In poor ‘ELF
* Terror tactics
* The backlash starts here
* Hound the Hummers
As an admirer of direct action, why not become a feared ecoterrorist and the leader of a cell linked to the Earth Liberation Front? You have probably been intrigued by the ELF ever since the early Nineties, when it was founded in Brighton during the British road protests. It soon spread to the rest of Europe and the US. Across the pond, the ELF became legendary as a group prepared to destroy property belonging to groups who have allegedly hurt the environment. This tactic has been so effective, in fact, that the FBI has classified ‘ecotage’ as the number-one domestic terrorism threat in the US and treats it on a par with al-Qaeda.
According to the FBI, the ELF (whose members are known as Elves) have been responsible for more than 1,200 criminal acts in the US, with the cost of their campaign close to £50 million. Creating an ELF cell would be one of the most effective means of tarnishing the mainstream green movement across the Western world. As leader, you’ll be equipped to taint the environmental groups which campaign rather tiresomely against ‘a profligate consumption of resources’. Official ELF policy is to ‘create environmental sustainability’ and at the same time to ‘take all necessary precautions against harming any animal – human and nonhuman’. This seems unnecessary, so you won’t be doing either.
They christened it the ‘street of dreams’, an ostentatious development in the quiet Washington state suburb of Woodinville, near Seattle. Its homes were billed as ‘green’, intended to tick every box of the well-heeled, ethically conscious families at which they were aimed. One night in March 2008, five large, half-built houses mysteriously caught fire. Neighbours described hearing explosives. In the sudden ferocious blaze, more than £3 million worth of damage was caused. A spray-painted bedsheet left at the scene read: ‘Built green? Nope, black.’ It was signed ELF.
Although the subsequent investigation could not find the perpetrators, the latest witch-hunt had begun. Commentators and libertarian bloggers used the attack as ammunition in their ideological war against green and left-wing campaigners. Environmentalism was back in the spotlight, dubbed misguided and irresponsible; an enemy of the state and of honest wage-earners everywhere. Some pointed out that burning down green homes would cause even more emissions, and accused the ELF of being hypocritical. It seemed your militant pals had done themselves more harm than good.
There’s no such thing as bad publicity. You must capitalize on this situation and take ELF’s campaign to greater, more damaging heights than ever before. First, you need to make contact with the secretive, well-educated, and politically aware people behind this shadowy movement. It may be difficult. The official website of the ELF, which is clearly monitored by the authorities, does not respond to emails. In fact, you learn that, over the last six years, their website has only been updated sporadically, the once-frequent ‘communiqués’ to believers now conspicuous by their absence. There is no central ELF authority, no membership, no public meetings, and no mailing list. You cannot find an HQ or an official spokesperson. Like al-Qaeda, it is entirely decentralized.
Your attempts to track down Rod Coronado, who the FBI described as ‘a national leader’ of the ELF in the USA, reveal that he is in prison, having been charged in 2006 as part of the FBI’s ‘Operation Backfire’, which ended in lengthy prison sentences for many suspected members. Instead, you manage to find some like-minded revolutionaries and self-fund a cell that will use the ELF as a banner for action. Your autonomous unit will be difficult for state and industry forces to infiltrate and destroy.
You turn to Dr Steven Best for advice. He co-edited a publication entitled Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth, which includes essays by convicted environmental activists Jeff Luers and Noel Molland. Clean-shaven, tousle-haired Best also helped found the Animal Liberation’s US press office, branded a terrorist organization by the FBI for its links with the ELF. You call the University of Texas, where Best is a professor of philosophy, and arrange a chat, taking precautions to ensure your phone is not tapped, because he is probably under surveillance. The risk is worth it: Best can offer you guidance and inspiration to shape your radical ecological ideal.
Suitably galvanized, you can get on with setting up your own group. A splinter group will be connected to an existing cell, known by the Charles Mansonesque title of The Family. The FBI believes it has shut down The Family after more than a dozen members based in Washington and Oregon were charged with causing seventeen fires, but you know better. The Family will be given the responsibility of liaising with ELF support networks in Belgium, Italy, North America, Poland, and Turkey.
Contacts are important, but be careful not to make yourself known to too many. An extraordinary state campaign is underway against green activists, some of whom now stand accused of arson offences from as far back as 2001. People in the States are paranoid; there is talk of a ‘Green Scare’, akin to the 1950s ‘Red Scare’ over communist infiltration. Your cell must consist only of trustworthy types; the threat of rogue people infiltrating your group cannot be overstated. Undercover agents may try and penetrate your group, a massive surveillance operation may attempt to catch you out, and beware of provocateurs hired by the state. Trust few and keep your head down.
It is time for the campaign to begin. Nothing less than £1 million in damage will be considered a success. Initially, you sabotage power lines, which is a cinch. Next, you and your balaclava-clad believers burn down an SUV dealership, spraying ‘Politics is pig meat’ over the charred shells of vehicles. For a week you orchestrate a campaign which becomes known in the media as the ‘Hummer bombings’. By the fourth night, security is stepped up at all SUV dealers in the Western world. Your terror campaign makes the front page of the New York Times and the Guardian. When a Manchester showroom featuring the Hummer H3 is engulfed in flames, images lead the BBC News at Ten bulletin. A fuzzy CCTV image of a wide-eyed figure in a mask appears on the internet. It is you. Newspaper articles refer to you as the sectarian SUV-slayer.
Your courage mounts every day. On the sixth night, two of your cell go on the rampage in the spiritual home of the urban SUV, southern California. They torch forty Hummer H2S. The phrase ‘Hummer-burning’ enters the American lexicon as a euphemism for extreme environmental behaviour. The Family claims responsibility. The next morning, you buy a Hummer to distract attention from you as a potential suspect.
Any target that activists believe is detrimental to the environment is considered legitimate. And, as long as the attack is quick, organized and well-researched, you stand a good chance of getting away with it. One of the most celebrated ELF strikes happened in October 1998 in the ski resort of Vail, Colorado, which was scheduled to expand. The attack destroyed 885 acres of wilderness and caused up to £6 million worth of damage, the most expensive act of ecological sabotage so far. No suspects have yet been found.
You almost match this sum with an audacious attack on a chemical conglomerate on Teesside. With the world’s media spotlight firmly upon your small band of anarchists, it’s time for a masterstroke. You disseminate orders to torch a huge housing estate for the retired and rich on a Cornish Greenfield site. Your colleagues believe it is unoccupied. For years, the FBI have stated it is only luck that no one has been killed in fires started by Elves. That ‘luck’ is about to run out. The fires sweep through the complex, trapping a number of elderly on the upper floor. Seven die in the resultant blaze. The backlash is immediate. Overnight, sympathy for eco-activism – and environmentalism in general – evaporates, in the face of the monsters who put the sanctity of animal above human life. World leaders rally together, declaring that attacks against property and the elderly cannot be countenanced.
Fearing that the end is nigh, you close down your own treasured Family. But the threat to environmentalism will not so easily be contained. Commentators remark that your eco-terrorism has harmed the environment: the atmospheric effect of setting forty Hummers on fire released a harmful cocktail of chemicals, such as hydrogen cyanides, from the seat foam. One expert calculates that your attacks have released hundreds of tonnes of global-warming carbon dioxide – the equivalent of driving every one of those vehicles more than 10,000 miles. Hummers, whether they are being burnt or driven, are unfailingly good for your purposes. You go underground, leaving the mainstream environmental movement to defend itself. You are confident that, blood on its hands, it will struggle to recover its saintly image.
* Resurgence of ELF in Britain. First wave of attacks strike government departments amid claims that climate-change budgets have been cut. Tenable.
* Europe claims eco-terrorism is a more potent threat than al-Qaeda sympathizers. Doubtful.
* An audacious ELF attack in Oregon in autumn 2009 claims the movement’s first victim after a Hummer explodes in a showroom and engulfs passing dog-walker in a fireball. Probable.
* FBI and Interpol officers round up more than forty ELF activists in a series of dawn raids after attack on high-profile Texas oil estate. Possible.
* Your good friend Dr Steven Best is banned from entering Britain for his latest book-signing tour. Weeks later he is arrested, after an email links him to British animal-protection activists campaigning against science laboratories in Oxfordshire. Possible.
Likelihood of ELF becoming a major European terrorist group by 2015: 26%