An Interview with Dean Kuipers Firebrand: Rod Coronado's Flame
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An Interview with Dean Kuipers Firebrand: Rod Coronado's Flame War By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR He was the firestarter, shooter of flaming arrows. He traveled the night-path, unseen, leaving ashes and wreckage in his wake. He was the escape artist, the man of few traces, the Yaqui warrior, who communed with animistic spirits. He was the sinker of ships, liberator of coyotes, scourge of the animal skinners. Or so the myth goes, anyway. He is, of course, Rod Coronado, the most notorious radical animal rights activist—no, activist isn’t the right word—avenger of our time. Some call Coronado a terrorist. But he is devoted to non-violence—non-violence against living beings. He shows no mercy toward machines, research labs, fur farms. In dozens of incendiary actions that destroyed tens of millions in property, not one person was seriously injured. Not even Rod. Yet it is fair to say that Coronado’s season of retributive fire changed the game for environmentalists and animal rights activists. It upped the ante. Congress, pushed by the fur lobby and medical research establishment, used Coronado’s dramatic raids as a pretext for a series of punitive federal and state laws that equated nonviolent acts of sabotage to domestic terrorism. Burning down a barn that housed animal skinning equipment or torching a few SUVs could now land you in federal prison for twenty or thirty years. With a straight face, the FBI would claim that environmentalists, like Coronado, (and not neo-Nazis like John Van Brunn or anti- abortion zealots like Scott Roeder) constituted the most dangerous domestic threat to the United States. More than a dozen activists, many of them inspired by Coronado’s tactics, are now in the federal pen staring down long prison terms for emulating Coronado’s pyrowar. How did it come to this? Now veteran journalist Dean Kuipers steps forward with a thrilling book about Rod Coronado’s life and his audacious assaults against the fur industry and the medical research complex. Kuipers’ book, Operation Biteback, is an intimate and chromatic portrait of an American Revolutionary, the John Brown of the Animal Rights Movement. Kuipers has known Coronado since the early 1990s and has had unparalleled access to Rod and his circle. All this adds up to a rare inside look at the tactics and social dynamics a militant underground movement. Kuipers vividly evokes the battleground and the stakes, taking his readers into the gruesome abattoirs of the animal skinners and the vile medical research labs on college campuses across the country. The more buildings Coronado torched, the more draconian was the government response. In tracking the often bumbling efforts of the FBI to nail Coronado, Kuipers also tells the grim story of how non-violent environmental activism came to be treated as terrorism by law enforcement at both the state and federal level--Constitution (and coyotes) be damned. You first met Rod Coronado at a cafe in Venice, California in 1992. At that very moment, the FBI was zeroing in on him for string of daring raids and arsons at mink farms and animal research labs on several campuses, including Oregon State, Washington State and Michigan State. Even though the smoke was almost fresh on his clothes, he looked you in the eye and told you he had nothing to do with them. Did you believe him? 1 I believed Rod when he told me he was not the arsonist, but I strongly suspected that he had inside knowledge about the arsons. He was always in the proximity of the fires, yet it seemed so unlikely that he would be talking to the press if he were guilty. This was exactly the same position that law enforcement was forced to take at the time: many people had a hunch that it was Rod, and some of the state and federal arson investigators were sure it was him, but even they had to admit there was simply no evidence. Nothing tied him to the fires, so we all had to go with Rod’s own explanation: that he was just the messenger for the ALF. It was being the messenger that finally got him busted for the MSU fires; he was prosecuted for being part of the conspiracy, not for setting the fire itself. But then, unbeknownst to the rest of the world, part of his plea bargain was that he admitted his role as the actual arsonist in all of the Bite Back arsons. That information was sealed. No one knew that except some federal prosecutors, his attorney and a judge, until Rod told me about a decade later. He had a good poker face. During those years, Rod was living a double life--at night launching raids to liberate mink and coyotes and burning research labs during the day publicly reporting on these anonymous feats as the spokesman for a group called CAFF and later the Animal Liberation Front. You quote the Oregon eco-commune leader Chant Thomas as referring to Rod as living a "Clark Kent/Superman" existence. This must have exacted a tremendous psychological toll, as well as putting the FBI on his trail. By his own admission, Rod really wanted to control the way his message was received by the press. He wanted his Operation Bite Back actions to be understood as Ghandian nonviolence and as protests for the way animals are treated. Not as rash, unconsidered violence. He thought the rest of the movement would step up and explain that to the press, but of course they wanted no association with any arson campaign. Too dangerous. So he exposed himself to the press, over and over, and his paranoia grew. I think he became a paranoid wreck. He had no intention of getting caught, so he had to accept that he would die in this campaign, and putting his face on TV day after day only made it more likely someone would come after him. His relationships with all his friends and lovers and supporters were strained by his behavior. Lots of people wanted him to stay away. I think he came to believe that the fur industry had a bounty on his head because of this paranoia. He did have some reason to believe it was a bounty, but it was a thin logic. His exhaustion and fear just blew it all out of proportion. For me, Rod's first act of sabotage, the sinking of half of the Iceland whaling fleet, remains the most spectacular and consequential. Can you describe that raid and more generally his relationship with Paul Watson and Sea Shepherd? Paul Watson was one of Rod’s earliest environmentalist heroes and role models, and he still maintains great respect for him today. Rod joined Sea Shepherd and began giving them money when he was 12 years old. From my discussions with them both, the respect is mutual and heartfelt. Rod had many historical role models, especially among Native Americans, but Paul was the one Rod saw on TV, out on the ice in Canada, physically interfering with the killing of seals. As Rod told me later, he didn’t grow up wanting to be the cameraman on such a campaign, even though he knew the images were part of Paul’s strategy: he wanted to be the man stopping the killing just like Paul. And, remarkably, immediately after leaving high school he skipped college and joined Sea Shepherd with his parents’ blessing and Paul welcomed him. Rod’s parents dropped him off at the boat. He never looked back. 2 Rod and David Howitt went to Iceland in 1986 to stop the country’s whaling industry, which was small but took a fair number of whales every year. They lived in England for a bit while the Sea Shepherds battled the traditional killing of pilot whales in the Faroe Islands, then, already veterans of that campaign but only about 20 years old, they both moved to Iceland and got jobs where they could observe the whaling business there for about a month. They didn’t just sail in there and do the job in a day. This action got a lot of accolades because it was a model of nonviolence: they doggedly recorded the comings and goings of the security for the boats and the whaling plant until they were sure of a time when targets would be empty. They went on to the boats when they knew they were empty, and still searched them to be certain. Then they opened the valves in the bottom that would let sea water in, at some fair risk to themselves. They walked away undiscovered, but even if they had been arrested, their intention was that no one was going to be hurt. Same for the whaling station. They smashed it up and damaged equipment, but made it obvious they were doing so. They didn’t sabotage the equipment in a way that someone would inadvertently use it and be injured or killed. They made a loud, clear statement. It was only luck that made it all go so well that they got on a plane and got away, but anti-whaling sympathizers around the world were thankful that they’d done it in such a way that no one was put at risk. Plus, it was 100 percent effective. Those boats did not kill whales. It took the Icelanders a while to refloat and rehab the boats, and during that time whales were unmolested. Rod had multiple affairs during the time of his Operation Bite Back and many of these women would also join him in his acts of sabotage.