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10-8-2003 |
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This story of infiltration is still breaking in England. The full extent of it has yet to be revealed. The significance of it to the Catholic Worker and Plowshares movement is that the agent "Alan Fossey" was deployed to Liverpool to infiltrate the Liverpool Catholic Worker (1996-99). The Liverpool Catholic Worker came into being on the momentum of the local organizing around the trial of the "Seeds of Hope Ploughshares" trial and acquittal in July '96. We decided to keep the momentum going by founding a live-in community with East Timorese exiles and an extended live out community with local supporters. We organized nonviolent resistance at BAe Warton on a 3 monthly basis from Sept. '96. Before this event a former policewoman was approached by local Special Branch and offered £200 to attend one meeting a month, with bonuses on information on organizers. She taped the second meeting with Special Branch and exposed their actions in "The Guardian". (Sept '96) Fossey moved his operations from Hull to Liverpool - as by the end of '96 the Liverpool Catholic Worker became the most significant base during this period for non-violent direct action against BAe. There was also a full scale infiltration and undermining of lobbying attempts from London based groups at this time . Special Branch's agenda was to close us down and Fossey was to play a significant role in this through the years of '97 and '98. On my return to Australia in '98 to participate in the Jabiluka Ploughshares, Fossey dovetailed into the agenda of a couple of resentful parishioners and some recently arrived opportunists to wipe out what had become a significant organizing base against BAe and a rare experiment in radical Christian resistance praxis in England. Much of the destabilization had to do with discrediting my character in my absence and marginalizing the working class supporters who had been the source of much of the hospitality and resistance organizing. At the start of '99, a few weeks before the final eviction of the Liverpool CW, Fossey met me at Heathrow Airport (On my return from Australia) delivering a banning order form the priest/landlord.. I refused to open in it and he drove me to Liverpool. In the CW house at the time were the recently bailed Bread Not Bombs Ploughshares, a new crew of East Timorese exiles and a very different vibe to when I had departed. NV resistance had pretty much dried up and the lines were clearly drawn between the working class supporters who had been effectively marginalized and the opportunists who had hoped to stage a coup and set up a comfort zone. The priest, the parishoner and Fossey's agenda was to close the place down. They made their move a couple of weeks later as we accompanied the Swedish "Bread Not Bombs" Ploughshares to Preston for a day of reflection before their bail breaking at Barrow shipyards and return to jail awaiting trial. Fossey drove some of us to Preston and then returned to Liverpool to hook up with the crew facilitation the eviction of the Catholic Workers and East Timorese. On the Sunday, Fossey returned to Preston and on to Barrow with the Bread Not Bombs breaking their bail conditions and returning to jail. He maintained mobile phone contact with those back in Liverpool facilitating the eviction. When we returned to Liverpool that afternoon, the locks were changed, the CW and East Timorese evicted, the bank account ransacked and the rest is (albeit an unwritten) history. I hope to write more about this experience after more information is available and time for reflection. Try to draw some lessons from it. That Fossey could over the course of two years infiltrate, operate within, betray, and profit from an environment that contained East Timore (who on many occasions fed, watered him) who had been tortured, witnessed massacres and lost many family shows the depth of evil we are encountering in this work. Ciaron O'Reilly |