FBI to Monitor European Activists

Once upon a time the FBI investigated leftists at home, and the CIA subverted them abroad. This started to change in the 1960s, when crack intelligence squads from the CIA were required to stamp out domestic 'threats to stability.' The Black Panthers, anti-war groups and the American Indian Movement were all targeted by the CIA, which according to its own charter was restricted from doing so. Once the precedent was set, it was a smooth transition to gun running and drug smuggling onto private US airstrips in the 1980s, when the agency wiped its patriotic rear with the Constitution and helped turn Black America into a nation of crack zombies in order to illegally fund the Contras.

If the 1960s saw the CIA cut in on the FBI's turf, then recent years are witnessing the opposite trend. The FBI has caught globalization fever, and is currently dotting Central Europe with offices to complement its already impressive network of 43 centers operating off US soil. Along with one in Budapest, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation is launching an office in Prague. According to Czech State Television, FBI chief Louis Freeh met with Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross to finalize arrangements and discuss an agenda for the joint US-Czech project, which is to include at least one agent and an administrative force. Although the training and intelligence gathering center is supposed to be fighting organized crime, the Central and Eastern European Review reports that one of the "main topics of discussion during Freeh's visit was the upcoming joint IMF/World Bank annual meeting in Prague in September."

Something tells me that those Albanian heroin rings aren't going to be out in full force next September 26th during the protests. No, the FBI is colluding with the Czech police to gather information on citizens exercising their constitutional rights. Not that anybody should be gasping at this.

In terms of practical obstruction, it is not clear what a bunch of G-men can accomplish. They can plant moles, monitor the listserves, collect names, and forward everything to the mother database in Washington; but they can't stop tens of thousands of European activists from trying to get into the country and filling the streets. It is no secret where activists are organizing in Prague, and anybody can join the email list offering detailed information about the protests. The FBI will basically be eavesdropping on an open conversation.

The FBI may be convinced, along with Czech political elites, that the "largest threat to stability in the country is the extreme left" (Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman), but they should not be surprised to find no bomb making materials in opposition quarters. Unlike the extreme right, which actually kills people and has explicit political ambitions, the Czech anarchists, whose political expression is limited to an annual street party powered by a couple of diesel generators, are harmless. A minority of militants hold a penchant for breaking the occasional window and many of them fancy shocking imagined bourgeois sensibilities with pierced faces and various flavors of self-imposed disfigurement, but their actions cannot be anticipated or controlled by anyone, not even their fellow anarchists.

In short, they are isolated, unpredictable and largely unaffiliated. If the FBI is after an imagined clique of well organized Fidelistas buried deep within some Molotov cocktail factory, they are wasting their time.

A more cynical and dystopic view of FBI involvement posits that global elites are merely integrating their intelligence networks as part of a long-term project in countering international movements for economic and social justice; which is to say, in countering the pan-European Left. Just as these movements gathered force in the 1960s and challenged traditional structures of power, it is possible that we are moving toward a similar era at the dawn of the new century.