Schemes and Devices

The parishioner sitting next to you may be wearing a "wire" under his or her shirt. If you belong to a sanctuary church or synagogue, or even if your congregation is active in social justice issues, the possibility of a federal agent secretly taping everything that is said in a worship service or meeting is very real.

The recent use of paid government spies to infiltrate the churches of the sanctuary movement and secretly tape-record meetings, conversations, and even prayer services raises many questions about this illegal government surveillance of U.S citizens. Who does it and why? How pervasive is it? Who have been targets of it? Who may be next?

Movement organizations, religious social activists, and groups supporting social change usually have a hard time believing that they might be important enough to be targets of surveillance by government or industry. Perhaps that is a result of our general cultural conditioning. As U.S. citizens, we tend to be a rather trusting lot. It is not in our nature or national mythology to be distrusting of government—at least not our own.

People also have a hard time believing that their telephones might be tapped because they are not aware of the new technologies. They picture telephone taps in terms of a little man with earphones sitting in a basement and writing down everything he hears. That's not the way it is done anymore.

In fact, much of the listening in on the telephone probably isn't technically a "tap." If compliant telephone officials hook onto the right pair of wires at the switching station, something akin to an answering service can be set up. The customer never gets billed, however, because the "service" was never requested. And instead of an answering service on the other end, there is a computer that will record whatever is being said and sort and store it under a variety of categories.

In other words, telephone conversations can be easily recorded. Later, most of them are automatically erased, provided one is talking about Aunt Matilda's new car or some equally innocuous topic. But say anything about drugs, sex, nuclear weapons, Central America, or any one of a thousand other "trigger words," and the machine will preserve what is being recorded.

All of this is possible with very little human power. Considering that most long distance telephone traffic is transmitted by microwaves, which can be picked out of the air and fed into similar machines, the capacity to monitor becomes formidable. We have come a long way from the little man in the basement with his earphones.

Moreover, other forms of listening devices have grown apace. There are wall sockets carrying built-in transmitters. Laser beams can be trained on windows to pick up the slight vibrations that voices make.

Telephones can be converted into listening devices even when the receiver is down. With the use of a harmonica amplifier, anyone can begin the conversion simply, by dialing your phone. When you answer the call by picking up the receiver, the connection is made. After you hang up, the telephone in your room or office acts as a listening device.

The state of the art is very advanced. Developing surveillance technologies extend beyond listening devices. Special switching mechanisms on a car can change the configuration of headlights and tail-lights. The car following you may appear to have one headlight. You round a comer, and the car behind you now has two lights. You think it's a different car, but it's not.

Special videotape photography equipment can trace your steps at night, while data bases, through credit card purchases, can follow your movements across the country. And expanding computer technologies can easily collect all types of information about you and make it available almost anywhere on a moment's notice.

WHILE PRESENT-DAY surveillance technologies are more sophisticated than ever, monitoring and actual disruption of groups considered a threat to the power, structure are, of course, not something new in our history. As Frank Donner showed in his well-documented book The Age of Surveillance, the FBI has been a political police force from its very inception.

The general public became aware of FBI spying and manipulation only in the '60s, with the public revelation of the FBI's Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO as it was code-named. This program began in 1956 as a concerted and coordinated effort to infiltrate and disrupt organizations considered leftist, quite apart from any criminal activity on their part.

COINTELPRO combined vicious psychological warfare and forms of official terrorism, particularly against non-white organizations and individuals. Its activities directed at Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., for example, are now well-known. J. Edgar Hoover's own handwritten memos outlined the goals of COINTELPRO, including the use of dirty tricks to prevent black leaders "from gaining respectability by discrediting them."

The political use of the CIA against U.S. citizens first came to public notice during the Watergate hearings when it was disclosed that the Nixon White House had used the agency to obstruct the investigation of the special prosecutor. Public consciousness was further raised by lawsuits brought by individuals such as Morton Halperin, the assistant to then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Halperin was illegally wiretapped for years at the direction of the White House.

The full spectrum of CIA violations of its charter had been merely hinted at until then Sen. Frank Church (D-Iowa) convened hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee. The committee's final report, some of which is still secret, was a document of almost gothic details, including assassinations and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders, mass disruption of domestic student and anti-war groups under the rubric of something called "Operation CHAOS," experimental drug testing upon unwitting subjects, multimillion-dollar propaganda campaigns aimed at the American people, and a whole host of other actions against citizens and perceived enemies.

Well-publicized scandals such as these made the public aware for the first time of the issues of surveillance and disruption of perfectly legal political activities in this country. But these concerns never became a priority for most citizens, and many of the lessons were quickly forgotten.

MY OWN INTRODUCTION to the domestic surveillance issue came in the late '70s, when I worked as an investigator on the Karen Silkwood case. Karen was a young worker at the Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation plant in Oklahoma who tried to blow the whistle on company malpractice in the nuclear industry. Her story has been told in part by the movie Silkwood, in which Meryl Streep portrayed Karen. While she was on her way to deliver documents to a New York Times reporter, Karen's car was run off the road, and she was killed in the collision. All of her documents disappeared during the course of the night.

As a public interest law community, Christie Institute was retained to represent Karen's family. We were not very far into the case before we realized that the question of the illegal political surveillance used against Karen Silkwood was a key to solving her murder. There was abundant evidence pointing to the fact that her telephones were being monitored and that other kinds of "blanket surveillance" methods were being used against her.

I had previously been exposed to the political application of intelligence agencies by governments in Central and South America. And since I had seen how they are used there to further the ends of both government and corporations, I wondered if a similar policy and practice were developing here at home. By personal choice, as well as the requirements of the case, I spent a large portion of my time looking into the issue of illegal government and corporate surveillance. Because of my Latin America experiences, I thought I was somewhat prepared for what I would find. The reality was shocking.

Our investigation team discovered a whole nest of so-called private surveillance agencies, often paid for directly or indirectly by government agencies. These quasi-official spy groups were surreptitiously going about doing the very surveillance activities and dirty tricks that the government agencies were now too embarrassed to do, having been caught with their electronic hand in the political cookie jar. The surveillance activities of these government agencies have never really ceased. However, after the bad publicity attendant on the Senate hearings headed by Sen. Church, the government agencies had to "lay low" for a few years.

Now, under the Reagan administration, they are once again on the march, but for years the private sector of the surveillance industry took up the slack. Under President Nixon, a cozy, semi-mercenary system developed that served the government intelligence agencies quite well. It is still in place. Just how cozy the arrangement can be is perhaps best illustrated by the case of Jerry Ducote.

JERRY DUCOTE was a police officer in Southern California who learned all the tricks of the trade of breaking and entering when he worked as a law enforcement official. After leaving law enforcement, he went into business for himself.

He didn't steal materially valuable things, but he would burglarize offices, such as the United Farm Workers offices, the Catholic Peace Fellowship of San Jose, and other "movement" groups, stealing such things as mailing lists and lists of supporters and contributors. He would then take this information to a private surveillance organization called Research West, in Emmryville, California.

The Karen Silkwood investigation team had come across Research West earlier and had found that, while its origins lay in the attempt to control campus radicals at the University of California, Berkeley, in the '60s, its main clients, as of 1977, seemed to be the private industrial giants—especially those engaged in the development of nuclear power.

Ducote later told me that when he went to Research West with his ill-gotten goods, he saw, almost on a daily basis, FBI agents there using the organization's files. His own "conversion" from this activity—aided no doubt by the fact that he eventually got caught—has made him an interesting source on how some of the connections are made.

At one time Ducote was hired by the large landholders of Southern California to infiltrate a modestly reformist Catholic organization known as the Liturgical Conference. Never mind that its most radical activity was to push for singing the "Tantum Ergo" in English instead of Latin, to the landed aristocracy its members were "the enemy." These wealthy clients coached Ducote in how to comport himself as a priest and had him attend the Liturgical Conference meetings in Washington, D.C., in full clerical garb. Their attitude typifies a pathology that has grown more virulent in recent years.

Since I knew of Ducote's "priestly" escapades, I had telephoned him and suggested that since he had been an investigator who once worked disguised as a priest, and I was a priest who was now working as an investigator, we ought to get together. In our conversation I learned the details outlined above.

The Ducote connection with religion was not the only one we uncovered during the Silkwood investigation. In fact, I was amazed at how frequently right-wing surveillance operations had some kind of religious connection. There are even ostensibly "religious" organizations that are actively involved in surveillance operations.

One example is the Church League of America, which was founded in 1937 and still operates today out of Wheaton, Illinois. It was taken over in the '50s by Ed Bundy, an Air Force intelligence officer and Baptist minister. The Church League of America seems to be gathering information and keeping files on all "commie sympathizers"—that is, anyone to the left of themselves. Although Karen Silkwood was decidedly apolitical—and not even remotely leaning toward communism—I found out that the Church League of America had a file on her.

John Rees, another shadowy gatherer of political intelligence data on citizen's groups, worked on the late Rep. Larry McDonald's (R-Ga.) staff. Rees frequently wore a priest's collar and called himself Fr. John Seeley while infiltrating groups on the Left. He was also the editor of an ultra-conservative magazine known as Information Digest, which was used for sharing the results of these surveillance operations with "appropriate," carefully selected organizations or persons.

THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN private surveillance organizations and government agencies can run very deep. Audio Intelligence Devices (AID) and its sister company, the National Intelligence Academy (NIA), are Florida-based private intelligence firms. Headed by a former CIA agent, AID manufactures surveillance equipment, like the harmonica amplifier, and sells it to government agencies at the national, state, and local levels around the country.

But AID's "services" are not limited to domestic concerns. Michael Townley, when he was on trial for the assassination of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier, gave testimony that he purchased equipment for the bombing from AID and was also trained by the firm. AID and NIA have been involved in the equipping and training of secret police forces, including those in Chile, Iran, and South Africa.

Another private surveillance organization, the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit (LEIU), is in reality a private network of police organizations. While police departments themselves cannot become members of LEIU, individuals in police departments can. LEIU currently has more than 200 members.

LEIU's computerized network of information is basically a pointer system. If LEIU has a file on someone, it is usually limited to one card containing the name of another private surveillance organization that has a more detailed file. I did, however, see one LEIU file that simply said, "No previous arrest record."

Indeed, the connections between government agencies and private surveillance organizations such as Information Digest, AID, Research West, Church League of America, and LEIU run deep. Many receive funding from the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), and most are headed by former government intelligence agents.

While private intelligence organizations continue to flourish, government intelligence agencies in the Reagan years are regaining their former strength. The use of authorized wiretaps jumped 40 percent in 1984. Since 1981 the CIA has been permitted to eavesdrop on organizations in the United States as long as it believes it may learn "international intelligence." The FBI in 1983 obtained permission to abolish distinctions between investigations of organized crime and of political or religious organizations. And a host of Executive Decrees amount to the unleashing of the government intelligence agencies once again.

But it is not just the intelligence agencies like the FBI and the CIA that are involved. Other agencies, such as the National Security Agency (NSA), the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which have no intelligence charters, are becoming engaged in surveillance, infiltration, and harassment of groups and organizations opposed to Reagan administration policies.

The instances of illegal government political surveillance, break-ins, and harassment have been growing (see "Cat-and-Mouse Games," page 20, and "A Frightful Litany," page 22). The most prominent example of intimidation and infiltration has been experienced by those individuals and churches opposed to administration policies in Central America, especially those involved in the sanctuary movement.

UNDER THE CODE name of "Operation Sojourner," in April 1984 the Justice Department began an undercover investigation of church groups. It went on for 10 months and involved nearly 100 hours of secret taping, in an attempt to crack down on those churches openly harboring refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala. More than 270 churches have declared themselves sanctuaries for the protection of Central Americans. They span the entire spectrum of mainline Christian denominations and include some Jewish congregations as well. Government sources who infiltrated these groups claim they were only doing their job—investigating possible illegal activities. Nevertheless, as far as we can tell, this is the first time in our history that paid informants of the federal government have gone into churches to secretly tape-record their proceedings.

The government agents were not supposed to tape worship services, it was claimed. But procedures were left to the discretion of the infiltrators themselves—one of whom is said to be a field-labor contractor and part-time pimp and another of whom has a criminal record. They decided what constitutes worship. What they taped, in fact, were not only meetings but also a Bible study, a worship service, and a prayer meeting—some 10,000 pages when transcribed.

Pastor John Fife, whose Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona, was one of the primary sites for tapings (and was the first church to declare sanctuary), pointed out that the government's use of surveillance must have had some purpose other than the mere gathering of information. "We had been completely open and public about all our activities for three years," he said, "I realize their purpose was not to investigate, but to intimidate the movement by spying within congregations."

WHAT CAN WE do about it? Inevitably this question arises among those who become aware of the surveillance issue. The answer is quite simple and yet quite profound: Live the gospel. Do not be intimidated; do not be factionalized and divided. Let the truth be your primary shield.

These are not just pious maxims written to stroke a largely religious readership. The gospel-based values of the Christian community are the best antidote to illegal government and corporate spying. Live lives that are truthful. Don't use illegal drugs or participate in sexual activity that you would be afraid to admit to. The methodology of the snoops depends upon potential embarrassment and intimidation—the use of information for the sake of power. Fear not. This not only makes good gospel sense, it totally defuses the very engine of those who order the spying.

There is, of course, a handful of practical measures that can and should be taken at times in order not to jeopardize others needlessly. These include such practices as using "safe" phones (long-distance calling where both parties go to pre-arranged public phones at a set time), making sure you know all the people who attend your meetings, stopping all loose talk or even joking about any forms of violence, and unplugging the telephone before beginning a sensitive conversation in the same room.

But these precautions hardly constitute a total Christian response. Much more important are the steps we take to promote unity, sisterhood, brotherhood, and solidarity. COINTELPRO and programs like it depend almost entirely on being disruptive, on breeding suspicion, envy, divisiveness, and anxiety. They exploit the tendencies we all have to be petty, to unfairly caricature those with whom we disagree, to nurture hurt feelings, and to sometimes put down others.

Apart from discovering these potentially divisive weak points and exploiting them, what can the surveillance of Christians actually accomplish? Let Pharaoh's agents learn of our plans. It will only make them feel worse knowing that we are indeed dedicated to the service of the oppressed and that we will indeed do the things we are publicly saying we will do.

The old adage used to be: Love your enemies; it drives them crazy. An appropriate variation might be: Tell the surveillance experts the truth; it "debugs" even their most sophisticated technology.

William J. Davis, S.J., was co-founder and director of Central American Projects of the Christie Institute, an inter-faith public interest law firm and public policy center, when this article appeared.

The Plan to Silence Dissent

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is a little-known government agency that occasionally makes headlines by assisting the victims of tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. But FEMA's powers go far beyond relief efforts. It is now also prepared to widely curtail basic civil liberties in the event of a "national emergency."

In April 1984 President Reagan signed a highly classified document called the National Security Decision Directive (NSDD). According to Daniel P. Sheehan, attorney and investigator for the Christie Institute in Washington, D.C., the directive contemplates the president unilaterally declaring a "State of Domestic National Emergency" in the event of direct U.S. military intervention in Central America. Under the directive's provisions, FEMA would then be called upon to enforce a domestic side of the administration's Central America war plan.

This NSDD is similar in many ways to "Project Garden Plot," former president Richard Nixon's unimplemented contingency plan designed to round up and detain thousands of U:S. citizens opposed to the Vietnam War. Two of Project Garden Plot's most enthusiastic supporters were Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, and his special assistant Edwin Meese, now U.S. attorney general. When they came to Washington, Reagan and Meese appointed their long-time associate and friend, Louis 0. Guiffrida, to be director of FEMA. Guiffrida recently left FEMA and hopes for a higher post within the administration.

In a state of "domestic national emergency," FEMA's role would be crucial in silencing dissent to the administration's Central America policy. According to Sheehan, FEMA, with the assistance of all state National Guard units, would, under the proposed plan, be authorized to summarily arrest, detain, and imprison undocumented Central American immigrants.

FEMA officials are also seeking the authority to arrest, at the same time, U.S. citizens whose names are listed on a classified "Administrative Index" kept by the FBI. Those arrested would be detained at 10 national detention centers located on military bases in the United States which are now being readied for possible use.

Other preparations for a state of emergency have also occurred. In 1984 FEMA supervised a secret project code-named "Rex 84." Conducted simultaneously with "Operation Night Train," a simulated U.S., military operation in Central America, Rex 84 tested FEMA's round-up scenario and the government mechanisms needed to implement the plan.

Joe Roos was the publisher of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.