Mother Jones Exclusive: Cops and Former Secret Service Agents Ran Black Ops on Green Groups

[bananas]

In case anyone missed it:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=3145574&mesg_id=3145603

Exclusive: Cops and Former Secret Service Agents Ran Black Ops on Green Groups
Source: Mother Jones

NEWS: Meet the private security firm that spied on Greenpeace and other environmental outfits for corporate clients. A tale of intrigue, infiltration, and dumpster-diving.

By James Ridgeway
Additional reporting by David Corn, Jennifer Wedekind, Daniel Schulman, and Nick Baumann

April 11, 2008

A private security company organized and managed by former Secret Service officers spied on Greenpeace and other environmental organizations from the late 1990s through at least 2000, pilfering documents from trash bins, attempting to plant undercover operatives within groups, casing offices, collecting phone records of activists, and penetrating confidential meetings. According to company documents provided to Mother Jones by a former investor in the firm, this security outfit collected confidential internal records—donor lists, detailed financial statements, the Social Security numbers of staff members, strategy memos—from these organizations and produced intelligence reports for public relations firms and major corporations involved in environmental controversies.

In addition to focusing on environmentalists, the firm, Beckett Brown International (later called S2i), provided a range of services to a host of clients. According to its billing records, BBI engaged in "intelligence collection" for Allied Waste; it conducted background checks and performed due diligence for the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based investment firm; it provided "protective services" for the National Rifle Association; it handled "crisis management" for the Gallo wine company and for Pirelli; it made sure that the Louis Dreyfus Group, the commodities firm, was not being bugged; it engaged in "information collection" for Wal-Mart; it conducted background checks for Patricia Duff, a Democratic Party fundraiser then involved in a divorce with billionaire Ronald Perelman; and for Mary Kay, BBI mounted "surveillance," and vetted Gayle Gaston, a top executive at the cosmetics company (and mother of actress Robin Wright Penn), retaining an expert to conduct a psychological assessment of her. Also listed as clients in BBI records: Halliburton and Monsanto.

BBI, which was headquartered in Easton, Maryland, on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, worked extensively, according to billing records, for public-relations companies, including Ketchum, Nichols-Dezenhall Communications, and Mongoven, Biscoe & Duchin. At the time, these PR outfits were servicing corporate clients fighting environmental organizations opposed to their products or actions. Ketchum, for example, was working for Dow Chemical and Kraft Foods; Nichols-Dezenhall, according to BBI records, was working with Condea Vista, a chemical manufacturing firm that in 1994 leaked up to 47 million pounds of ethylene dichloride, a suspected carcinogen, into the Calcasieu River in Louisiana.

Like other firms specializing in snooping, Beckett Brown turned to garbage swiping as a key tactic. BBI officials and contractors routinely conducted what the firm referred to as "D-line" operations, in which its operatives would seek access to the trash of a target, with the hope of finding useful documents. One midnight raid targeted Greenpeace. One BBI document lists the addresses of several other environmental groups as "possible sites" for operations: the National Environmental Trust, the Center for Food Safety, Environmental Media Services, the Environmental Working Group, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, and the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, an organization run by Lois Gibbs, famous for exposing the toxic dangers of New York's Love Canal. For its rubbish-rifling operations, BBI employed a police officer in the District of Columbia and a former member of the Maryland state police.

<snip>

Supporting Documents
August 20, 1998 Briefing (PDF)
Daron Work Report (PDF)
BBI Report for Ketchum (PDF)
"Dow Global Tracking Team" Report (PDF)
Florida PI's Dumpster-Diving Attempt (PDF)
The "Glow-in-The-Dark Tacos" Emails (PDF)
Handwritten Document With Greenpeace Door Codes (PDF)
"Sat Surveillance" Outside Fenton's Home (PDF)
Nestle Project Billing (PDF)
"Our Operative Should Be Inquiring But Not Participatory" (PDF)
Possible Target Addresses (PDF)
Lawyer Doubts Dumpster-Diving's Legality (PDF)

Read more: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/04/firm-spied-on-environmental-groups.html

[madrchsod]

1. every group has spys

[nosmokes]

2. On the upside, at least it shows we're making some progress when

the NRA is nervous enough about Moms for Peace that they go and rummage through their garbage.