Greenpeace

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NO MERRI

History

Origins

While no earthquake or tsunami followed the test, the opposition grew when the U.S. announced they would detonate a bomb five times more powerful than the first one. Among the opposers were Jim Bohlen, a veteran who had served in the U.S. Navy, and Irving Stowe and Dorothy Stowe, who had recently become Quakers. As members of the Sierra Club Canada, they were frustrated by the lack of action by the organization.^[27] From Irving Stowe, Jim Bohlen learned of a form of passive resistance, "bearing witness", where objectionable activity is protested simply by mere presence.^[27] Jim Bohlen's wife Marie came up with the idea to sail to Amchitka, inspired by the anti-nuclear voyages of Albert Bigelow in 1958. The idea ended up in the press and was linked to The Sierra Club.^[27] The Sierra Club did not like this connection and in 1970 The Don't Make a Wave Committeewas established for the protest. Early meetings were held in the Shaughnessy home of Robert Hunter and his wife Bobbi Hunter. Subsequently the Stowe home at 2775 Courtenay St. became the HQ.^[28] As Rex Weyler put it in his chronology, Greenpeace, in 1969, Irving and Dorothy Stowe's "quiet home on Courtenay Street would soon become a hub of monumental, global significance". Some of the first Greenpeace meetings were held there. The first office was opened in a backroom, storefront on Cypress and West Broadway SE corner in Kitsilano, Vancouver.^[29] Within half a year Greenpeace would move in to share the upstairs office space with The Society Promoting Environmental Conservation at 4th and Maple in Kitsilano. *SPEC*** Official WebsiteIn the late 1960s, the U.S. had plans for an underground nuclear weapon test in the tectonically unstable island of Amchitka in Alaska. Because of the 1964 Alaska earthquake, the plans raised some concerns of the test triggering earthquakes and causing a tsunami. A 1969 demonstration of 7,000^[26] people blocked a major U.S.-Canadian border crossing in British Columbia, carrying signs reading "Don't Make A Wave. It's Your Fault If Our Fault Goes".^[27] The protests did not stop the U.S. from detonating the bomb.^[27]}:

Irving Stowe arranged a benefit concert (supported by Joan:{Baez) that took place on October 16, 1970 at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver. The concert created the financial basis for the first Greenpeace campaign.^[30] Amchitka, the 1970 concert that launched Greenpeace was published by Greenpeace in November 2009 on CD and is also available as an mp3 download via the Amchitka concert website. Using the money raised with the concert, the Don't Make a Wave Committee chartered a ship, the Phyllis Cormack owned and sailed by John Cormack. The ship was renamed Greenpeace for the protest after a term coined by activist Bill Darnell.^[27]}:

In the autumn of 1971, the ship sailed towards Amchitka and faced the U.S. Coast Guard ship Confidence^[27] which forced the activists to turn back. Because of this and the increasingly bad weather the crew decided to return to Canada only to find out that the news about their journey and reported support from the crew of the Confidence had generated sympathy for their protest.^[27] After this Greenpeace tried to navigate to the test site with other vessels, until the U.S. detonated the bomb.^[27] The nuclear test was criticized and the U.S. decided not to continue with their test plans at Amchitka.

Founders and founding time of Greenpeace

Environmental historian Frank Zelko dates the formation of the "Don't Make a Wave Committee" to 1969 and according to Jim Bohlen the group adopted the name "Don't Make a Wave Committee" on 28 November 1969.^[31] According to the Greenpeace web site, The Don't Make a Wave Committee was established in 1970.^[32] Certificate of incorporation of The Don't Make a Wave Committee dates the incorporation to the fifth of October, 1970.^[33] Researcher Vanessa Timmer dates the official incorporation to 1971.^[34] Greenpeace itself calls the protest voyage of 1971 as "the beginning".^[35] According to Patrick Moore, who was an early member but has since distanced himself from Greenpeace, and Rex Weyler, the name of "The Don't Make a Wave Committee" was officially changed to Greenpeace Foundation in 1972.^[33][36] Because of the early phases spanning several years, there are differing views on who can be called the founders of Greenpeace.

Vanessa Timmer has referred to the early members as "an unlikely group of loosely organized protestors".^[34] Frank Zelko has commented that "unlike Friends of the Earth, for example, which sprung fully formed from the forehead of David Brower, Greenpeace developed in a more evolutionary manner. There was no single founder".^[37] Greenpeace itself says on its web page that "there's a joke that in any bar in Vancouver, Canada, you can sit down next to someone who claims to have founded Greenpeace. In fact, there was no single founder: name, idea, spirit and tactics can all be said to have separate lineages".^[32] Patrick Moore has said that "the truth is that Greenpeace was always a work in progress, not something definitively founded like a country or a company. Therefore there are a few shades of gray about who might lay claim to being a founder of Greenpeace."^[33] Early Greenpeace director Rex Weyler says on his homepage that the insiders of Greenpeace have debated about the founders since mid-1970's.^[38]

The current Greenpeace web site lists the founders of The Don't Make a Wave Committee as Dorothy and Irving Stowe, Marie and Jim Bohlen, Ben and Dorothy Metcalfe, and Robert Hunter.^[32] According to both Patrick Moore and an interview with Dorothy Stowe, Dorothy Metcalfe, Jim Bohlen and Robert Hunter, the founders of The Don't Make a Wave Committee were Paul Cote, Irving and Dorothy Stowe and Jim and Marie Bohlen.^[33][39]

Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society maintains that he also was one of the founders of The Don't Make a Wave Committee and Greenpeace.^[40] Media sources concerning Watson report him being one of the founders of Greenpeace,^[41][42]with many articles reporting him being a founder in 1972.^{[43][44][45][46]} Patrick Moore has denied Watson being one of the founders of The Don't Make a Wave Committee, and Greenpeace in 1972. According to Moore the already campaigning organization was "simply changing the name" in 1972.^[33] Greenpeace has stated that Watson was an influential early member, but not one of the founders of Greenpeace.^[47] Watson has since criticized Greenpeace of rewriting their history.^[40]

Because Patrick Moore was among the crew of the first protest voyage and the beginning of the journey is often referred as the birthday of Greenpeace, Moore also considers himself one of the founders.^[33] Greenpeace used to list Moore among "founders and first members" of but has later stated that while Moore was a significant early member, he was not among the founders of Greenpeace in 1970.^[39][48]

After Amchitka

After the office in the Stowe home, (and after the first concert fund-raiser) Greenpeace functions moved to other private homes and held public meetings weekly on Wednesday nights at the Kitsilano Neighborhood House before settling, in the autumn of 1974, in a small office shared with the SPEC environmental group at 2007 West 4th at Maple in Kitsilano. When the nuclear tests at Amchitka were over, Greenpeace moved its focus to the French atmospheric nuclear weapons testing at the Moruroa Atoll in French Polynesia. The young organization needed help for their protests and were contacted by David McTaggart, a former businessman living in New Zealand. In 1972 the yacht Vega, a 12.5-metre (41 ft) ketch owned by David McTaggart, was renamed Greenpeace III and sailed in an anti-nuclear protest into the exclusion zone at Moruroa to attempt to disrupt French nuclear testing. This voyage was sponsored and organized by the New Zealand branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.^[49] The French Navy tried to stop the protest in several ways, including assaulting David McTaggart. McTaggart was supposedly beaten to the point that he lost sight in one of his eyes. However, one of McTaggart's crew members photographed the incident and went public. After the assault was publicized, France announced it would stop the atmospheric nuclear tests.^[27]

In the mid-1970s some Greenpeace members started an independent campaign, Project Ahab, against commercial whaling, since Irving Stowe was against Greenpeace focusing on other issues than nuclear weapons.[citation ^needed] After Irving Stowe died in 1975, the Phyllis Cormack sailed from Vancouver to face Soviet whalers on the coast of California. Greenpeace activists disrupted the whaling by placing themselves between the harpoons and the whales, and footage of the protests spread across the world. Later in the 1970s, the organization widened its focus to include toxic waste and commercial seal hunting.^[27]

The "Greenpeace Declaration of Interdependence" was published by Greenpeace in the Greenpeace Chronicles (Winter 1976-77). This declaration was a condensation of a number of ecological manifestos Bob Hunter had written over the years. The "Three basic Laws of Ecology," were developed by Patrick Moore, with inspiration from the writings of Barry Commoner^[50]

Organizational development

In the mid-1970s independent groups using the name Greenpeace started springing up worldwide. By 1977 there were 15 to 20 Greenpeace groups around the world.^[54] At the same time the Canadian Greenpeace office was heavily in debt. Disputes between offices over fund-raising and organizational direction split the global movement as the North American offices were reluctant to be under the authority of the Vancouver office and its president Patrick Moore.^[54]Greenpeace evolved from a group of Canadian and American protesters into a less conservative group of environmentalists who were more reflective of the counterculture and hippie youth movements of the 1960s and 1970s.^[51] The social and cultural background from which Greenpeace emerged heralded a period of de-conditioning away from old world antecedents and sought to develop new codes of social, environmental and political behavior.^[52][53]

After the incidents of Moruroa Atoll, David McTaggart had moved to France to battle in court with the French state and helped to develop the cooperation of European Greenpeace groups.^[27] David McTaggart lobbied the Canadian Greenpeace Foundation to accept a new structure which would bring the scattered Greenpeace offices under the auspices of a single global organization. The European Greenpeace paid the debt of the Canadian Greenpeace office and on October 14, 1979, Greenpeace International came into existence.^[34][54] Under the new structure, the local offices would contribute a percentage of their income to the international organization, which would take responsibility for setting the overall direction of the movement with each regional office having one vote.^[54] Some Greenpeace groups, namely London Greenpeace (dissolved in 2001) and the US-based Greenpeace Foundation (still operational) however decided to remain independent from Greenpeace International.^[55][56]

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In September 2003, Public Interest Watch (PIW) complained to the Internal Revenue Service that Greenpeace USA tax returns were inaccurate and in violation of the law.^{[68][better source needed]} The IRS conducted an extensive review and concluded in December 2005 that Greenpeace USA continued to qualify for its tax-exempt status. In March 2006 The Wall Street Journal reported that PIW's "federal tax filing, covering August 2003 to July 2004, stated that $120,000 of the $124,095 the group received in contributions during that period came from Exxon Mobil."^[69] In 2013, after the IRS performed a follow-up audit, which again was clean, and, following claims of politically motivated IRS audits of groups affiliated with the Tea Party Movement, Greenpeace U.S. Executive Director Phil Radford called for a Congressional investigation into all politically motivated audits – including those allegedly targeting the Tea Party Movement, the NAACP, and Greenpeace.^[70]

Summary of priorities and campaigns

On its official website, Greenpeace defines its mission as the following:

Greenpeace is an independent global campaigning organization that acts to change attitudes and behaviour, to protect and conserve the environment and to promote peace by:

Catalysing an energy revolution to address the number one threat facing our planet: climate change.

Defending our oceans by challenging wasteful and destructive fishing, and creating a global network of marine reserves.

Protecting the world's remaining ancient forests which are depended on by many animals, plants and people.

Working for disarmament and peace by reducing dependence on finite resources and calling for the elimination of allnuclear weapons.

Creating a toxin free future with safer alternatives to hazardous chemicals in today's products and manufacturing.

Campaigning for sustainable agriculture by encouraging socially and ecologically responsible farming practices.

—Greenpeace International^[71]

Climate and energy

Currently Greenpeace considers global warming to be the greatest environmental problem facing the Earth.^[71] Greenpeace calls for global greenhouse gas emissions to peak in 2015 and to decrease as close to zero as possible by 2050. For this Greenpeace calls for the industrialized countries to cut their emissions at least 40% by 2020 (from 1990 levels) and to give substantial funding for developing countries to build a sustainable energy capacity, to adapt to the inevitable consequences of global warming, and to stop deforestation by 2020.^[79] Together with EREC, Greenpeace has formulated a global energy scenario, "Energy [R]evolution", where 80% of the world's total energy is produced with renewables, and the emissions of the energy sector are decreased by over 80% of the 1990 levels by 2050.^[80]Greenpeace was one of the first parties to formulate a sustainable development scenario for climate change mitigation, which it did in 1993.^[72] According to sociologists Marc Mormont and Christine Dasnoy, Greenpeace played a significant role in raising public awareness of global warming in the 1990s.^[73] The organization has also focused on CFCs, because of both their global warming potential and their effect on the ozone layer. Greenpeace was one of the leading participants advocating early phase-out of ozone depleting substances in the Montreal Protocol.^[15] In the early 1990s, Greenpeace developed a CFC-free refrigerator technology, "Greenfreeze" for mass production together with the refrigerator industry.^[15] United Nations Environment Programme awarded Greenpeace for "outstanding contributions to the protection of the Earth's ozone layer" in 1997.^[74] In 2011 two fifths of the world's total production of refrigerators were based on Greenfreeze technology, with over 600 million units in use.^[15] ^[75]^Moreover, Greenfreeze technology had been blocked in the U.S. by the EPA being lobbied by a coalition of chemical corporations including Du Pont until the 2011 decision which cited Ben & Jerry's and General Electric's interest beginning in 2008.^{[75][76][77][78]}

Using direct action, Greenpeace has protested several times against coal by occupying coal power plants and blocking coal shipments and mining operations, in places such as New Zealand,^[81] Svalbard,^[82] Australia,^[83] and the United Kingdom.^[84] Greenpeace is also critical of extracting petroleum from oil sands and has used direct action to block the oil sand operations at Athabasca, Canada.^[85][86]

Kingsnorth court case

In October 2007, six Greenpeace protesters were arrested for breaking into the Kingsnorth power station, climbing the 200 metre smokestack, painting the name Gordon on the chimney, and causing an estimated £30,000 damage. At their subsequent trial they admitted trying to shut the station down, but argued that they were legally justified because they were trying to prevent climate change from causing greater damage to property elsewhere around the world. Evidence was heard from David Cameron's environment adviserZac Goldsmith, climate scientist James E. Hansen and an Inuit leader from Greenland, all saying that climate change was already seriously affecting life around the world. The six activists were acquitted. It was the first case where preventing property damage caused by climate change has been used as part of a "lawful excuse" defense in court.^[87] Both The Daily Telegraph and The Guardiandescribed the acquittal as embarrassment to the Brown Ministry.^[88][89] In December 2008 The New York Times listed the acquittal in its annual list of the most influential ideas of the year.^[90]

"Go Beyond Oil"

As part of their stance on renewable energy commercialisation, Greenpeace have launched the "Go Beyond Oil" campaign.^[91] The campaign is focused on slowing, and eventually ending, the world's consumption of oil; with activist activities taking place against companies that pursue oil drilling as a venture. Much of the activities of the "Go Beyond Oil" campaign have been focused on drilling for oil in the Arctic and areas affected by the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The activities of Greenpeace in the arctic have mainly involved the Edinburgh-based oil and gas exploration company, Cairn Energy; and range from protests at the Cairn Energy's headquarters^[92] to scaling their oil rigs in an attempt to halt the drilling process.^[93]

The "Go Beyond Oil" campaign also involves applying political pressure on the governments who allow oil exploration in their territories; with the group stating that one of the key aims of the "Go Beyond Oil" campaign is to "work to expose the lengths the oil industry is willing to go to squeeze the last barrels out of the ground and put pressure on industry and governments to move beyond oil."^[91]

Nuclear power

Greenpeace views nuclear power as a relatively minor industry with major problems, such as environmental damage and risks from uranium mining, nuclear weapons proliferation, and unresolved questions concerning nuclear waste.^[94] The organization argues that the potential of nuclear power to mitigate global warming is marginal, referring to the IEA energy scenario where an increase in world's nuclear capacity from 2608 TWh in 2007 to 9857 TWh by 2050 would cut global greenhouse gas emissions less than 5% and require 32 nuclear reactor units of 1000MW capacity built per year until 2050. According to Greenpeace the slow construction times, construction delays, and hidden costs, all limit the mitigation potential of nuclear power. This makes the IEA scenario technically and financially unrealistic. They also argue that binding massive amounts of investments on nuclear energy would take funding away from more effective solutions.^[80] Greenpeace views the construction of Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant in Finland as an example of the problems on building new nuclear power.^[95]

Anti-nuclear advertisement

In 1994, Greenpeace published an anti-nuclear newspaper advert which included a claim that nuclear facilities Sellafield would kill 2,000 people in the next 10 years, and an image of a hydrocephalus-affected child said to be a victim of nuclear weapons testing in Kazakhstan. Advertising Standards Authority viewed the claim concerning Sellafield unsubstantiated, and ASA did not accept that the child's condition was caused by radiation. This resulted in banning of the advert. Greenpeace did not admit fault, stating that a Kazakhstan doctor had said that the child's condition was due to nuclear testing. Adam Woolf from Greenpeace also stated that, "fifty years ago there were many experts who would be lined up and swear there was no link between smoking and bad health."^[96] The UN has estimated that the nuclear weapon tests in Kazakhstan caused about 100,000 people to suffer over three generations.^[97]

EDF spying conviction and appeal

In 2011, a French court fined Électricité de France (EDF) €1.5m and jailed two senior employees for spying on Greenpeace, including hacking into Greenpeace's computer systems. Greenpeace was awarded €500,000 in damages.^[98] Although EDF claimed that a security firm had only been employed to monitor Greenpeace, the court disagreed, jailing the head and deputy head of EDF's nuclear security operation for three years each. EDF appealed the conviction, the company was cleared of conspiracy to spy on Greenpeace and the fine was cancelled.^[99] Two employees of the security firm, Kargus, run by a former member of France's secret services, received sentences of three and two years respectively.^[100]

Forest campaign

Greenpeace aims at protecting intact primary forests from deforestation and degradation with the target of zero deforestation by 2020. Greenpeace has accused several corporations, such as Unilever,^[101] Nike,^[102] KFC, KitKat and McDonald's^[103] of having links to the deforestation of the tropical rainforests, resulting in policy changes in several of the companies under criticism.^{[104][105][106]} Greenpeace, together with other environmental NGOs, also campaigned for ten years for the EU to ban import of illegal timber. The EU decided to ban illegal timber on July 2010.^[107] As deforestation contributes to global warming, Greenpeace has demanded that REDD (Reduced Emission from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) should be included in the climate treaty following the Kyoto treaty.^[108]

Another Greenpeace movement concerning the rain forests is discouraging palm oil industries.^[109] The movement has been the most active in Indonesia where already 6 million hectares are used for palm oil plantation and has plans for another 4 million hectares by 2015. Acknowledging that mass production of palm oil may be disastrous on biodiversity of forests, Greenpeace is actively campaigning against the production, urging the industries and the government to turn to other forms of energy resources. One of the positive results of the campaign was GAR(Golden Agri-Resources),^[110] the world's second largest palm oil production company, deciding to commit itself to forest conservation. The company signed an agreement which prevents them from developing plantations in areas where large amounts of carbon are locked up.

Removal of an ancient tree

In June 1995, Greenpeace took a trunk of a tree from the forests of the proposed national park of Koitajoki^[111] in Ilomantsi, Finland and put it on display at exhibitions held in Austria and Germany. Greenpeace said in a press conference that the tree was originally from a logged area in the ancient forest which was supposed to be protected. Metsähallitus accused Greenpeace of theft and said that the tree was from a normal forest and had been left standing because of its old age. Metsähallitus also said that the tree had actually crashed over a road during a storm.^[112] The incident received publicity in Finland, for example in the large newspapers Helsingin Sanomat andIlta-Sanomat.^[113] Greenpeace replied that the tree had fallen down because the protective forest around it had been clearcut, and that they wanted to highlight the fate of old forests in general, not the fate of one particular tree.^[114] Greenpeace also highlighted that Metsähallitus admitted the value of the forest afterwards as Metsähallitus currently refers to Koitajoki as a distinctive area because of its old growth forests.^[115][116]

'Tokyo Two'

Main article: Tokyo Two

In 2008, two Greenpeace anti-whaling activists, Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki, stole a case of whale meat from a delivery depot in Aomori prefecture, Japan. Their intention was to expose what they considered embezzlement of the meat collected during whale hunts. After a brief investigation of their allegations was ended, Sato and Suzuki were arrested and charged with theft and trespass.^[117] Amnesty International said that the arrests and following raids on Greenpeace Japan office and homes of five of Greenpeace staff members were aimed at intimidating activists and non-governmental organizations.^[118] They were convicted of theft and trespass in September 2010 by the Aomori district court.

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs)

Greenpeace has also supported the rejection of GM food from the US in famine-stricken Zambia as long as supplies of non-genetically engineered grain exist, stating that the US "should follow in the European Union's footsteps and allow aid recipients to choose their food aid, buying it locally if they wish. This practice can stimulate developing economies and creates more robust food security", adding that, "if Africans truly have no other alternative, the controversial GE maize should be milled so it can't be planted. It was this condition that allowed Zambia's neighbours Zimbabwe and Malawi to accept it."^[119] After Zambia banned all GM food aid, the former agricultural minister of Zambia criticized, "how the various international NGOs that have spoken approvingly of the government's action will square the body count with their various consciences."^[120] Concerning the decision of Zambia, Greenpeace has stated that, "it was obvious to us that if no non-GM aid was being offered then they should absolutely accept GM food aid. But the Zambian government decided to refuse the GM food. We offered our opinion to the Zambian government and, as many governments do, they disregarded our advice."^[121]

Greenpeace on golden rice

Greenpeace opposes the planned use of golden rice, a variety of Oryza sativa rice produced through genetic engineering tobiosynthesize beta-carotene, a precursor of pro-vitamin A in the edible parts of rice. The addition of beta-carotene to the rice is seen as preventative to loss of sight in poverty stricken countries where golden rice is intended for distribution. According to Greenpeace, golden rice has not managed to do anything about malnutrition for 10 years during which alternative methods are already tackling malnutrition. The alternative proposed by Greenpeace is to discourage mono-cropping and to increase production of crops which are naturally nutrient-rich (containing other nutrients not found in golden rice in addition to beta-carotene). Greenpeace argues that resources should be spent on programs that are already working and helping to relieve malnutrition.^[122]

The renewal of these concerns coincided with the publication of a paper in the journal Nature about a version of golden rice with much higher levels of beta carotene.^[123] This "golden rice 2" was developed and patented by Syngenta, which provoked Greenpeace to renew its allegation that the project is driven by profit motives and to serve as propaganda aimed at increasing public opinion of GMO products.^[124][125]

Although Greenpeace had stated that the true efficiency of the Golden Rice program in treating malnourished populations was its primary concern as early as 2001,^[126] statements from March and April 2005 also continued to express concern over human health and environmental safety.^[127][128] In particular, Greenpeace has expressed concern over the lack of safety testing being done on GMO crops such as Golden Rice and of "playing with the lives of people...using Golden Rice to promote more GMOs".^[124]

Toxic waste

In July 2011, Greenpeace released its Dirty Laundry report accusing some of the world's top fashion and sportswear brands of releasingtoxic waste into China's rivers.^[129] The report profiles the problem of water pollution resulting from the release of toxic chemicals associated with the country's textile industry. Investigations focused on wastewater discharges from two facilities in China; one belonging to the Youngor Group located on the Yangtze River Delta and the other to Well Dyeing Factory Ltd. located on a tributary of the Pearl River Delta. Scientific analysis of samples from both facilities revealed the presence of hazardous and persistent hormone disruptorchemicals, including alkylphenols, perfluorinated compounds and perfluorooctane sulfonate.

The report goes on to assert that the Youngor Group and Well Dyeing Factory Ltd. - the two companies behind the facilities - have commercial relationships with a range of major clothing brands, including Abercrombie & Fitch, Adidas, Bauer Hockey, Calvin Klein,Converse, Cortefiel, H&M, Lacoste, Li Ning, Metersbonwe Group,Nike, Phillips-Van Heusen and Puma AG.

In 2013, Greenpeace launched the "Detox Fashion" campaign, which signed up some fashion brands to stop the discharge of toxic chemicals into rivers as a result of the production of their clothes.^[130]

Save the Arctic....

Ships

Since Greenpeace was founded, seagoing ships have played a vital role in its campaigns. Now that the Rainbow Warrior III has been completed, the group has three ocean-going ships, the Esperanza, Arctic Sunrise and Rainbow Warrior III.^[146]

First Rainbow Warrior

Main article: Rainbow Warrior (1955)

In 1978, Greenpeace launched the original Rainbow Warrior, a 40-metre (130 ft), former fishing trawler named for the book Warriors of the Rainbow, which inspired early activist Robert Hunter on the first voyage to Amchitka. Greenpeace purchased the Rainbow Warrior(originally launched as the Sir William Hardy in 1955) at a cost of £40,000. Volunteers restored and refitted it over a period of four months. First deployed to disrupt the hunt of the Icelandic whaling fleet, the Rainbow Warrior would quickly become a mainstay of Greenpeace campaigns. Between 1978 and 1985, crew members also engaged in direct action against the ocean-dumping of toxic and radioactive waste, the Grey Seal hunt in Orkney and nuclear testing in the Pacific. In May 1985, the vessel was instrumental for 'Operation Exodus', the evacuation of about 300 Rongelap Atoll islanders whose home had been contaminated with nuclear fallout from a US nuclear test two decades ago which had never been cleaned up and was still having severe health effects on the locals.^[147]

Later in 1985 the Rainbow Warrior was to lead a flotilla of protest vessels into the waters surrounding Moruroa atoll, site of French nuclear testing. The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior occurred when the French government secretly bombed the ship in Auckland harbour on orders from François Mitterrand himself. This killed Dutch freelance photographer Fernando Pereira, who thought it was safe to enter the boat to get his photographic material after a first small explosion, but drowned as a result of a second, larger explosion.^[148]The attack was a public relations disaster for France after it was quickly exposed by the New Zealand police. The French Government in 1987 agreed to pay New Zealand compensation of NZ$13 million and formally apologised for the bombing. The French Government also paid ₣2.3 million compensation to the family of the photographer. Later, in 2001, when the Institute of Cetacean Research of Japan called Greenpeace "eco-terrorists", Gert Leipold, then Executive Director of Greenpeace, detested the claim, saying "calling non violent protest terrorism insults those who were injured or killed in the attacks of real terrorists, including Fernando Pereira, killed by State terrorism in the 1985 attack on the Rainbow Warrior".^[149]

Second Rainbow Warrior

Other vesselsIn 1989 Greenpeace commissioned a replacement vessel, also named the Rainbow Warrior (also referred as Rainbow Warrior II), which was retired from service on the 16th of August 2011 to be replaced by the third Rainbow Warrior. In 2005 the Rainbow Warrior II ran aground on and damaged the Tubbataha Reef in the Philippines while inspecting the reef for coral bleaching. Greenpeace was fined US$7,000 for damaging the reef and agreed to pay the fine saying they felt responsible for the damage, although Greenpeace stated that the Philippines government had given it outdated charts. The park manager of Tubbataha appreciated the quick action Greenpeace took to assess the damage to the reef.^[150]

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Along with the Rainbow Warriors, Greenpeace has had several other ships in its service: MV *Sirius, MV *Solo, MV *Greenpeace, MV *Arctic Sunrise and MV*Esperanza*, the last two being in service today.

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wiki

The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, codenamed Opération Satanique,^[1] was an operation by the "action" branch of the French foreign intelligence services, the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (DGSE), carried out on 10 July 1985. During the operation, two operatives sank the flagship of the Greenpeace fleet, the Rainbow Warrior in the port of Auckland, New Zealand on its way to a protest against a planned French nuclear test in Moruroa. Fernando Pereira, a photographer, drowned on the sinking ship.

France initially denied responsibility, but two French agents were captured and charged with arson, conspiracy to commit arson, willful damage, and murder. As the truth came out, the scandal resulted in the resignation of the French Defence Minister Charles Hernu.

As part of a plea bargain, the two agents pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to ten years in prison, but in fact spent just over two years confined to the French island of Hao before being freed by their government in breach of its treaty obligation.^[2]

[hide]

Sinking of the ship

Fernando Pereira

French agents posing as interested supporters or tourists toured the ship while it was open to public viewing.DGSE agent Christine Cabon, posing as environmentalist Frederique Bonlieu, volunteered to work in the Greenpeace office in Auckland. Cabon "was no ordinary lieutenant...a veteran of many dangerous intelligence missions in the Middle East, particularly in Lebanon."^[3] Cabon secretly monitored communications from the Rainbow Warrior, collected maps, and investigated underwater equipment, in order to provide information crucial to the sinking.

After the necessary information had been gathered two DGSE divers attached two limpet mines to theRainbow Warrior berthed at Marsden Wharf and detonated them 10 minutes apart. The first bomb went off at 11:38 p.m., blasting a hole about the size of an average car. Agents intended the first mine to cripple the ship so that it would be evacuated safely by the time the second mine was detonated. However, the crew did not react to the first explosion as the agents had expected. While the ship was initially evacuated, some of the crew returned to the ship to investigate and film the damage. A Portuguese-Dutch photographer, Fernando Pereira, returned below decks to fetch his camera equipment. At 11:45 p.m., the second bomb went off. Pereira drowned in the rapid flooding that followed, and the other ten crew members either safely abandoned ship on the order of Captain Peter Willcox or were thrown into the water by the second explosion. The Rainbow Warrior sank four minutes later.

France implicated

Operation Satanique was a public relations disaster. France, being an ally of New Zealand, initially denied involvement and joined in condemning what it described as a terrorist act. The French embassy in Wellington denied involvement, stating that "the French Government does not deal with its opponents in such ways".^[4]

After the bombing, the New Zealand Police started one of the country's largest police investigations. Most of the agents of the French team escaped from New Zealand but two, Captain Dominique Prieur and Commander Alain Mafart were identified as possible suspects. Posing as the married couple Sophie and Alain Turenge, Prieur and Mafart were identified with the help of a Neighbourhood Watchgroup, and arrested. Both were questioned and investigated. While carrying Swiss passports, their true identities were discovered, along with the French government's responsibility.

Three other agents, Chief Petty Officer Roland Verge, Petty Officer Bartelo and Petty Officer Gérard Andries, who sailed to New Zealand on the yacht Ouvéa, were arrested by Australian police on Norfolk Island, but released as Australian law did not allow them to be held until the results of forensic tests came back. They were then picked up by the French submarine *Rubis*, which scuttled the Ouvéa.^[5]

A sixth agent, Louis-Pierre Dillais, commander of the operation, was never captured and never faced charges. He acknowledged his involvement in an interview with New Zealand state broadcaster TVNZ in 2005.^[6]

Prieur and Mafart pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment on 22 November 1985. France threatened an economic embargo of New Zealand's exports to the European Economic Community if the pair were not released.^[7] Such an action would have crippled the New Zealand economy, which was dependent on agricultural exports to Britain.^[citation ^needed]

o atoll

In June 1986, in a political deal with Prime Minister of New Zealand David Lange, presided over by United Nations Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, France agreed to pay NZ$13 million (USD$6.5 million) to New Zealand and apologise, in return for which Alain Mafart andDominique Prieur would be detained at the French military base on Hao Atoll for three years. However, the two agents had both returned to France by May 1988, after less than two years on the atoll. Mafart returned to Paris on 14 December 1987 for medical treatment, and was apparently freed after the treatment. He continued in the French Army and was promoted to colonel in 1993. Prieur returned to France on 6 May 1988, because she was pregnant, her husband having been allowed to join her on the atoll. She, too, was freed and later promoted. The removal of the agents from Hao without subsequent return was ruled to be in violation of the 1986 agreement.^[2]

A commission of enquiry headed by Bernard Tricot cleared the French government of any involvement, claiming that the arrested agents, who had not yet pleaded guilty, had merely been spying on Greenpeace. When The Times and Le Monde claimed that President Mitterrand had approved the bombing, Defence Minister Charles Hernu resigned and the head of the DGSE, Admiral Pierre Lacoste, was fired. Eventually, Prime Minister Laurent Fabius admitted the bombing had been a French plot: On 22 September 1985, he summoned journalists to his office to read a 200-word statement in which he said: "The truth is cruel," and acknowledged there had been a cover-up, he went on to say that "Agents of the French secret service sank this boat. They were acting on orders."^[8]

Aftermath

At that time, French nuclear tests in the Pacific were halted. However, another series of tests was conducted in 1995.^[9] In 1987, under international pressure, the French government paid $8.16 million to Greenpeace.In the wake of the bombing, a flotilla of private New Zealand yachts sailed to Moruroa to protest against a French nuclear test.

The Rainbow Warrior was refloated for forensic examination. She was deemed irreparable and scuttled at :{:{34.9748°S 173.9349°E:(style="display:inline"):}::(style="display:inline"):}: in Matauri Bay, near the Cavalli Islands, on 12 December 1987, to serve as a dive wreck and fish sanctuary.^[10] Her masts had been removed and put on display at the Dargaville Maritime Museum.

The failure of western leaders to condemn this violation of a friendly nation's sovereignty caused a great deal of change in New Zealand's foreign and defence policy.^[11] New Zealand distanced itself from its traditional ally, the United States, and built relationships with small South Pacific nations, while retaining excellent relations with Australia, and to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom.^[12]

A Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior benefit concert at Mt. Smart Stadium, Auckland, on 5 April 1986 included performances by Herbs, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Topp Twins, Dave Dobbyn and a Split Enz reunion.^[13][14]

In 2005, Le Monde released a 1986 report that said Admiral Pierre Lacoste (fr), head of DGSE at the time, had "personally obtained approval to sink the ship from the late president François Mitterrand." Soon after the publication, former Admiral Lacoste came forward and gave newspaper interviews about the situation, while also admitting the death weighed on his conscience and said the aim of the operation had not been to kill.^[15] He acknowledged the existence of three teams: the crew of the yacht, reconnaissance and logistics (those successfully prosecuted), plus a two-man team that carried out the bombing and whose identities have never been confirmed.^[16]

A 20th anniversary memorial edition of the 1986 book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior,^[17] by New Zealand authorDavid Robie who was on the bombed ship, was published in July 2005. He was interviewed by TVNZ on 8 August 2006 about the Court of Appeal judgment.^[18]

Also on that anniversary, Television New Zealand (TVNZ) sought to access a video record made at the preliminary hearing where the two agents pleaded guilty. The footage had remained sealed on the court record since shortly after conclusion of the criminal proceedings. The two agents opposed release of the footage—despite having both written books on the incident—and have unsuccessfully taken the case to the New Zealand Court of Appeal and, subsequently, the Supreme Court of New Zealand.^[19] On 7 August 2006, judges Hammond, O'Regan and Arnold dismissed the former French agents' appeal^[20] and Television New Zealand broadcast their guilty pleas the same day. However, two days later the judges reversed their ruling, temporarily blocking webcasts^[21] and further broadcasts of the footage.^[18]

In 2006 Antoine Royal revealed that his brother, Gérard Royal, had claimed to be involved in planting the bomb. Their sister is FrenchSocialist Party politician Ségolène Royal who was contesting the French presidential election.^[22][23] Other sources identified Royal as merely a Zodiac pilot,^[24] and the New Zealand government announced there would be no extradition requests since the case was closed.^[25]

In 1993, Louis-Pierre Dillais was appointed to an elite espionage position in the office of Defence Minister Francois Leotard.^[26] He later became an executive in the U.S. subsidiary of Belgian arms manufacturer FN Herstal and as of May 2007 lived in the U.S. state ofVirginia.^[6] In 2007 the New Zealand Green Party criticized the government over its purchase of arms from FN Herstal.^[27] At that time, Greenpeace was still pursuing the extradition of Dillais for his involvement in the act.^[28]

On 14 October 2011, Greenpeace launched a new sailing vessel called Rainbow Warrior III, which is equipped with an auxiliary electric motor.^[29]

References

:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Bremner, Charles (11 July 2005). "Mitterrand ordered bombing of Rainbow Warrior, spy chief says". The Times (London). Retrieved16 November 2006.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior#cite_ref-UN_2-1) "Case concerning the difference between New Zealand and France concerning the interpretation or application of two agreements, concluded on 9 July 1986 between the two states and which related to the problems arising from the Rainbow Warrior Affair" (PDF). Reports of International Arbitral Awards XX: 215–284, especially p 275. 30 April 1990.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ The French Government and Greenpeace Agents back in court on Friday The Canberra Times, 20 November 1985, at Trove
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Diary Compiled by Mike Andrews (Secretary of the Dargaville Maritime Museum)
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ "The Bombing of the Warrior". Rainbow Warrior home page.Greenpeace. Archived from the original on 2012-03-10. RetrievedNovember 4, 2014.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior#cite_ref-guardian1_6-1) Goldenberg, Suzanne (25 May 2007) "Rainbow Warrior ringleader heads firm selling arms to US government".guardian.co.uk, Retrieved 26 May 2007
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Shabecoff, Philip (3 October 1987). "France Must Pay Greenpeace $8 Million in Sinking of Ship". New York Times. Retrieved 11 April 2010.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Evening Mail – Monday 23 September 1985
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ "Fifth French nuclear test sparks international outrage". CNN. 28 December 1995. Retrieved 13 June 2010.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ "Wreck to reef-the transfiguration of the Rainbow Warrior". New Zealand Geographic (023). Jul–Sep 1994. Retrieved 30 October2012.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand Penguin Books, New Zealand, 1991
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Nuclear Free: The New Zealand Way, The Right HonourableDavid Lange, Penguin Books, New Zealand, 1990
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ "Rainbow Warrior music festival". NZHistory. History Group of the New Zealand Ministry for Culture and Heritage. Retrieved17 April 2014.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ "Rainbow Warrior concert 1986". Frenz Forum. 14 July 2006. Retrieved 17 April 2014.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Simons, Marlise. "Report Says Mitterrand Approved Sinking of Greenpeace Ship". The Guardian. Retrieved 1 November 2013.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Field, Catherine (30 June 2005). ":{':(style="padding-left:0.2em"):}:Third team' in Rainbow Warrior plot". New Zealand Herald. Retrieved 6 June 2010.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ "Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior".Auckland University Press. 15 July 2005. ISBN 9781877314469. Retrieved 6 June 2010.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior#cite_ref-tvnz_18-1) "Tuesday August 8". TV One. 8 August 2006. Retrieved6 June 2010.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3487761a11,00.html^[dead ^link]
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Transcript Mafart Prieur v TVNZ, PDF document, 195Kb, 22 November 2005, Retrieved 22 September 2010
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3760746a12855,00.html^[dead ^link]
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ NZH Staff (30 September 2006). "Presidential hopeful's brother linked to Rainbow Warrior bomb". nzherald.co.nz. Retrieved1 October 2006.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ "NZ rules out new Rainbow Warrior probe". Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 1 October 2006. Retrieved 1 October2006.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Guerres secrètes à l'Élysée, by Paul Barril, ed Albin Michel, Paris (1996)
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Kay, Martin (2 October 2006). "French frogman slips the net; Paper identifies bomber, but PM says the case will remain closed".The Dominion Post. pp. A1.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ In Brief: Once a spy... The Canberra Times, 24 June 1993, atTrove
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ NZ trades with Arms Company whose US chief executive was a lead agent in the Rainbow Warrior bombing NZ Green Party Just Peace newsletter No 110, 18 May 2007. Retrieved 21 February 2015
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Greenpeace gunning for the leader of Warrior bombersStuff.co.nz, Retrieved 26 May 2007^[dead ^link]
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Rainbow Warrior Greenpeace International, October 2011. Accessed 10 February 2015

External links

The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior – impact on New Zealand's international relations.
greenpeace.org.au
New Zealand police history
"French Connections" Transcript of the 1985 investigation by the Australian program Four Corners.
2010 documentary by Journeyman Pictures for TVNZ
Detail text and letter from NZ PM D. Lange regarding incident in 'Sailing The Dream' at Google Books

Films (all are productions for television):

*The Rainbow Warrior Conspiracy* at the Internet Movie Database (Australia 1989)
*The Rainbow Warrior* at the Internet Movie Database (New Zealand 1992)
*The Boat and the Bomb* at the Internet Movie Database (United Kingdom and Netherlands 2005)
*L' Affaire du Rainbow Warrior* at the Internet Movie Database (France 2006, concentrating on the experience of French journalists)
Blowing Up Paradise 2006 BBC Documentary movie by Ben Lewis about French Atomic Testing in Pacific and associated murder of Rainbow Warrior Greenpeace activist by French Secret Service.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Greenpeace

Greenpeace is one of the world's largest environmental organizations. The headquarters of Greenpeace International are in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. It is formally allied with 350.org.

Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director, Greenpeace International
Gerd Leipold, former Executive Director, Greenpeace International

Directors

The directors of Greenpeace International, as of October 2009, are:^[1]

Former directors

Adam Werbach, Satchi & Satchi

Former Related Greenpeace Personnel and Directors

Donald K. Ross, Greenpeace USA chair

History

Greenpeace was founded in 1971 following a group of activists sailing an old fishing boat, the Phyllis Cormack, from Vancouver towards the island of Amchitka, Alaska in protest against proposed US underground nuclear testing. [1]

Current campaigns

Greenpeace focuses its activities on:

nuclear weapons
nuclear energy
the oceans - fisheries issues, whaling and pollution
toxic chemicals
forests
genetic engineering
climate change
trade rules
coal

[2]

Resources

Greenpeace operates a fleet of several ocean-going ships used in protest and awareness raising

Funding and expenditures

"... Greenpeace does not seek or accept funding from governments, corporations or political parties or any other source that could compromise its aims and objectives, its independence or its integrity. Greenpeace relies wholly upon the voluntary donations of individual supporters and on grant support from foundations." [3]

They also provide a breakdown of their expenditure and income (about $350m in 2003 for Greenpeace international and all regional subsidiaries) [4]

Though there does not seem to be any information about the foundations that give them money on their website, the financial breakdown from 2001 for Greenpeace international alone indicates that 118m of 143m came from individuals with 3.9m from foundations, 4.2m from major donors and 4.4m other income. 12.5m was left in legacies and bequests, so foundations constitute a relatively small proportion of income, assuming that the same is roughly true of the subsidiaries.

Greenpeace has referred to "independent foundations" [5]. Greenpeace fundraising policies from 1998 state that Greenpeace screens all major donations in order ensure it does not receive unwanted donations. Donations from foundations which are funded by political parties or receive most of their funding from governments or intergovernmental organisations are rejected. Foundation donations are also rejected if the foundations attach unreasonable conditions, restrictions or constraints on Greenpeace activities or if the donation would compromise the independence and aims of Greenpeace.[6]

Books

Bob Hunter, Warriors of the Rainbow: A Chronicle of the Greenpeace Movement, Henry Holt & Company, October, 1979, ISBN 0030437415
David McTaggart, Greenpeace III: Journey into the bomb, Collins, 1978. ISBN 0002118858
John May and Michael Brown, The Greenpeace Story, Dk Publishing*inc ISBN 086318328X
Mark Warford (ed), Greenpeace Witness: Twenty-Five Years on the Environmental Front Line, Andre Deutsch, August 1, 1997. ISBN 0233990240

Contact details

Greenpeace International

Ottho Heldringstraat 5

1066 AZ Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Tel: +31 20 7182000

Fax: +31 20 5148151

Email: supporter.services AT int.greenpeace.org

Web: http://www.greenpeace.org/international

Web: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/about/worldwide Websites of national/regional offices

Articles and resources

Jeffrey St. Clair, The Post-Modern Protest Blues, Designer Protests and Vanity Arrests in DC, CounterPunch, April 12, 2013.
John Stauber, The Progressive Movement is a PR Front for Rich Democrats, March 15, 2013, CounterPunch.

References

:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:↑ Greenpeace International, "Greenpeace International Board of Directors", Greenpeace International website, accessed October 20, 2009.

External resources

External articles

Sharon Beder, Offering Solutions or Compromises?, Chain Reaction 87, Friends of the Earth Australia, 2002, pp. 14-15,26-7.
Chris Bunting, "No grey areas in a green's world", Times Higher Educational Supplement (UK), September 19, 2003. (Subscription only though a copy is archived here)
Tobias Webb, "Does it pay to get into bed with business?", Guardian (UK), February 25, 2005.
Mark Sherman, "FBI Says It Has Files on Rights Groups", Washington Post, July 17, 2005. (This is an Associated Press story).
Captain Paul Watson, "The Other Whaling Industry: How Greenpeace Cashes In on the Suffering and Death of the Great Whales",Counterpunch, February 8 / 10, 2008.
Dru Oja Jay, "Greenpeace's Corporate Overreach: Controversial Hire is an Opportunity to Start Building a Democratic Environmental Movement', Counterpunch, March 11, 2010.

Categories:

PIW Campaign Against Greenpeace

In September 2003 PIW complained to the Internal Revenue Service claiming that Greenpeace USA tax returns were inaccurate and breached the law. PIW wanted the IRS to investigate the complaint. Greenpeace rejected the claims and challenged PIW to disclose its funders. The request was rejected by the then PIW Executive Director, Mike Hardiman because contributions to Greenpeace were tax deductible, whereas contributions to PIW were not. [6]

In a column filed with the Copley News Service Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and James Madison Scholar with the American Legislative Exchange Council, while conceding that Greenpeace had a right to advocate its beliefs, railed against non-profit groups having tax-deductible a 501c(3) entity that can transfer funds to a non-deductible 501 c (4) entity. "What they shouldn't be able to do is manipulate the tax system to advance their agenda," Bandow complained.

Bandow endorsed PIW's claim that foundations that provided grants should verify how funds were spent. Bandow also complained that PIW's claims only prompted a dozen stories but found some soalce in the conservative media. "The only thorough rendering was written by tireless columnist Deroy Murdock at National Review Online," he wrote. As with most of the other media coverage, Murdock's column largely rehashed PIW's claims, took PIW's claim to be a legitimate non-profit group at face value and relegated Greenpeace's comments to the bottom of the story. [7]

PIW's attack on Greenpeace was also taken up by Californian Republican Assemblyman Ray Haynes, who urged that State Attorney-General Lockyer prosecute Greenpeace under various laws, including the state's unfair-business-practice law.

The Public Interest Watch report was also seized upon by Marc Levin, a lawyer and president of the American Freedom Center. After reviewing a number of incidents of damage to property attributed to the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, Levin sought to smear Greenpeace with the ecoterrorism tag. "While these acts of ecoterror are clearly illegal, few people realize that the money used to commit many of these crimes may have been illegally laundered through tax-exempt organizations whose donors - individuals and nonprofit foundations unaware of the laundering - receive tax deductions," he wrote in the New Jersey Law Journal.

Levin flagged the move by the U.S. Department of Justice to sue Greenpeace for the April 2002 boarding of a cargo ship approaching Miami that was laden with timber from the Brazilian rainforests. Without skipping a beat, Levin conflated Greenpeace's peaceful protest with ecoterrorism which, he argued, justified an IRS crackdown. "Prosecuting ecoterrorists has proved difficult; they have a "cell" structure and lack centralized leaderships or membership rosters. But this is precisely why it is critically important that the IRS does its part to immobilize ecoterror groups by investigating how moneys flow through tax-exempt organizations to affiliates," he wrote.

In May 2004 under interim Executive Director Lewis Fein, PIW were targeting Greenpeace once more claiming that they had found what they claimed was the 'secret' location of the Greenpeace actions warehouse in Washington, D.C. :{[:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:8] The media release, which echoed around various conservative websites in the US and Canada, was picked up by the Washington Times.[9]

In a letter to the editor in the Washington Times, Greenpeace's operations manager, Bill Richardson, ridiculed PIW's claim that the warehouse location was secret. "What extraordinary detective skills it must have taken to notice the mailbox with the name "Greenpeace" on the front of the building. Thanks for the giggle," he wrote. [10]

The warehouse claims were made the same week that the attempt by the US Justice Department to sue Greenpeace over a 2002 protest against a ship carrying rainforest timber into Miami. In the media release, Executive Director of Public Interest Watch, Lewis Fein, candidly stated that it was the organisations' capacity for media-savvy civil diosobedience that prompted the government to act. "What has made Greenpeace such a high-profile target for the Justice Department is its ability to train and organize its activists and the attention-grabbing, creative props it uses in its stunts," he stated.

PIW sparks IRS Audit of Greenpeace

In 2003, PIW wrote to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax audit of Greenpeace. In September 2005, the three-month long audit began that audit amid claims that it was influenced by PIW. According to Greenpeace USA executive director John Passacantando, the IRS auditor, Charles Walker, told him the investigation was in response to PIW's complaint. In March 2006 Greenpeace was informed that it retained its tax exempt status.

PIW sparks IRS Audit of the Dogwood Alliance

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/planet-2/report/2010/3/dealing-in-doubt.pdf

Another week, another instance comes to light of governments targeting peaceful environmental activists. This latest document leak finds that South Korea asked for an assessment from South Africa of whether Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo constituted a “security threat against the president of South Africa during the G20 summit to be held in South Korea.”

The cables are part of a leaked cache from South Africa’s spy agency that shows efforts by a number of countries to keep close tabs on dissenters. The request was made in the run-up to the 2010 summit, and listed Naidoo alongside two other “dangerous persons” who were later arrested during a terrorist raid in Pakistan. In an otherwise unamusing document, Naidoo’s first name is amusingly misspelled “Kimi.”

Another document in the cache alluded to some sort of cooperative effort between the CIA and intelligence agencies in the U.K., Australia, and South Africa “to provide the CIA with a deeper understanding of the potential for ramping up renewable and clean energy in key parts of the world and a better understanding of the collection capabilities and interests on renewables in the UK, South Africa and Australia.” From *The Guardian*:

The reasons for the CIA’s interest are not clear. It may see climate change as a potential source of conflict and want to explore possible consequences. Some see a potentially more sinister motivation.

A senior US climate scientist, Alan Robock, based at Rutgers University in New Jersey, expressed concern this month that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were funding climate change research to learn if new technologies could be used as potential weapons.

The document casting Naidoo as a potential terroristic threat puts South Korea among a host of governments recently discovered to be targeting Greenpeace. The Indian government cracked down on the group, as well as other international environmental NGOs, ahead of Obama’s recent visit to the country, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, irked by the group’s anti-Keystone activism, named Greenpeace alongside the Sierra Club and Tides Canada in a leaked document outlining potentially violent threats to Canadian infrastructure.

Environmental activists have also faced some heat in the States recently. Grist’s own Heather Smith wrote last month that FBI agents have been paying visits to anti-Keystone activists, asking for information while also saying that there’s no investigation underway. Bloomberg reported this week that the intelligence behind those FBI visits could be coming from TransCanada, the company that wants to build the Keystone XL pipeline. Reporter Isaac Arnsdorf writes that local authorities along the pipeline’s route had been warned that homegrown extremists were targeting the project:

That risk assessment, laid out in documents obtained through open-records requests, wasn’t provided by law enforcement. It was provided by TransCanada Corp., the Calgary-based company that has waged a long campaign to sell America on Keystone XL and the Canadian crude it would carry. President Barack Obama vetoed Congress’s approval of extending the pipeline, but the fight is far from over.

Few understand the threats facing corporations better than corporations, and few could argue with putting safety first. Yet the alarms TransCanada raised in Nebraska … were part of a broad campaign for Keystone XL, the documents suggest. Time and again, in private e-mails and closed-door meetings with federal, state and local law enforcement, the Canadian company characterized peaceful opponents engaged in constitutionally protected protest as dangerous radicals or worse. …

TransCanada representatives have met with law-enforcement officers in at least two states. Hundreds of pages of meeting logs, police e-mails and other documents obtained by Bloomberg suggest TransCanada provided intelligence on protesters’ activities and, at times, helped guide law enforcement’s response.

Kumi “Kimi” Naidoo, for his part, said he wasn’t particularly surprised that spy agencies were keeping tabs on him. “Sadly, the assumption that we make, especially after the Edward Snowden leaks and the Wikileaks information came out, is that we are heavily monitored and under constant surveillance,” he told Al Jazeera. “But it’s one thing assuming that it’s happening; it’s a little numbing and chilling to have it confirmed.”

http://grist.org/news/spy-agencies-are-snooping-on-enviros-around-the-globe/

pulled a yes men on edelman,they spun of Blue co so could say clean (API huge client)

===

After finishing a study contending that solar activity is increasing global warming, scientist Willie Soon of theHarvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysicsreported his news to a utility company that was a major funder of his work.

"I have a big super-duper paper soon to be accepted on how the sun affects the climate system," Soon wrote in a 2009 email to Robert Gehri, a research specialist with Southern Company Services, a mega utility company in the southeastern U.S. that generates power largely from coal.

Soon, one of few skeptics in the climate science community, described the paper that was published in the journal *Physical Geography* as "fairly significant scientifically in that this is the first successful formulation of a sun-climate connection." He was writing a follow-up note to Gehri, whose company has provided more than $400,000 from 2006 through 2015 to fund Soon’s research—and part of his salary.

The emails and related documents were obtained by Greenpeace through Freedom of Information Act requests. They were made public today by Greenpeace and the Climate Investigations Center, an environmental watchdog organization based in Virginia.

The communications show that Soon called his peer-reviewed research papers "deliverables" in return for funding from fossil fuel companies. In addition, the documents reveal that Soon and Harvard-Smithsonian gave the coal utility company the right to review his scientific papers and make suggestions before they were published. Soon and Harvard-Smithsonian also pledged not to disclose Southern’s role as a funder without permission.

Although the emails don’t show a response from Gehri, an industry executive with a long track record of working behind the scenes to downplay the significance of global warming, they do show Soon sharing a collegial familiarity with industry executives, media skeptics and organizations dedicated to undermining prevailing climate science.

The theory advanced by Soon that the sun is a contributor to recent climate change has been widely discredited by scientists worldwide as well as by theUnited Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading international body on climate science. Nevertheless, the theory has stoked long-simmering public confusion about the sun’s role in global warming that continues to this day.

For decades, the industry has latched on to controversial findings like those advanced by Soon and a small group of contrarian scientists to create the impression that researchers are divided about the cause of climate change. It has pumped millions of dollars into research projects to cast doubt on mainstream climate science showing that the primary driver of global warming is the burning of fossil fuels.

The trove of documents released today offers one of the starkest glimpses yet into the workings of this strategy of peddling scientific doubt. Scientists, academics and policymakers say the strategy has helped the industry in delaying or thwarting decisive steps toward curbing global warming.

"The industry has had a longstanding, rather broad-based campaign to create doubt about the science," said Michael MacCracken, a former program director for the U.S. Department of Energy's Carbon Dioxide Research Program. He is now the chief scientist for climate change programs with the Climate Institute, an independent climate research organization in Washington, D.C.

The campaign "has paralyzed implementation of what could have been a reasonable ramping up of control efforts over the last few decades, putting the nation and the world now into a situation where much more aggressive action to limit emissions is needed," MacCracken said.

One of the first worldwide calls to address global warming resulted in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that mandated greenhouse gas reductions.

In response, the American Petroleum Institute (API) coordinated a plan to spend millions of dollars to convince the public that the climate accord was based on shaky science. The institute pulled together a Global Climate Science Communications team to enlist scientists who shared the industry's views. The action plan developed by the team said "victory will be achieved when those promoting the Kyoto treaty on the basis of extant science appear to be out of touch with reality."

Among the 12 people listed as members of the team was Robert Gehri, the Southern Co. executive who was Soon's corporate contact on the 2009 sun study. Others included representatives from Exxon and Chevron and organizations critical of global-warming science.

Today the industry persists in its campaign to muddy the picture of climate change. ExxonMobil, API and the Charles Koch Foundation for years were among the largest funders of research and lobbying intended to cast doubt on the science documenting global warming.

Soon, who is not paid a salary by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center but relies on grants for his wages, has tapped that largess. In addition to the research grants from Southern Co. totaling $409,754 between 2006 and 2015, Soon collected nearly $800,000 in funding from ExxonMobil, API and the Charles Koch Foundation between 2003 and 2012, according to years of public records obtained by Kert Davies, executive director of the Climate Investigations Center.

Soon declined numerous requests for an interview and when reached by phone Thursday after business hours said it was "rude" to be contacted at home.

The 49-year-old scientist earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in science and his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering at the University of Southern California. Soon has been affiliated with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics since 1991. (The group is not officially associated with Harvard University, though it is located on the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Mass.)

Soon and his co-authors have published dozens of papers in top scientific journals worldwide, sometimes without disclosing the source of funding for those projects, a practice that raises ethical questions and often violates the conflict-of-interest policies of the publications.

The reports cover a wide range of climate-denial perspectives. Many of the studies postulate that changes in solar activity are responsible for global temperature trends, such as the 2009 paper that Soon boasted about to Southern Co. The studies all question the extent, severity, cause and existence of man-made climate change.

Questions regarding Soon's credibility and impartiality have circulated for years and have been grist for environmental organizations critical of his research findings and his ethics.

Controversy erupted early this year with the publication of a paper co-authored by Soon in Science Bulletin, a scientific journal cosponsored by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

In the paper, Soon and three other climate skeptics attempt to discredit the UN panel on global warming, the IPCC. Soon and his co-researchers contend the IPCC used flawed techniques to calculate changes in global temperature that exaggerated the threat of global warming by as much as 50 percent. The paper has been roundly criticized by climate scientists and academics.

Each of the writers said at the end of the piece that they had no conflicts of interest. But Davies of the Climate Investigations Center challenged that assertion because of the FOIA paper trail showing Soon has long accepted industry money.

The newly released documents show that the dust-up over the Chinese journal echoed a practice Soon engaged in with a variety of less obscure journals that published his work.

Although Soon has at times disclosed the support he received from Exxon, API and the Koch Foundation, the documents show he failed to disclose his special relationship with Southern.

"As further consideration to SCS [Southern Company Services], Smithsonian shall provide SCS an advance written copy of proposed publications regarding the deliverables for comment and input, if any, from SCS," according to a funding agreement signed by Smithsonian’s William J. Ford, contract and grant specialist; and Bryan Baldwin, Southern’s manager of environmental assessment.

Christine Pulliam, a spokeswoman for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said Soon expressed his own opinion. She defended the center's funding agreements and its scrutiny of the research performed.

"The Smithsonian stands by the process by which the research results of all of its scholars are peer reviewed and vetted by other scientists," Pulliam said. "This is the way the scientific process works. The funding entities, regardless of their affiliation, have no influence on the research."

Southern Co. did not make an official available to explain its association with Soon. Company spokeswoman Jeannice Hall issued a brief statement that the company "funds a broad range of research on a number of topics that have potentially significant public policy implications for our business."

Agreements such as those between Soon and Southern raised troubling issues, according to Juscelino Colares, a professor of law and associate director of the Frederick K. Cox International Law Center at Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland.

"It all goes to the matter of credibility," said Colares, who teaches courses on international environmental law. "Why are they hiding something? Why are they giving non-science the weight of science? This is manipulation that gives the funder the last word."

Davies said the close relationship with industry that the Soon documents reveal raises doubts about the impartiality that is supposed to come with scientific research.

"It shows that he is not just being funded to do science but to impact the public policy arena," Davies said.

As part of a final report to Southern in 2011 outlining the papers and presentations he produced for a $60,000 grant, Soon explained the policy relevance of the research he delivered: "The hypothesized dangerous consequences of rising atmospheric CO2 are too speculative for responsible regulatory policy."

In announcing the completion of his 2009 sun-climate paper to Koch foundation executives, who had contributed $65,000 to fund the study, Soon said his findings were consistent with the hypothesis that the sun causes climatic change in the Arctic.

"It...raises serious questions about the wisdom of imposing cap-and-trade or other policies that would cripple energy production and economic activity, in the name of preventing catastrophic climate change," Soon told the executives in a 2009 email.

One study Soon published—funded by Southern and the Koch foundation—has stirred the debate about the fate of polar bears in the face of climate change and the loss of sea ice. In the study, Soon dismissed the idea that polar bears in the Canadian Arctic were at risk from the impacts of climate change—and questioned whether the region was even warming at all.

Davies said Soon's polar bear research goes to the heart of how the industry employs research like Soon's to deflect attention from the true cause of global warming.

"Climate change isn't something you can go out and see like a polluted river," he said. "But with the polar bears, all of a sudden you could see the results of climate change."

They were starving as their hunting grounds melted away, and people were beginning to connect all of this to the consequences of fossil fuel and atmospheric carbon, Davies said.

"So the companies are happy having Willie Soonout there," he said "These companies are paying him to go out in the world to cast doubt."

InsideClimate News reporters Lisa Song and Sabrina Shankman contributed to this report.

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/greenpeace-usas-new-leader-on-the-fight-for-our-planet-theres-hope/

A contract signed in Jakarta on Tuesday by the owners of Asia Pulp and Paper, which is based in Indonesia, has received the qualified endorsement of its tormentor, Greenpeace after it agreed to log solely plantation timber.

The man who brokered the deal, Australian Scott Poynton, from the Forest Trust, said this ‘‘could be a real turning point in the fight against deforestation’’.

‘‘APP has got such a complex political, environmental and economic context, if they can do it, there’s no excuse for any other company to have deforestation in their supply chain,’’ he said.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/a-turning-point-for-deforestation-20130205-2dwps.html#ixzz31hvmz8ju}:

big 2013 report

update:

With this new edition of Dealing In Doubt we:

Detail the ongoing attempts to attack the integrity of individual climate scientists and their work.

Look beyond the strategic parallels between the tobacco industry’s campaign for “Sound Science” (where they labeled mainstream science as “junk”) to the current climate denial campaign, to new research that has come to light revealing the deeper connections: the funding, personnel and institutions between the two policy fights.

Detail how some scientists are now fighting back and taking legal action.

Showcase the Heartland Institute as an example of how tobacco-friendly free market think tanks use a wide range of tactics to wage a campaign against the climate science.

Reveal the range of tricks used by the denier campaign, from “pal review” instead of peer review, to personal attacks on scientists through Freedom of Information requests, self-publishing books, and the general conspiratorial noise from the denial machine in the blogosphere.

rfk2:

BUT John Ashcroft used sailor mongering act ~

Greenpeace for 1st x in 132 yrs (fines and probation 5 yrs) fed judge threw out

(!?)

Venerable organization, international, high profile and effective, so not surprising they have been targetted for infirtration SLAPP?

asks apple to have green energy vs coal for cloud kpfa may 21 **The Morning Mix**

----

The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, codenamed Opération Satanique,^[1] was an operation by the "action" branch of the French foreign intelligence services, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE), carried out on July 10, 1985. It aimed to sink the flagship of the Greenpeace fleet, the Rainbow Warrior in the port of Auckland, New Zealand, to prevent her from interfering in a nuclear test in Moruroa.

Fernando Pereira, a photographer, drowned on the sinking ship. Two French agents were arrested by the New Zealand Police on passport fraud and immigration charges. They were charged with arson, conspiracy to commit arson, willful damage, and murder. As part of a plea bargain, they pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to ten years in prison, of which they served just over two.

The scandal resulted in the resignation of the French Defence Minister Charles Hernu.

----rfk2? 12/27/2001. 86 bill to prevent gov contract for co's w/ repeated safety

and eco vio (could mean up to 138B$) 35 BUT John Ashcroftused sailor

mongering act ~ Greenpeace for 1st x in 132 yrs (fines and probation 5

yrs) fed judge threw out (!?)

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Shell Oil Co. has filed a pre-emptive lawsuit against 11 Alaska Native and environmental organizations, asking a federal judge to rule on its spill response plan in the Chukchi (CHUK'-chee) Sea before the organizations sue to challenge it.

Shell Alaska spokesman Curtis Smith says the Houston company is initiating the inevitable court review of the plan.

He says the lawsuit filed Wednesday attempts to avoid legal challenges on the eve of summer drilling operations.

The company filed a second lawsuit in Alaska against Greenpeace only. The measure seeks a restraining order and injunction against organization members seeking to stop them from illegally disrupting Shell operations preceding Arctic drilling.

Greenpeace activists in New Zealand last week boarded a Shell drill ship destined for Alaska waters.

Also on HuffPost

cointelpro:

Over the years, Greenpeacehas repeatedly been the target of public relations firms working for industry, and the group has experienced burglaries and caught would-be spies posing as students seeking employment. But Greenpeace officials say they did not know that their organization was under surveillance during that period of time.

In the late 1990s, Greenpeace was working with environmental groups in the stretch of Louisiana dubbed "Cancer Alley," organizing against various forms of industry pollution. Its work there and that of its Louisiana partners became another target for BBI. In 1998, according to BBI emails, correspondence, and records, BBI retained Mary Lou Sapone, a self-described "research consultant," who recruited a paid operative in Louisiana to infiltrate an environmental group called CLEAN. Sapone had something of a talent for infiltrating activist groups. In the late 1980s, working for a security firm called Perceptions International, which was, in turn, working for the U.S. Surgical Corporation, she penetrated a Connecticut-based animal-rights group, gathering evidence on an activist who would later serve jail time for planting a pipe bomb near the parking space of the company's CEO. The activist would eventually accused Sapone of coaxing her into the plot.

Sapone's operative in Louisiana relayed to her information on what the local enviros were planning, provided gossip on the internal rivalries, and identified the scientists aiding the groups. She passed the intelligence to BBI. In an August 20, 1998 "client briefing," BBI boasted that "our operative is being nominated to the citizen action panels for local industries" and it asked which local industry Condea Vista, the chemical manufacturing firm, would prefer the operative to focus on. (The previous year, Condea Vista had lost a lawsuit brought by the residents of Lake Charles, Louisiana, against the company for the 1994 ethylene dichloride leak and had been slapped with a $7 million judgment.) Another BBI document noted, "The operative has been trained to be inquiring, but not participatory. Operatives are not allowed to offer suggestions or `help' targets in any way. They are trained to seek documents, ID friends and foe legislators and regulators, follow money trails, ID informants, discover future targets."

BBI produced detailed confidential reports for Ketchum on the environmental activism underway in Louisiana. And BBI records indicate that the firm worked for Nichols-Dezenhall on a "Condea Vista Project." Citing "strict confidentiality agreements," Dezenhall will not say whether his firm worked with Condea Vista (or any other company), but he notes in an email, "It would be extremely damaging and wrong…to interpret or portray the term 'operative,' a generic term often used by investigators and former law enforcement types to mean an individual, as implying someone necessarily engaged in illicit actions such as corporate espionage." (Sapone did not respond to a message requesting comment.)

bbi

rfk2?

wise use: 12/27/2001. 86 bill to prevent gov contract for co's w/ repeated safety

and eco vio (could mean up to 138B$) 35 BUT John Ashcroftused sailor

mongering act ~ Greenpeace for 1st x in 132 yrs (fines and probation 5

yrs) fed judge threw out (!?)

Bob Hunter, Warriors of the Rainbow: A Chronicle of the Greenpeace Movement, Henry Holt & Company, October, 1979, ISBN 0030437415
David McTaggart, Greenpeace III: Journey into the bomb, Collins, 1978. ISBN 0002118858
John May and Michael Brown, The Greenpeace Story, Dk Publishing*inc ISBN 086318328X
Mark Warford (ed), Greenpeace Witness: Twenty-Five Years on the Environmental Front Line, Andre Deutsch, August 1, 1997. ISBN 0233990240

Attacks On Greenpeace and Other Ecology Groups

Portions of this report have previously been published in Greenpeace Magazine, The Humanist, Our Right to Know, Covert Action Quarterly, and Investigative News Service.

by Chip Berlet, 8/22/91

Political Research Associates

Environmental activists over the past few years have reported a series of incidents involving surveillance, police overreaction, and harassment that leads then to believe they are being targettedby a campaign to discredit them and hamstring their attempts to exercise their constitutional rights. Many of those targetted are members of the environmental group Greepeace, and it's not just a problem in big cities, as one person fighting a rural toxic waste dump found out the hard way.

Mike Buckner's family has deep roots in central Georgia--relatives have lived there since 1832--so he was apprehensive when he learned of plans to build a toxic waste incinerator there. Buckner, who works for the post office, and other concerned citizens came to believe that state and county officials and corporate interests had rigged the planning and hearing process. County officials had voted in secret to nominate the site, and the first suitability study neglected to mention health and environmental concerns. Then, according to a local lawyer who sued the state, several state officials admitted they had voted for the Taylor-county site because "it was the governor's wish."

Now, the local people were being invited to a town meeting calledby the consulting firm hired to do a second study. But this company had close ties to Waste Management Incorporated, the corporation that wanted to build the incinerator. The local people were angry. "They call all these meetings," Taylor resident Ben Parham told a local paper, "and they don't amount to a tinker's dam."

Mike Buckner sat next to Brian Spears, an experienced civil rights attorney from Atlanta, who recalls "the courtroom was nearly packed with some 250 people." As the meeting opened, Katrina McIntosh walked forward to present the panel with a suitcase stuffed with fake money as "welcome gift." Halfway up the aisle, she was intercepted and hustled out by officers of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Others began to throw more wads of fake money at the consultants.

After the consultant's presentation, it became clear that the hearing would go as some of the others had before--no opportunity for opponents of the incinerator to speak. So they turned to their last resort. Somebody tripped the switch on a tape recorder in a locked briefcase in the balcony, and the strains of the Beatles hit "Money" filled the courtroom. Taylor County Sheriff Nick Giles ordered his deputies to silence the case, which was attached by a chain to a chair bolted to the balcony floor. They complied, smashing it with their boots.

"The protests were certainly colorful," says Spears, "but they were harmless, and definitely not criminal." Yet Buckner was placed on administrative leave for three weeks after Sheriff Giles falsely told Buckner's supervisors that Buckner was involved in the "disruption." Buckner also was interrogated by his superiors. "I was asked what I knew about bombings of federal officials and bomb threats at the meeting and other things I had never heard of," says Buckner. He was asked if he was a member of Greenpeace.

Local environmental activists tell Spears they now are worried about attempts to discredit them. A local newspaper reported that the authorities were compiling information about potential troublemakers. Sheriff Giles is quoted saying "We have photographed the crowds at every meeting. We know who is at these meetings. We have videotapes of some meetings." Jan M. Caves, whose family owns property next to the proposed site, told reporters of "an air of harassment towards the opponents [of the incinerator] adding that some had become too intimidated to speak out. "The harassment has become unbelievable," says incinerator opponent Marie McGlaun.

What happened in Taylor County is not unique. The environmental movement is entering a new era, one in which the traditional channels of reform--the courts, the hearing room and the legislature--are proving increasingly unresponsive to the concerns of ordinary citizens. At the same time, the overwhelming influence of big business in setting priorities, such as where incinerators should be sited or how much old growth should be clearcut, is becoming obvious.

In response, average people are beginning to act in defense of their country, their homes and their environment, often using tactics that are traditionally drawn upon in this situation: sit-ins, demonstrations, and other time-honored acts of civil disobedience. And for their trouble, they are being treated as criminals and subjected to surveillance and retaliation in the workplace.

Their tactics, pioneeered by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi, are being recast by the media and others as"terrorism." In parts of the country, legal authorities are levying fines and setting bail for environmental activists that equal or in some cases exceed those leveled at suspects held for muder and other violent crimes. Even worse, some people are being singled out by the police and the FBI as well as private interests solely on the basis of their activities in defense of the environment.

In Arizona, revelations of possible cover-ups and illegal collusion between the state and a company planning to build an incinerator led to vocal and active opposition from a local group. A hearing last May in the town of Mobile, southwest of Phoenix, dissolved into a shouting match when the hearing officer tried to oust hundreds of concerned citizens who crowded the back of the hearing room. With no provocation,officers arrested 18 activists and dragged them outside, using high voltage "stun guns" on five of them.

Fourteen activists were locked in a sheriff's van at the side of the highway and denied phone calls or legal counsel until the hearing ended. Seven of them have since been charged with disorderly conduct.

After the incident, it was discovered that the EPA had forwarded videotapes showing some of the activists at a demonstration in California to police authorities in Arizona.These same citizens were picked out of the crowd and arrested.

In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, an activist with Bucks People United to Restore the Environment (B-PURE), was pulled by police from a township meeting and held illegally in a holding cell without charges. His request to use a phone was refused. His crime? He had approached the chairperson and demanded that more chairs be added to accomodate the people who were unable to fit into the meeting room. In Astoria, Oregon, ten Greenpeace activists were held overnight without bail after being arrested on class-C misdemeanor charges (one step above a parking ticket) during an antinuclear demonstration. The only other person refused bail in recent history by the judiciary in Clatsop county was a man charged with two murders. In Texas a local magistrate demanded $100,000 bail for a Greenpeace activist who blocked a railroad track, roughly ten times the bond set for some drug dealers and murders in the same jurisdiction.

The loose group of activists known as Earth First! is being subjected to particularly harsh treatment. No person associated with Earth First! has ever assaulted anyone; the only felony conviction of a person associated with the group was for the crime of pulling up survey stakes. But last year in Arizona, four activists associated with Earth First! were arrested on conspiracy charges including the organization's founder, Dave Foreman, whose alleged crime was to have donated some money for the other activists to use in an illegal operation. After the arrests, it was revealed that the FBI spent some $2 million on a two-year campaign to infiltrate Earth First!, largely through an undercover agent named Michael Fain. Fain befriended several environmentalists, forming a romantic relationship with one, and according to several witnesses, joined in illegal witnesses and encouraged the activists to act illegally.

At one point, Fain accidentally left his hidden tape recorder on and recorded a conversation reflecting his frustration with having failed to get Foreman to incriminate himself. [Foreman] was there, but he doesn't even mention it (illegal activities). . . Foreman isn't the guy we have to pop--I mean in terms of an actual perpetrator. [Foreman] is the guy we have to pop to send a message." This and other evidence adds ammunition to the charge that the prosecution of these activists is politically motivated.

Perhaps the most chilling example was the reaction of local police and the FBI after the mysterious May bombing of the car carrying Earth First! activists Darryl Cherney and Judi Bari. Although the pair had received dozens of death threats and had not been associated with violence of any kind, they were immediately arrested by local police and charged with carrying the bomb.

Two months later, the District Attorney declined for the third time to prosecute, and the case appears to have collapsed for lack of evidence. But in the hours after the bombing, Oakland police ransacked the home of a group of local activistswithout a search warrant. Lawyers also were turned away from the local jail, where friends and acquaintances of Bari and Cherney were questioned and held without charges or legal counsel for seven hours. Bari's lawyer had to get a court order to see her client in the hospital. The FBI implied that it had the evidence to prosecute all along, creating a climate of suspicion and anger toward Earth First! and environmentalists in general. Even now, according to environmentalists in California, the FBI investigation has yet to follow up on several obvious clues, including the death threats received by the pair in the months before the bombing.

Many observers suspect political motivation in the FBI's biased investigation of the Earth First! bombing incident. Two alliances of individuals and groups including Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, California Congressman Ron Dellums, Earth Island Institute president Dave Brower, Greenpeace, the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organization for Women have drafted letters calling for an investigation of FBI and Oakland police conduct in the case. But the public is not inclined to believe that federal and local agencies are capable of bias of this sort. While no evidence has yet surfaced to suggest that there has been any wrong-doing this time, the history of FBI activities regarding protest groups is not encouraging. "We don't like to face this aspect of our society," say Spears, "but it is part of the historical record." As the environmental movement grows in numbers and impact, there is little reason to believe it will remain free of the harassment that has been visited upon every other significant social-change movement in U.S. history.

Brian Glick is an attorney and author of a handbook on resisting FBI activities called War at Home. Glick concludes that historically, "dissenting groups came under attack as they began to seriously threaten the status quo." Since the environmental movement "threatens to meddle with people who control billions of dollars, it should be no surprise when they fight back," says Glick, "especially as corporate and government officials come to realize how dramatically they will have to restructure their activities in response to the environmental crisis."

Another area where environmentalists face unfair harassment is in the courts and through overreaction on the part of police departments. As we have seen, judges and prosecutors can arrange for high bail, ignore due process and otherwise harass activists when they are so inclined. While activists can countersue in cases of outrageous conduct, this involves considerable time and expense.

Police who are told to prepare for "radical environmentalists" during marches and other forms of peaceful protest will not necessarily exercise the restraint appropriate to the activity of the protesters. When marchers approached the headquarters of American Cyanamidin Bound Brook, New Jersey, to protest the company's practice of sending mercury-contaminated waste abroad, county police in riot gear rushed the crowd, grabbed several marchers and clubbed them to the ground. Fortunately the incident did not escalate.

"We were peaceful, and we announced our intention to be non-confrontational in advance," says Peter Bahouth, Executive Director of Greenpeace in the United States, one of the marchers beaten and arrested. "The media's treatment of incidents like this paints a picture of wild and unreasonable environmentalists marching in the streets, and it portrays the pursuit of healthy debate as dangerous. The first point is not true, and if people are intimidated into not speaking out, we lost the most vital part of our democracy."

From one perspective, this escalation of public activism and government and corporate response is a measure of the movement's success. The 8,000 or so community groups that have formed around toxics issues in the United States have proven a significant impediment to the toxic waste handling industry as well as a thorn in the side of major polluters. Thanks to the efforts of a handful of dedicated activists, the razing of the nation's last stands of old growth forest has become a national issue that could seriously affect the profits of several major corporations. Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior was blown up by the French government precisely because it represented the first creditable threat to their nuclear testing program; more threatening to France than U.N. censure, international condemnation and a 19 International Court of Justice decision.

And now the movement confronts an inevitable backlash. What the environmental community fears most is that the present trend will not abate, and that innocent, concerned individuals will be injured or persecuted for their beliefs. The confluence of interests on the "other side" of this debate--the "growth-at-any-cost" wing of big business, the legislatures and the government--is now openly linking environmentalism with lack of patriotism, an end to the "American way of life" and other vague rhetorical horrors. "As the Cold War thaws," says David Chatfield, chairman of the board of Greenpeace in the United States, "we may be entering an era in which government, industry and the media substitute the Green Menace for the Red Menace."

When ordinary citizens begin to be treated as criminals, public discourse is inhibited and democracy begins to break down. "This is a period of time that requires a renewed focus on basic rights," says Bahouth. "We want to create a climate in which people can speak out freely and participate, without fear of violence, jail or harassment."

RESISTING SPYING & ATTACKS ON ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS

The environmental movement is being subjected to obvious surveillance, intimidation, anonymous letters, phony leaflets, telephone threats, police over-reaction and brutality, dubious arrests, and other threatening actions unfamiliar to most environmental activists. Experienced organizers warn these techniques often create side effects such as false divisions, rivalry, paranoia, false accusations, internal strife, and overall stressful circumstances that divert energy and time from the real work at hand.

The type of subtle and not-so-subtle harassment being experienced by the environmental movement may be new to eco-activists, but to civil rights attorney Brian Spears and other advocates for civil and constitutional rights, these types of incidents strike an all-too-familiar chord. Spears observes that, "activists on Central American issues, Native American organizers, Black power advocates, and others dissidents have been subject to unconstitutional covert surveillance and disruption for many years." In fact when Spears attended the annual National Lawyers Guild (NLG) convention last summer in Austin, Texas, he found not only two workshops on the grassroots toxics movement, but also two workshops on repression and attacks on political activists.

Brian Glick, an attorney who spoke at the NLG's political repression workshop in Austin, is the author of a security guidebook for activists titled "War at Home." Glick concludes that historically, "dissenting groups come under attack as they begin to seriously threaten the status quo." Since the environmental movement "threatens to meddle with people who control billions of dollars, it should be no surprise when they fight back," says Glick, "especially as corporate and government officials come to realize how dramatically environmentalists expect them to restructure their activities."

Glick says the bombing attack on the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand presaged the current situation in the U.S. "Domestic covert action is a powerful deterrent to democratic discussion of public policy and effective organizing for social change," says Glick echoing a number of civil liberties activists interviewed for this article. "We need to take security seriously without being distracted from our main goals", says Glick, "and one way is to educate ourselves about what has happened in the past." Glick and other authors and academics who have studied government intelligence abuse and political repression frequently find people are skeptical that human rights violations can happen in the United States. "We don't like to face this aspect of our society," agrees Spears, "but its part of the historical record."

Assorted Sordid Pasts

Most documented information about government harassment of social change activists came to light in the 1970's following a series of Congressional hearings which took a critical look at the FBI, CIA, military intellignce, federal agencies and the private security industry.

The most sensational revelations revolved around the FBI's Counterintelligence Program or COINTELPRO in Bureau jargon. In its final report, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, often called the Church Committee, concluded:

"COINTELPRO [was] a series of covert action programs directed against domestic groups....Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that...the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence."

The COINTELPRO operations targetted political groups calling for social change, including civil rights and antiwar activists, civil liberties advocates, radicals, feminists, even food co-ops and health clinics. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was a major target in a campaign that included anonymous threatening letters and attempts to scare away his funders. In one ten year period starting in 1966, the FBI employed over 5,000 secret informers in Chicago alone.

According to Glick, a review of the 2,370 officially approved COINTELPRO operations admitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee shows four main techniques: infiltration, psychological warfare from the outside, harassment through the legal system, and extralegal force and violence. In the latter category falls the sinister collaboration between the FBI and right-wing vigilante groups. For instance, in Chicago the FBI and local police worked with the Legion of Justice, a rightist group that burglarized offices of antiwar activists. In San Diego the FBI hid the weapon used by a Secret Army Organization sniper in a shooting incident directed at a local activist professor which resulted in a woman being injured by a stray bullet.

The revelations of the Church Committee, the Watergate scandal and other [exposes] led to the passage of some valuable but limited reforms that briefly curtailed the abuses of the intelligence agencies. But along with the election of Ronald Reagan to the Presidency came a concerted and successful attempt by the intelligence agencies to abolish the reforms which had restrained them during the late 1970's. The early 1980's also saw tremendous growth in the private security industry coupled with an Executive Order signed by President Reagan authorizing the contracting of intelligence investigations to private firms outside the reach of Congressional oversight and laws protecting privacy.

The FBI and other agencies also redefined the terms "terrorism" and "foreign intelligence" to reflect a broad and self-serving interpretation; and then argued their investigations into social change groups met the terms of specific legal language allowing the FBI greater investigative latitude in probes involving political violence and foreign spying. The result was that by 1983, FBI agents and private security specialists had launched broad intrusions into the lives of ordinary citizens engaged in otherwise legal activities.

Ross Gelbspan is the author of a forthcoming book on the FBI's campaign from 1981 to 1985 against groups critical of U.S. policy in Central America. Gelbspan says "While the FBI conducts legitimate criminal investigations, its carrying out of unauthorized politically-motivated police activity is more than just history." For proof, Gelbspan (a veteran Boston Globe reporter who helped pen a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative series) points to documents obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act, lawsuits, and Congressional hearings which show that in an FBI probe of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), "the FBI took at face value allegations by right-wing security specialists that members of (CISPES) were terrorists or foreign agents."

The FBI probe of CISPES moved beyond surveillance to attacks on CISPES, its members and allies. Thousands of citiens were referenced in secret dossiers. The FBI also used the services of right-wing sleuths including a network of conservative campus activists who attended meetings and then submitted reports to the FBI. "The CISPES probe by the FBI was not an aberration by a handful of field agents," says Gelbspan refuting widely published reports. "It was clearly approved at the highest levels of the Bureau and was apprently sanctioned by the NSC and the White House."

"Looking at the CISPES investigation in light of other political investigations dating back to the 1950's, one gets the distinct impression that the FBI sees its mandate as neutralizing or disabling every political movement that has the potential for bringing about significant changes in the American political system," argues Gelbspan.

Kit Gage, the Washington representative of the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation (NCARL) agrees with Gelbspan. "We know first hand the kind of havoc the FBI can wreak on a group exercising its First Amendment rights," says Gage who has leafed through FBI files recording "38 years of surveillance on NCARL and its predecessors which produced 130,000 pages of files but not one criminal conviction." What is well documented "is an incredible amount of harassment and disruption of our organization," Gage charges. "Since the FBI seems unable to regulate itself," says Gage, "NCARL is currently seeking legal remedies in the form of legislation that would limit FBI investigations solely to criminal activity." Hundreds of law school professors have endorsed NCARL's proposed legislation.

Meanwhile, surveillance and disruption continue to hamstring activists. At the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, the Movement Support Network (MSN) maintains a list of suspicious incidents called in by groups around the country. According to MSN coordinator Jinsoo Kim, "since 1984 there have been over 300 suspicious incidents including 150 unexplained break-ins" where usually files are rifled but expensive office equipment not stolen. Suspicions point to an ad-hoc alliance of FBI agents and informants, other government investigators, far right vigilantes, and private security sleuths who trade information and justify their actions in the name of national security and fighting terrorism.

The zealousness of these snoops can lead them to break the law in pursuit of their quarry. Earth Firstactivist Dave Foreman says his unfortunately intimate knowledge of FBI informant-provocateurs leads him to not rule out the possibility that the California bombing incident was the result of a covert operation....a charge that reflects an accurate historical awareness of how far some agents are willing to go in an attempt to trap their target.

An example of this involved Connecticutanimal rightsactivist Fran Trutt, charged with attempting to plant a bomb she says was meant to scare an offical of the U.S. Surgical Corporation which uses animals for medical tests and sales demonstrations. Her accomplices, not charged with any crime, turned out to be private security agents hired by U.S. Surgical. Trutt's attorney, John Williams, says there is "absolutely no question that Trutt was enticed" into considering the bombing by agents from Perceptions International." Furthermore, several months prior to the attempted bombing, according to Williams "the entire situation was reviewed at a meeting that included representatives of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Connecticut States Attorney's office, the security director of U.S. Surgical and at least one representative of Perceptions International...and the topic of the meeting was Fran Trutt."

According to Williams, it was the agents of Perceptions International, working for U.S. Surgical but posing as Trutt's friends, who suggested the bombing, paid for the purchase of the pipe bomb, and drove her to the U.S. Surgical parking lot.When Trutt had second thoughts while on her way to the parking lot, she called a trusted friend, and was encouraged to proceed--that "friend", too, was a private undercover agent from Perceptions International. Although Trutt was clearly set up, under Connecticut law she needed to show substantial state involvement to use entrapment as a defense, a problematic tactic given the available evidence. Trutt reluntantly accepted a plea bargain and will serve a short prison term rather than risk a lengthy sentence on more serious charges. One person troubled by the Trutt case is Gary T. Marx, a sociology professor at Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology and author of "Undercover: Police Surveillance in America." Marx says serious ethical problems can arise "When police must depend on persons whose professional lives routinely involve deceit and concealment and who have a motive to lie." Informants "often have strong incentives to see that others break the law," says Marx, who worries that our democratic values are being threatened by the increased use of technologically sophisticated forms of electronic surveillance and computerized dossier-keeping.

What To Do!

Jinsoo Kim of the Movement Support Network urges that environmental activists pick up some simple security consciousness and briefly study the history of political repression against dissent in America. "There has been a whole generation of activists since the revelations about the FBI COINTELPRO program and Watergate," says Kim. "Something that happened fifteen, or even five years ago, its as if it never happened. We need to teach the lessons learned by previous movements about how to empower ourselves and fight back without losing sight of our political goals." Kim urges people to contact her at MSN if they want printed information on repression and helpful security tips, have an incident to report, or need advice.

Sheila O'Donnell, a progressive private eye for twenty years who specializes in political cases, suggests environmentalists need to be very suspicious of attempts to define individuals or groups in a way that isolates them. "Smear campaigns often are a part of disruption operations, so charges of eco-terrorism and allegations of violence should be carefully considered on the basis of documented facts, not lurid headlines," says O'Donnell. "And if people use different techniques, that's OK," adds Brian Glick, "there is a place for lobbying, grassroots organizing, education, and militant action...they reinforce each other." Susan B. Jordan, lawyer for two Earth First! activists whose car was bombed, points out that her clients "were easy people to whip up public opinion against," because of their reputation for militancy. Attorney John Williams offers this advice based on the Trutt Case and 20 years of defending political activists: "Assume the other side is listening, consider everything you do as if it will be played back in a courtroom or appear on the front page of the local newspaper. If you don't act this way, you are very foolish, and could not only go down the tubes, but take your friends and your movement with you. Fran Trutt's problem was that this never occured her. She was literally seduced. It has been a hard lesson for her to learn"

Sheila O'Donnell advises that talking to the FBI or other investigators without the advice or presence of an attorney is not a good idea. "It's hard for some people to understand this," conceeds O'Donnell, "But it simply isn't an issue of social courtesy. Individual FBI agents or other investigators might be friendly and assure you they don't think you or your friends are criminals or terrorists, but they pass along the information they glean from you to faceless bureaucracies with a history of attacking activists and derailing their movements. You never know what seemingly-harmless bit of information might get you or a friend in trouble," insists O'Donnell, "an attorney will protect your rights, not the FBI."

O'Donnell recommends all political activists use the "buddy system" where group members share phone numbers and a pledge to call each other if anything suspicious or threatening happens, no matter how seemingly silly or trivial. "By talking with friends about strange events, the events lose their sinister aspect, and you gain courage by sharing your fears," says O'Donnell. "I know talking about security makes some people nervous," she admits. "But other political movements have adopted simple common sense attitudes about security and still reached their political goals." O'Donnell says when groups are harassed it is important to "promote caring working relationships within the membership and keep a healthy sense of skepticism and humor." One thing her investigations have shown clearly, says O'Donnell, "is that it is not only true that democracy is worth fighting for...but you also have to fight for it just to keep it alive."

Creating the Conditions for Surveillance Abuse

In the summer of 1988 Greenpeace Magazine asked me to look into reports of suspected surveillance and harassment experienced by Greenpeace activists. I immediately made reservations to attend the annual conference of the American Society for Industrial Security (ASIS). The ASIS convention attracts thousands of private security specialists from business, industry and the military who attend workshops and wander through the world's largest display of security equipment and services. If something is happening that involves security, you'll hear about it here.

My credentials said I was an analyst specializing in security, which I figured would get a more honest response than a press pass, and I set off to ask what the security world thought of Greenpeace. The vast majority of the persons I talked to had an accurate, even gruffly respectful image of Greenpeace--"tough," "creative," "they can really give your public relations office a headache." One security firm representative said his biggest worry would be making sure no one gets hurt during a Greenpeace demonstration. A vice president of Baker and Associates, specialists in protective services and corporate investigations, summed up the general view of the mainstream security providers when he said "Those Greenpeace people are not violent, but they [do] stage some colorful incidents."

But several conversations indicated a troubling trend among a few hard-line outfits. Over breakfast a Navy security staffer said he had attended a Naval intelligence briefing where Greenpeace was described as a "terrorist" group with ties to "international communist groups."At three security firm display booths I was told archly that their intelligence staff knew what really was behind Greenpeace and that clients who hired them would not have any problems with Greenpeace. Several people including the head of one New York firm that uses aerial photography to help companies improve plant site security said they had recently picked up accounts from corporations that feared politically motivated attacks from the environmentalist or animal rights movements.

The boldest statement came from an account executive from Vance Security who leaned forward and said "We expect Greenpeace to move in the direction of violence soon." Vance has been accused of using obtrusive surveillance and physical intimidation in a number of strikebreaking and union-busting episodes over the past few years, and is among a handful of security firms frequently referred to derogatorily as "The Cowboys" by others at the ASIS conference. The view of Greenpeace held by Vance and other hard-liners in the security field is an important indicator of future problems, because the "labelling" of a group as violent, terrorist or pro-communist is often a first step toward the delegitimizating the group. Labelling undermines public support and thus sanctions the use of aggressive surveillance and harassment by government agencies or private security firms. There is also a self-fulfilling prophecy with labelling,as police are likely to respond with unjustified force when you think you are peaceful protestors and they have been trained that you are violent potential terrorists.

One of the first groups to label Greenpeace as a violent security risk was that run by ultra-right crank and crook Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. whose April 21, 1989 "Executive Intelligence Review" contained a lengthy feature titled "Greenpeace: shock troops of the new Dark Age." LaRouche's security staff is known to have had contacts with numerous local police intelligence units and several foreign intelligence services. They once convinced two gullible New Hampshire State Police detectives that a peaceful protest against the Seabrook nuclear power plant was a cover for a terrorist attack, leading the Governor to call out the National Guard.

The problems extends to campus activism. Accuracy in Academia's "Campus Report" attacked Greenpeace in an April 1990 article headlined "Environmentalism Becomes Radical," and the "1989 Young Americans for Freedom List of Un-American Organizations on Our College Campuses" includes one group opposed to nuclear war, and the respected hunger group Oxfam America. The YAF authors, who warn of "the terrible threat these Hard-Left groups pose to our way of life," boast in their introduction that they have been "able to secretly monitor Leftist groups for the last several years."

A murky netherworld exists among ultra-right ideologues that see conspiracies everywhere, the "Cowboys" of the private security sphere, and certain segments of the law enforcement community. They spy on activists, trade information, and inevitably end up harassing persons engaged in the type of freedom of expression our laws are supposed to protect. The one thing that stops them is public exposure.

This report is available in print form from PRA.

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Political Research Associates

Greenpeace

History

Origins

Founders and founding time of Greenpeace

After Amchitka

Organizational development

Summary of priorities and campaigns

Climate and energy

Kingsnorth court case

"Go Beyond Oil"

Nuclear power

Anti-nuclear advertisement

EDF spying conviction and appeal

Forest campaign

Removal of an ancient tree

'Tokyo Two'

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs)

Greenpeace on golden rice

Toxic waste

Save the Arctic....

Ships

First Rainbow Warrior

Second Rainbow Warrior

Contents

Sinking of the ship

France implicated

Aftermath

See also

References

Further reading

External links

Directors

Former directors

Former Related Greenpeace Personnel and Directors

History

Current campaigns

Resources

Funding and expenditures

Books

Contact details

Articles and resources

Related SourceWatch articles

References

External resources

External articles

PIW Campaign Against Greenpeace

PIW sparks IRS Audit of Greenpeace

PIW sparks IRS Audit of the Dogwood Alliance

Attacks On Greenpeace and Other Ecology Groups