Counterintelligence Rules for Political Activism, Part 1
If you don't know them, your group is in trouble.
We’ve been talking about infiltration, and how it can derail your political efforts in real and even life-changing ways. This week we’ll start looking at prevention and mitigation.
Counterintelligence is an often-overlooked facet of an activism group. In fact, you might already be saying, “We don’t need that because we aren’t doing anything illegal.” Some groups are doing things that are considered illegal, even if they consider them necessary or morally right. Either way, you need to understand why counterintelligence is necessary, and some of the ground rules for operating in a political activism arena.
In 2001, James Olson wrote “The Ten Commandments of Counterintelligence,” a long-form article for the Fall-Winter issue of Studies in Intelligence. Olson was in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations for over 30 years, mostly undercover in foreign assignments. Regardless of what your feelings are about the CIA itself, Olson is a wealth of information on counterintelligence and how it should be done effectively.
Today we’ll be looking at a modified version of his commandments, specifically applied to citizen activism for a political cause.
Whether your group’s focus is purely legislative, civil disobedience, propaganda, or some other form of activism, you’ll want to understand these rules because they form a foundation for safe, effective operation.
In fact, if you’re following even half of them, you’ll be head and shoulders above 95% of other groups. That includes your opposition, which means there’s no down side to learning and applying these principles.
1. Be Offensive
While I am a huge proponent of defensive CI efforts in political groups, that’s only because so few groups do it at all. Defense is a good place to start; offensive efforts, however, are where the really skilled groups operate.
The key to CI success, according to Olson, is penetration. That means your group should be actively looking to recruit people from other groups, opposition positions, legislators, and others.
“But wait!” you’re probably saying. “You’ve been arguing against open recruiting!”
That’s true, and I do. There are two kinds of recruiting. The kind most groups are familiar with is membership recruiting. That’s not the good kind. It involves giving people access to information, often critically so. It involves them attending your meetings, and being able to represent your group with their words and actions by identifying as being one of you.
Penetration recruiting is something wholly different. It involves creating conduits of information and even action, without bringing the person on as a member of your group or even letting them know you’re in a group at all.
Some groups don’t foster relationships outside of their group, or they only approach people when they want something from them. They think that in doing things this way, they control the relationship. Quite frankly, that’s amateur hour. You should be fostering relationships all over the place, so that when you do need or want something, the rapport is already there.
If you can get a legislator to tell you inside information about inner workings of certain bills you’re interested in, or pass along dirt on an opposing legislator, that’s a huge asset.
If you identify an employee at a print shop who is friendly to your cause, you may be able to get posters and other propaganda materials under the table.
If you can build rapport, even begrudgingly, with an opposing activist or group, you can potentially get an insight to what they’re doing or what their next actions will be.
If you get contacts in various industries or even agencies, you can have access to a lot of different things that can help your group. Be creative.
Also included in offensive action is infiltration—and in this case, you or your group are doing the infiltrating. In an urban area, for instance, understanding who your oppositional groups are is critical. At that point, you fall back upon the research phase we’ve already discussed.
Who are the groups/individuals opposing your goals?
What do they want?
Who are they as people?
How are they motivated?
What are they capable of and willing to do?
Keep in mind that in order for offensive efforts to work, usually your contact needs to be largely unaware of your affiliation. Jack the legislative member, for instance, might be far more inclined to talk about things he shouldn’t if he thinks he’s speaking with his buddy Joe, as opposed to Joe The Leader Of a Political Group. That’s reason #2398, by the way, why small and nameless is the way to go for your group. The less people who know what you’re really doing, the better.
2. Honor Your Professionals
Olson’s point here was that CI people within the various government agencies didn’t get enough recognition for their work. In our context, it’s still somewhat true—although I would modify this rule a bit to say “Understand the Need for Trained Counterintelligence People.”
In many activism and prepper groups, roles are often filled by whoever has the most experience in that area—or if no one has any experience, by whoever wants the spot. Intelligence-related positions (especially counterintelligence) are harder to fill because they require a specific kind of person, not just a certain set of knowledge.
Anyone, for instance, can come up with an idea for group action. It takes a different kind of person to be able to game out all the potential scenarios, see the risks for each outcome, understand whether the risk is warranted, and explain the 2nd, 3rd, and even 4th order effects—essentially providing them with the information they need to make an informed, rational decision about what their group will or won’t engage in.
Now add in the other functions that a counterintelligence person in your group might fill.
Designing a robust vetting process specifically geared toward the biggest type of infiltration threat your group may be targeted with
Constantly evaluating your group operations and process for security holes and risk-related issues.
Keeping your group informed about outside threats that might not have even reached your group yet
The list goes on. You can already see that CI isn’t something you can just point to someone and say, “Hey wanna be the CI guy?” What you can do is look for the member who exhibits the type of personality traits most suited to this kind of work, and tap/train them for it. There is training available everywhere; thanks to COVID, online resources are at an all-time high.
Once you have a trained CI member, whether they’re self-taught or were already trained, hang on to them. They will save your butt at some point, probably repeatedly.
3. Own the Street
For a nation-level counterintelligence service, this refers to espionage operations. For our purposes, it refers to a slightly different arena.
In the current climate, public action that is openly in support of your cause is not just dangerous, but often stupid. Rallies are obsolete, having become more a way to “be seen doing things” as opposed to actually doing them.
Owning the street, for activists, is more about owning the local discourse, and the space in which other opposing groups are operating. Here’s what that looks like.
If you know an opposition group is about to put up a bunch of propaganda posters for their cause (because your contact from Rule #1 gave you that info), get your contact in the print shop to help provide some posters of your own. Get your Pet Milk and other supplies together and go to work covering theirs with yours that very night; no group name on the posters, nothing that identifies you.
Make a bunch of ‘flyers’ that are the size of a business card with some food for thought on it, and put them in 12-packs of soda at a grocery store in an area where your opposition already operates.
If you know there is about to be a public action by an opposing group, game out ways to disrupt it before it can even get off the ground.
One group in Seattle a few years back put origami butterflies all over the city with a cryptic message on them—you are not safe. It caused quite the buzz for a while, until the group was unmasked.
Get creative about what you can do and how you can “own the streets” in your area. Hide in plain sight. Come up with ways to control the narrative about your operations. Don’t allow bad actors to identify with you. This is much easier to do if you focus on action instead of names and labels. You can’t be derailed by someone claiming your group name if you don’t have one.
4. Know Your History
A major failing of most political groups is that they don’t understand or even know the history of their own cause, or the failure and successes of those who came before. They might be able to discuss it in general terms, but in today’s society where political discourse is often distilled down to memes, many activists can barely point to a major incident or two. Many civil rights activists, for instance, pontificate about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. but know very little about the man’s actual life or work—especially if their own actions go against things he preached about. Many activists that claim to be constitutionalists seem to think the entire document consists of Article I, Section 8 and the Bill of Rights, or they are woefully uneducated about the rest of the pertinent writings by the Founders they claim to want to emulate.
If you’re going to be effective, you should be studying your cause’s past. Where did it come from? Who were the players? What did they really want, and where did they fail?
You should also be studying your opposition’s past and present. Why do they oppose you? Who are the key figures? What is their capability and where did it come from? Who’s funding them? What are their tactics? Can you modify them for your own cause?
An effective activist is a highly well-read one. You don’t need a degree, you need to read everything about your own cause and its opposition that you can get your hands on, whether you agree with its premise or not.
5. Do Not Ignore Analysis
Olson points out that “operators make bad analysts.” This is true in the political activism side as well.
Operators and analysts are two different kinds of people. An operator wants to be out there “doing stuff”—or, depending on their motivation, wants to be seen doing it. They’re the faces of a cause, the public speakers and the marchers. As Olson explained, “Research and analysis is really not our thing—and when we have tried to do it, we have not been good at it.”
The problem, as we’ve seen repeatedly, is that analysis is necessary. More importantly, good analysts are necessary.
Analysts are behind the scenes, putting it all together. They don’t want to be out front because that’s not where their work is done. They are the ones connecting dots, finding holes, and advising on next actions. They’re the ones who know the inside scoops, the dirt on key players, the vulnerabilities in everyone’s armor.
If you have a symbiotic relationship between operators and analysts, you’ll have effectiveness and smart action. If, however, your leaders have decided that analysts aren’t necessary, or they’re not willing to heed the analyst’s advice, you’re going to find yourself in hot water.
In the next issue we’ll continue our look at the rules for counterintelligence in political activism. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it!
Kit Perez is a counterintelligence and deception analyst, and the co-author of Basics of Resistance: The Practical Freedomista. She is currently working on her second book, which will focus on group activism efforts.