The Hunt for Red Menace The Hunt for Red Menace: How Government Intelligence Agencies & Private Right-Wing Groups Target Dissidents & Leftists as Subversive Terrorists & Outlaws by Chip Berlet Political Research Associates Revised 19941 ”Our First Amendment was a bold effort. .to establish a country with no legal restrictions of any kind upon the subjects people could investigate, discuss, and deny. The Framers knew, better perhaps than we do today, the risks they were taking. They knew that free speech might be the friend of change and revolution. But they also knew that it is always the deadliest enemy of tyranny.” -U. S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black Since the colonial period in the late 1690s liberties for illusionary national security our land has been swept by witch hunts, moral safeguards. Some observers of this phenomenon panics, and fears of collectivist plots. Following see it as having fueled Cold War antagonisms the end of World War II, a coalition of and resulted in what they term the “National conservative, ultra-conservative, right-wing and Security State.” liberal anti- communist political movements and Within the United States there developed a groups organized support for high levels of covert apparatus to suuport domestic anti- military spending, promoted the use of covert communism in the form of a loosely-knit action abroad, and cultivated the acceptance of infrastructure where both public and private obsessive governmental secrecy, surveillance intelligence agents and right-wing ideologues and repression at home. In the domestic public shared information both formally and sphere this coalition shaped an overwhelming informally. The result was an ad-hoc domestic willingness among citizens to trade real civil counter-subversion network. Oliver North relied 1 The Hunt for Red Menace on elements of this institutionalized counter- commercial clients. subversion network to raise funds for the Private spies who supply information to a Contras and serve as a public lightning rod to variety of groups as part of a commercial enterprise. hide his own government- backed covert Corporate security specialists who utilize operation. In fact, some of the same players political intelligence operatives, hire private North orchestrated in the off-the-shelf private firms to supply political intelligence, or share foreign policy drama were also involved in an intelligence information with their public and off-the-shelf private domestic intelligence private counterparts. network. Groups specializing in workshops and seminars predicated on the supposition that The private domestic intelligence network is demands for social-change are frequently that sector of the counter-subversion network covers for foreign “active measures,” which conducts surveillance of progressive disinformation, criminal subversion, or groups, and then feeds the information to the terrorism. Federal Bureau of Investigation and other public Private right-wing intelligence gathering law enforcement and intelligence agencies, as groups which frequently publish their allegations in small limited- circulation well as other private right-wing groups, and in newsletters. some cases corporate and industrial security. Blacklisting publications that report on the Some of the groups involved in the domestic activities of community, labor, anti-nuclear, intelligence network utilized by North were civil-rights, peace and social justice outgrowths of McCarthy Period witch hunts, activists. others were projects of former agents who fled Ultra-conservative and far-right magazines federal employ in the wake of civil-liberties and newspapers and other publicly- disseminated publications that target liberal reforms of intelligence agencies prompted by the and left dissidents. intelligence agency scandals of the 1970's, still others were new groups created by ideologues Havens within the U.S. government for of the New Right. Many were formed after the members of the counter- subversion network terror attacks on September 11, 2001. include congressional committees such as the The counter-subversion network is now-disbanded House Committee on Un- comprised of many overlapping institutional and American Activities and the Senate individual components: Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (especially the Individuals employed at government law counter-terrorism section), military investigative enforcement and intelligence gathering agencies on the federal, state and local units especially Naval Intelligence, certain level. sectors of the Immigration and Naturalization Staff of various congressional committees Service, and many others. In pursuit of their goal and executive agencies. of exposing and stopping alleged subversion, Agents and officers of foreign intelligence government intelligence agents periodically services. make tactical alliances with conservative, ultra- Private associations made up primarily or exclusively of law enforcement personnel conservative, and even anti-democratic far right that share information, run computerized political groups and movements, both domestic data exchanges, and conduct training and foreign. Working cooperatively, the public seminars on suspected subversives and and private components of the domestic terrorists. counter-subversion network carry out legal, Associations of former intelligence agents electoral, political, and extra- legal attacks on that facilitate the sharing of information on subversives and jobs. dissidents—primarily on the political left. Private security firms with industrial and Political surveillance, by private or public 2 The Hunt for Red Menace agencies, is designed to preserve and protect the or unwittingly serve the goals of radical politics, status quo. Often, the tactic of infiltration or global communism, or terrorism. This is not a surveillance is used to gather real, imagined, or rational critique of communism, radical political invented mud to sling at social change theory, or actual terrorism, but a non-rational organizers in order to smear their public image ideological construct which resembles the and neutralize their organizing efforts. Even Manichean rightist worldview described in when the spying fails to turn up any illegal (or Professor Richard Hofstadter's classic work The even faintly embarrassing) information, the Paranoid Style in American Politics. Despite its reports are dutifully filed, and frequently traded non-rational metaphysical nature, the views of back and forth between private and public these counter- subversion ideologues have intelligence-gathering agencies. Eventually the consequences which are real and documentable. information percolates into conservative and Many authors have discussed the recurring right-wing publications. themes of political repression by government Among the scapegoats historically and private groups, and noted how the end promoted by the counter-subversion network: result was a defense of the status quo that the Soviet military threat, the international benefits powerful ecomomic and political communist Red Menace, KGB spies, airplane interests. hijackers, terrorists, drug lords, secrets about Historian Frank Donner's 500-page book U.S. nuclear weapons, rioting by urban Blacks, The Age of Surveillance: The Aims &Methods persons organizing against the war in Vietnam, of America's Political Intelligence System is the Black Panther Party, the American Indian considered the definitive study of this Movement, political radicals, Palestinian rights phenomenon and its relationship to federal law activists, members of the Arab community in enforcement probes of dissent.2 Donner the U.S., protesters against U.S. policy in Central followed with Protectors of Privilege: Red America, environmental activists, feminists, Squads and Political Repression in Urban persons calling for equal rights based on sexual America. 3In Protectors of Privilege Donner preference, and AIDS activists. showed how local police intelligence units— Each of these targets have been portrayed often dubbed Red Squads—subverted the as powerful sinister forces attacking the very Constitution while justifying their actions as foundations of America. Each, we have been preserving democracy in the fight against told, could only be stopped by using law subversion. Because they believed the country enforcement and intelligence agency techniques was on the brink of ruin due to internal that required trading civil liberties for safety and subversion organized by communist agents, security. Real terrorists, airplane hijackers, and local police Red Squads not only conducted others engaged in criminal activity can and surveillance and built dossiers on a wide range should be prosecuted for their crimes—but for of activists, but also worked with far-right the most part, the persons spied on by the public vigilante groups to carry out break- ins and and private components of the counter- assaults, sometimes with an assist from the FBI. subversion network are not criminals, but Political Repression in Modern America, persons simply seeking to exercise their First 1870 to Present, by Robert J. Goldstein is Amendment rights to speech, association, another lengthy look at government and religion, or petitioning to redress grievances. corporate attacks on dissident political groups The domestic counter-subversive network through the years. 4 was built by persons who share a perception that Murray B. Levin examined the underlying the U.S. is constantly