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Indybay Feature

The Spymaster's Tale

by Z Magazine
From the Port Protests of 2003 (April 7 & May 12): A cop told a story; the SF Chronicle printed it; some people believed it; Z Magazine investigated it.
by Daniel Borgström
Z Magazine, Oct 2006


NO SPY STORY should be taken uncritically, least of all when it comes from a spymaster who's still in the business. The spymaster in this story is Oakland's Deputy Police Chief Howard Jordan, who told the ACLU that two undercover Oakland police officers had infiltrated an antiwar demonstration at the Port of Oakland on May 12, 2003.

May 12th was the day some five hundred protesters returned to the Port of Oakland for a successful demonstration in defense of our First Amendment rights after being attacked by police five weeks earlier. On the morning of April 7th, fifty nine people including longshoremen, journalists, legal observers and peaceful protesters had been injured by police firing "less-lethal munitions." The April 7th attack received world wide attention and was even investigated by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. So, as a human rights abuser, our City of Oakland achieved a distinction generally reserved for countries such as Egypt, Israel and Guatemala.

Police records later obtained during litigation reveal that Howard Jordan was directly in charge of some of the officers who fired the "less-lethal munitions." Jordan was then a lieutenant: he was later promoted to captain, and has since become Deputy Chief. Some might call him a rising star while others still consider him a thug, but for this story I find it more appropriate to just call him Spymaster Jordan.

Jordan's espionage activities came to light last month in an ACLU report "The State Of Surveillance: Government Monitoring of Political Activity in Northern & Central California," written by Mark Schlosberg. The SF Chronicle (7/28/2006) picked up the story and published an article titled "Police spies chosen to lead war protest."

Nobody doubts the police sent spies to pose as protesters on May 12th. I was present on both April 7th and May 12th, and it was generally assumed that the police who'd attacked us in April would now be spying on us during our return to the Port in May. I remember ILWU's Jack Heyman even saying something to that effect.

The surprise was to read in the Chronicle that two undercover officers were "elected to be leaders in the May 12 demonstration an hour after meeting protesters that day."

Now that's astoundingly impressive! Think about it--those two undercover cops just walk in, unknown, and within an hour they've been elected to the leadership by the activists themselves!

Impressive, yes, but on reading that I wondered what sort of "leadership" positions they were talking about. Although I was at the demonstrations of April 7th and May 12th, I hadn't taken any part in organizing those events, so I didn't know exactly how the thing was put together. But I did have some concept of it because the following year, 2004, on the anniversary of the attack, we again held a protest at the Port, and for that event I was part of the committee that organized it. This committee was called the "Working Group:" there were about a dozen of us in it. But nobody was "elected" or even "chosen." I and the others simply showed up at the meetings and pitched in to help with the work.

As with any public event involving hundreds of people, there were literally dozens of tasks, large and small, all of which have to be done in order to prepare for the event. Most of these tasks were not very glamorous. It's probably a bit like being stage hands for a theatrical production.

So I contacted people who'd organized the May 12th, 2003 demonstration, and they confirmed my suspicions. "The use of the word 'elected' tells me that someone didn't quite do their research," Susan Quinlan wrote me in an email. Another person said, "From what they told the ACLU they don't seem to know how we operate."

"Nothing the police deputy chief says matches up with how we organized for May 12," David Solnit told me. "No one was elected to anything. All the decisions the deputy chief claimed they made were made in a general meeting."

The general meeting, called a "spokes council," was attended by eighty to a hundred people, I was told. Did the undercover agents attend and express some opinion? It was an open meeting, and it seems possible. Presumably many opinions were expressed at that meeting. A lot of people were involved in the decision-making process. It wasn't decided upon by a committee.

The deciding moment must've been at a rally at Jack London Square on April 26th. This was an event I attended and remember well. The final speaker was Sasha Wright. Sasha looked around the gathering, drew in her breath, then told us they were considering a return to the Port. "If we were to go back to the docks, how many people here would be willing to go?" she asked us. "Could I see your hands?"

It was quite like a scene from the movie High Noon, except that instead of a single guy being left to go it alone, in this real life show there were a lot of Marshal Kanes. A sizeable number, perhaps half of those present, raised their hands. Cheering followed.

That, I believe, was the deciding moment. On May 12th we returned to the Port, and this time the police didn't attack us.

A few weeks after our successful May 12th demonstration, on May 29, 2003, Jordan addressed the OPD Board of Review, expounding on the usefulness of police infiltrators. He explained that the OPD should have a unit available for such things on a long term basis.

"So if you put people in there from the beginning," Jordan told the Board, "I think we'd be able to gather the information and maybe even direct [the protesters] to do something that we want them to do. An example would be if [the protesters] wanted to march to the dock station or march to the police department. If we have our people near it we can say, 'We don't think that's a good idea, let's go somewhere else.' So those are some of the things I think we should consider for future."

Of course May 12th was an outstandingly good counter-example of such a situation--where police had infiltrated the organization, were in purported control, and protesters still marched to a place that was not to the liking of the police.

The police did not want protesters to enter the Port of Oakland. Not on that day, nor on any other day. They made that absolutely clear by firing "less-lethal munitions" on April 7th, injuring at least 59 people. The message was clear--Stay OUT of the Port!

This was also expressed later in an Oakland Tribune article by Sean Holstege (6/29/2003) which began: "A nuclear explosion, a dive-bombing aircraft, sabotage -- and mass protests -- are equal threats to the Port of Oakland, according to a classified security plan being developed by those responsible for thwarting terrorists."

Of course it seems downright silly to compare a peaceful demonstration to a nuclear explosion, but, it can be understood that someone didn't want protesters in the Port. And of course the Port was precisely where an estimated five hundred of us went on April 7th, and were determined to return to on the evening of May 12th.

Several hundred of us presented our case to the Oakland City Council and received the support of several councilmembers. Then, a committee of our group negotiated with the Oakland Police, who at first said "no" to any thought of entering the Port. The police said they'd allow us to hold our demonstration a mile away from the Port in a "protest pen." Nevertheless, a day or two before May 12th, the police relented and promised they wouldn't interfere.

Despite the reassurances of the police, there was tension in the air, and I must confess to feeling a bit fearful as we marched back into the Port with a brass band on the evening of May 12th. For an hour or two we picketed the gates we'd been driven from; then marched out and went home with a feeling of triumph. We'd stood up to police violence, defended our First Amendment rights, and won.

Spymaster Jordan stated that his undercover agents played a role in determining the route we took to the Port. Actually, there is only one logical route from our gathering place at the West Oakland BART station to the Port. That was determined decades ago by the people who designed the street, bridge and road system.

So why is Jordan making the false claim that the police had some control over this demonstration? I can only speculate on his motives. One of them must be his desire to be spymaster, but perhaps another is that the May 12th demonstration was quite humiliating to the Oakland police. Judging from remarks I saw on websites, cops from other police departments seem to have been laughing at them and calling them "pansies." It might've rankled them a bit. So, my take on this is that Deputy Chief Jordan is trying rewrite history to read something like: "The Oakland Police had it all under control."

Actually there's not much that the Oakland Police Department does seem to effectively control--certainly not street crime. This town is sometimes called the "murder capital" of California. The OPD doesn't even seem to have much control over rogue cops in its own ranks, as was illustrated by the "Riders" case.

There remains one more interesting quirk in the spymaster's story. Jordan revealed the identities of the two undercover officers, and their names were printed in the SF Chronicle. Both officers are members of the vice squad, and presumably still working in that capacity. In any case, it seems strange that Jordan would so casually give out such information, especially after having spoken as he did to the Police Board of Review on the usefulness of having a unit of police infiltrators available on a long term basis.

No undercover person likes to have his cover blown. We all remember the controversy over the outing of Valerie Plame. It does seem that that is the very worst thing that anyone could do to an undercover person.

Perhaps it was a moment of carelessness. Or maybe it was to give credibility to his story. Possibly there was some other reason.

Such name-dropping doesn't seem to be the hallmark of a first-class spymaster. As a thug in charge of a "Tango Team"--officers who fired "less-lethal munitions" at peaceful protesters--he was superlative. Maybe he's finally achieved his level of incompetence. But is that so bad? I mean, do we really want to see an OPD spymaster who knows what he's doing?







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