Cat-and-Mouse Games

In late April I picked up the phone, and a radio news reporter asked me why my husband, Bill Kellermann, and I had supported the national April 29 "No Business As Usual" demonstration. I told her we hadn't but that I could give her the names of some people who had. Instead she told me that she had just talked to the people at Selfridge Airbase and they'd given her our number. She added that officials at the air base had been very concerned about the day of protest and had even called in the Reserves. Apparently they thought it was possible that the air base itself might be attacked, and they connected us to that threat.

We were troubled. Bill and I had given a lot of thought to whether we could support the April 29 protest. A lot of good people had supported it. But the literature for the protest essentially called for a national strike to protest nuclear weapons, saying they must be stopped "no matter what it takes." We couldn't support the last clause and neither could the Detroit Peace Community, so we disassociated ourselves from the protest. Or at least we thought we had.

One month later Bill went to jail for offering consecrated bread to the guards outside Williams International in Walled Lake, Michigan. Williams designed and produces the engines for cruise missiles. Bill and seven other Methodists were arrested; the group included four pastors, a representative of the United Methodist Women, and three other laypersons. Bill, a repeat offender, was sentenced to 30 days. While Bill was in jail, I finally reached a colonel at the air base who gave me more details about why the base had given our phone number to a reporter as supporters of the April 29 demonstration. He told me officials at the base had considered the demonstration a threat to their security and had taken it very seriously. Then he said Bill's name had been mailed to the base anonymously, attached to six pages of literature explaining the protest. He agreed to send me what he had.

The last sheet of the material the colonel sent was a handwritten page that listed Bill's full name, address, Social Security number, height, weight, hair color, eye color, and the word "trespass." Bill had trespassed at that base years earlier, but with many other people. It gave me pause that he had been singled out. I decided not to tell Bill that while he was in jail.

Within two weeks Bill called me from jail, clearly shaken. Two deputies had come down to his cell block and asked him to say "Fruit of the Loom." When he did, they said he was perfect for a task they had and asked him to be part of a voice line-up. With some ambivalence Bill agreed, thinking that line-ups sometimes protect people who have been falsely accused.

In typical jail process, he was hurried and told to wait at a variety of locked gates and then led into an area with several other prisoners. He was told to read into a microphone the following: "This is just to let you know that there is a bomb in this facility. I have my finger on the button of this little red box. You and your friends will be blown to smithereens."

It was like some horrible joke. To be in jail for protesting nuclear weapons production, to have been through trials where your nonviolent protest was implied by the prosecutor to be linked to bombings at other sites, and then to be asked to let the authorities record you making a bomb threat to some "facility" was too convenient. Bill refused. The deputy in charge reacted with a fit, but Bill remained resolute.

That night, when Bill reported all this to me, we both realized too late that if our phones were tapped, the authorities had their voice print of Bill saying those exact words anyway. But we tried to trust that telling friends about the incident would afford us some protection and to commend the rest to God. We commended each other to God and endured the rest of the separation—he, powerless and locked into a cell, and me, alone in an empty house.

ALL THIS FOLLOWED shortly on the heels of reports of severe harassment of a local faith-based Central America support group. Sarah Murray, a friend of ours who works as the sanctuary staff person for MICAH (Michigan Interfaith Committee for Central American Human Rights), had received death threats. It started innocuously enough, or at least in a style of surveillance and harassment that U.S. citizens have become accustomed to in the last 20 years. Sanctuary files disappeared from the MICAH office. Mailings—even first-class mailings—dropped off at the post office never reached their destination. Phone service was sporadic. Occasionally people seemed to be observing staff people as they arrived at or left the office.

In February 1985, Sarah was pulled aside after a CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) meeting. A young man warned her that death squads were forming in Detroit.

One month later Sarah's roommate received a phone call from someone who indicated that he was from the "East Side Clinic" and was supposed to pick up the Salvadoran children who are in sanctuary at St. Rita's Church in Detroit. The roommate alerted Sarah. Sarah called to remind the teachers at the school that the children were to leave with no one except their parents or Sarah, then she picked the children up and took them to their parents at the church.

Later in the spring, Sarah went to a small meeting on sanctuary at the American Friends Service Committee office in Chicago. Very few people knew about the meeting, although she had made some of the arrangements for the meeting over the phone. When she left the meeting, a cab pulled up, and she got in. The driver asked, "Is the AFSC office still in that building?" When she said yes, he initiated a conversation about sanctuary.

He told her that she should quit working with the program and that people who were involved with it were considered enemies. He told Sarah that when her name was cross-referenced on mailing lists it came up so often that she was no longer a suspect, but a target. She or members of her family could be killed, he said. Then he described ways she could be murdered so it would appear to be an accidental death. For instance, her apartment could be set on fire, and she could be held down until she suffocated. "Am I scaring you?" he asked before dropping her off.

MICHIGAN HAS GOOD laws concerning political surveillance. In 1976 Wayne County Circuit Court Judge James Montante ordered the Michigan State Police to disband their political surveillance unit and to release the 30,000 files they had accumulated to the subjects of their spying. The Detroit police were ordered to do the same with the 100,000 files they had gathered since the turn of the century. The Detroit collection includes more than one million names and has yet to be released.

Nonetheless, in the fall of 1983 when 52 nuclear weapons protesters gathered outside Walled Lake to train in nonviolent civil disobedience, two state police officers came undercover to gather information. At least three Oakland County sheriffs deputies worked the meetings undercover, as did an investigator from the prosecutor's office. On Thursday of the week-long protest, during which there were morning blockades of the driveway at Williams International, deputies came to search the church where we gathered. They had a warrant and insisted on taking all the written materials that belonged to Peter Dougherty, a Catholic priest who had helped organize the event.

All of us were charged with a laundry list of offenses. The list varied, but almost all of us were charged with trespass and conspiracy to trespass. Both are misdemeanors. Conviction for trespassing carries a 30-day maximum sentence, but conspiracy carries a one-year maximum. Some people were also charged with disturbing the peace, refusal to obey a police officer, littering (children's toys), and conspiracy to do all those things.

Conspiracy charges were intimidating both because of the sentence they could carry, but also because of their potential effect on community. We soon learned that if we were convicted of conspiracy, we could be obligated to testify against other co-defendants. If we refused, we could be held in contempt of court and jailed for the duration of the trials.

During the trials we learned that a deputy, posing as an activist, had been wired for sound. This man, Sgt. Fred Scholz, had dressed casually and "volunteered" to work in the kitchen. The prosecutor's investigator had carried a tape recorder. All five of the undercover officers who testified said they had told people they were there because they were concerned about nuclear war. They had also given false or misleading names. At one point a defense attorney asked the investigator, David Lunsford, if, to his knowledge, anyone besides law enforcement officers had lied about their names. Lunsford said no. Asked if anyone besides the police had lied about their reasons for being there, Lunsford answered, "How do I know if they were lying to me, as I was lying to them."

WE ALSO LEARNED in court that when the deputies raided the church, six of the 30 people present were undercover police officers. One out of five of the people gathered to pray and sing were actually assembling information to prosecute us.

The assault seemed a particular violation because some of the organizers of the event had contacted the sheriffs department in advance and provided members of the department with our handbook, which outlined the principles of nonviolence. The meeting with them was friendly, and we believed they understood that it was intended both as a courtesy and as a way of minimizing any spontaneous violence on the part of protesters or police.

Asked in court how the officers could justify invading our privacy, they answered that they attended our meetings undercover in order to protect us. The prosecutor invited the police to talk about the bombing of Litton Systems, a cruise missile contractor, in Toronto, Canada, in October 1982. The police suggested that such "terrorists" might infiltrate our demonstration. In one case a defendant took advantage of that opening and invited a co-defendant to testify about incidents in which the undercover police themselves introduced violence at demonstrations.

The legal cat-and-mouse games continue, as does the surveillance, we're sure. It's disappointing, but not surprising, that a judge's decision in 1976 failed to stop the harassment of citizens by public law enforcement officers. History seems to indicate that surveillance by public agencies rises and falls with public opinion about it—surveillance by private organizations fills the gap. In the face of both, we can and do commend ourselves to the Lord of history.

Jeanie Wylie is a freelance writer and a member of the Detroit Peace Community.

A Frightful Litany

Government surveillance and intimidation have grown steadily during the Reagan years. Some of the government's primary targets have included religious people and organizations whose Central America involvements have run counter to administration policy. Below is a partial listing of incidents that have occurred during 1985.

12/84-1/85
On three occasions between December 1984 and January 1985, a New York City woman active in the sanctuary movement found that her mail from other sanctuary activists had been opened before delivery.

1/16/85
A Kansas City journalist returned to the United States after spending two-and-a-half months in Nicaragua. Miami customs officials seized his address book, his personal diary, two articles, and additional papers. The FBI was called. An agent questioned the man and had the seized papers photocopied.

1/19/85
A Missouri man received an anonymous phone call about his trip to Nicaragua and about his political opinions and activities. His name was in the seized address book, and the call came three days after its seizure.

3/14/85
After returning from a trip to Nicaragua in January 1985, a Minneapolis woman was notified by the Internal Revenue Service about its desire to audit her 1982 tax return. The IRS specified that it wanted the audit to take place in her house.

3/20/85
Two men were waiting on the porch of a Detroit woman's home. The men left a name and telephone number on a piece of paper. When the woman called the number and discovered it was an FBI office, she hung up. The woman is active in Central America work and went to Nicaragua on a Witness for Peace trip in October 1984.

3/24/85
A secretary at the Colorado Council of Churches in Denver was contacted by the Defense Investigative Service about the identities of people attending a prayer meeting commemorating the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero.

4/4/85
In Chicago a woman who coordinates sanctuary activities in Michigan was picked up by a cab driver who appeared to know who she was and the work she had been doing. The cab driver let her know that she could be assassinated for her activities.

4/21/85
The offices of Nuevo Instituto de Centro America in the Old Cambridge Baptist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were broken into for the third time. Nothing was taken; drawers were left open.

4/25/85
A New York man, who returned from working with a Peace Brigade in Nicaragua in March 1984 was fired from his job after two men who "looked like cops" were seen talking to his boss and overheard mentioning the man's name.

7/6/85
A free-lance journalist who took part in a national sanctuary caravan originating in Arizona in the first week of July 1985 reported that a man with a large walkie-talkie tailed the caravan for about 20 minutes between Salina and Concordia, Kansas. The Louisiana license plates of the man's car were found to be unregistered.

7/16/85
The offices of a sanctuary church in Seattle were broken into. Nothing of value was taken except the keys to the rooms where six Central American refugees were being housed. The intruders also went through legal files, church membership lists, and papers related to the church's activity in the sanctuary movement.

8/10/85
A Washington, D.C. woman returning from Nicaragua via Dallas was questioned about her trip by customs officials, who referred to some children's books and other literature she carried as "communist propaganda."

8/85-9/85
Detroit sanctuary workers at the Michigan Interfaith Committee for Central American Human Rights (MICAH), which has experienced break-ins and difficulties receiving mail, observed on several separate occasions a man in a parked car taking notes on their movements.

9/14/85
At about 2:30 a.m., someone was observed leaving the premises of the Old Cambridge Baptist Church in Cambridge. The lights were on in the building, and two doors had been forced open; nothing was missing.

9/16/85
A Jesuit priest in Guadelupe, Arizona, who is also an attorney working on political asylum cases, discovered his office had been burglarized. His file box of "cases on appeal" was missing.

10/16/85
In Seattle the office of Donovan Cook, a co-conspirator in the Tucson sanctuary trial, was broken into and files were scattered. Personal records, including notes of phone conversations with Salvadoran clergy, were stolen.

10/25/85
In Phoenix the Central American Refugee Project, the legal arm of the Valley Religious Task Force, was broken into twice. Nothing was taken, but desks, files, and phone logs were ransacked.

12/5/85
The lastest of five burglaries in 1985 occurred at the Old Cambridge Baptist Church in Cambridge. Once again files were scattered and mail was opened, but nothing was taken.

Sources for the above information include the Center for Constitutional Rights, Ross Gelbspan of The Boston Globe, and The National Catholic Reporter.