only one. More members of Plane Stupid in Scotland have been separately approached by what they thought to be plainclothes police in early 2009. The Sunday Herald reported that in addition to environmental protest groups, individuals protesting against the Faslane naval base on the Clyde were offered cash for intelligence. Some, arrested for protesting, were taken out of their cells for ‘cosy chats’ with two female MoD police officers. Others were approached by Strathclyde Police and had similar problems tracing the officers. However, Assistant Chief Constable George Hamilton confirmed the police action, saying: ‘Officers from Strathclyde Police have been in contact with a number of protesters involved with the Plane Stupid protests, including Aberdeen Airport. The purpose of this has been to ensure any future protest activity is carried out within the law’ (Edwards, 2009).

NOT WITHOUT PRECEDENTS

Outsourcing surveillance and employing spies to monitor public protest is not a new phenomenon, and the present cases should not be seen in isolation. The climate change movement has its roots in the direct action campaign against the Tory road-building programme in the early 1990s. The state employed a whole range of tactics against protestors, including surveillance, legal and physical intimidation, and disinformation. But contractors were also involved. For many the defining anti-roads campaign was that of Twyford Down, where the route for the M3 was bulldozed through the chalk downs of Hampshire. In what was believed to be the first time a government department, rather than the security services, had spied on environmental protestors, the Department for Transport hired the Brays Detective Agency from Southampton. Brays ran up a bill of £700,000 spying on the protestors for the government, a move condemned by the organizations involved, including Liberty. ‘We believe that collecting information on people solely because they are protestors is a breach of their privacy under international law,’ said Liberty (cited in Rowell, 1996: 347), in a statement that has ramifications for the Mark Kennedy case.

Another defining anti-roads battle was that over the Newbury bypass. Thames Valley police later admitted paying for someone to spy on the protestors. Further intelligence was collected on Newbury activists for the security company Group Four and for the police by Evelyn le Chêne, the security consultant featured in Chapter 7. At the time, it was known that security companies were in regular contact with Special Branch, which had started compiling a list of environmental and animal rights activists. Fed by Special Branch, the press started a disinformation campaign against the protestors, often labelling them as violent and extremist (Rowell, 1996). The road protests marked the beginning of political policing as we know it today in the UK.

SECRET MANOEUVRES

As with most of the other cases related in this book, exposing Mark Kennedy would not have been possible without the unremitting efforts of a few of the activists involved, their research and the cooperation of committed Guardian journalists.

The story is typical in terms of the damage done and the trail of ruined friendships and relationships Kennedy left behind. The feelings of loss and betrayal on both the political and the personal levels tend to hamper crucial investigations by those involved in an attempt to map out what happened in more detail, and to understand the impact and the full consequences of the operation. Several of the stories in this book relay similar experiences. The ongoing exposure in the media, with the undercover police officer flawlessly recasting his character to the duped victim, did not help those involved to acquire the necessary distance from their object of investigation.

The Mark Kennedy case is more than a sensational scoop. The focus on his person and his personality obscures the underlying development of corporate spying on activists. Secret Manoeuvres in the Dark aims to address this trend of conjunctions between the state and the corporate world aimed at suppressing the critical voices that are indispensable in a democratic society.

1

Introduction: The Waste Paper Man

This book is about intelligence and activism. It addresses the ways in which large corporations seek to manage and manipulate public protest, and it reveals the informal dimension of information-gathering hidden behind the politics and practices of public relations and reputation management. It brings together a set of case studies examining corporate espionage, based on exclusive access to previously confidential documented sources. Each story is systematically unravelled to map the different aspects of the spying process. Detailing chronology, agents and strategy, each case is analysed as an actual intelligence operation, creating a new perspective on the events.

To make a proper risk assessment, first and foremost a company needs to know what is coming its way. Nowadays business intelligence has gone beyond details about the world economy, overseas wars and news about the competition. It must also include an evaluation of the risks of becoming the target of campaigners, boycotters or net activists. Publicly available information is not sufficient for this task. Informal data, however obtained, are invaluable. Desirable information is not limited to concrete action scenarios but can be as broad (and vague) as long-term strategy discussions, impressions of the mood inside a campaigning group, connections between organizations, networking possibilities, funding details, and so on. As it turns out, corporate issue management is evolving into more than an occasional exercise of ‘damage control’. Secret Manoeuvres in the Dark shows how intelligence gathering facilitates covert strategies designed to frustrate and undermine the critics of corporations.

Globalization and neoliberal politics provide the contexts for this investigation. The stories in this book highlight the privatization of intelligence, and the increasing value of information as capital in power relations. The research reveals increasingly blurred boundaries between public and private in secret operations, which, in my opinion, represents a potential danger to democracy. The importance of the issues at stake calls for a more active role for social scientists, investigative journalists, politicians and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and others concerned about the role of public protest in society. This book seeks to broaden the understanding of the policies of large corporations in their pursuit of power, and their efforts to avoid public debate and silence critics.

BATTLING BIG BUSINESS

The first time I encountered a case of corporate spying was in 1994, when I was involved in exposing a spy called Paul Oosterbeek. At the time, I was working with buro Jansen & Janssen in the Netherlands, monitoring police and intelligence. Founded in 1984, the buro investigated the ways in which social movements were curtailed and undermined, by supporting people and groups who had become involuntarily targeted by the police, intelligence agencies or their corporate counterparts. Buro Jansen & Janssen has since developed a broader perspective on monitoring and intervening in debates on issues like repression and privacy. For me, the shift of focus included an increasing interest in private intelligence agencies.

The case of the Waste Paper Man serves as a typical illustration of the issues at stake. It shows how an individual infiltrating activist groups can work for long periods of time collecting information in several different ways. It also illustrates how the information gathered is processed into ‘intelligence products’ and used by clients to undermine activist groups. The case reveals how the intelligence can end up in the hands of the press. When used to incriminate activist groups, this can work to the advantage of prosecuting authorities.

Oosterbeek was active in groups I worked with, and had tried to get involved in a network of activists investigating intelligence-related topics in the Netherlands. Although several people did not trust him, it took years to act upon the plans to screen Oosterbeek’s background. Only when several campaigners compared experiences was it discovered that he had used a variety of cover stories to hide his true identity. It emerged that Oosterbeek had created quite a network of information sources, and had worked for several activist organizations and NGOs. Going by the name of Marcel Paul Knotter, he posed as a volunteer and managed to stay under cover for more than seven years. He promoted his computer skills – rare in the late 1980s and the early 1990s – and offered to install software and set up computer databases. He would handle the input of contact addresses, new subscribers and possible sponsors into IT systems, and also assisted with archiving work. To explain his background Oosterbeek claimed to be engaged in investigating large corporations and their involvement in apartheid, child labour or other human rights violations – tailoring the details of his cover to the needs of his audience. Meanwhile, he took advantage of his position to collect the groups’ discarded paperwork, pretending he would sell it to a pulp mill and donate the proceeds to a charity project of the groups’ choice. At the time of his exposure, no fewer than 30 organizations, ranging from small activist groups to big church-affiliated research foundations like Pax Christi, knew Oosterbeek as their ‘Waste Paper Man’. In fact, Oosterbeek delivered boxes of faxed originals, photocopies and printouts to the offices of ABC, a small security consultancy owned by Peter Siebelt. There, behind a high wall and a sharp-spiked iron fence and under guard of security cameras, the data were processed. Every sheet was carefully combed for information, from financial data to the details of internal strategy discussions. The networks between organizations and the overlap in personnel were mapped, and the special interests of groups’ individual members scrutinized. ABC thus compiled numerous files on activists and NGOs, supplementing them with information available from public sources such as magazines, annual reports and other records filed with the Chambers of Commerce, the Dutch equivalent of the UK Companies House (Lubbers, 1994a, 1994b, 1995a, 2002a).

What we had discovered was a new, cleaner form of garbology – which is detective slang for a particularly dirty kind of research. Activists and advocacy groups in the Netherlands knew their waste paper was being gathered, but not what it was being ‘recycled’ into: intelligence files for companies those groups were criticizing. Little did they realize how interesting their paperwork could be to the companies they campaigned against, to the tabloids, and occasionally even to the police, the public prosecutor and the secret service.

Siebelt maintained good contacts with the Dutch daily De Telegraaf, a newspaper with a reputation for mudslinging and activist bashing. Over the years, the paper frequently published articles based on internal documents that could be traced back to the Waste Paper Man (see, for instance, De Haas and Koolhoven, 1993a, 1993b; Koolhoven, 1996, 1997; de Haas and Sanders, 1997a, 1997b). In one case, an article randomly linking alleged networks of progressive organizations to terrorism served as the sole piece of evidence to launch a criminal investigation. The paper claimed to know that the Dutch secret service BVD identified this network as potentially terrorist (De Haas and Koolhoven, 1993b). Based on a small quote in a De Telegraaf article, freelance journalist Hans Krikke ended up as the main suspect of two bomb attacks aimed against authorities responsible for the contentious Dutch asylum policy. According to the police, Krikke ‘doesn’t rule out the practice of bomb attacks.’ The police conveniently left out the rest of the quotation: ‘in times of severe oppression, like World War II’ – which qualifies the statement somewhat. Krikke and his colleague were arrested and their offices raided; it took months before the case was dismissed. The two received 230,000 in Dutch guilders (worth €136,000 or more than £11,000 today) in compensation, but their non-profit company did not survive (Lubbers, 1996, 1997a, 2002a).

The Waste Paper episode also demonstrates how inside information can give companies a strategic advantage. Used at the right moment, it can be an effective weapon. The formula industry, for instance, had acquired some internal correspondence of Wemos, a Dutch group monitoring pharmaceutical companies and the marketing of infant formula products in the Third World. In 1994, Wemos tried to convince the infant formula industry that it was not targeting specific companies. Dutch formula maker Nutricia (now Numico) produced a letter Wemos had sent to its partners in the Nestlé boycott campaign. The request for examples of companies circumventing the WHO code that restricts advertising infant formula in Third World countries was an example that proved otherwise in the eyes of the industry. Wemos had been a long-time client of the Waste Paper Man (Lubbers, 2002b).

Companies do not necessarily acknowledge that they have inside information on their critics. Using the information to anticipate future actions can be sufficient. In 1990, the Clean Clothes Campaign started a protest action against the use of child labour by clothing chain C&A. Customers were encouraged to ask shop assistants where their clothes had been manufactured. No sooner had the campaign begun than C&A came out with printed fact-sheets, and a booklet explaining the company’s CSR policy. Until then, C&A had been known as a closed, family-run company that never even published annual reports – and did not do so until 2005 (van der Hoff, 2006; NDH, 2006). Its rapid response to the Clean Clothes Campaign was remarkable. In fact, Oosterbeek had joined the Clean Clothes Campaign as a regular volunteer just before the campaign was launched. Oosterbeek’s inside information permitted C&A to anticipate and facilitate the rapid response.

The exposure of the Waste Paper Man revealed that there is a market for informal information about activists. It brings up questions about the kinds of information required, how this intelligence is gathered and how it may be used in subsequent strategizing. This book seeks to answer these questions by presenting a set of detailed well-sourced case studies. To address the blind spots in investigating corporate spying I will outline a specific field of research best described as activist intelligence, focused on the gathering of information, the methods used and the people professionally involved. It also includes the processing of the information into intelligence, and the strategic planning by corporations to make use of it: the covert corporate strategy.

The Impact of Infiltration

My commitment to do the research for this book originates from my work with buro Jansen & Janssen. Investigating cases of infiltration by either the state or private spies hired by corporations, I discovered the impact of such intrusions for the groups involved. The result, as explained below, was a quest for a wider and deeper understanding of what was behind the stories I encountered.

Buro Jansen & Janssen was rooted in the same network as the movements it sought to support. Although this made us a trusted party, our investigations