The Shocking, Super Secret, Unbelievably Wasteful World of Low-Tech Spying

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Where does such vandalism and violence come from?  We don’t know.  There are actual activists who believe that they are doing good this way; and there are government infiltrators; and then there are double agents who don’t know whothey work for, ultimately, but like smashing things or blowing them up.  By definition, masked trashers of windows in Oakland or elsewhere are anonymous.  In anonymity, they -- and the burners of flags and setters of bombs -- magnify their power.  They hijack the media spotlight.  In this way, tiny groups -- incendiary, sincere, fraudulent, whoever they are --  seize leversthat can move the entire world.

The Sting of the Clueless Bee

Who casts the first stone?  Who smashes the first window?  Who teaches bombers to build and plant actual or spurious bombs?  The history of the secret police planting agents provocateurs in popular movements goes back at least to nineteenth century France and twentieth century Russia.  In 1905, for example, the priest who led St. Petersburg’s revolution was some sort of  double agent, as was the man who  organized the assassination of the Czar’s uncle, the Grand Duke.  As it happens, the United States has its own surprisingly full history of such planted agents at work turning small groups or movements in directions that, for better or far more often worse, they weren’t planning on going.  One well-documented case is that of “ Tommy the Traveler,” a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organizer who after years of trying to arouse violent action  convinced two 19-year-old students to firebomb an ROTC headquarters at Hobart College in upstate New York. The writer John Schultz  reported onlikely provocateurs in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention of 1968.  How much of this sort of thing went on?  Who knows?  Many relevant documents molder in unopened archives, or have been heavily redacted or destroyed.

As the Boston marathon bombing illustrates, there are homegrown terrorists capable of producing the weapons they need and killing Americans without the slightest help from the U.S. government.  But historically, it’s surprising how relatively often the gendarme is also a ringleader.  Just how often is hard to know, since information on the subject is fiendishly hard to pry loose from the secret world.

Through 2011, 508 defendants in the U.S. were prosecuted in what the Department of Justice calls “terrorism-related cases.” According to  Mother Jones’s Trevor Aaronson, the FBI ran sting operations that “resulted in prosecutions against 158 defendants” -- about one-third of the total.  “Of that total, 49 defendants participated in plots led by an agent provocateur -- an FBI operative instigating terrorist action.  With three exceptions, all of the high-profile domestic terror plots of the last decade were actually FBI stings.”

In Cleveland, on May Day of 2012, in the words of a  Rolling Stone exposé, the FBI “turned five stoner misfits into the world's most hapless terrorist cell.” To do this, the FBI put a deeply indebted, convicted bank robber and bad-check passer on their payroll, and hooked him up with an arms dealer, also paid by the Bureau.  The FBI undercover man then hustled five wacked-out wannabe anarchists into procuring what they thought was enough C4 plastic explosive to build bombs they thought would blow up a bridge.  The bombs were, of course, dummies.  The five were arrested and await trial.

What do such cases mean?  What is the FBI up to?  Trevor Aaronson offers this appraisal:

“The FBI's goal is to create a hostile environment for terrorist recruiters and operators -- by raising the risk of even the smallest step toward violent action. It's a form of deterrence… Advocates insist it has been effective, noting that there hasn't been a successful large-scale attack against the United States since 9/11. But what can't be answered -- as many former and current FBI agents acknowledge -- is how many of the bureau's targets would have taken the step over the line at all, were it not for an informant.”