I infiltrated radical groups 40 years ago. Leftists are desperate for martyrs
It appears that agitators are trying to spark confrontations with federal law enforcement that could lead to protesters being harmed, even killed, to spark outrage and support for their cause.
It’s a sick story. It sounds outrageous. But it’s true, and everything old is new again.
I saw it 40 years ago and testified about it to Congress. Today we are seeing again: Inserting American citizens into flashpoints as part of a political strategy to get people shot for the purpose of inflaming the public against a president and his policies.
The recent deaths of two Minneapolis protesters reminded me of what I had learned as a 24-year-old in the mid-1980s while infiltrating radical groups – much as people in their twenties are doing today.
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Revolutionaries and insurgents create or exploit flashpoints in anticipation of getting some of their followers killed. Journalist Cam Higby has reported on this in Minneapolis. They need martyrs to spark or fuel public anger.
Facing professionally organized provocations and stressors, it was inevitable that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents would plunge into circumstances that domestic extremists had created to provoke media outrage.
Revolutionaries call it "armed propaganda."
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After Portland, Ore., activist Benjamin Linder was killed in Nicaragua by U.S.-backed resistance fighters, or contras, against the Soviet-backed Sandinista regime in 1987, the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere affairs held a hearing.
Linder was armed with an AK-47 at the time of his death. Sympathizers portrayed him as a peaceful humanitarian worker. I was called as a witness.
"For two years," I testified, a group called Witness for Peace had "anticipated the killing of an American citizen by the contras so that they could use his death for political propaganda. They wanted someone like Benjamin Linder to die."
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That was hard to say, not only because it sounded so outrageous, but because I was sitting with Linder’s parents in the congressional hearing room.
The Linders were lifetime radicals from Portland. They supported North Vietnam and the Vietcong against American troops. The mother was local leader of a group that collaborated with Soviet active measures operations against the United States. They raised their son Benjamin to place himself in mortal danger.
My impression was that they seemed less like grieving parents and more like mourners of a fallen comrade.
As college students and afterward, my friends and I had infiltrated and exposed groups across the country that supported the Central American communists. I also worked with the Nicaraguan resistance fighters against the Sandinistas.
At the hearing, I gave my eyewitness account, plus secondary reports, about how American militant leaders wanted U.S.-backed forces to kill some of their do-gooder allies.
Revolutionary insurgencies require martyrs to outrage and inspire.
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"It is obvious that Witness for Peace leaders are aware of the military role they are playing in Central America," I testified.
"On one of my trips with the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN) resistance in 1985, I asked several commanders and fighters if the presence of Americans was having any effect on their ability to fight the Sandinista army," I said in my testimony. "The answer was positive: The FDN fighters were afraid of hurting any Americans working with the Sandinistas for fear of a backlash of public opinion in the United States."
At a 1995 Witness for Peace meeting in Boulder, Colo., I learned that the group was planning to expand operations to El Salvador, only to abort three days later when its guerrilla friends murdered four off-duty U.S. Marines and two other Americans.
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I testified that in a later New York meeting, we heard "that some of the group’s leaders privately expressed hope that some of their activists in Nicaragua would get shot by the resistance. If a Witness for Peace activist was killed, they reasoned, American public opinion would turn against the contras."
The Boston Globe quoted another WfP activist, a lawyer from Bangor, Maine, as saying that "Some of us have got to die" at the hands of U.S.-backed forces. "If some of us die, we bring the cause home to our countrymen in a very personal way," he said. "If that’s what it will take, that’s what it will take."
With Linder’s death, I told Congress, the American radicals "finally had a martyr. They got their televised interviews. They have their congressional hearing. They got their wish."
Which brings us back to Minneapolis today. America must face the fact that organizers are out there to enrage, demoralize and manipulate us all. They don’t care about the human fallout.