CHAPTER 8
Intelligence & Reconnaissance
image

“Ninety percent of war is having good intelligence; if you know where the enemy is and what he has, you can figure out how to deal with him.”
—General Douglas MacArthur

IRA & BLOODY SUNDAY

Ireland, World War I. The Irish struggle for liberation is at a crossroads. Ireland has been occupied for centuries, but in the last fifty years it has regained a proud culture of resistance. It has won back much of its land through nonviolent struggle and noncooperation. But many feel that the struggle has reached the limit of what it can achieve through nonviolence when faced with a British occupier willing to use arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and murder against suspected resisters.

In April of 1916, the Irish Republican Brotherhood stages an uprising and seizes control of major government buildings in Dublin. But holding territory is hard for any movement, and the militants of the Easter Rising are swiftly defeated by the occupier’s superior arms and training. Britain hangs the leaders, and puts the rest into internment camps where the prisoners languish for years.

One of the survivors is a man named Michael Collins. He understands why the uprising failed, and the tactics that will be needed to win: not pitched battles, but hit-and-run tactics based on good intelligence, concealment, and boldness. He understands, especially, that the Irish resistance has been stymied by infiltrators and secret police. The secret police have been able to suppress the struggle for Irish independence by gathering information about its people and operations (in part by torturing prisoners).

As a leader of the original Irish Republican Army, Collins decides that the secret police and intelligence agents must be targeted, and with help from sympathetic insiders, Collins is able to identify them. He has them warned and intimidated at first, but those who continue to work for the British are beaten, or even assassinated. It works; the occupiers slowly lose their inside information on Irish resistance organizing.

In response the British escalate, sending in more paramilitaries and secret police. Michael Collins, who has built an incredible underground intelligence agency, helps resisters to avoid British agents.

By 1920, the situation is critical for the British. Public support for the Irish resistance is growing, and the British have very few Irish sources of intelligence to rely on. So they send in an elite group of British intelligence officers dubbed the “Cairo Gang.” It is the Cairo Gang’s job to find Michael Collins, to uproot the underground resistance, to see its organizers interrogated and hanged.

It’s make-or-break time for the original IRA. They painstakingly gather information about the Cairo Gang by intercepting letters in the post office, collecting discarded paper from wastebaskets, following informants, and grilling waiters, footmen, maids, and porters.109 Soon they have a full picture of the squad, their activity, and their places of residence.

On the morning of Sunday November 21, IRA squads across Dublin strike simultaneously, bursting in on the surprised British officers and shooting them. The Cairo Gang is shattered. Most of them are killed—the survivors flee the country or go into hiding.

State retaliation is swift. Police descend on a busy Dublin football game and fire indiscriminately into a crowd of civilians and players, killing fourteen women, men, and children. Then they torture and murder three IRA prisoners. The Irish will remember this day for generations as Bloody Sunday. Only one of the IRA assassins is captured. He is sentenced to death, but escapes prison before he can be hanged.

The gruesome events of the day bolster Irish support for armed resistance. And with the British intelligence capacity broken, resisters of all kinds can organize much more freely. The struggle escalates, and within eight months the British are begging to negotiate Ireland’s independence.

■    ■    ■

“Research is the engine of intelligence,” explains Algonquin organizer Bob Lovelace, “and intelligence is the foundation of a successful movement.”

Resistance movements are, by definition, outgunned. Those in power have overwhelming force; resistance movements win by applying the limited resources they do have in the right places. The resistance needs to know where those in power are most vulnerable and what the best targets are. It is good intelligence that allows resistance groups to understand where and how to apply force strategically.

In a 1977 communiqué, the underground George Jackson Brigade explained: “Good intelligence is the foundation of a successful guerrilla organization. The vast majority of intelligence work involves the gathering and organization of readily available pieces of information. Although this is mostly shit work, there is no way to overstate its importance.”110 These words apply to any resistance movement, aboveground or underground, armed or nonviolent.

Serious intelligence capacity requires organization and hard work. In the 1996 film Michael Collins, a maid finds a list in a wastepaper basket which contains the names of everyone in the Cairo Gang, and gives it directly to Michael Collins. If only intelligence gathering were so simple. In reality, an entire underground intelligence department was required.

The process of building that department began much earlier, when Michael Collins was approached by a sympathetic police detective named Eamon Broy. Broy gave Collins a midnight tour of the headquarters of G Division (the police intelligence unit that investigated Irish resisters). Collins spent most of the night going through their records. As Michael T. Foy explains: “After five hours reading and note-taking, Collins emerged into the morning light a changed man whose questions had been answered, whose ideas had crystallised and who now knew what G-men knew—and did not know—about the republican movement. Having entered and toured his enemy’s mind, Collins was now in a position to create ‘his own G Division’—one that would emulate and finally outclass the original model.”111

Very soon, Collins had built a corps of trained intelligence personnel who gathered and analyzed enormous amounts of information. Far from a lucky find by a friendly maid, the compromise of the Cairo Gang was the result of an enormous amount of work and preparation. The IRA prepared dossiers on each target, recruited staff at the rooming houses where the British officers stayed, and even got copies of their room keys.112 They conducted surveillance for weeks so that they were certain of who their targets were and where they would be; they wanted to avoid killing bystanders. A maid did assist in identifying several rooms used by members of the Cairo Gang, but nothing so dramatic as in the film.

The benefits of good intelligence—combined with good tactics—are beyond measure. M. R. D. Foot points out that sabotage in Nazi-Occupied France was more effective than aerial bombing, since the Special Operations Executive required fewer people and fewer resources for more impact. He explains that the “SOE succeeded in putting ninety factories completely out of production with a total load of explosives that was less than that carried by one light bomber.”113

■    ■    ■

“So what is intelligence?” asked World War II intelligence officer and journalist Donald McLachlan. “Quite simply, it is information about the enemy. Not just any old information, any scrap of gossip, or rumor, but relevant information which has been processed and made as accurate as it can be.”114 He continues: “What then is the chief military function of intelligence, in peace as well as in war? I would say that its chief function is offensively to achieve and defensively to avert surprise.”115 In a broader sense, intelligence includes not just information about the enemy but about many other factors that affect the conflict: terrain, other factions, and so on.

Resistance intelligence is part research, part investigative journalism, and part espionage. And gathering intelligence is a job in which everyone can participate. The George Jackson Brigade suggested: “An important task for people who want to remain aboveground while participating in a supporting armed struggle would be to develop these skills.

Perhaps this all seems abstract, or distant from the needs of resisters today. Let’s sharpen our focus; for the rest of this chapter, we’ll follow the thread of a nonviolent movement trying to stop a new oil pipeline.

THE INTELLIGENCE CYCLE

image

Imagine that we are organizers in a movement to stop the construction of an oil pipeline on Indigenous territory. What do we need to know to mobilize effective resistance? What kind of intelligence must we develop in order to win?

The US Marine Corps intelligence manual explains: “good intelligence is primarily the result of solid headwork and legwork, not the output of some secret process or compartmented database. . . . It is developed through the focused collection of information, thorough study, and, most importantly, effective analysis and synthesis. The result is an intelligence product that provides knowledge, reduces uncertainty, and supports effective decision making.”119

Professionals use a multistep “intelligence cycle”: information is collected, analyzed, packaged, and then distributed:

Three Levels of Intelligence

After the African National Congress won its struggle against apartheid, member Ronnie Kasrils summarized his role in its underground intelligence operations: “As chief of military intelligence I supervised the gathering of information that would assist us in prosecuting the struggle against the State. We focused on security force command structures and personnel, deployment, battle order, strategy and tactics, bases and installations, communications, arms and equipment and state of morale.

“We also compiled information on the country’s geography and terrain, power and communication network, the economy, the industrial and agricultural sectors.

“We gave special attention to border reconnaissance and developing infiltration routes home” from training camps outside of South Africa. “Cadres returning home were trained in collecting data and carrying out their own reconnaissance against the background of information and briefings given by military intelligence.”117

This is a good overview of typical resistance intelligence tasks. Kasrils touches on the three general levels into which military intelligence (and strategy) is often divided, which also apply to resistance organizing in general:

Strategic intelligence deals with the big picture. It includes information about political situations, economic systems, industrial infrastructure, communications and energy networks, notable people and organizations, technologies, and so on. Strategic intelligence helps resistance groups formulate, evaluate, and optimize their strategy, and gives members of the organization a better strategic context in which to operate.

Operational intelligence helps resistance groups plan and implement a particular campaign and major operations. Operational intelligence may help to identify potential targets or actions and evaluate which have the most value in moving the strategy forward. In the MK example, operational intelligence might focus on a particular campaign like the infiltration or exfiltration of cadres and trainees across the border, or on gathering area-specific information about the electrical grid of Johannesburg.

Tactical intelligence deals with specific units, targets or engagements at the most detailed level, such as direct reconnaissance. This may include gathering detailed information about potential targets. If the target is a physical installation, this may mean identifying the number of guards and their patrol routes, surveillance or camera equipment, entry and escape routes, weak points in the structure, and so on. In the MK example, tactical intelligence might involve preparation to bring down a specific electrical pylon in a particular Johannesburg suburb.

Of course, there is no clear dividing line between these different levels. Instead, they overlap and work in concert.

Militaries may emphasize strategic intelligence so that they can mobilize huge armies and plan over the long term. Resistance movements, smaller and more agile, may emphasize tactical or operational intelligence so they can win short-term objectives to sustain themselves. That was the case for Michael Collins and the IRA. Foy writes: “Collins was indifferent to intellectual theories about intelligence or its ability to divine the enemy’s long-term strategic intentions. He regarded its raison d’être as facilitating political and military action and was concerned only with intelligence’s immediate and practical application to the Irish conflict.”118

(If you want to use this as an exercise for yourself or your group, pause and answer the above questions for our hypothetical pipeline struggle, or another issue you are working on now. Otherwise, continue.)

In our movement against a pipeline on Indigenous territory, some of the answers will look like this:

image

Figure 8-1: The Intelligence Cycle

In this example, especially, a lot of the key information can be collected either online or person-to-person. In general, as the George Jackson Brigade alluded to, gathering intelligence is often much easier aboveground. (Almost everything is more difficult underground.) Aboveground allies can make things easier for underground movements by doing some of the work for them.

Intelligence gathering doesn’t have to be a highly formalized process. The intelligence cycle is a useful conceptual guide, but resistance groups with limited resources and tight time lines—most of them—focus on their most important and urgent priorities. In small groups, intelligence workers may just share what they know in meetings and help guide planning, rather than writing formal briefings.

DIRECTION AND GOALS

image

The first question is “what kind of information do we need?” There are general kinds of research questions that can be asked (see sidebar of research questions), but the answer depends on our struggle.

Consider the case of uranium prospecting imposed on the Ardoch Algonquin (west of Ottawa) circa 2006. Robert Lovelace explains: “As a small indigenous community, Ardoch did not know much about uranium. Our first concerns were with a trapline and the failure of Ontario to consult. Research at the beginning stages allowed our community to expand its understanding of the history of uranium mining and the associated social, economic, and environmental consequences. We became knowledgeable and then capable of linking our concerns with the broader world. As well as expanding our knowledge outward, we opened the bundle of traditional knowledge and found within the many coded layers of direct reference to our current situation and the language needed to express our concerns in universal terms.”120

Next, consider what we need to know for our pipeline example.

We’ll need to understand the regulatory process for approval. We need to know when and where public meetings are happening so we can bring public pressure to bear or even to disrupt phony “consultations.” We’ll need to know who is making decisions, who influences the decision-makers, and some information about their backgrounds. We’ll need to know about the history of the process—is it a complete sham, and if so can we demonstrate that to the public?

We’ll also want technical information about the pipeline, its planned route, and the people and companies building it.

We’ll want to understand which places on the pipeline route are most suited to direct action, such as a blockade. We’ll need to know which pipeline components and contractors are most important and most vulnerable to disruption. And so on.

Ultimately, resistance is about action, so we’ll want to identify which tactics are best matched to stopping the pipeline, so we can build the skills, organization, and allies necessary to win. For example, NoDAPL chose a mass mobilization on Indigenous land at a crucial point on the route. Activists opposed to Ontario’s Line 9, on the other hand, used technical information about the pipeline to locate safety valves that they could use to manually shut down the line.

COLLECTION AND INTELLIGENCE SOURCES

image

Once a group has determined the purpose and priorities of their intelligence efforts, they need to find their sources.

For the original IRA, intelligence gathering “consisted of tracing the activities of enemy agents and spies, keeping records of enemy personnel, contacts with friendly personnel in government and Crown service” among other things. They intercepted and decoded government correspondence and communication, as well as relying on moles. Intercepted correspondence was especially useful in warning comrades about impending raids or arrests.121

Intelligence Research Questions

Journalists use the “five W’s” to build their stories. Resistance intelligence workers can use the same framework as a starting point and ask questions like the following:

What?

  • Strategic: What’s the key thing we’re fighting?
  • What is its organizational or corporate structure?
  • Is it driven by the need to make a profit, to maximize public support, or some other cause? What drives it forward? What do they want, and what are they afraid of?
  • What are their likely courses of action? What are the most dangerous courses of action (for us) that the enemy might take?
  • What is the terrain of the operational area, geographically, socially, economically, politically, and infrastructurally?
  • What are the structural points where the opposition is strongest or weakest? What are their shortcomings and vulnerabilities?

Who?

When?

  • What is the schedule for proceeding?
  • When are the critical deadlines or moments at which we can intervene?
  • Tactical: What are the business hours of the target? When are shift changes? When is it busiest or slowest?

Where?

  • Tactical: Where is the action happening?
  • Do we have maps of the area?
  • How easy is it to access, and by what routes?
  • What places do the opposition frequent?

How?

  • Have people fought a similar struggle before?
  • How, and what tactics did they use? Did they win? Why or why not?
  • Are those people available as allies, advisers, or elders?
  • What means of struggle do we have available to us now, and which do we need to develop?

Modern resistance groups have a huge range of possible intelligence sources, including these:

Human sources. The easiest source of information may be someone you know or can cultivate a relationship with. Experts or journalists can be very helpful. So can sympathizers inside an organization you are struggling against, whether those are people who have worked there a long time or people sent in undercover to gather information. Useful sympathizers don’t have to be highly placed moles. Tradespeople, cleaning staff, and other working folks often have valuable information about what is really going on inside an organization. (And cleaning staff may have access to every office.) The World War II Danish resistance group BOPA recruited young factory apprentices, who helped identify factories used to supply the German military, factories that were later attacked. The SOE recruited tradespeople to identify the most effective ways of sabotaging industrial machinery (and even built a special “experimental establishment and school” for sabotage research).122

Charles Dobson argues: “The best intelligence comes from inside organizations that can influence the success of your project. Let’s suppose your goal is to change government policy. Reading government reports will provide some useful information. But talking to bureaucrats will provide new information and a quick rundown on attitudes inside government. A sympathetic senior bureaucrat who understands your project can provide the most help. Finding such a person will help you make all the right moves.”123

In our pipeline example, we’ll want to recruit or consult with a variety of people including experts on the regulatory process, pipeline technologies and construction, tradespeople, even municipal workers in townships the line passes through.

Governments commonly recruit spies and human sources using dirty methods. Former KGB agent Stanislav Levchenko wrote that there were four main reasons people became intelligence sources: ideology, money, ego, or compromise (e.g., extortion, threats, and coercion). For a resistance movement to use the latter three can be dangerous, both morally and practically. Those in power have more money, more fame, and more coercive force to wield; a human source motivated by money, ego, or threats may be unreliable.

Far better to recruit sources through solidarity, loyalty, and shared aims. This was how the original IRA enlisted human sources, explains biographer Tim Pat Coogan. Michael Collins’s agents, he writes, “were not highly trained, C.I.A.-style operatives, but ordinary men and women, people whom nobody had ever taken notice of before. Collins gave them a belief in themselves, a courage they did not know they possessed, and they in return gave him a complete picture of how their masters operated.”124

If you want to have a good source on the inside, it’s important to cultivate a trusting, ongoing relationship with that person that respects their limits and the risks they take. Protect their identity and their safety.

Reconnaissance and scouting. Resistance groups should know their territory well, and gain a huge advantage from having a detailed, up-to-date picture of their area of struggle.125 This requires scouting and reconnaissance of targets.

Let’s say you want to stage a sit-in at the well-secured office of a pipeline contractor. To prepare, you might want to watch the site at critical times. If an action is planned to take place on a Tuesday, consider watching the two preceding Tuesdays to ensure you have a good sense of what is going on there.

Have an appropriate cover so you can scout the area without interruption or drawing unnecessary attention. If the target site is in a remote area, maybe you want to pose as a wilderness photographer or hiker. If the target is in a downtown area, maybe you want to pose as a student working on a laptop in a nearby café. In an industrial area, perhaps you need to look like a maintenance worker or tradesperson with a hard hat, coveralls, and a clipboard.

In their scouting manual, the Ruckus Society suggests: “Good scouting usually begins with good research. . . . Often, your potential action site is far away and you don’t want to make repeated trips. So if you haven’t been to the potential action site try to visualize it.”126

They also have plenty of suggestions for things to bring on a scouting mission, suggestions I’ve expanded on in the scouting equipment sidebar.

When doing recon, understand the kinds of action being considered so you can look for the right things. Are you planning a banner drop and need a secure and highly visible location? Or do you want to stage a surprise action with well-covered entry and egress routes? Know in advance the kinds of tactics you are scouting to prepare for.

Across all kinds of action, scouts will also want to look for cameras and other surveillance in and around the action site.

Open sources. An enormous amount of information is available freely and openly. Newspapers and the media are valuable resources (especially with Google Alerts or other online tools that will notify you when news matching your keywords is posted). Press releases and media statements from companies and bureaucracies can be useful. Social networks, forums, or newsgroups are useful for tracking down relationships among people you might be researching. WikiLeaks, Cryptome, and other whistleblower resources can be valuable when you need to know what’s going on behind the scenes of power.

Information that has been online, but has since deleted can often be found in search engine caches or the Internet Archive (archive.org).

Don’t forget offline sources of information, such as the library. Those sources are especially relevant when looking for information from the 1990s and earlier. The reference section, phone book (and phone book archives), newspaper archives and microfiche, and old yearbooks can be valuable.

Michael Collins, too, used open sources. His aide Charlie Dalton went through newspapers and cut out “any paragraphs referring to the personnel of the Royal Irish Constabulary, or military, such as transfers, their movements socially, attendance at wedding receptions, garden parties, etc. These I pasted on a card which was sent to the Director of Intelligence for his perusal and instructions. Photographs and other data which were or might be of interest were gathered and put away. We often gathered useful information of the movements of important enemy personages in this manner, who we traced also by a study of Who’s Who, from which we learned the names of the connections and clubs.”

The challenge of open sources is to pluck useful and accurate knowledge from an ocean of data. Open sources may be of lower quality. Sometimes the problems are deliberate; when the ANC gathered maps to plan their strategy in the 1960s, they found that the South African government had deliberately introduced errors into public maps as a form of disinformation.128 They had to compensate for this during analysis.

Scouting Equipment

Useful scouting equipment may include the following:

Remember that for any serious resistance movement, intelligence goes hand in hand with counterintelligence. Especially with online sources, it’s worth the effort to browse safely and anonymously; otherwise you may be identifiable to the site owners (or others). Don’t tip your hand unnecessarily to the people or entities you are researching. Use good internet security practices such as Tor, VPNs provided by radical organizations, and other anonymous browsing tools.

With open sources like the Internet, the biggest challenge is to winnow out the useful information from the astronomical volume of garbage.

Allies. Your friends and allies may already have the intelligence you need. Ask around to save yourself extra work and to track down additional sources (especially human sources). Academics and researchers may have databases on your subject of interest. Campaigners, grassroots activists, or union organizers might have a friend on the inside you can connect with. Similarly, it’s important to share what you know with your allies. Entire campaigns can be built around this, as SHAC demonstrated (which we’ll return to in chapter 12).

Maps. Road maps and aerial photographs are incredibly useful and publicly available resources. I use online maps almost every time I plan an action. If you need to choose between different sites for an action, those online services are a huge time-saver when you need to consider access or exit routes to an action, or choose multiple sites for disruptive action. You still need up-to-date recon, but they’ll save time and reduce your workload, as well as giving you high-resolution photographs of places it might be inconvenient to access. On bodies of water, nautical charts are very handy.

Government or private registries and databases. Open sources will get you pretty far, but some information needs to be retrieved from closed or semi-closed sources. Aboveground groups can request specific answers through Access to Information/Freedom of Information channels, usually for a small fee. Sensitive information is commonly censored and responses can be slow. (Make sure to ask for information about previous requests on the same topic. This can help you save time, zero in on interesting material, and identify potential allies.)

You can learn a lot from government bidding websites (like MERX in Canada), where the government posts requests for services and contracts. You can find everything from successful bidders to plans and blueprints. Also consider land registries or land claims offices, driving and licensing registries, tax records, political donation listings. (Some of these may require a nominal fee to access information.)

Information about people can sometimes be found through voter registration information, tax records, or court records. (That’s especially true if you are running a background check. Has someone been through court but ended up serving much less time than you might expect? Have they agreed to cooperate with the state previously? Those would be warning signs that someone could be an informer.)

Espionage and social engineering. I’m not suggesting that you do the things in this category. Resistance movements sometimes use them. They’re also techniques that those in power might use against you, and so they’re worth knowing about. For example, going through someone’s garbage is illegal for you, but not illegal for the government. Garbage can contain bills (credit card, phone, utilities), notes or correspondence, discarded files, and other bits of information.

A major form of espionage by deception is social engineering, which is “the art and science of getting people to comply with your wishes” using certain psychological knowledge and tricks.129 Social engineers understand that the weak point in a security system is often not the technology; it’s the people. So, if a social engineer wants to get into a secured building, they don’t rappel in through the ceiling; they stand by the door with a stack of books in their arms so that a passerby opens it for them without thinking. If they want access to a corporation’s computer network, they don’t reprogram the firewall like leather-clad movie hackers; they just leave some USB sticks with spyware in the company parking lot, and wait for an employee to pick one up and plug it into a work computer. If they need to get information about a person’s work or school history, they don’t put on an elaborate disguise; they just make a “routine” phone call and pretend to be checking job references.

Confidence, quick thinking, an authoritative voice, and a good pretext may be all that’s needed to get someone to give up information over the phone.130 There are ample resources on social engineering, and how to avoid it, online.

■    ■    ■

Armed movements like the IRA and the ANC offer clear-cut examples of why resistance movements need good intelligence. But the core principles apply to any movement that wants to use political force effectively.

I’ve mentioned already my role in the campaign to keep farms open at several prisons in Canada. The prison farm campaign at Collins Bay Penitentiary in Kingston required extensive and ongoing reconnaissance to be effective, and this became a core part of our strategy. We promised that if the government failed to listen to public opinion—and to answer basic questions about why the farm was being closed, what its budget was, and so on—then we would use massive civil disobedience to stage and hold blockades against the removal of cattle or machinery.

We used several different intelligence approaches to prepare for this and to guide the campaign in general. Human sources were critical. The prison system employs—directly or indirectly—well over a thousand people in our area. With such a large pool of potential sources, many of whom were already disenchanted or angry with the administration, it was easy to get in touch with sympathizers inside the affected institutions. We were able to get highly up-to-date insider information. We often knew about government plans and announcements well in advance, which made it much easier for us to plan and mobilize people (instead of scrambling to react after the fact).

Friendly journalists often shared what they knew with us. Newspaper and government reports were sometimes useful as well. Some members of our coalition met with Corrections officials at different points; those officials weren’t going to share sensitive information with us, but we did glean some useful information, especially when it came to their attitudes. (Direct meetings like this can be dangerous, of course, because the other side will want to gather information, too, and possibly to intimidate. That’s especially true for any meeting involving police.)

The farmers in the coalition were able to predict the types of transport trucks and loading facilities needed to remove the cattle. We also knew that the prison didn’t have a loading dock for cattle, which meant that loading would be an extended operation.

Online maps were invaluable. We couldn’t do complete direct recon on a thousand acres of prison farmland, and armed prison guards are not happy with visitors wandering around. But using Google Maps we could instantly access high-resolution aerial photographs of the site. We combined this information with direct recon and information from our human sources inside. This allowed us to develop our blockade strategy.

Fig. 8-2, an annotated image based on Google Maps imagery, shows part of the prison farm. We identified three potential access points for the cattle trucks. Access point 1 is the main entrance for the entire complex, a paved two-lane road with wide shoulders. Transport trucks could move quickly here in any weather. Access point 2 is a disused former driveway. It was blocked by concrete barriers and partly grassy. It would be possible for transport operators to move the barriers and try to drive across this point. Access point 3 was a sturdy farm gate on the opposite side of the farm. A winding dirt-and-gravel road connected it to the main complex and the farm buildings.

It was a rainy summer, which meant that the gravel road was not likely to be passable for fully loaded transport trucks. Also, a prisoner who worked on the farm “accidentally” dumped a large load of manure in the middle of that road, obstructing it. We knew that a few people could lock down the rear gate easily, so we focused on the main entrance.

image

Figure 8-2: Prison Farm Map (from a handout)

When we publicly announced the civil disobedience strategy, we also placed a reconnaissance station in front of the prison. Since “reconnaissance” sounded a bit militaristic for our campaign’s tone, we chose a more warm-and-fuzzy name, dubbing it the “Community On Watch Station” or COWS. (This framing also reinforced the idea that, even though we might break the law, our community was in the right by defending itself.) This would make it psychologically easier for people to defy police in the campaign.

We found a sympathetic business owner across the street from the prison and placed a camper trailer in a front parking lot. The COWS trailer was to be staffed twenty-four hours a day, watching the front access points and the farm buildings for any sign that the cattle might be moved out soon, especially transport trucks with cattle trailers. I stocked the trailer with snacks, some petty cash for minor expenses, and some board games and books. I also brought a pair of binoculars, a logbook for recording activities, and—most importantly—a mobile phone that the watcher could use to report problems or to trigger a phone tree that would bring hundreds of people to block the entrance, night or day, on a few minutes’ notice.

I took the first shift on the first day of watch, set up a schedule, and did a few media interviews. The COWS trailer was to be staffed by volunteers in shifts around the clock. I knew that the COWS trailer was a big logistical risk because it required so much labor. I expected to be spending a lot of sleepless nights there to keep the watch going. But the community stepped up; we were flooded with campaign volunteers taking shifts. The station—emblazoned with banners—became a physical rallying point for the campaign, a meeting place, and overflowed with donated food and supplies.

During the weeks that followed, I didn’t have to take a single shift for lack of volunteers, and not a single person missed the shift they volunteered for. Our community doesn’t have a recent history of that kind of radical direct action. But people did the work, and they did it well. I still have the logbook from the watch station—filled with detailed notes by volunteers recording each shift, things they saw, and stories of friendly neighbors who came to visit them. (We also canvassed the neighborhood with tongue-in-cheek “wanted” posters with pictures of the responsible government officials, warning neighbors to watch out for “cattle rustlers” and to call our hotline if they saw anything suspicious.)

The experience deeply changed the way I thought about radical organizing—and about the importance of intelligence gathering. That work also laid the groundwork for further direct action in that campaign.

ANALYZING INTELLIGENCE

image

Let’s return to our anti-pipeline example. Because we have many intelligence sources, we could easily gather enormous amounts of information about the proposed pipeline. Regulatory filings from energy companies routinely run into the thousands of pages. Technical reports on pipeline safety might contain millions of data points. And understanding the relationship between colonial governments and specific Indigenous groups could require that we listen to oral histories, study history books, and analyze treaties and land claims documents. The amount of raw information we could collect is incredible.

And not all of that information will be correct or unbiased—I can tell you firsthand that an oil company will say almost anything to get a profitable pipeline approved.

So we must understand this: Raw data is not intelligence. Information becomes intelligence once processed and analysed. That means assessing whether information is relevant, accurate, and reliably sourced. It means sorting through the information to find the most important pieces—salient knowledge—and constructing a coherent overall picture. And it means avoiding selection bias that would twist the information.

So how can we focus our effort and keep ourselves from being bogged down? The answer, as always, is action. The US Marine Corps intelligence handbook observes “that knowledge does not exist for its own sake, but as the basis for action. We do not develop lengthy intelligence studies just because we have the ability to do so or because a subject is of academic interest. Intelligence that is not acted upon or that does not provide the potential for future action is useless.”131

An excess of information can be just as bad as a shortage of that information that isn’t analyzed properly. Consider the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which came as a complete surprise to the United States. But American historian Roberta Wohlstetter explained: “If our intelligence system and all our other channels of information failed to produce an accurate image of Japanese intentions and capabilities, it was not for want of the relevant materials. Never before have we had so complete an intelligence picture of the enemy.”132 The problem, she argues was that the US military “failed to anticipate Pearl Harbor not for want of the relevant materials, but because of a plethora of irrelevant ones.”133

The problem wasn’t just excessive information, but also racist bias. As Christopher Andrew explained, “these problems were compounded by the underrating of the Japanese opponents. ‘Why be apologetic about Anglo-Saxon racial superiority?’ Winston Churchill once asked. ‘We are superior.’ Until Pearl Harbor, Churchill’s confidence in the racial inferiority of ‘little yellow men’ to Anglo-Saxons was widely shared by both U.S. and British military commanders.”134 General MacArthur insisted that Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor were piloted by white mercenaries.

Racism was also at play in 1973, when Israel failed to anticipate the coordinated surprise attack that started the Yom Kippur War, despite ample sources of intelligence. The head of Israeli intelligence agency Mossad explained: “We simply did not believe that they [the Arabs] were capable. In effect—that was also my personal problem—we scorned them.”135 The same kind of wishful thinking afflicted members of the British government facing Michael Collins and the IRA. Blinded at the tactical level, high-level bureaucrats told the heads of government what they wanted to hear. They preferred “comforting illusion to unpalatable truth.”

Bias is very dangerous for organizations that are strongly motivated by ideology. Even paid professional intelligence analysts rarely maintain a neutral perspective. And people join resistance movements because of strong ideology. That can make it much harder for them to look at things objectively.

That’s dangerous, as Jane Mansbridge pointed out in Why We Lost the ERA; it plays into the iron law of involution. Mansbridge explains that many of those who supported the Equal Rights Amendment failed to gather proper intelligence on how well their arguments were working on public opinion. Instead they relied on their own ideologies and ignored reality when it didn’t conform to their preexisting bias.136 And so they lost.137

When people self-select into a group because they possess the same ideology, they are more vulnerable to logical pitfalls like groupthink. You can reduce this tendency by maintaining group diversity and by crosschecking and questioning your assumptions. No matter how good your intelligence sources, excessive ideological bias can make you overlook the obvious and render your analysis misleading or even catastrophic.

INTELLIGENCE PACKAGING AND PRODUCTS

image

Once we have done some rudimentary analysis of our intelligence, what do we do to make it useful for action?

Intelligence analysis can yield many useful products:

Warnings. If your intelligence suggests something important will happen soon (especially something bad), it’s important to warn your colleagues. Maybe you’ve learned that FBI or RCMP agents are sniffing around your community, or that there’s some ongoing investigation. Maybe a pipeline we’re opposing is moving forward ahead of schedule.

Michael Collins and the IRA frequently learned of impending raids and arrests and were able to warn their colleagues to flee or sleep in different places. They saved many from prison and torture.138

Warnings must be issued in a way that protects intelligence sources. When the Allies in World War II cracked various Axis code systems, allowing them to track German submarines, they had to be extremely careful about how they used the information. They couldn’t just intercept and destroy every U-Boat. In the beginning, they couldn’t destroy more than good luck would suggest they should have. If the Axis learned that their codes were broken, they would have changed them, a major blow to the Allied war effort. Intelligence and counterintelligence go hand in hand.

General intelligence briefings, and updates, and situations maps. Keep your comrades and allies in the know about the opposition and the state of your struggle, so that they can make intelligent decisions. Reports, briefings, and regular updates can make sure that everyone is on the same page. Good intelligence (the Marines emphasize) is objective, thorough, accurate, timely, usable, relevant, and available.

Summarizing what you know graphically can help make complex information clearer. Annotated maps, organizational charts of the opposition, and concept maps are very useful tools.

In our anti-pipeline struggle this could be a flow chart of the regulatory approval process. Or a map of regulator meeting dates and locations that could be disrupted. Or a map of the pipeline route showing Indigenous territories and watersheds crossed.

Social and political spectrum analysis. Don’t just map the opposition; map the social and political landscape of your struggle to clarify your goals for strategy, mobilization, and recruitment. In their civil-rights-era book A Manual for Direct Action, Martin Oppenheimer and George Lakey ask: “Who has the power? What is the relationship of forces, both racial and otherwise? What is the economy like?”139 They suggest creating a social inventory, ranking different institutions or parties along a spectrum of support and opposition.140 Figure 8-3 is based on their suggestion for putting groups into six different categories from most to least supportive.

I’ve inserted some typical civil rights examples into the spectrum. If you wanted to run a local civil rights campaign in the early 1960s, your active antagonists might include the KKK and White Citizens’ Councils. The federal government and bystander citizens might be on the fence. You might get moral support from sympathetic churches, and perhaps some funding or organizational support from an organization like CORE or the NAACP.

image

Figure 8-3: Social and Political Landscape Analysis (Civil Rights era examples)

This spectrum is important to understand for a couple of reasons. For one, it is valuable to identify disagreements among powerful groups: “Above all, it is important to remember that elites do not always agree among themselves. They have interests which differ and sometimes conflict. These differences and conflicts can be ‘used’ by the smart civil rights worker.”141 Pitting certain businesses and the federal government against authorities in the South was crucial.

That doesn’t mean that resisters should go easy on neutral parties. In dealing with segregated stores, Oppenheimer and Lakey explain: “Generally it is wise to try to boycott all stores, even when some stores are prepared to give in to demands on equal hiring and serving. The managers who are willing to give in will then pressure the more stubborn ones.”

Once you understand the spectrum of parties, your job in action will be to push people and groups along the spectrum so that they will become more friendly—or at least, less antagonistic—toward you. For example, you might recruit friendly community supporters onto the organizing team. Or you might want to encourage moral supporters (the mass base) to become active supporters by contributing funds or resources. Intelligence can help identify ways of doing this, along with potential obstacles. Oppenheimer and Lakey warn: “Where allies are concerned, your chief problems are fear and apathy.”142

Getting people out of the neutrality mind-set can be difficult, they note in a civil-rights-era example: “Some ministers, schoolteachers, and businessmen in the Negro community depend on segregation for their living. Others do not. People with independent incomes (or no incomes) will tend to be readier to act than those who depend on others and are insecure.”143

Dealing with hostile parties and antagonists is more challenging, and you probably aren’t going to achieve that with persuasion. But you can neutralize their ability to harm you. The KKK was neutralized in large part by the Deacons for Defense, while some other antagonists were neutralized by changing legislation.

Any action at all may push people out of the neutrality camp and cause them to become polarized. A highly polarized spectrum of parties isn’t necessarily bad—in fact, it is often easier to mobilize people in a very polarized community than in a community with a large number of indifferent people. You can’t stop everyone from hating you, but you can provide your allies with means to action while limiting the ability of antagonists to attack or damage your organization.

(Another tool to assess the political landscape is through a SWOT analysis—Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats—which I’ll come back to in the final chapter.)

Target lists. As the George Jackson Brigade said, compiling target lists is a fundamental intelligence task. Even the most liberal campaign has a list of people to write to; radicals use similar lists to find the pressure points in a bureaucratic system. Of course, targets are often not people but facilities, organizations, or infrastructure. Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) made a whole—and very successful—campaign out of publishing target lists and letting decentralized groups do the direct action. Annotated target lists, perhaps along with priorities or rankings, are a key intelligence product that allow strategists to plan well and combatants to focus on action. Such lists identify the adversary’s general capabilities and vulnerabilities, and compile information to aid in target selection (like target criticality, vulnerability, recuperability, and accessibility, which I’ll come back to in chapter 11, “Actions & Tactics”).

In the anti-pipeline example, this could include pumping stations, pipeline junctions, corporate offices, or contractor equipment yards.

Detailed target profiles and reconnaissance. Tactical intelligence about specific targets is crucial, especially once a target list and a “short list” of targets for action have been created. A target profile of a person might include biographical information, public statements that person has made, their CV, and so on. A target profile of a physical site might include a map of the area with possible entrance and exit routes, notable features and terrain, information about security, and so on. Reconnaissance is crucial to developing a proper target profile for physical places.

New tools and tactics, handbooks for struggle. Intelligence is not limited to gathering information about enemy forces. It also includes research and development that can be used by friendly forces to improve their effectiveness. This was the case with the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in World War II, which was tasked with organizing sabotage and other forms of unconventional warfare against Axis forces around the world.

SOE recruited and trained agents in unconventional tactics and then dropped them into occupied countries to work with resistance organizations and help coordinate actions between those groups and the Allied conventional forces. This meant relying heavily on clandestine communications, and SOE delivered special radios for that purpose. They also conducted research and development on tools and equipment. They developed a miniature folding motorcycle for parachutists, and a special suppressed pistol that was easy to conceal, various explosive devices, and special folding crossbows designed to fire incendiary bolts and powered by thick rubber bands. They distributed cheap firearms to resistance cells with an emphasis on those that were easy to use and maintain and which were compatible with enemy ammunition. Some firearms were simple enough to be made in bicycle shops. And they researched techniques for resistance operatives to use, and SOE’s training syllabus for agents has since been declassified and published.144 (More recent books like Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching are similarly useful tactical guides based on practical experience.)

Forecasts and predictions. No movement can win by simply responding to events after the fact. If you want to win, you have to seize the initiative; you have to get several steps ahead of your adversary. We know resistance movements have limited resources; developing new skills and capacities can take time. Winning means preparing to fight the way that the struggle will be waged tomorrow; not the way that it was fought yesterday. Understand and research how your opponent has functioned in the past in order to anticipate their actions in the future. Map possible outcomes of your actions and campaigns; understand how to maximize the good outcomes and respond effectively to the bad. (The final two chapters discuss how to do this.) If you’ve run through many different scenarios, you’ll know how to act swiftly even in emergencies.

THE MAN WHO VOLUNTEERED FOR AUSCHWITZ

Sometimes intelligence is very costly. In the middle of 1940, the Nazis began to send prisoners to a new prison camp in occupied Poland. As the number of people “deported” to Auschwitz grew, grim suspicions began to circulate about what was happening there. But few people ever got out of Auschwitz to tell their stories. A handful of prisoners with wealthy families were released in the early days, but they had mostly been terrorized into silence and wouldn’t speak about events in the camp.

Enter Witold Pilecki, a Polish military officer and member of the underground resistance.145 Pilecki had a wife and two children, whom he rarely saw because of his underground work. But he volunteered to infiltrate Auschwitz to gather intelligence.

In September of 1940, Pilecki deliberately wandered out into a Warsaw street as people were being rounded up. When captured, he gave a fake name. He and his fellow prisoners were beaten severely (some of them arbitrarily shot) and sent to Auschwitz.

In 1940 the camp’s infrastructure of mass murder was still rudimentary. The gas chambers had not yet been built. On arrival, Pilecki pretended to be a tradesperson. He began to write regular reports of what he saw—the arbitrary beatings and murders, the mass executions, the games in which guards would bury prisoners alive and place bets on how long it would take for them to suffocate.

He reported on numbers of prisoners, where the prisoners came from, and what happened to them. His reports, smuggled to resistance command and eventually out of Europe, became the Allies’ main source of intelligence inside the camps. His intelligence made it clear that Auschwitz was not just a prison or labour camp, but a site of mass murder and extermination. From Pilecki’s actions, the Allies learned details of the Holocaust early in the war.

While he was smuggling out his secret reports, Pilecki got in trouble with the SS for failing to send personal letters. Prisoners were told to send regular letters to their relatives. These letters were meant to hide the atrocities in Auschwitz, and were expected to begin with the words Ich bin gesund und es geht mir gut—I’m healthy and I’m doing well.146 The SS interrogated Pilecki about why he wasn’t sending letters. He lied convincingly, and instead of killing him the SS made him fill out a change of address form for his imaginary relatives.

In addition to his reports, Pilecki organized underground resistance groups among the prisoners. They redistributed food and supplies, arranged less strenuous working conditions for ill members, gathered information, and made connections with civilians and resisters on the outside. Pilecki negotiated alliances among different political factions among the prisoners. And they dealt quietly and ruthlessly with informers.

They also made careful and detailed plans for an eventual armed uprising. Special, secret squads were put on rotating duty shifts, ready to lead an uprising at a moment’s notice if there was any sign of outside intervention. An arms drop, perhaps, or a landing by friendly paratroopers. But that intervention didn’t come (at least, not until Russian troops liberated the camp at the end of the war).

Witold Pilecki spent more than thirty-one months in Auschwitz; he was there for most of the camp’s operation. In April 1943, Pilecki escaped Auschwitz with two others. He then begged leaders of the Polish underground army to aid an uprising in Auschwitz. But many officers in the Polish underground thought the prisoners a lost cause, too weak to fight or to be of any use in the resistance. And the Allies believed that Pilecki’s intelligence reports were exaggerated; they thought it preposterous that millions of people were being killed in the Holocaust. So he went to Warsaw, where he took part in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. During the uprising he was again captured and became a POW.

He survived the war. But the postwar government of Poland was a Soviet puppet state. Pilecki refused to leave Poland as his comrades urged. Rather, he stayed to compile evidence of Soviet atrocities; deportations to concentration camps had been replaced by deportations to gulags. Pilecki was captured, interrogated and tortured by Stalinist secret police, and forced to sign a phony confession. In 1948, he was executed. The Polish government expunged his name from public records, so too few people learned the story of Pilecki’s courage and sacrifice.

I don’t know how Pilecki managed to keep his sanity in Auschwitz. I’ve read his book-length final report cover-to-cover and still don’t understand where he found his reserves of determination and strength. He faced all the unceasing horrors of the concentration camp with barely a moment of respite.

Witold Pilecki’s story is not just about intelligence gathering with great risk. It is a story of contrasts, of action and inaction in the face of implacable evil. The great majority of Germans, or Poles, or the Allies who knew about the concentration camps did little to impede them before the end of the war. But Witold Pilecki took action. He risked everything and gave everything. He acted, and continued to act, despite a horrible cost to mind and body.

It’s easy to be intimidated by the depth of his sacrifice or by the fantastic nature of his actions. But don’t focus on that; rather ask, who do you want to be? Someone who stands idly by in the face of terror? Or someone who acts, even when it could cost them?

■    ■    ■

Of course, gathering intelligence about the adversary is not enough. Resistance groups also need to deal with active attempts by those in power to gather information about them, to penetrate resistance organizations with disruptive infiltrators and informers. Which brings us to the next chapter: Counterintelligence & Repression.