Armies of Repression:

The FBI, COINTELPRO and Far Right Vigilante Networks

By Tom Burghardt, BACORR-North

Over the years, our approach to investigative problems in the intelligence field has given rise to a number of new programs, some of which have been most revolutionary, and it can be assumed that with a continued aggressive approach to these problems, new and productive ideas will be forthcoming. These ideas will not be increased in number or improved upon from the standpoint of accomplishments merely through the institution of a program such as COINTELPRO which is given another name, and which in fact, only encompasses everything that has been done or will be done in the future.

— J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director: Memorandum, July 15, 1964

COINTELPRO AND THE FAR-RIGHT: THE POLITICAL CONTEXT OF ANTI-CHOICE VIOLENCE

Now that the Christian right’s anti-abortion “national cultural and holy war” has evolved into a campaign of arson, murder and terror, mainstream “feminist” groups tied to the capitalist Democratic Party—the National Organization for Women (NOW), National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), and the Feminist Majority Foundation—are demanding that the FBI investigate anti-choice violence.

In the wake of Rev. Paul Hill’s assassination of Dr. John Bayard Britton, clinic escort James Barrett, and the wounding of clinic escort June Barrett on July 29 in Pensacola, Fla., the drumbeat for federal intervention has reached deafening levels.

Armed US Marshals, FBI agents using “special investigative techniques,” and police SWAT teams, however, will defend neither women seeking reproductive health care nor abortion providers. Rather, such intervention will transform women’s clinics into armed camps. The net result of such a massive show of firepower by the State will not guarantee women’s safety at clinics. Neither will such intervention increase women’s access to reproductive health care.

Indeed, police intervention on such a grand scale plays into the hands of anti-choice terrorists. They believe that such displays of state power only assist their own propaganda efforts and buttress their assertion that “abortion is murder” and that women who control their bodies are doing something “wrong.”

Despite US Attorney General Janet Reno’s statement that clinic violence “is a problem throughout the nation,” and that “it is appropriate to address an issue of deep concern,” two more women’s clinics have been fire-bombed since Rev. Hill’s murderous rampage.

A clinic in Falls Church, Va. sustained more than $10,000 in damage on July 30, while a Planned Parenthood facility in Brainerd, Minn. was burned to the ground on August 10; the Minnesota facility did not perform abortions. During the same period in which these two clinics were attacked, a right-wing vigilante was arrested outside a Philadelphia women’s clinic; six molotov cocktails were seized from the trunk of his car. Reports of death threats against patients, doctors and health-care workers have skyrocketed since the Pensacola murders.

While the State is poised, through the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (the FACE law), to legitimize anti- abortion thugs who “sidewalk counsel” and engage in other forms of harassment against women, gangsters such as convicted clinic bomber Rev. Michael Bray, an endorser of Hill’s Defensive Action Declaration, insist: “Anyone who truly believes that the slaughter of innocent children is what we have with abortion could go out and shoot an abortionist.”

Similarly, other supporters of the “justifiable homicide” position go further. According to the Rev. David Trosch, even pharmacists might eventually become targets. “I would see no problem with shooting a pharmacist” who provided a “morning-after pill” to women who seek to terminate their pregnancies. Trosch, in a July 16 letter that predicted the “massive killing of abortionists and their staffs,” pointedly warned that clinic defenders and reproductive- rights activists “will be sought out and terminated as vermin are terminated.”

Rev. Trosch and C. Roy McMillan, Executive Director of the Christian Action Group in Jackson, Miss., believe that clinic escorts and clinic defenders act as “accomplices,” and therefore are fair game for right-wing, anti-abortion vigilantes.

McMillan, a weapons specialist who served two tours of duty in Vietnam, states that “Twenty-five years later I have not changed my opinion as to the justification of the US intervention in Vietnam...I assume the enemy I killed were not Christian like me.”

Today McMillan believes that the killing of unarmed escort James Barrett was no more than “collateral damage.” Apparently McMillan’s ideological fervor will come in handy as he and others wage “cultural civil war” on the home front.

Recent protests in Jackson and Gulfport, Miss. targeted Black physician Dr. Joseph Booker, the sole abortion provider for the entire state. The American Coalition of Life Activists (ACLA), a violent front group founded by Andrew Burnett, publisher of Life Advocate magazine, and Joseph Foreman, a founder of Operation Rescue and current director of Missionaries to the Preborn (MTP), has vowed to drive Dr. Booker from his practice. Both Burnett and Foreman were signers of Rev. Hill’s Defensive Action Declaration.

Daniel Ware, a Rescue America member and friend of Paul Hill’s, was arrested in Pensacola last March for having a cache of weapons and more than 400 rounds of high-velocity ammunition in his car. Ware had vowed to “terminate” abortion providers who had gathered in Pensacola for a memorial service for Dr. David Gunn, assassinated last year by Rescue America member Michael Griffin. Although charged with having made statements that he intended “to take out child-killers in a Beirut-style massacre,” Ware was released after a Florida jury found him not guilty.

During the Mississippi protests Ware declared, “If you sow death and destruction, you shall reap death and destruction. If you kill by the sword, then you must be killed by the sword.”

According to a recent Planned Parenthood news conference, anti-abortion leaders Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, and Matthew Trewhella, a top leader of Missionaries to the Preborn and a Defensive Action supporter, have joined forces with the far-right US Taxpayers Party (USTP).

Planned Parenthood released videotaped excerpts of Terry and Trewhella’s speeches to a USTP meeting held in Appleton, Wisc. last May. The footage had been obtained by clandestine anti-fascist researchers.

While one speaker urged conference participants to “arm their children,” another asserted that “abortionists should be put to death.” The USTP distributed a 100-page manual entitled “Principles Justifying the Arming and Organization of a Militia.” The USTP was founded in 1992 by “New Right” guru Howard Phillips. Early supporters of the organization have included Larry Pratt, president of Gun Owners of America, and Julie Makkima, director of the anti-abortion group Fortress International.

Meanwhile, fascists from five separate Ku Klux Klan groups demonstrated outside the Aware Woman Center for Choice on August 20 in Melbourne, Fla. The clinic, targeted by Operation Rescue National’s (ORN) 12-week long IMPACT team, a paramilitary “boot camp” for “Christian warriors,” in 1993, has been under siege for years.

According to J.D. Alder, Imperial Advisor to a Florida unit of the Klan, the group listed Rev. Hill as “the hero of the month.” Alder added, “I put an abortionist in the same category as John Wayne Gacy.”

Ostensibly the Klan groups are gathering to protest the presence of US Marshals outside women’s clinics. “It’s big brother. It’s a government who tries to control people through fear and intimidation,” said “former” Klansman John Baumgardner.

However, their real agenda was revealed when Alder stated, “We consider abortion to be tantamount to racial suicide because it’s primarily white people killing their babies. I am selectively opposed to abortion. I don’t care if Blacks and Jews have abortions. It is white babies that are our primary concern.”

The convergence of Christian right reconstructionist anti-abortion theocrats, far-right vigilante outfits such as the US Taxpayers Party, an organization with extensive ties to the quasi-fascist “posse comitatus” movement of the 1970s, and Klan thugs, should not surprise us in the least. Such a fascist united front of terror has been spawned by a system of class exploitation, racism, sexism, and deadly homophobia--i.e., capitalism.

The bourgeois State, unsurprisingly, will utilize fascist and clerical-fascist gangs such as Operation Rescue, Defensive Action and the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize and crush opposition to the State and their “post-modern” corporate employers.

State intervention by the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF), and the US Marshals at women’s clinics however, will only serve to marginalize—and potentially criminalize—one force that has kept Christian Right terrorists at bay: community-based, direct-action, clinic- defense groups.

Those, such as Feminist Majority Foundation president Eleanor Smeal, who call on the FBI “to form a special task force” to investigate anti-abortion terror consciously delete from history the role played by this repressive agency throughout its existence.

Far from being a “neutral” investigative agency concerned with uncovering the depredations of organized crime or “domestic terrorism,” the FBI has been the vanguard federal force that has targeted labor, minority groups struggling against racism, the women’s movement, queer activists and the Left.

The sordid history of the FBI is littered with the bodies of activists murdered to maintain the status quo. During the 1960s the FBI’s role was not to “protect” civil rights workers, but rather, through its utilization of informers and other far-right “assets” inside the Ku Klux Klan, the Bureau actively assisted the KKK in their campaign of racist murder and terror.

Unlike in slick Hollywood popularizations of the period, such as Alan Parker’s film “Mississippi Burning,” the FBI was instrumental in re-building the Ku Klux Klan in the south “...setting up dozens of Klaverns, sometimes being leaders and public spokespersons. Gary Rowe, an FBI informant, was involved in the Klan killing of Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights worker. He claimed that he had to fire shots at her rather than ‘blow his cover.’ One FBI agent speaking at a rally organized by the Klavern he led proclaimed to his followers, ‘We will restore white rights if we have to kill every Negro to do it.’”

The Bureau’s not-so-secret war against the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Communist Party (CP), the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the Black Panther Party (BPP), the American Indian Movement (AIM), the Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), and most recently, the attempted frame-up of Judi Bari and Earth First!, span the decades. Will the clinic defense movement be the FBI’s next target, the recipient of an “active measures” campaign?

While the “Cold War” may be over, the search for “enemies” continues. Where “threats to national security” cannot be found, they are created; this is the legacy bequeathed by J. Edgar Hoover to the FBI and its current Director, Louis J. Freeh.

One can only speculate that the Bureau’s “reluctance” to investigate far-right advocates of anti-choice violence may stem from their utilization of Christian Right “assets” during the 1980s as the Reagan administration and the Bureau prosecuted their own “dirty war” at home to buttress the terrorist Central American death-squad states propped up by the US Government.

In this writer’s view, it is inconceivable that the FBI, the BATF, and other federal investigatory agencies have no knowledge of the interconnections among far- and Christian right terrorists waging their “holy war” against women’s rights; a campaign that now spans three decades.

Since 1977, according to the National Abortion Federation (NAF), there have been 128 bombing/arson attacks, 573 incidents of clinic vandalism, 66 attempted bombing/arson attacks, 199 incidents where doctors or health-care workers have been stalked, and 197 death threats leveled against patients, physicians or health-care workers.

In the majority of cases these serious incidents of domestic terror are treated by local, state and federal authorities as unconnected acts of mayhem—with much complicity by “mainstream” media. Rather, such heinous acts of violence against women are evidence of a broad campaign waged by the direct-action anti-abortion movement; a program designed to destroy abortion access through low-intensity war.

As I have written elsewhere, the direct-action anti- abortion movement and the broader Christian Right have temporarily ceded the legislative and judicial domain to their opponents. Having lost in the courts and in the legislatures, they have turned to a broad campaign of arson, bombing, selective violence, and, once again, murder against abortion providers: Randall Terry’s “weak link.”

As a strategic orientation, low-intensity warfare rests on a simple premise: In order to achieve political objectives by “extraordinary” means, a comprehensive, coordinated set of tactics are required. Such tactics are intended to guarantee that prolonged economic sabotage and the cumulative effects of propaganda, espionage, psychological terror and violence will eventually wear the “enemy” down and achieve the desired goal: destruction of access and the loss of reproductive health care for women.

THE FBI, KU KLUX KLAN, AND AMERICAN NAZI PARTY: THE GREENSBORO MASSACRE

Another case which, after all, “only encompasses everything that has been done or will be done in the future,” occurred in Greensboro, NC in 1979.

On November 3, 1979, a posse organized by Klansmen and neo-Nazis murdered five members of the Communist Workers Party (CWP) in broad daylight. Their “crime” had been to organize a “Smash the Klan” demonstration among Greensboro’s heavily black and working-class mill workers. CWP members were also union organizers and activists who had upset “the fundamental order of things.”

An essential component for the operation organized by the Klan was BATF agent Bernard Butkovich. The BATF agent, a Vietnam veteran and demolitions expert undercover in the local branch of the American Nazi Party, helped the fascists obtain automatic weapons. After the smoke cleared and five people lay dead, the BATF “asset” assisted the Klansmen and nazis in making their escape.

This anti-communist death squad had been recruited, organized and led by an FBI infiltrator, Edward Dawson. Dawson was also a paid informant for the Greensboro Police Department.

Dawson reported to his handlers that eighty-five Klansmen meeting in near-by Lincolnton had expressed their intent to counter-demonstrate on November 3.

They had stated that they intended to arm themselves for their counter-demonstration and that Klan leader Virgil Griffin was actively calling on Klansmen from other states to participate. It was also rumored that fascists and neo- nazis from the Winston-Salem area had obtained a machine gun and other weapons. They planned to come to Greensboro on November 3 “in order to shoot up the place.”

Dawson reported to Greensboro detective Jerry Cooper that Klansmen and neo-nazis were assembling at the home of a local Klan member and that they were armed. Grand Dragon Virgil Griffin was present.

The police/FBI informant had received a copy of the parade route the day before the CWP-initiated march; the map had been supplied by Detective Cooper. Dawson had driven over the parade route three hours earlier with a contingent of out-of-town Klansmen. Dawson also alerted Cooper that the Klansmen and neo-nazis possessed three handguns and nine long-barreled rifles, including automatic weapons supplied by Butkovich.

Prior to the beginning of the CWP’s march and demonstration, Cooper and other police officials drove by the house where the Klansmen and neo-nazis were assembling. They jotted down some license plate numbers and then declared a lunch break—at approximately 10 a.m.!

Less than an hour later, Cooper, trailing behind the fascist caravan, reported “shots fired” and then “heavy gunfire.” However, the tactical squad assigned to monitor the march was still out to lunch.

Two other officers, responding to a domestic disturbance call, noted the absence of patrol cars usually assigned to the area. They arrived at the Morningside Projects, the site of the CWP march. Officer Wise later reported having received a most unusual call from the police communications center. The officers were asked how long they anticipated being at their call; they were subsequently advised to “clear the area as soon as possible.”

Moments later five demonstrators lay dead, murdered in broad daylight by members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. According to anti-racist researcher Michael Novick, the Greensboro massacre “set the tone for neo-nazi organizing by the KKK and other white supremacists in the ensuing decade.”

A subsequent civil suit brought against the neo-nazis, the Klan and the Greensboro police resulted in a partial award to the surviving family members of those murdered by the fascists. However the FBI and BATF agents walked away scot-free.

FBI Director William Webster labeled the charge of federal complicity “utterly absurd,” even though the killers had been recruited, organized and led on their murderous rampage by Bureau informant Edward Dawson, and automatic weapons supplied by BATF agent Bernard Butkovich were used in the deadly attack.

As we have seen, however, this is simply standard operating procedure; what Noam Chomsky has termed the “demonstration effect” for those who dare to challenge the hegemony of US corporate elites and their fascist and clerical-fascist allies.

CLINIC DEFENSE AFTER PENSACOLA

The search for “endless enemies” by the FBI and other government agencies will continue; of this we can be certain. It is critical that grass-roots organizations continue to defend women’s clinics and health care providers from the deadly attacks of the Christian Right.

The clinic defense movement, if it is to remain a vital source of strength and empowerment for women (and, by its heroic example of militant mass struggle, to all who fight against every vestige of capitalist oppression) must begin an active campaign that directly challenges and defeats the Christian Right.

Any “partnership” with repressive government agencies, however provisional, would be a grave political error with consequences impossible to foresee.

Even before the smoke cleared in Pensacola, however, the drum-beat of violence-baiting and specious comparisons between “extremists on both sides of the abortion issue” had begun to reverberate in the bourgeois press.

As with other cases of institutional, state repression cited in this report, the media played a pivotal role in legitimizing attacks by the FBI and other federal agencies on radical and progressive movements. By uncritically presenting Bureau disinformation as unadulterated facts, despite evidence to the contrary, the media are witting and unwitting accomplices for the FBI’s on-going COINTELPRO operations against the Left.

Progressive researcher Chip Berlet has described this as a process he terms a “paradigm shift.” Through a “paradigm shift,” progressive organizations are transformed into shadowy terrorist networks by the media. Oftentimes political disinformation on groups targeted for repression is passed to the media by reactionary right-wing opponents or state agencies themselves; the ubiquitous “unnamed government sources.”

According to Berlet’s definition, “The perceptual shift from dissent to criminality first goes public with unsubstantiated allegations and conclusions in the media of the reactionary and paranoid political Right. Eventually the right-wing media’s attempt to re-frame the public’s perception of the dissident group as subversive or criminal spills over into more mainstream media. The dissidents are seen as non-rational, unstable, alien, and capable of odious crimes because of their zealous mindset. Lists of potential crimes are discussed, and finally actual crimes are blamed on the political movement. Ideas that were once merely marginalized are thus criminalized. In some cases, the re- framing is so successful that there is widespread sentiment supporting the attacks. When this process of re-framing is successful, paradigm shift has occurred.”

BACORR and Refuse & Resist! representatives who recently traveled to Florida were continually quoted out of context while the primary source material they distributed, linking national leaders and Pensacola anti-abortion activists, went unreported.

They were followed and harassed by local and federal law enforcement officials, while the anti-abortionists were given unlimited access to patients outside the Pensacola Women’s Medical Services clinic.

New York Times correspondent Sam Howe Verhovek portrayed BACORR and Refuse & Resist! activists as “fanatics” and “zealots;” that is as “non-rational, unstable, alien,” according to Berlet’s definition.

Though Mr. Howe Verhovek and other Times correspondents had interviewed BACORR members and were well-aware of evidence in their possession linking “former Klansman” John Burt, Paul Hill and other anti-abortion activists to a plot to stalk and harass Dr. Britton prior to his assassination, this material was ignored. Mr. Howe Verhovek offered instead a piece of unvarnished slander as a substitute for an investigation of the complex interconnections among anti- abortion cadres.

According to Howe Verhovek’s hit-piece, “At a rally sponsored by a coalition of abortion-rights groups...one speaker pointedly refused to disavow violence against anti- abortion demonstrators.”

The speaker, a member of Refuse & Resist!, had actually drawn the comparison between a battered woman defending herself against her batterer and women who defend themselves from physical attacks directed at them by anti-abortion zealots. Thus, self-defense is transformed, in typical Times fashion, into offensive violence!

While we cannot control the political disinformation of the bourgeois media, we must continue to be clear as to our goals—unrestricted access to reproductive health care for women. The tactics we select in order to achieve this goal must reflect the actual contours of the struggle as it is waged today.

Self-defense is a right of all oppressed people. Just as we would urge a woman about to be raped to use whatever force is necessary to deter a rapist, we would also counsel clinic defenders, patient escorts, or health-care providers to defend themselves from attacks launched by anti-abortion thugs. To countenance anything less is political suicide.

In this regard, we would be well-advised to look to other historical parallels—to the history of fighting fascism, for example—with such knowledge in hand, clinic-defense activists will draw the necessary conclusions.

THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES...
REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM, BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY!


(A longer, unedited version of this essay is available with footnotes. Please include $1 postage.)

For more information on how you can get involved in the battle to win full reproductive rights, contact The Fight Back Network:

Bay Area Coalition for Our Reproductive Rights (BACORR)
750 La Playa # 730
San Francisco, CA 94121
(415) 252-0750

Refuse & Resist!
305 Madison Avenue #1166
New York, New York 10165
(212) 713-5657