The vandalism, which disrupted completion of the pipeline, created new work for TigerSwan. But the company did more than deploy additional guards along the line — it also embarked on a multistate hunt for the culprits.

By early May, TigerSwan had a pair of suspects. “The best assessment based on the known facts is that the attack was most likely conducted by Iowa activists; Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya,” states an internal report dated May 4.

On July 24, Reznicek and Montoya claimed responsibility for the sabotage. Standing in front of an Iowa Utilities Board sign, the two women read a joint statement: “After having explored and exhausted all avenues of process, including attending public commentary hearings, gathering signatures for valid requests for environmental impact statements, participating in civil disobedience, hunger strikes, marches and rallies, boycotts and encampments, we saw the clear deficiencies of our government to hear the people’s demands.”

“We are speaking publicly to empower others to act boldly, with purity of heart, to dismantle the infrastructures which deny us our rights to water, land and liberty.”

Reznicek and Montoya then turned to the utility board sign behind them, and using a crowbar and a hammer, they began to remove its letters, prompting Iowa State Patrol officers to arrest them. They were charged with fourth-degree criminal mischief for damaging the sign and released on bond two days later.

Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya publicly confess to vandalizing valve sites along the Dakota Access Pipeline. To watch the full video, click here. Video: Unicorn Riot

Explaining the timing of their confession, Reznicek and Montoya referred in their statement to a phone call from The Intercept that they viewed “as an opportunity to encourage public discourse surrounding nonviolent direct action.” The Intercept had contacted the two women to give them an opportunity to respond to allegations about their involvement in the valve sabotage included in daily situation reports that TigerSwan prepared for its client Energy Transfer Partners.

For at least two weeks in May, Reznicek and Montoya had been a primary focus of TigerSwan’s work, as operatives attempted to track their movements, sharing their photos and other identifying information with employees at hardware stores, hotels, and gas stations, and passing intelligence they collected to local law enforcement and the FBI, according to the reports, among more than 100 provided to The Intercept by a contractor working for TigerSwan. At the time this story was published on August 26, Reznicek and Montoya had not been charged in connection with any of the vandalism for which they claimed responsibility.

TigerSwan was founded amid a private security industry boom, its business driven by U.S. government contracts supporting the nation’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. With its Dakota Access Pipeline contracts, agents applied the tactics they had honed in wars abroad to an environmental and indigenous rights movement based in the rural American Midwest.

“Our concentrated focus is the massing of intelligence (digital and ground) to find, fix and eliminate one person from the ‘detachment’ who will lead us to the arrest and conviction to the remainder of these terrorists,” TigerSwan wrote on May 4, echoing a phrase, “find, fix, finish,” used by U.S. special operations forces in so-called targeted killing campaigns in Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan. The firm used the term “detachment” to refer to a group of anti-DAPL activists they believed were operating outside of protest camps.

But as with the U.S. targeted killing program, TigerSwan’s surveillance operation frequently reached far beyond its mark, sweeping up dozens of individuals in its hunt for a few and casting suspicion on pipeline opponents who say they were uninterested in property destruction.

Previously unreleased documents from March, April, and May — which the company referred to as “fighting season” — reveal that while protest activity had substantially died down, TigerSwan only escalated its efforts to convince Energy Transfer Partners that threats remained. In its reports, TigerSwan indicated to its client that agents could keep the pipeline safe by deploying infiltrators to influence activists’ actions, monitoring private residences connected to pipeline resistance, and recruiting employees at local businesses to help keep watch.

The Intercept spoke to dozens of individuals mentioned in the documents, many of whom were disturbed by TigerSwan’s language and tactics. Several denied the accuracy of the reports. According to people whose activities were described by TigerSwan, the company misidentified their places of work and positions within tribal communities, misinterpreted disputes, and erroneously claimed that a protest encampment was armed. In multiple cases, the documents placed individuals at locations they said they had never been.

A former TigerSwan contractor, who declined to be named out of fear of legal consequences, told The Intercept that the threats described in the situation reports were often inflated. Reports were framed based on “whatever sounded better for the company to put forth to ETP,” the former contractor said. “They were using scare tactics.”

“Dictate the Battlespace”

In early March, the media spectacle created by protest encampments and police violence at Standing Rock faded as national attention shifted to the chaotic Trump administration.

But the NoDAPL movement lived on. Some water protectors started smaller encampments along the route, including the Little Creek camp in Iowa and the Takini, or Native Roots, camp in South Dakota. A busload of young people began crisscrossing the nation and giving talks, calling themselves the “Rolling Resistance.” And individuals who had called the large Oceti Sakowin camp home for months left North Dakota searching for their next move.

TigerSwan continued to monitor many of them, but the company didn’t just watch — the spring situation reports are more explicit than those obtained by The Intercept from earlier months in descriptions of activities that went beyond observation into intervention.

A March 5 report, for example, describes TigerSwan agents engaging in a vehicle pursuit of Tawasi, a DAPL opponent with a large social media following who helped coordinate media for the anti-pipeline Sacred Stone camp in North Dakota. As the activist drove through an industrial area in Patoka, Illinois, near the pipeline’s endpoint, agents used what they described as vehicle posturing to “manipulate” his direction of travel and “persuade Tawasi to take an alternate route.”

Indeed, a live video Tawasi posted on Facebook at the time aligns with the company’s description of the incident. “He’s following us now — the [mercenary is] following us,” Tawasi says in the video. “I think we need to go and go to a diner or something and just go somewhere where we can be in public.”

Only when Tawasi entered the freeway did TigerSwan call off the pursuit “in order to ensure to avoid a possible high speed chase.”

Tawasi posted a live video on Facebook as he was pursued by security guards near the Dakota Access Pipeline’s endpoint in Patoka, Illinois, on March 5, 2017. To watch the full video, click here. Video: Tawasi

TigerSwan agents on the ground also sought to disrupt Little Creek and Takini by undermining public perception of the camps, priming local residents to assist with surveillance, and sowing internal discord. As a report from March 1 puts it, referring to members of Little Creek, “Their operational weakness allows TS elements to further develop and dictate the battlespace.”

As The Intercept previously reported, around the time that Little Creek opened in February, videos began appearing on Facebook pages called Defend Iowa and Netizens for Progress and Justice featuring an individual named Robert Rice, who failed to disclose his link to TigerSwan. A September 22 document noted that Rice had assisted TigerSwan in developing an information operations campaign. He didn’t just warn area residents that Little Creek members might be dangerous — at least one video also encouraged people to send tips to the administrators of the Facebook page on what they were seeing and hearing about the camp.

Videos were posted on Facebook featuring Robert Rice, who encouraged local residents to submit tips about the Little Creek camp without disclosing his link to TigerSwan. Video: Defend Iowa

Camp members felt the impact of TigerSwan’s efforts. “Law enforcement was warning people in the vicinity that they should lock their doors,” recalled Christine Nobiss, one of the founders of Little Creek. “When the Netizens videos came out, there were locals that stopped talking to us because they were scared.”

Neither TigerSwan nor Rice responded to requests for comment on the videos. Energy Transfer Partners spokesperson Vicki Granado told The Intercept, “We were not involved in any way with Robert Rice.”

TigerSwan’s reports repeatedly claimed that agents, at times posing as protesters, held sway over camp members. “Reporting officer has convinced some activists to leave Little Creek Camp and settle in the more forward-looking Native roots camp,” TigerSwan wrote in April. At that camp, the document notes, “Reporting officer was able to increase existing divisions between the Native American groups and Hippie group, which is a thinly veiled Marxist commune led by ‘Travis.’” Not long afterward, another report suggested that “it would be relatively simple to disband the camp internally, by inserting divisive rumors, as well as information operations on social media.”

Hunting the Valve Saboteurs

On March 13, TigerSwan described the first valve incident. “At approximately 430 PM/1630 today a hole, roughly 1/4 in diameter was produced by some type of torch or stick, was discovered on IA Valve 430.” Days later, five more damaged valves were discovered in Iowa and South Dakota, according to TigerSwan’s reports.

The company’s frequent references to eco-terrorism echo rhetoric that law enforcement agencies first widely adopted in the aftermath of 9/11. As the U.S. government’s definition of terrorism expanded, agencies like the FBI and Department of Homeland Security established new information-sharing partnerships with “critical infrastructure” industries, including the oil industry.

A legal complaint filed on Tuesday suggests that ETP agrees that Dakota Access Pipeline opposition represents a terroristic movement. The 187-page complaint accuses Greenpeace and an array of other anti-pipeline entities of racketeering and defamation, characterizing NoDAPL as driven by “a network of putative not-for-profits and rogue eco-terrorist groups who employ patterns of criminal activity and campaigns of misinformation.”

TigerSwan repeatedly sought to collaborate and share information with local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies investigating the sabotage, the documents show.

The FBI declined to comment on its investigation or any meetings that took place with TigerSwan. Mike England, a spokesperson for the federal Department of Homeland Security, said the only contact the agency had with TigerSwan was when the company reported valve vandalism on March 13 and March 17. A spokesperson from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, Alex Murphy, said the agency met TigerSwan for an intelligence-sharing meeting regarding DAPL in March, but had no further contact.

Mark Schouten, director of the Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management Division, said that such conversations are “generally classified at a ‘secret’ level” and noted that the existence of a pending criminal investigation into the valve incidents further prohibited him from commenting. “We spend a great deal of our time talking with the private sector, because 80 percent of the nation’s critical infrastructure is held in the hands of private sector entities,” he said. “Frankly, the nature of our discussions are dependent on us holding their information confidential.”

TigerSwan’s March and April reports reveal wide speculation about the culprits behind the vandalism, blaming the sabotage at various points on Tawasi; residents of Little Creek; the Mississippi Stand group, of which both Reznicek and Montoya are members; and the Rolling Resistance.

In an interview with The Intercept, Tawasi denied involvement in the valve sabotage. “I want to be a law-abiding citizen, and I make a point of behaving that way, because I don’t want to go to jail,” he said, adding, “I’d lose my ability to be a mouthpiece.” He said he was unaware of any contact he had with the FBI, although, he noted, “I suspect that people who are in my daily life are either agents or operatives or mercenaries.”

Christine Nobiss vehemently denied the accusations levied against her and the Little Creek camp. “I don’t do anything illegal at all,” she said. At the camp, she added, “All we did was argue a lot, buy goats, and try to build a sustainable community.” Stuart Perkins, who traveled with the Rolling Resistance, said the group was never involved in any valve sabotage.

As TigerSwan hunted the valve culprits, the Takini camp in particular became a talking point used to paint the NoDAPL movement as growing increasingly radicalized even as it shrunk.

Takini was located on private property, yet the reports fixate on allegations that its members were armed. The landowners “wish to develop the land into an armed resistance sustained community,” an April 16 document notes. “The arming of the groups within the camp are not at 100 percent, but each native familial-group has individual weapons.”

TigerSwan identified Frank Archambault and Aidoneus Bishop — “the ‘Viking’ nut job” — as running the operation.

Archambault, who was at the camp, said he and others had discussed whether the local community should hire security for self-defense, to protect against a proposed temporary housing site for pipeline workers in the area, known as a “man camp.” In North Dakota’s Bakken region, man camps have been linked to sexual violence and drug trafficking. “The thing about the weapons is false,” he told The Intercept. “I am a felon, and I cannot possess weapons, especially firearms.” Archambault also said he had never heard of any plans to damage valve sites or other property.

Bishop, meanwhile, who goes by Viking, told The Intercept he had never even visited the camp and has not left Washington state since January. “I wish I was there,” he said. Bishop is tall, red-haired, and known for wearing a neon orange jacket. “I’m pretty easy to spot.”

The reports also claimed that a nonprofit called Sustainable Settings had offered to purchase weapons for the Takini camp, and Angela Ohmer and Phyllis Bald Eagle had planned a trip to Colorado to make arrangements.

“Wow,” Ohmer said in response to the allegation. “It’s not true.” She said she did travel to Colorado, but met with the organization to discuss camp design. A member of Sustainable Settings said the group had only provided consultation in designing a sustainable community.

The camp was created as a “healing space,” explained Amos Cook and Phyllis Bald Eagle, the native couple who own the land where Takini was set up. They called TigerSwan’s repeated claims that the camp was armed “funny” and “not true.”

“Me and my wife, we are praying people, as our ancestors were,” Cook added. “We have no reason to have any weapons.”

Spring was “when things started to get more crazy,” said the former TigerSwan contractor of the sinister light in which the situation reports cast activists’ activities. “It’s kind of amateur. You thought it sounded good, but it just made us sound like idiots.”

“Use as Many Locals as We Can”

At the end of April, TigerSwan reported that a burned-up Bobcat front-end loader was discovered at a valve site in Iowa. Within a few days, “the valve was torched” at another Iowa site. “The times have changed, nothing can be taken for granted anymore,” says a TigerSwan report submitted April 28.

After a surveillance camera reportedly captured individuals cutting through a fence surrounding a South Dakota valve, where no additional damage was done, TigerSwan became convinced that Montoya and Reznicek were behind many of the incidents.

Reports from the beginning of May describe how Reznicek smashed a window at the office of defense contractor Northrop Grumman in 2016 — for which she was arrested and charged with criminal trespassing and criminal mischief. “This was her turning point in the escalation of force,” one document states. “Most recently, Reznicek and Montoya participated in a fasting ceremony in order to ‘gain wisdom in dismantling the DAPL pipeline.’”

TigerSwan’s hunt only became more sprawling as it zeroed in on its suspects.

The company began sending agents into area businesses, showing employees images of the two women. In one case, the spouse of a hotel employee claimed to remember Montoya, saying she recalled the activist’s “smell” and that she was taken from the hotel to an area hospital. Montoya denied ever visiting the hotel or any hospital during that time.

A May 9 document describes using digital surveillance to monitor the women and locating residences of Reznicek’s family members in Iowa that were believed to be “potential hiding places.”

Operatives scoured hardware stores, searching for the location where the culprits bought their tools. But the images passed around weren’t just of Reznicek and Montoya. Members of Little Creek were also posed to store employees as suspicious characters. And, according to the reports, two employees at stores agreed that they’d seen Nobiss or her partner, Lakasha.

“If members of Little Creek Camp purchased the supplies, they likely used Christine Nobiss’s Indigenous Iowa credit card. (TigerSwan is in possession of Nobiss’s credit card information and can potentially match it to receipts),” a May 5 report states. Two other reports from the period note that TigerSwan captured drone footage of the Little Creek camp.

Nobiss was alarmed to hear that the company had obtained her credit card information, and said that she kept her distance from Reznicek and Montoya because of their participation in acts of civil disobedience. As for visiting the hardware store where she was allegedly spotted, she said, “I don’t even know where that store is — that’s a complete lie.” She added that she suspected racial profiling was at play in the employees’ identifications, since both she and Lakasha are native. Lakasha also denied the accuracy of the reports.

“The feeling of being surveilled doesn’t bother me so much, because I have nothing to hide,” Nobiss said. “What does bother me is the inaccuracies in these reports.”

“A lot of this stuff is not really happening; it’s just them guessing,” she added.

As they had done since the beginning of the Standing Rock protests, TigerSwan operatives on the ground kept track of vehicles they deemed to be suspicious — sometimes simply for driving in the vicinity of the pipeline at slower speeds. They listed license plate numbers and other identifying details in a “Be On Look Out” list, known as “BOLO,” and used the mobile app WhatsApp to warn their network in real time when they sighted a suspicious car. They also shared that information with law enforcement, as well as local landowners, gas station attendants, construction crews, and store employees they had recruited into their surveillance effort.

In South Dakota, TigerSwan personnel began meeting with residents near the pipeline, asking them to be on the lookout and recording their names and contact information in the reports. “Use as many locals as we can to further our oversight on the valves,” a TigerSwan operative noted on May 5.

TigerSwan itself admitted the zealous effort yielded little of relevance. “Security personnel have been diligently reporting any suspicious vehicles,” a May report notes. “All reports at this time have not been anything resulting in malicious activity. All reports have been linked with either curious people or ETP inspectors.”

But in one case, the company’s information sharing led a sheriff’s department in South Dakota to arrest someone TigerSwan operatives falsely suspected to be Montoya. “Description of the driver fits Ruby Montoya’s physical features. The woman had a brief conversation with the guard, was very upset, told the guard to stop following her, and sped off,” TigerSwan reported in a May document.

TigerSwan then shared the license plate information with the Minnehaha County Sheriff’s Office, despite the fact that the same document also reported spotting Reznicek and Montoya in Des Moines, Iowa, demonstrating at a drone base.

“As of today, the vehicle has been found and the sheriff’s department has the driver in custody. The driver was arrested because the plates that were on the vehicle did not belong to that vehicle. We are currently waiting to hear back on the driver’s information to determine the driver’s identity,” TigerSwan wrote.

Contacted for comment, the Minnehaha County Sheriff’s Office provided an update on the arrest described in TigerSwan’s report. “Quite frankly, she was in the wrong place (with substitute plates on her vehicle) at the wrong time,” Sheriff Mike Milstead noted in an email. He said people often use such plates when they can’t afford a renewal fee.

Regarding the department’s contacts with DAPL security, he said, “We really had very limited contact and events. We had a couple of vandalisms to the wellheads or whatever, but other than that, it went off here relatively with little, if any, problems.”

Meanwhile, in Illinois, TigerSwan surveilled the private residence of Susan and Bradley Stanton, a native couple who had gone to Standing Rock and occasionally welcomed water protectors on their property. A report dated May 7 includes two Google Earth images of the couple’s property in Nauvoo, Illinois, as well as grainy photos taken at much closer range that show their home from behind a fence. “On site, the frame for a sweat lodge was discovered behind a shop,” the report states.

Reached by phone, Susan Stanton was shocked to find her home and sweat lodge in a TigerSwan report. “Why would they even pick on that? That’s so bizarre,” Stanton told The Intercept.

“I’m not hiding. They can take pictures of my home. I don’t have anything under wraps,” she added. “If they wanted to come here, I’d show them around. I’d put them in the sweat lodge if they wanted to go and pray.”

Counterinformation Ops

Outside of the valve hunt, TigerSwan’s surveillance spread beyond the boundaries of the NoDAPL movement, portraying a range of progressive efforts as threatening.

“Illinois activists have switched their current focus from the environment to the POTUS and recent combat activity in Syria,” a TigerSwan operative reported in April. Yet the firm continued to closely monitor those groups. “Chicago is a key indicator of the ongoing rise of the progressive movement and the hub of the financial support for that movement,” another report noted.

Describing a pipeline divestment proposal presented to the Chicago City Council, TigerSwan wrote: “It will also affect the platform of the Democratic party, pushing it further left.”

TigerSwan also pushed to expand its efforts at shaping the public narrative around the pipeline, pitching its client regularly on the need for a counterinformation campaign.

“Chicago continues to foster continuance of the Narrative of Standing Rock,” an operative wrote on May 4, pointing to an issue of Scholastic News, a magazine distributed to elementary school kids, that featured water protectors on the cover. “The schools in the suburbs are now providing students with indoctrination of the same Standing Rock Narrative that the Native Americans are all being systematically repressed and discriminated against.”

All the while, TigerSwan sought contracts for new pipelines, and messaging efforts similar to those faced by Iowa’s Little Creek camp have begun to surface in other states where Energy Transfer Partners has a presence.

In August, pipeline opponents in Pennsylvania and Louisiana discovered videos posted on local Facebook pages dedicated to criticizing anti-pipeline activists, called PA Progress and Louisiana First. As The Intercept confirmed in earlier reporting, TigerSwan operatives have been working on the ETP-owned Mariner East 2 Pipeline, slated to run through Pennsylvania. In Louisiana, ETP is seeking to build the Bayou Bridge Pipeline, which would deliver crude from the Dakota Access Pipeline to the refineries and ports of the Gulf Coast.

The first video, posted on August 8, features a young man named Josh Baker warning Pennsylvania residents of the dangers associated with an anti-Mariner East camp called White Pine. The second, posted August 11, accuses an anti-Bayou Bridge activist in Louisiana of organizing protests for profit. It features the same man, who this time introduces himself as Brent Williamson.

On August 8, a video featuring an individual identified as “Josh Baker” appeared on a Facebook page criticizing anti-pipeline organizers in Pennsylvania. Video: PA Progress

On August 11, the same individual appeared in a similar video posted on the Louisiana First Facebook page, this time introduced as “Brent Williamson.” Video: Louisiana First

“We’re asking people in the area to please stay away from [members of the camp] if you see them. And if you see anything suspicious, call the number below,” says “Josh Baker,” listing the number of Pennsylvania’s Huntingdon County sheriff.

TigerSwan did not respond to questions about the videos, nor did administrators of the PA Progress or Louisiana First pages. ETP spokesperson Vicki Granado told The Intercept that the company had no involvement with either Facebook page.

Meanwhile, the chair of TigerSwan’s advisory board, retired Maj. Gen. James “Spider” Marks, has been criticized for failing to disclose his link to the security company in a number of op-eds denouncing protest activities related to ETP projects. After learning of Marks’s affiliation with TigerSwan, the Pennsylvania news outlet PennLive promised his work would not appear on its website again. Yet a new Marks op-ed appeared in the Washington Examiner on August 23, referring to the valve sabotage and stating, “If Islamist terrorists had sabotaged a U.S. oil pipeline, held a press conference to claim credit for their crime, then punctuated their declaration by defacing government property, it would be a national news story.”

In recent months, TigerSwan’s efforts to obtain new business have been stymied by increasing scrutiny from regulators.

In June, citing documents published by The Intercept, the North Dakota Private Investigation and Security Board sued TigerSwan for operating without a license for the duration of its work in that state. In July, the company was denied a license to operate in Louisiana. In Illinois, meanwhile, the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation had no record of TigerSwan even seeking a license, a Freedom of Information Act request revealed, despite the company having operated in the state for several months.

TigerSwan is appealing the Louisiana decision and fighting the North Dakota suit, demanding the state pay the firm’s attorneys’ fees. In legal filings, the company denied providing private security services at all in North Dakota, instead describing its activities as “management consulting.”

“Contrary to what has been alleged on the internet and elsewhere, the reports were not a summary of TigerSwan’s security and investigative activity,” a filing reads. “Except for information gathered by TigerSwan in North Carolina, the information was gathered by other companies hired directly by the client and the client’s contractors.” TigerSwan also denied that it “placed or attempted to place undercover private security agents within the protest group to carry out investigative and surveillance activities” in North Dakota.

TigerSwan did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment for this story. “We do not speak for TigerSwan,” ETP’s Granado told The Intercept. “I can confirm that we do use TigerSwan as an adviser for some of our security programs, however, beyond that we don’t discuss details of our security initiatives, which are designed to ensure the safety of our employees and the communities in which we live and work.”

In its suit accusing DAPL opponents of racketeering, ETP counts Reznicek and Montoya among members of a massive “enterprise” led by Greenpeace. The suit alleges that the two were “incited by the enterprise’s misinformation campaign” to vandalize the valves. The law firm representing the pipeline corporation is Kasowitz Benson Torres, which was started by Trump’s longtime private lawyer Marc Kasowitz. Kasowitz drew criticism this summer when he responded to an email from a stranger encouraging him to resign. “Watch your back, bitch,” he replied.

“At All Personal Costs”

When The Intercept first spoke with Jessica Reznicek, she denied TigerSwan’s allegations about her involvement in the pipeline vandalism, though she noted that she did not perceive property destruction as violent and had previously taken responsibility for smashing a window at Northrop Grumman. “[I] stayed, expressed my opinion, and told the public why I was there. I did not strike and run.”

“I don’t see property destruction as a bad thing — I see it as something that’s really honorable, and I commend those people, groups, or whatever that have taken it to that next level,” Ruby Montoya told The Intercept, after also denying a role in the vandalism. “I’m also glad they’re looking at me because that takes heat off of whoever else.”

But days later, Reznicek and Montoya took responsibility for many of the valve incidents and arsons, stating that their first action was a $2.5 million arson on election night and their last was in Wapello County, where they burned a valve with a blow torch at the beginning of May.

Reznicek and Montoya told The Intercept they had changed their story after consulting with each other and deciding that the TigerSwan reports offered them an opportunity to advance their cause. Both women said they acted alone, without consulting any other people.

“I guess this was one last opportunity for me to put my case forward in a system that I have no faith in,” Reznicek said. “This really is about getting this pipeline stopped. Apparently at all personal costs.”

Asked to comment on the way TigerSwan used the valve actions to justify the surveillance of others, Reznicek replied, “Ruby and I weighed that in at every point, particularly because we care very deeply for our friends and family and comrades. It is unfortunate that we live in this security state,” she added, but “I can’t allow that to limit my ability to act.”

Although TigerSwan reported sharing information related to the vandalism extensively with police and the FBI as it carried out its investigation, Montoya and Reznicek said they were never questioned or picked up. In the early morning of August 11, the FBI raided the Catholic Worker house where the two women live, hauling away bags of their belongings, reportedly including attorney-client privileged material. But so far, more than a month after their confession, they have not been charged.

To search all TigerSwan documents published by The Intercept, go to the TigerSwan project page on DocumentCloud.

The Intercept redacted the names of individuals included in internal TigerSwan documents unless those individuals directly communicated their willingness to be identified. The names of public figures and senior TigerSwan and law enforcement personnel were not redacted. Several of the situation reports TigerSwan submitted to Energy Transfer Partners in March, April, and May contained inconsistent or inaccurate dates on the title page of the report. In our articles, we defer to the date listed in the report’s file name.

The post TigerSwan Responded to Pipeline Vandalism by Launching Multistate Dragnet appeared first on The Intercept.

Drone footage by Dean Dedman, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe

Documents obtained via open records requests, as well as material from court cases, reveal new details about how the FAA and state agencies helped police and private security companies wrest control of the airspace above the NoDAPL resistance from indigenous water protectors.

Following the flight ban, the media was no longer permitted to use aircraft to cover the events without undergoing a review process. According to the FAA’s no-fly order, “Only relief aircraft ops under direction of North Dakota Tactical Operations Center [were] authorized in the airspace.” Meanwhile, aircraft operated by Dakota Access Pipeline security officials continued to fly over the area to conduct surveillance. The FAA confirmed to The Intercept that the flights would have been legal only if the private security aircraft were participating in a law enforcement action. Prosecutors have used footage from those flights as evidence in felony cases brought against pipeline opponents, displaying an unusual and troubling partnership between the private security operatives and law enforcement.

As The Intercept has previously reported, pipeline builder Energy Transfer Partners hired the shadowy mercenary firm TigerSwan in September 2016 to oversee its security operation. TigerSwan moved quickly to establish a collaborative relationship with law enforcement. The Intercept received more than 100 leaked documents from a TigerSwan contractor describing those efforts in detail, along with DAPL security’s broader strategy of using aerial surveillance, infiltration, and social media monitoring to counter the water protector movement. TigerSwan, which began as a military and State Department contractor, frequently used the language of counterterrorism to inflate threat assessments, at times comparing the water protectors to jihadi insurgents.

Court documents confirm that DAPL security personnel were coordinating their flights with state agencies. In a police report concerning a highly militarized October 27 police raid during the no-fly period, Lt. Cody Trom of the Bismarck Police Department wrote that a team of officers assigned to clear protesters from a bridge at County Road 134 included a “DAPL air asset.” A spokesperson for the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, one of the agencies leading the police response at Standing Rock, told The Intercept, “DAPL was not deputized.” The spokesperson did confirm, however, that law enforcement personnel were present on DAPL aircraft. “During no-fly zone periods, a law enforcement officer was always on board the helicopter. The helicopter was flown by a private contractor, and a law enforcement officer accompanied him to conduct aerial surveillance.”

As the temporary flight restriction went into effect, at least one DAPL security aircraft circled the airspace above the police raid on October 27, photographing water protectors and coordinating with police. 

The DAPL photos from that day have become key evidence in a federal felony case accusing five indigenous men of helping set fire to barricades on North Dakota County Road 134. If convicted, they each face a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison.

In a January 24 affidavit and in a later court hearing, Special Agent Derek Hill of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives described how he identified at least two of the defendants, Michael Markus and Brennon Nastacio. “While law enforcement was conducting their operation, a helicopter that was being utilized by the Dakota Access Pipeline was monitoring the situation from the air,” Hill wrote in the affidavit. “A passenger in the helicopter was utilizing a digital camera to document the operation, and these digital photos were provided to law enforcement.”

“From a constitutional standpoint, landowners and others who have property rights have every right to show the police evidence that someone has trespassed on their land,” says Lee Rowland, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “But if this instead amounted to deputizing a private company to take aerial surveillance of protesters on public property, including streets, and snitch on them to the police, that’s deeply problematic.”

According to water protectors, a DAPL helicopter frequently strayed from Dakota Access property. “The yellow helicopter that we’d identified as being DAPL’s flew to the south of DAPL property lots of times on October 27,” says Dallas Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network, who often filmed and livestreamed from the water protector camps in North Dakota.

A spokesperson for the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services did not respond to a request for comment. Vicki Granado, a spokesperson for Energy Transfer Partners, told the Intercept, “We are thankful for the professionalism and the services provided by all the law enforcement teams that were on the ground in North Dakota that ensured the safety not only of our employees, but the safety of those who live and work in the Mandan area. Beyond that, we do not comment on our security programs.” TigerSwan did not respond to inquiries.

A spokesperson for the FAA noted, “The Federal Aviation Administration carefully considers requests from law enforcement and other entities before establishing Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFR) in U.S. airspace. The TFR over the pipeline protest was approved to ensure the safety of aircraft in support of law enforcement and the safety of people on the ground.”

The FAA spokesperson noted that the flight restriction offered provisions for media to operate aircraft as long as they complied with FAA rules around licensing and safety, and coordinated with the agency before flying. The agency did not respond to questions about how many media operators obtained waivers, stating, “We did not deny any requests from media who met those requirements.” One drone pilot, Rob Levine, eventually obtained a media waiver, but only in a small segment of the restriction zone.

“I told the FAA, the difference between how we’re approaching this is that I’m exercising sovereignty,” said Dewey, who is Newe-Numah/Paiute-Shoshone. “I said, ‘If you want to bring up a no-fly zone, you need to go to the tribal council and make your request to them.’”

The no-fly zone came at a moment of heightened tension between police and pipeline opponents, as water protectors, claiming what they called “eminent domain,” built a new camp on land owned by Energy Transfer Partners that would have been covered under the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie. Two days after the no-fly zone was imposed, law enforcement and private security officers forcibly evicted the new camp, using military-grade armored personnel carriers and shooting protesters with rubber bullets and other “less-than-lethal” weapons.

Yet even before the no-fly zone, law enforcement had been targeting drone operators. On October 19, Aaron Turgeon, a member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe of South Dakota, was charged with two counts of “reckless endangerment” and one count of “physical obstruction of a government function” for flying his drone in the vicinity of a law enforcement operation. Prosecutors also charged Dewey with misdemeanor “stalking” for flying his drone near a DAPL security guard. Turgeon was eventually found not guilty, and Dewey’s charges were dropped.

Law enforcement went so far as to shoot at a drone belonging to Dean Dedman, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, in the days leading up to the temporary flight restriction, claiming that the drone was flying too close to a helicopter.

An October 24 law enforcement email obtained by The Intercept shows police and emergency response officials communicating with a representative of the California-based security company Trak Assets, which had offered a demonstration on “drone defense technology” for the police to use in North Dakota. And a “logistics tracking sheet” shows that law enforcement acquired a “drone shoot down device” from the Dakota Zoo to “disable protestor drones” on November 4. The document notes that the device was eventually returned to the zoo.

Screenshot of a law enforcement email with “logistics tracking sheet” from Oct. 24, 2016.

Recognizing the “substantial sensitivities” of the issue, officials “at the highest levels” of the FAA weighed in on the decision to institute the no-fly zone at Standing Rock. Internal records show the request generated controversy within the agency. “I know this is a high profile event so I wanted you onboard with my denial. I plan on denying the request based on there being no hazard from the ground to [aircraft], exp: no shots fired,” wrote Kevin George, an air traffic control specialist at the FAA, on October 23. George noted that violations of law by drone pilots would be more appropriately pursued individually by police.

When a request to renew the restriction was submitted in November, FAA officials again expressed hesitation. “Candidly,” an FAA official wrote at the time, “some of the involved tribes are arguing that the FAA’s action to implement a [temporary flight restriction] was driven not by a genuine safety/security threat, but rather by the desire of the local [law enforcement agents] handling the situation to prevent the protesters from using drones to surveil unlawful actions on the part of [law enforcement] that infringe on the protesters’ First Amendment rights.”

“A pattern we have to be very vigilant about in the future is that the FAA tends to just respond in lockstep to requests from law enforcement,” the ACLU’s Rowland told The Intercept. “And we need to ensure that law enforcement does not get used to the perverse incentive of asking for an over-broad no-fly zone that creates a blackout on media surveillance.”

Ultimately, North Dakota law enforcement officers helped sway FAA officials by suggesting that anti-DAPL water protectors would take up arms and consumer drones might cause a fatal accident. “There is also good intel they are going to be even more desperate in their actions,” wrote Sean Johnson of the state’s Department of Emergency Services.

In the same email exchange, Johnson alleged that pilots had intentionally flown their drones toward law enforcement aircraft, and “it is only a matter of time until a law enforcement officer, a lawful protester, or member of the public is injured (or worse yet killed) as a result of unlawful actor usage of UAS.” Highway Patrol officer Shannon Henke added, “We can only pray for the best that a flight crew is not lost due to the violations that keep occurring.” Henke claimed that law enforcement had observed protesters wielding “both long guns and handguns” and stated, “We need to ensure the movement of law enforcement trying to protect the innocent is not being broadcast live by the use of drones.”

In the spring of 2017, as TigerSwan expanded its surveillance effort to new camps in multiple states, the security firm encouraged staff to “focus on becoming Certified Drone Pilots to support the DAPL program,” according to a situation report dated May 5 that was leaked to The Intercept. A day later, TigerSwan confirmed that one of its contractors “completed drone training and has successfully passed the drone operator test” and “is now an official drone operator in the state of SD.”

Top photo: A screenshot from a drone video over a circle of Dakota Access Pipeline opponents on Sept. 20, 2016.

The post Police Used Private Security Aircraft for Surveillance in Standing Rock No-Fly Zone appeared first on The Intercept.

Although it was not the most violent confrontation between the pipeline resistance and law enforcement, no other incident better illustrates the collaboration between federal, local, and state police and private security in suppressing the NoDAPL movement, nor would any be as symbolic of the historic proportions of the native-led fight. A year later, two other pipeline fights — against Enbridge Line 3 and Keystone XL — are brewing nearby in South Dakota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. As indigenous leaders in those fights stand again on treaty rights against the pipelines, the October 27 standoff and the eviction of Treaty Camp have become a roadmap for both water protectors and law enforcement as they prepare for battles to come.

The Intercept has obtained hours of police bodycam and aerial footage, as well as photographs, audio recordings, and a large set of incident reports describing police activities during the October 27 raid. That material, selections of which appear below, along with interviews with more than a dozen water protectors who were present that day, paints the most detailed picture yet of the most dramatic standoff between indigenous people and U.S. police forces in over four decades.

Drive north on Highway 1806 through the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, cross the Cannonball River, and you enter unceded treaty territory — land indigenous people never agreed to relinquish.

Immediately north of the river begins federal land controlled by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, where the largest Dakota Access Pipeline resistance camp, known as Oceti Sakowin, was located for seven months beginning in August 2016. Just north of there, the Dakota Access Pipeline now crosses the highway. Energy Transfer Partners bought the property on either side of the road, known as Cannonball Ranch. The legality of its sale to ETP is questionable under a North Dakota law that blocks corporations from buying agricultural land. But North Dakota law aside, native historians say, that land should never have been for sale: It belongs to the Sioux. If the Fort Laramie treaties in 1851 and 1868 had been honored, the site would still be controlled by the Great Sioux Nation.

For water protectors, the fight against the pipeline was only the latest episode in two centuries of native resistance to U.S. government incursion into the northern Great Plains, part of a lineage that includes the 1876 Battle of Greasy Grass, where indigenous people defeated the U.S. 7th Cavalry in defense of their treaty rights to South Dakota’s Black Hills; the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, where as many as 300 Lakota people were killed by U.S. soldiers; and the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, where armed members of the American Indian Movement faced off with federal agents in protest of a corrupt local government and the U.S. government’s legacy of broken treaties.

This latest confrontation was not supposed to involve guns — the water protectors were mostly committed to unarmed opposition — but it did invoke that bloody history.

Law enforcement planned to evict the Treaty Camp on October 26, but a soupy fog descended on the hills. A small envoy of local, state, and federal officers drove toward the blockade that water protectors had erected on the highway to keep police out.

They were greeted by Mekasi Camp Horinek, a member of the Ponca tribe from Oklahoma, whose uncle Carter Camp helped organize the Wounded Knee occupation in 1973. He was joined by several other pipeline opponents.

The negotiators talked in circles, with Horinek and his companions returning repeatedly to the issue of the Fort Laramie treaties, which law enforcement repeatedly argued was not their jurisdiction.

“So is this about water and oil, or is this about 140 years?” Cass County Sheriff Paul Laney replied, referring to the Great Sioux War, which ended with the U.S. government’s annexation of the sacred Black Hills.

“Everything. All of that. We’ve had enough. We’ve had enough,” one of the water protectors said.

As the conversation broke down, Horinek declared, “Highway 1806 is now a no-surrender line, and that camp is no retreat.”

“That’s your final word?” Laney asked.

“That’s the final word,” Horinek replied.

Police recording of negotiations between pipeline opponents and law enforcement officials on Oct. 26, 2016.

Reflecting on that day nearly a year later, Horinek explained that the experiences of native people 140 years ago are impossible to disentangle from the poverty and environmental contamination seen across Indian Country today.

To him, the October 27 raid was a visible reminder that the past is present. “I wanted the world to see this militarized force coming in like it’s the 1800s with their gatling guns and their advanced weaponry,” he told The Intercept. “I wanted pictures of them slashing those teepees; I wanted pictures of them pulling open those teepees and arresting families.”

Law enforcement officials tear down a tent at Treaty Camp on Oct. 27 2016.

In the weeks preceding the founding of the Treaty Camp, direct action had become a daily ritual for residents of the resistance camps nearby. On some mornings, convoys of cars carrying water protectors would weave through the hills toward construction sites or government buildings identified as protest targets. A team of lawyers stood at the ready to assist those who were arrested and detained. But the temperature was dropping below freezing at night. Winter would doubtlessly sap energy from the movement.

Meanwhile, scouts and drones sent out into the hills were returning with reports that the construction was getting closer to the highway crossing and to the river.

Water protectors felt a growing sense of urgency.

Joye Braun came to the NoDAPL movement already a veteran pipeline fighter. She was involved with a Keystone XL opposition camp on South Dakota’s Cheyenne River Sioux reservation. After Obama’s State Department denied Keystone XL a key permit, putting it to a halt, Braun became the first person to pitch a teepee at the first DAPL resistance camp, called Sacred Stone.

“The only way you can stop a pipeline when it gets that drastic is to go in front of it,” Braun said. “This was our land. This is our land.”

The Dakota Access Pipeline cuts through land that by treaty belonged to the Great Sioux Nation, which was later confined to reservations like Standing Rock. The clashes on October 27, 2016, took place in the area indicated in red above. Source: Forensic Architecture, 2017

According to treaties signed between the U.S. government and indigenous nations in the 19th century, Cannonball Ranch — the land DAPL eventually purchased — should have never been for sale.

That’s because the pipeline route cuts through land that the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, intended to buy peace and safe passage for settlers moving through the area, established as belonging to the Sioux. In 1868, the treaty was superseded by a second treaty that established the Great Sioux reservation. But while that treaty created a reservation whose borders were further south, it also determined that the land DAPL bought was “unceded Indian territory” — a designation that holds to this day, despite the beliefs of some U.S. elected officials.

“Unceded land is land that was never given over or conceded; it’s essentially stolen land,” Nick Estes, a Lakota historian, told The Intercept. Cannonball Ranch, specifically, was “illegally settled,” Estes said, and acquired as private property through squatters’ rights.

Only an act of Congress can abridge a treaty, opening unceded territory for non-native settlement, Estes said — but that never happened with this particular land, the status of which remains disputed. Disputes over unceded land have arisen before — most notably over the Black Hills, which resulted in a 1980 Supreme Court decision that offered a monetary settlement as reparation for the settled land — but no actual land restitution. Indigenous people have refused to take that money.

“Turning private land back into indigenous land … is near impossible,” said Estes. “Private property always trumps indigenous land rights, and that’s just how the federal system works.”

“People think … oh, that was back in the 1800s, and that was a long time ago, and those don’t have any merit today,” said Braun. “That’s my land, that’s the Lakota and Dakota people of this territory.”

Native American activist Joye Braun — the first person to pitch a teepee at the first DAPL resistance camp — talks to The Intercept about the fight for her native land.

On October 23, Braun moved her teepee to what would become the Treaty Camp. But she never doubted that a police confrontation was imminent. Two days earlier, police had moved their staging area from the Mandan airport, a 40-minute drive from the heart of the protests, to Fort Rice, 10 minutes away.

“I think every night I only got about an hour of sleep because we were constantly under threat of them moving in,” Braun said. “There were constant rumors — they’re coming, they’re coming, they’re coming.”

Then, on the morning of October 27, “They came marching in.”

Law enforcement officials training in darkness.

To Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier, whose department led the law enforcement response to the pipeline protests, treaty enforcement is the federal government’s job. “I understand the treaties and what that’s about,” he told The Intercept.

“This was a federal problem from the beginning of it,” he said, adding, “We as the county officials can’t do anything about it.”

“That’s the irony of it,” Estes said. “County sheriffs and any law enforcement officials are supposed to uphold federal law and the Constitution, and in the Constitution, it says that the treaties are the supreme law of the land.”

Nonetheless, Kirchmeier would lead some 300 officers to clear the Treaty Camp on October 27.

Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier tells The Intercept about the various law enforcement agencies that came together on Oct. 27 and the tools they used, including LRADs, Tasers and OC spray.

It wasn’t just local police that would join the operation. In August, North Dakota’s Department of Emergency Services activated the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, which allows states to import police from other states. On October 27, 97 out-of-state officers participated in the raid – approximately a third of the force.

An array of federal agencies was involved, too. Ninety federal law enforcement officials from various agencies had taken part in monitoring the DAPL resistance by October 23, police records show — and 14 of them took part in the October 27 operations, according to police. Meanwhile, the law enforcement Emergency Operations Center in Bismarck, established to respond to the DAPL protests, hosted daily meetings that included intelligence officers from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and other agencies.

Still, after more than two months of DAPL demonstrations, police felt under-resourced, frustrated that the federal government refused to take control of the situation by making a final decision on the pipeline or sending more support.

This would be one of the largest operations the multi-agency force had carried out. “The biggest concern is that there were several hundred individuals that were camped out on private property, and that could not continue,” Sheriff Kirchmeier said.

1. On the morning of October 27, 2016, as law enforcement officers moved to clear the 1851 Treaty Camp, water protectors set up barricades on Highway 1806 and County Road 134, in an effort to halt their advance. 2. Police slowly moved down Highway 1806, arresting dozens of water protectors and forcing them to retreat. 3. At County Road 134, a group of water protectors set a barricade on fire before retreating. 4. Kyle Thompson, a DAPL security guard armed with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, drove his track at high speed towards one of the camps, before being pushed off the road and chased into the water by a group of water protectors. Source: Forensic Architecture, 2017

Treaty Camp would be defended at two front lines: on Highway 1806, where water protectors set up a barricade directly north of the camp, and on County Road 134, a dirt road that bisects the highway south of Treaty Camp and north of Oceti Sakowin Camp. Water protectors suspected police would use the dirt road to cut off access to the larger camp, where thousands of water protectors had stayed behind.

Desiree Kane, a Miwok freelance reporter who stayed at the resistance camps from May to December 2016, approached County Road 134 as the standoff with police began. Within hours, barricades were set ablaze in between the water protectors and the police.

Despite the flames, Kane said, “There was an overwhelming sense of calm.” Singers sang prayer songs to the beat of a hand drum. On the hills, horse riders looked down on the gathering. “I think it’s portrayed as mayhem, but that’s not what I witnessed.”

At Highway 1806, however, arguments had broken out about whether to allow police to extinguish a barricade fire that was sending smoke billowing into the hills. Horinek backed away from his cry of “No surrender; no retreat.” Despite objections, he pushed people back, allowing police to inch forward. “I think had we not slowly pulled back that there would have been loss of life on October 27, 2016,” he said.

Soon, law enforcement began deploying pepper spray, Tasers, rubber bullets, sound cannons, and batons against water protectors.

Frank Archambault, a Standing Rock tribal member and member of a camp security group, found himself pleading with water protectors to avoid provoking police. “We’re all the time trying to stop them from throwing stuff, so they don’t have an excuse to shoot those people,” he said.

Pipeline protesters throw objects at law enforcement agents, who respond with pepper spray.

Allison Renville, a member of the Great Sioux Nation from South Dakota, saw historical trauma playing out in the mixed reactions of her fellow water protectors. “A lot of it had to do with fight or flight, a natural response when you’re threatened that bad that you’re waiting to die,” she said.

“When I went out there, I went out with the mindset of, I’m going out there to protect and stand for what is right, and if that costs me my life, then so be it,” said Elih Lizama, an Apache and Mayan pipeline opponent from California, who joined a group of horse riders assigned to patrol the hills that made up the DAPL property. But he didn’t equate readiness for death with violence.

“They brought guns to this fight,” Lizama said. “All we have is our prayer.”

At a meeting of DAPL security personnel held the day before the Treaty Camp was raided, a PowerPoint was presented describing a volatile situation. “There are outsiders deliberately moving the rioters toward violent action,” the PowerPoint said. Under a category labeled “What we know,” it noted, “Rioters do possess weapons.” Under “What we do not know”: “Number and type of weapons in the camp.”

Private security firm TigerSwan shared this intelligence update with law enforcement a day before the raid of Treaty Camp.

TigerSwan, a firm made up of former military personnel hired by Energy Transfer Partners to manage its sprawling security operation, organized the daily briefings and made sure police knew what was being discussed. Public records show that Mercer County Sheriff Dean Danzeisen and Morton County Sheriff’s Deputy Lynn Wanner received the presentations.

A spokesperson for Morton County said that they only used the information from briefings for “situational awareness.” Mercer County did not respond to requests for comment. TigerSwan and Energy Transfer Partners did not respond either.

In an interview with The Intercept, Kirchmeier insisted that law enforcement kept private security at a distance. “When we did a law enforcement function or we had a law enforcement incident, I did not want the private security anywhere near where the law enforcement was,” he said. “Could they stay up on the hilltops and that type of thing? Yes, because it was on Dakota Access property.”

But he admitted that law enforcement and DAPL security did sometimes work together, “depending on the circumstance.”

“Did we talk to private security? Absolutely. We used them as a resource just like many other resources that are out there,” he said, listing asset sharing that included police using private security’s snow mobiles and ATVs for their operations.

For example, police were using ATVs owned by DAPL to distribute their own personnel throughout the sweeping plains, including at least one sniper, who crouched in the weeds aiming at Highway 134. A Morton County Sheriff’s Department spokesperson told The Intercept, “Because [law enforcement] received numerous threats that protesters had snipers in the hills and people hiding with weapons in the trees, we had to take precautions. Our [law enforcement] was not there to shoot at targets, but rather to observe and protect our officers in the area.”

On the day of the Treaty Camp raid, private security personnel also provided police with extra hands.

As the line of police moved down Highway 1806, Alyssa Beaulieu, of the Red Lake band of Ojibwe in Minnesota, and a handful of others jumped a fence and started running though the field where pipeline construction was underway. She was quickly surrounded by men in plainclothes.

“They were trying to herd us,” she added, describing how police and security were able to control people’s movement, “so I just stood there.”

“It was just a prideful thing. I could have run, I could have gone back to camp,” she added. “But I had a moment.” She and another protester were tackled to the ground by four men, including two DAPL security guards. Private security assisted police in attaching zip ties around her wrists.

Alyssa Beaulieu is arrested by police assisted by DAPL security guards.

A spokesperson for the Morton County Sheriff’s Department confirmed that the two men (shown in law enforcement video footage in the brown coat and the camouflage bandana) helping handcuff Beaulieu and her companion were DAPL security officers.

“Security was not arresting – they do not have the authority to do so – they are only helping with detaining the unlawful protesters,” the spokesperson wrote in an email to The Intercept. The spokesperson added that it was “not any different than if an intruder was on your private property – you have every right to try to hold them, detain them, as the police arrive to arrest them.”

A selection of law enforcement reports concerning the events of October 27, 2016.

Deeper in the hills, horse riders were facing off with police and private security in ATVs, in trucks, and even in the air. Lizama had been scouting on horseback in the plains for days, watching the activities of police and private security, “We knew they were dropping people off to spy on people from the hills,” he said.

Where horses couldn’t go, water protectors sent drones to conduct reconnaissance. But by the day of the raid, the aircraft had been officially banned. On October 23, the day the first tents went up at Treaty Camp, North Dakota officials submitted a request to the Federal Aviation Administration for a rare “temporary flight restriction” covering the airspace above the pipeline resistance.

The no-fly zone was in place between October 25 and December 13 — allowing “only relief aircraft ops under direction of North Dakota Tactical Operations Center,” according to the FAA. But on the day of the raid, DAPL’s helicopter continued to fly above, alongside North Dakota Highway Patrol aircraft, officially becoming part of the law enforcement’s eviction effort. According to Kirchmeier, a law enforcement officer always accompanied DAPL personnel in the private aircraft.

From above, police and private security captured footage of the raid and the action in the countryside, some of which would be used later in the prosecution of water protectors.

Security footage shows horseback riders facing off with police and private security in ATVs, trucks, and helicopters.

Meanwhile, on Highway 1806, police were breaking up various ceremonies in the midst of the standoff. They separated and arrested a huddle of elders immersed in prayer. Joseph Hock, of the Mackinac tribe from Michigan, was pulled out of a sweat lodge. “I was sort of a little fuzzy-headed by then,” he said. “It was like jumping in ice-cold water in the middle of winter, that’s what it felt like.”

In the distance, smoke billowed, as a bulldozer was set on fire in an area off 1806 where DAPL stored its equipment. The group blocking County Road 134 had retreated.

Still, there was defiance in the faces of many, even as it became clear the camp had fallen. “Regardless if we come out of this whole thing heroes or not, we were fighting for our people that day; we were fighting for our land,” Renville said. “We felt like we were winning.”

In the hills, three water protectors on horseback put into action a plan formulated by Lizama and his crew in the first days of Treaty Camp: They drove a herd of buffalo from an area ranch toward the frontline. As police moved farther and farther south, the buffalo stampeded in the background. “This is the epitome of Indian Country — what it’s like to be here. We’re in a modern-day Indian war,” Renville said. “When it comes to these attacks on the environment, these treaty laws are the only thing that can save us because they’re the supreme law of the land.”

A herd of stampeding buffalo is seen from a security helicopter.

As water protectors retreated, a call came over the radio, “Gunman, gunman, gunman.”

A white truck careened down Highway 1806 toward the big Oceti Sakowin camp, where thousands of DAPL opponents had stayed as the smaller front-line camp was evicted.

“All of a sudden a guy with a gun comes toward us,” said Mike Fasig, a member of the camp security group. Fasig thought of the camp full of women, elders, and children, imagining the melee that would follow if the gunman opened fire near the police line.

Fasig and another security group member, Israel Hernandez, jumped into their respective vehicles and sped toward the gunman’s vehicle.

Mike Fasig tells the story of a white truck driven by an armed man that came careening towards Oceti Sakowin camp in this interview with Intercept staff.

The man at the wheel of the white truck was Kyle Thompson, a guard for Leighton security, one of about half a dozen private security companies working to guard the pipeline. Although Thompson was ex-military, Leighton mostly hired off-duty cops, including, said company president Kevin Mayberry, officers from the Morton County Sheriff’s Department and other local agencies. Morton County told The Intercept that Leighton had requested personnel to watch an equipment yard. “The sheriff made the deputies aware of the job opportunity to serve as private security in their off hours (essentially, a second job – they were paid by Leighton). It was only for 12 days from Aug. 5-17 because once the protest began, the deputies were needed to respond to that activity and worked plenty of overtime with that,” said a spokesperson.

For the water protectors, private security had been a constant presence since August. Scouts like Lizama encountered them dressed in ghillie suits, which are used by the military to disguise soldiers as piles of grass, hiding in the countryside at night. They followed drivers around. Rumors of security infiltrating the camps — later proven to be founded — had circulated for weeks.

The sudden appearance on October 27 of an armed private security officer was the manifestation of a threat they had always felt was lurking.

In an interview with The Intercept, Thompson said he drove toward the camp responding to a message that equipment was on fire near Highway 1806.

He said that as he approached the side road where the burning construction equipment was located, wearing a red bandana to disguise himself as a water protector, he saw a crowd of people. “I got super paranoid and nervous. I was security, and in a sense behind the lines,” Thompson said. Sitting next to him was his AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

Mayberry said that his company largely stayed away from protesters and did not deploy disguised guards. “We had no guards doing that, so if he was doing that, or if somebody was doing that, that’s on him; that has nothing to do with our company,” he said, adding that non-law enforcement were not supposed to be armed. “We didn’t even know he had a gun with him,” he said.

Water protectors noticed the unfamiliar truck and asked Thompson who he was. “Brian,” he lied.

But the water protectors didn’t miss his rifle.

“They were like, stop that truck. If they stopped me and got into it, I realize they would have known who I was. I don’t know what they would have done,” Thompson recalled. So he sped down the road, steering into the ditch to avoid pedestrians. As he drove, people attempted to block his path.

“The suicide by law enforcement thing popped back into my head,” Thompson said later, recalling a warning he said he’d heard in one of the daily security briefings. “These people are almost willing to get run over.”

“If he would have shot those rounds off, the police would have killed us,” said Horinek. As was the case with many other water protectors, his thoughts immediately went to Wounded Knee, when a single shot fired as the U.S. 7th Cavalry descended on an encampment of Lakota people sparked a massacre.

As Thompson’s white truck neared the Oceti Sakowin camp, Fasig veered left, ramming Thompson to a halt. Thompson emerged from the vehicle holding his AR-15, finger on the trigger. The crowd screamed at him to put down the gun. He backed into the pond on the side of the road as water protectors, one armed with a knife, surrounded him and attempted to disarm him. Pipeline opponents set his truck on fire.

While Thompson was eventually disarmed and arrested by officers with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he was never charged. Instead, it would be Fasig and two others who tried to disarm Thompson who would face felony charges.

To Fasig, the outcome seemed twisted. “If you have an unknown person wearing a mask with an AR-15 that took the license plates off his truck, and he’s going through a ditch and driving around people in an aggressive manner, trying to get close to your schools and your churches — if the citizens in that city take and do everything they can to stop that man, that city would have a parade,” he said. “But when it comes to employees of Dakota Access doing anything like that toward Native Americans, we all of a sudden become criminals.”

Many of the 142 people arrested at Treaty Camp that day told The Intercept that they were held on the highway in handcuffs for hours, stripped of their clothes, and had identification numbers written on their arms.

Eventually, they were loaded onto school buses, some barefoot and in their underwear, and taken to Morton County, where they were packed into dog kennels before being shipped to jails across the state, including some several hours away, without being told where they were going. Upon release, many returned to find that their cars had been impounded and their tents and property dumped on a pile on the ground.

Hock, who was pulled out of the sweat lodge, said he returned to find his belongings, including a sacred pipe, had been urinated on.

“They wanted to degrade and humiliate us so that we would turn back and go home,” he told The Intercept. “But what they actually did added to the resolve to go ahead and stand up and fight even more.”

The spokesperson for the Morton County Sheriff’s Department confirmed that “fenced cubicles” were used on that day but stressed that “all essential services” were provided to those temporarily held in them. She added that “the inmates had the number written on their arms so it couldn’t be easily removed,” as had happened on previous occasions, and noted that those arrested were only allowed to keep one layer of clothes for safety reasons. “If they didn’t want that layer to be their long underwear, they had the option of going to the restroom to remove the underwear and change into their pants,” the spokesperson wrote.

She also confirmed that those arrested were not told where they were being taken to in order to avoid “the potential for the bus being stopped and surrounded on the highway by a mass of people, or a mass of people gathering at the destination attempting to disrupt the process and creating a dangerous situation.”

“The private security company working for the landowner likely knows what was done with property left behind,” the spokesperson added, noting that as those arrested were trespassing, the property owners had no obligation to return their belongings. “If there was property urinated upon, it was not done by law enforcement.”

In all, over the course of seven months, 838 people faced charges in at least 427 separate DAPL-related criminal cases in North Dakota, according to the Water Protector Legal Collective, a group of lawyers representing many of those defendants. As of late September, 427 people’s cases remained open, 289 were dismissed, 105 resolved through plea deals or other pretrial diversions, and 10 resulted in convictions. Two more people were convicted and imprisoned last week — the first to receive a jail sentence in connection to last year’s protests.

Timothy Cominghay, a member of Freshet, a native collective that’s been providing support to activists returning to North Dakota for court dates, talks to The Intercept about the Oct. 27 arrests.

The most serious charges involve incidents that took place on October 27.

Five people accused of helping set the County Road 134 bridge on fire — as well as one person accused of setting a Highway 1806 barricade ablaze — were charged with “commission of a civil disorder” and “using fire to commit a civil disorder,” federal charges that carry a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison. And a woman named Red Fawn Fallis faces three federal felony charges — after a gun went off when officers tackled her to the ground on the day of the Treaty Camp raid.  She faces the possibility of life in prison.

“A lot of people thought that it was over after Standing Rock, and they didn’t think how this is years long. We have cases scheduled out through July,” said Timothy Cominghay, a member of Freshet — a native collective that’s been providing support to those returning to North Dakota for their court dates. “This is just a different type of resistance.”

Months after he drove his truck toward the Oceti Sakowin Camp, Thompson, the private security guard, emerged as an unlikely ally to those facing charges for attempting to disarm him.

“The water protectors that day, they had a mission to protect their own people,” Thompson told Myron Dewey, a water protector and journalist with Digital Smoke Signals, in a Facebook Live interview on July 12. “It was just a miscommunication on both sides, I believe, that made us do what we did.”

Following that interview, a state prosecutor dropped charges against Brennon Nastacio, one of the water protectors that had attempted to disarm Thompson in the water, saying that Thompson’s statements had raised “significant doubt as to whether the state could meet its burden of proof with regard to the charge of terrorizing.” According to an agreement with the court, Fasig and Hernandez will see their charges dismissed in a year if they pay fines and commit no crimes.

“I’m ready for this all to be over with. But I also want to help and get the truth out there. The charges people are facing are a little bit extreme for what they did,” Thompson told The Intercept. “I feel like I have people who don’t like me on both sides now. I feel like a lot of protectors that don’t like me. A lot of law enforcement that don’t like me.”

Most water protectors and police have doubled down on their resolve — and new pipeline fights have picked up across the country.

“There is a lot of interest throughout the country on what happened and how we handled it, what we learned, and those type of issues,” Sheriff Kirchmeier told The Intercept. “I have been around, went to several other states and talking to emergency managers, to other sheriffs, to those individuals who are interested in it. The main interest is trying to find out a little bit about the background, the history of it, and what we could do, and what we did do for the safety of everybody involved.”

Joye Braun is preparing for the next treaty stand. The newly revived Keystone XL Pipeline would swing just outside the boundary of her Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation and awaits a major decision from Nebraska.

“There won’t be another Standing Rock, just like there won’t be a Wounded Knee ’73,” she said. “But we learned a lot of lessons.”

If the Keystone XL Pipeline begins construction, Braun will pitch a teepee at another frontline camp.

Top photos: Some 142 people were arrested on October 27, 2016, as law enforcement raided the 1851 Treaty Camp. Police photographed them ons site with their arrest information. [Source: law enforcement photo]

The post Law Enforcement Descended On Standing Rock A Year Ago And Changed the DAPL Fight Forever appeared first on The Intercept.

For months, a conference room wall at TigerSwan’s Apex, North Carolina, headquarters was covered with a web-like map of funding nodes the firm believed it had uncovered — linking billionaire backers to nonprofit organizations to pipeline opponents protesting at Standing Rock. It was a “showpiece” for board members and ETP executives, according to a former TigerSwan contractor — part of a project that had little to do with the pipeline’s physical security.

In August, the law firm founded by Marc Kasowitz, Donald Trump’s personal attorney for more than a decade, filed a 187-page racketeering complaint against Greenpeace, Earth First, and the divestment group BankTrack in the U.S. District Court of North Dakota, seeking $300 million in damages on behalf of Energy Transfer Partners. The NoDAPL movement, the suit claims, was driven by “a network of putative not-for-profits and rogue eco-terrorist groups who employ patterns of criminal activity and campaigns of misinformation to target legitimate companies and industries with fabricated environmental claims.”

“It was as if the entire campaign came in a box. And of course it did,” the suit alleges. “Its objective was not to protect the environment or Native Americans but to produce as sensational and public a dispute as possible, and to use that publicity and emotion to drive fundraising.”

Among the nonprofit network’s alleged crimes: “perpetrating acts of terrorism under the U.S. Patriot Act, including destruction of an energy facility, destruction of hazardous liquid pipeline facility, arson and bombing of government property risking or causing injury or death.”

“We felt compelled to file the lawsuit against Greenpeace and others because we want the truth to come out about the illegal actions that took place in North Dakota and the funding of these actions,” ETP spokesperson Vicki Granado told The Intercept. “In many cases, the only way the truth comes out is through the legal process.”

The case was filed under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, passed in 1970 to prosecute organized crime — primarily the mob. Greenpeace says it amounts to a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or SLAPP, designed to curtail free speech through expensive, time-consuming litigation.

“It grossly distorts the law and facts at Standing Rock,” said Greenpeace general counsel Tom Wetterer. “We’ll win the lawsuit, but it’s not really what this is about for ETP. What they’re really trying to do is silence future protests and advocacy work against the company and other corporations.”

“[The lawsuit] had some major racist overtones. They were basically saying that we were not intelligent enough to know for ourselves what the possibilities were in case the pipeline were to leak. They were basically saying we were manipulated,” said Linda Black Elk, a member of the Catawba Nation who lives on the Standing Rock reservation and organized against the pipeline months before the protests began. “I think the whole purpose of it is to scare tribes from further activism when it comes to the fossil fuel industries and to scare these green groups to keep them from supporting us in those future fights.”

A Short-Lived Line of Work

TigerSwan, which got its start working U.S. government contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq, was hired by Energy Transfer Partners to coordinate the DAPL operation in September 2016, after dogs handled by private security officers were caught on film biting pipeline opponents. The firm began collecting information on the movement’s funding streams soon afterward, submitting intelligence to ETP via daily situation reports, more than 100 of which were leaked to The Intercept by a TigerSwan contractor.

But the effort to build a lawsuit began in earnest in January. TigerSwan personnel were tasked directly by lawyers working for ETP with fulfilling information requests, according to two former contractors. Situation reports from the beginning of February note that the company planned to “continue to proceed with the ETP legal team’s requests.”

In response to the requests, TigerSwan personnel sent reports on trespassing incidents and pipeline sabotage, including information about who was suspected to be involved and monetary damages caused by the work stoppages. The firm also compiled descriptions of movement leaders and individuals arrested by law enforcement, and tracked donations to DAPL-related GoFundMe accounts. Much of the intelligence collection was carried out via fake social media accounts and infiltration of protest camps by TigerSwan operatives.

According to the former contractors, the company intended to sell its legal investigative services to future clients. A PowerPoint presentation obtained by The Intercept, which a former contractor described as marketing material to attract a new contract, shows TigerSwan applying its follow-the-money tactics to a new pipeline fight against Pennsylvania’s Mariner East 2 project. The presentation traces nonprofit funds to various “action arms,” which include activist groups — Lancaster Against Pipelines and Marcellus Shale Earth First — as well as a member of the press, StateImpact, a regionally focused public radio project.

“As concerns StateImpact, the TigerSwan graphic is incorrect,” editor Scott Blanchard told The Intercept. “StateImpact, which covers Pennsylvania’s energy economy, is independent of outside influence and is not aligned with any stakeholders.”

While TigerSwan eventually landed security work on the Pennsylvania pipeline, its RICO work for Energy Transfer Partners was short-lived. By early March, the legal team working for ETP had pulled the security firm off the lawsuit. Former TigerSwan contractors speculated the firm’s lack of experience building legal cases made it ill-equipped for the project.

Michael Bowe, the Kasowitz attorney representing ETP in the RICO case, told The Intercept, “We did not retain or work with TigerSwan.” Former TigerSwan personnel agreed that the ETP lawyers working most closely with TigerSwan were not with Kasowitz.

ETP declined to comment on TigerSwan’s work, stating, “We do not comment on any specifics related to our security programs.” A TigerSwan spokesperson stated, “We do not discuss the details of our efforts for any client. We are proud of our work to provide the very best in consultative risk management services to our clients around the world.”

Hunting Paid Protesters

Internal documents and interviews with the former TigerSwan contractors display some of the fruits of the firm’s investigation, which include claims that echo prominent right-wing conspiracy theories.

A PowerPoint presentation created in the fall of 2016 describes what TigerSwan dubbed the Billionaire’s Club: “an exclusive group of wealthy individuals, [which] directs the far-left environmental movement.” Several slides are dedicated to the anti-pipeline nonprofit Bold Nebraska, whose parent organization, Bold Alliance, is named in the ETP suit.

“Underlying Bold Nebraska’s homespun, grassroots facade is a significant, growing, well-funded and well-organized financial support network originating from wealthy far-left environmental interests thousands of miles away,” one slide states. The language is pulled verbatim from a 2014 report by the Republican minority staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, titled “Chain of Environmental Command: How a Club of Billionaires and Their Foundations Control the Environmental Movement and Obama’s EPA.”

TigerSwan claimed that among the wealthy interests behind Bold Alliance was billionaire philanthropist Warren Buffett, whose donations to foundations that support environmental causes, one slide states, benefited an oil-by-rail business owned by Buffett’s investment company Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett also appears at the center of a TigerSwan links map, obtained by The Intercept, meant to depict movement funders and influencers.

One of the theory’s most obvious flaws is that Buffett has a significant financial stake in the Dakota Access pipeline. Berkshire Hathaway is the largest investor in the oil and gas firm Phillips 66, which owns a 25 percent stake in DAPL. Buffett did not respond to a request for comment.

Jane Kleeb, founder of Bold Alliance, told The Intercept that the group raised money for food and shelter at the DAPL resistance camps. They also had an indigenous staff member on the ground for six months who was involved in organizing protests.

“We’d be happy to take Buffett’s millions, but we don’t have any of that money,” she said, noting the organization relies on thousands of small donors. “There’s literally never been a foundation or a major donor that has given us money and said, ‘You have to do XYZ and target XYZ person.’”

“It’s remarkable that because we are a nonprofit and because I get paid a salary, and I pay our organizers a salary, that somehow makes us a paid protester,” Kleeb added.

Indeed, according to one of the former TigerSwan contractors, a goal of the firm’s RICO work was to identify “paid protesters.”

Throughout the protests, prosecutors and police also took interest in identifying such protesters, indicating that the oil industry’s hunt for a conspiracy was taken up by the public sector.

Multiple TigerSwan situation reports note law enforcement efforts to follow the money. For example, on March 3, a TigerSwan operative wrote, “Spoke with FBI Agent Tom Reinwart in reference to funds being funneled to protesters.” Another report from February 11 describes the Bureau of Indian Affairs tracking individuals “assessed to be assisting in the facilitation of moving money and supplies to the camps.”

Meanwhile, Lynn Woodall of the Morton County Sheriff’s Department also regularly forwarded a protester social media activity bulletin from a Gmail account to an array of law enforcement officials. The bulletins summarized Facebook and Twitter statements made by DAPL opponents, tracked the progress of various anti-DAPL fundraising campaigns, and at times noted posts made by groups named in the lawsuit — including 350.org, Greenpeace, and Earthjustice — under a category labeled “Protest Supporters and Amplifiers.” In at least one case, the bulletin was forwarded to a TigerSwan operative.

A spokesperson for Morton County told The Intercept that a law enforcement staff member collected the fundraising information for “situational awareness.” Neither the FBI nor the Bureau of Indian Affairs responded to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

State’s attorneys were also interested in funding linked to media coverage of the protests, repeatedly singling out Democracy Now, the news outlet whose footage of private security dogs attacking protesters attracted widespread criticism of the pipeline project and galvanized many to join the opposition movement. In a motion filed last December as part of a criminal case against pipeline opponents, state’s attorney Ladd Erickson repeated right-wing talking points. “Some DAPL protester videos are designed for fundraising, to get actors weeping into cameras,” he said, adding, “Pretend journalists like Amy Goodman of Democracy Now or The Young Turks have published manipulated DAPL social media videos with faux narratives in an attempt to be recognized as a news source by those who are duped by fake news.”

In a November 29 email, the acting state’s attorney of McKenzie County, Todd Schwarz, relayed to a North Dakota State and Local Intelligence Center officer a secondhand story he’d heard about someone a colleague sat next to on a flight. “He indicated to Ron that he is a paid protester, $ 3000/day plus expenses. His check comes from Democracy Now who receives their money through the DNC from the Clinton Foundation. I have no way to confirm this but was asked to pass it to you.” Schwarz noted it was “the first time I’ve had it confirmed from the person who actually heard it from the paid protester.” Schwarz did not respond to a request for comment.

“These claims are baseless and absurd,” Julie Crosby, general manager for Democracy Now, told The Intercept. “The Young Turks’ Jordan Chariton took six trips to Standing Rock, where he conducted interviews that shined a light on the truth and raced to cover the front lines of the demonstration,” a spokesperson for the network told The Intercept, calling the narrative pushed by ETP “a continuation of right-wing, corporate intimidation tactics.”

Of course, as police and prosecutors searched for the big-money backers of the protest movement, they were receiving their own share of billionaire support. Throughout the protests, police used ETP equipment including ATVs, snowmobiles, and a helicopter. This past October, ETP paid the state of North Dakota $15 million for law enforcement expenses, and went on a tour of pipeline counties in Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Illinois, handing out giant checks totaling $1 million — “gifts without condition,” as one ETP executive put it.

Using Lawsuits to Chill Free Speech

“When it was adopted, RICO was thought to be a mafia tool,” Jeffrey Grell, who teaches courses on RICO at the University of Minnesota School of Law, told The Intercept. “Now it’s going through a renaissance,” he added, noting that while federal courts tried to limit applications of the law, winning the case is often not the primary motive of those filing charges.

“I do not think this pipeline claim is a very legitimate use of this statute … but in legal reality, whether you have a good claim or not does not matter,” Grell said. “If you are an energy company, you have a lot more money than some of these protest groups, so paying a lawyer for two or three years to sue these protesters, who cares? But I guarantee you, the protest groups, they’re going to care.”

“If you have got money in our country, you can use litigation for a lot of purposes, and many times those purposes are not to win a court case.”

Marc Kasowitz’s firm was also behind a RICO suit filed last year against Greenpeace on behalf of logging company Resolute Forest Products. That suit was dismissed in October, although Resolute has filed an amended complaint.

Kasowitz attorney Michael Bowe told Bloomberg Businessweek that Energy Transfer Partners and Resolute are not the only companies with an interest in suing Greenpeace. “When Greenpeace directly attacks a company’s customers, financing, and business, that company has little choice but to legally defend itself,” he said. “I know others who are considering having to do so and would be shocked if there are not many more.”

Several states have passed “anti-SLAPP” legislation in an effort to counter the use of lawsuits for the purpose of chilling free speech, but North Dakota is not one of them. “There’s no question that whether it’s a civil damages lawsuit or a criminal prosecution, if part of what’s motivating it is a desire to suppress speech, that it’s a First Amendment problem,” Seth Berlin, an attorney who has defended the First Amendment rights of advocacy groups and political organizations, told The Intercept.

“It’s a big threat to the environmental movement,” said Wetterer, the Greenpeace lawyer. “These baseless lawsuits have to be thrown out at the initial stage because the longer they go on, the corporations win.”

To search all TigerSwan documents published by The Intercept, go to the TigerSwan project page on DocumentCloud.

Top photo: Dakota Access pipeline protesters faced off with law enforcement on the day their camp was slated to be raided, Feb. 22, 2017, in North Dakota.

The post Dakota Access Pipeline Company Paid Mercenaries to Build Conspiracy Lawsuit Against Environmentalists appeared first on The Intercept.

Well before that moment, Fallis had been caught in a sprawling intelligence operation that sought to disrupt and discredit opponents of the pipeline. The Intercept has learned that the legal owner of the gun Fallis is alleged to have fired was a paid FBI informant named Heath Harmon, a 46-year-old member of the Fort Berthold Reservation in western North Dakota. For at least two months, Harmon took part in the daily life of DAPL resistance camps and gained access to movement participants, even becoming Fallis’s romantic partner several weeks prior to the alleged shooting on October 27, 2016.

In an interview with agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, a recording of which was obtained by The Intercept, Harmon reported that his work for the FBI involved monitoring the Standing Rock camps for evidence of “bomb-making materials, stuff like that.” Asked what he discovered, Harmon made no mention of protesters harboring dangerous weapons, but he acknowledged storing his own weapon in a trailer at the water protectors’ Rosebud Camp: the same .38 revolver Fallis is accused of firing.

Harmon spent the day of October 27 with Fallis and was nearby during her arrest. He continued to withhold his FBI affiliation from his then-girlfriend in phone conversations with her while she was being held at the Morton County jail in Mandan, North Dakota, records show. Investigators’ notes on those calls were distributed to the ATF, two local sheriff’s departments, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Bismarck, among others.

Federal prosecutors are charging Fallis with civil disorder, possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, and discharge of a firearm in relation to a felony crime of violence — perhaps the most serious charges levied against any water protector. If convicted of discharging the weapon, she faces a minimum of 10 years in prison and the possibility of a life sentence. She has pleaded not guilty.

Attorneys for Fallis argue their client was seized without probable cause while engaging in speech protected by the First Amendment, pointing to the account of one of her arresting officers that Fallis was shouting “water is life and you’re killing Mother Earth and stuff of that nature.” Drone footage appears to show her being tackled just minutes after arriving in the vicinity of the police line. In a hearing that concluded Monday, her lawyers challenged the admissibility of any property seized or statements Fallis made immediately after the incident, arguing they represent the products of an unconstitutional arrest. Defense attorneys declined to comment or make Fallis available for this story, citing her pending trial.

Drone footage from Oct. 27, 2016, shows Red Fawn Fallis driving an ATV alongside the highway, then parking and approaching the police line. Around the 3:35 minute mark, she breaks from the crowd and walks parallel to law enforcement before being tackled and arrested.

As the struggle to limit the mining and burning of fossil fuels has developed into a potent force, indigenous activists like Fallis have frequently been at the forefront. Documents and recordings reviewed for this story provide a window into federal law enforcement’s use of counterterrorism tactics to target pipeline opponents based on the threat of “environmental rights extremism” — and reveal infiltration of the water protector movement as the latest chapter in the FBI’s long history of repression of indigenous political activism.

The intelligence operation targeting DAPL opponents was based at an emergency operations center in Bismarck, as well as the North Dakota State and Local Intelligence Center, known as the SLIC, a fusion center established to facilitate information sharing in the aftermath of 9/11. Although local law enforcement frequently served as the public face of the operation, federal agents played a central role soon after the first civil disobedience actions kicked off in August 2016. By early September, the operations center was hosting daily meetings involving representatives of the FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the U.S. Marshals Service, and state and local police.

In his interview with the ATF and Bureau of Criminal Investigation on December 13, 2016, Harmon described how he came to be an FBI asset: He had reached out to his brother, a BIA police officer in North Dakota, to see if he could help by “being an observer” of the protest movement. “He said he knew people and they would get ahold of me,” Harmon stated. “That’s when the FBI contacted me. That’s the reason why I was down there in the first place.” By August, Harmon was regularly visiting the Rosebud Camp, which is where he met Fallis, according to his interview. He said he helped the FBI confirm the presence of specific “AIM members” at the camp, in reference to the American Indian Movement, and reported a vehicle carrying lockdown devices used by protesters to disrupt pipeline construction.

Fallis has a long history with indigenous movements, including AIM, according to Glenn Morris, an activist and scholar at the University of Colorado, Denver, who regards Fallis as a niece. Her mother, Troy Lynn Yellow Wood, worked with Morris and others to start the Colorado chapter of AIM in the 1970s, and Fallis began attending marches in Denver when she was 5 or 6 years old, Morris said.

Founded at the height of the civil rights era, AIM fought for religious freedom and the fulfillment of treaties the U.S. government signed with indigenous nations. Yellow Wood was part of the organization’s struggle on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. In that case, AIM famously took up arms in 1973 and occupied the town of Wounded Knee — site of the U.S. 7th Calvary’s massacre of Lakota people in 1890 — as a show of opposition to a corrupt tribal government that was working behind the scenes to sell off lands rich in uranium and other resources.

Harmon is part of a different lineage. In his interview with law enforcement, he noted that his uncle Gerald Fox had been on the “other side” of the AIM struggle at Pine Ridge. Fox was a BIA officer who stood off against AIM during the 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee, alongside members of the U.S. Marshals Service and the FBI. According to a 2010 obituary in the Bismarck Tribune, Fox went on to join a BIA special operations unit, and between 1976 and 1984 “was detailed to every major Native conflict that happened in the United States.”

In the aftermath of the Pine Ridge standoff, the FBI looked the other way while a paramilitary organization known as the GOONs — whose leaders included members of the BIA tribal police force — carried out a multiyear campaign of extrajudicial killings and brutal physical assaults of AIM members and supporters.

In recent years, as climate justice activists have taken on pipelines, coal mining, hydro-fracking, and Arctic oil drilling, law enforcement agencies have established formal collaborations with the oil and gas industry in the name of preventing threats to so-called critical infrastructure, Jeff Monaghan, a Carleton University professor who studies the surveillance of social movements, told The Intercept. “That discourse has been the gateway for fusing the corporate energy sector and the national security apparatus in both the U.S. and Canada,” he said.

Sara Jumping Eagle, a physician on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation who was among the first DAPL opponents arrested in August, said the heavy-handed law enforcement response at Standing Rock was not altogether surprising. “There’s a long history of the U.S. labeling people who stand up as terrorists, so some of us figured they were gonna use those same tactics against this movement as well,” she said.

Jumping Eagle was among some two dozen activists featured on an early blueprint for the intelligence operation at the North Dakota fusion center, a “links chart on leaders of the movement” obtained by The Intercept via public records request. The document mapped out connections between DAPL opponents purportedly affiliated with the Red Warrior and Sacred Stone camps, two of the main nerve centers of pipeline resistance on the Northern Great plains. Nearly everyone on the chart is an indigenous person.

Fallis appeared on the diagram more than seven weeks prior to her October 27 arrest. She was listed under her Facebook profile name, Luta Wi Redfawn, alongside the allegation that she had purchased pepper spray at Scheels, a sporting goods chain with a store in Bismarck.

Cheyenne River Sioux tribal member Cody Hall, who served as a spokesperson for the Red Warrior Camp, also featured prominently on the chart. On September 8, 2016, around the time the document was completed, Hall was pulled over by Highway Patrol officers who served him a warrant for two charges of misdemeanor trespass. Hall recalled a disproportionate number of officers on hand for his arrest.

After he was booked into the Morton County jail, Hall said two FBI agents attempted to interview him, but he asserted his right to remain silent. After a three-day stint in solitary confinement, he was released. “The experience was “unsettling” and “completely over the top,” Hall told The Intercept. “They were treating me like I was the native Osama.”

In addition to mapping out connections to the NoDAPL camps, the chart linked individuals to the hacker group Anonymous and the Black Lives Matter movement and even attempted to track romantic relationships among pipeline opponents.

Rana Karaya, a Chicago resident from the P’urhépecha tribe in Mexico, was listed as having a relationship with David Vlow Rodriguez, who had been “maced by DAPL security,” the document noted. After reviewing a section of the chart, Karaya labeled it “disgustingly intrusive.”

According to Monaghan, the links analysis reflects broader trends in the policing of domestic dissent. “Since 9/11, police have more widely adopted surveillance practices to enable them to identify and disrupt protest actions,” he said. “And one technique has been the mapping of so-called persons of interest lists and then engaging in punitive, pre-emptive arrests or disruptions of people on those lists.”

Cecily Fong, public information officer for the SLIC fusion center and the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services, provided a different explanation for the chart. “The primary purpose for the links chart was to attempt to identify any leaders in the protest camps that our law enforcement could approach to engage in diplomatic talks,” Fong told The Intercept. She said she was unable to find a concrete example of the chart being used for diplomatic purposes and directed The Intercept to the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, which similarly failed to provide such an example.

Emails and reports documenting intelligence collection on pipeline opponents, which The Intercept obtained through records requests, show a heightened focus on the threat of “environmental rights extremist violence,” while revealing a broader effort on the part of law enforcement to keep digital tabs on activists.

In an October 2016 email to federal, state, and local law enforcement, a Bismarck police officer relayed information from a North Dakota patrol sergeant about “AIM propaganda” on Facebook. “Free Peltier” stickers appeared in the posts of an individual believed to be a longtime AIM member, the sergeant noted, in reference to AIM activist Leonard Peltier, who was imprisoned for killing two FBI agents during a 1975 shootout on Pine Ridge, in what indigenous activists and human rights groups have labeled a wrongful conviction. Another purported member appeared to be “pro-violence,” the sergeant warned.

The message was part of a shared thread among law enforcement representatives affiliated with the emergency operations center who referred to themselves as the “intel group,” monitoring the DAPL protests in real time. Additional emails concerning Standing Rock operations plans were sent to multiple Department of Homeland Security and FBI addresses, including that of E.K. Wilson, a special agent with the FBI’s Minneapolis office. According to press reports, Wilson was previously the supervisory special agent for one of the FBI’s largest domestic counterterrorism operations since 9/11: a probe of the Shabab militant group’s recruitment of Somali-Americans.

Michael German, a former FBI special agent who is now a fellow at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, notes the concept of environmental extremism originated as part of the broader war on terror and is based on a model of radicalization that argues that people who develop ideas the FBI deems extremist have embarked on a dangerous path that might eventually lead them to commit an attack.

“It’s an intellectual framework that’s saying, ‘We’re only interested in using our surveillance and investigative tools on the terrorists, but the terrorists come from this specific pool of activists,’” German told The Intercept. “They can then justify surveilling the activists, suppressing the activists, and also selectively prosecuting the activists. We’ve seen that in the prosecutions of people following the January 20 protests, and we’ve certainly also seen it with Standing Rock.”

Following the breakup of Standing Rock resistance camps, the North Dakota SLIC offered information on DAPL opponents to a central Florida fusion center monitoring opposition to the Sabal Trail Pipeline, according to an April 2017 intelligence bulletin. The document, which repeatedly uses the terminology of “domestic violent extremists,” notes the migration of pipeline opponents to struggles in Minnesota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, and Iowa.

“Our SLIC, when asked, has provided information to other SLICs in states that are, have, or may experience protests similar to the one that occurred in North Dakota,” Fong told The Intercept. “The ND SLIC is not actively monitoring anyone associated with the NoDAPL protests.”

A May 2017 report prepared by the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis and fusion centers across seven states defines “environmental rights extremists” as “groups or individuals who facilitate or engage in acts of unlawful violence against people, businesses, or government entities perceived to be destroying, degrading, or exploiting the natural environment.”

The report claims that “suspected environmental rights extremists exploited Native American anti-DAPL protests to attract new members to their movement, gain public sympathy, and justify criminal and violent acts,” a narrative later repeated in a conspiracy lawsuit DAPL parent company Energy Transfer Partners filed against environmentalist groups. Yet widely disparate individuals are included under the extremist label, including Canadian indigenous people who traveled to North Dakota and a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, Dean Dedman, whose “suspicious drone use” raised concerns of attempted countersurveillance. To Dedman, the extremist designation fits with police officials’ broader effort to discredit water protectors. “They’re putting it in their words to portray that we’re terrorists or we’re somehow trying to disrupt the peace, which is totally bogus,” he told The Intercept.

The document categorizes a broad range of protest activities as violent, noting that while “environmental rights extremists often consider themselves to be nonviolent because their attacks tend to be against property,” tactics such as tampering with pipeline valves and setting fire to construction equipment “carry an inherent risk of death or serious of injury, regardless of intent.” Its authors identify ominous intelligence gaps as to the existence of “training camps established to teach violent tactics” and “which camps house individuals who have an interest in using lethal weapons such as IEDs against law enforcement or pipeline entities.”

In a section describing “use of potentially lethal devices,” the report holds up Red Fawn Fallis as an example of extremist violence. Without mentioning Fallis by name, the report claims she “shot a firearm at law enforcement officers who had confronted her while taking her into custody,” echoing an allegation long since discarded by prosecutors — that Fallis intentionally shot at police.

The same section cites a November 2016 incident in which a Standing Rock protester “threw small IEDs at officers, resulting in near amputation of her arm after one of the IEDs exploded prematurely, according to law enforcement and DHS reporting.” But according to multiple sworn witnesses, the woman in question, Sophia Wilansky, sustained the gruesome injury after police shot her with “less than lethal” munition during a confrontation that saw officers spray protesters with water hoses and rubber bullets amid subfreezing temperatures, resulting in hundreds of injuries.

As The Intercept previously reported, an FBI informant played a key role in defining the version of events law enforcement promoted about Wilansky’s injury. In an email to several FBI and Department of Justice addresses after the incident, Terry Van Horn, a national security intelligence specialist with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, noted that an FBI “source from the camp reported people were making IEDs from small Coleman-type propane canisters.”

Neither the FBI nor the Department of Homeland Security would address specific questions from The Intercept related to intelligence collection. “The FBI investigates activity which may constitute a federal crime or pose a threat to national security. Our focus is not on membership in particular groups or adherence to particular ideologies but on criminal activity,” a spokesperson for the FBI said in a statement.

A spokesperson for DHS wrote, “DHS works with federal partners, including the FBI, and state and local law enforcement through the National Network of Fusion Centers to assess threats and analyze trends in activity from all violent extremist groups, regardless of ideology. DHS is prohibited from engaging in intelligence activities for the sole purpose of monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment.”

The dramatic circumstances of Fallis’s arrest have frequently been used by law enforcement and fossil fuel interests to bolster the portrayal of water protectors as reckless and violent. Fallis’s attorneys have argued that it is impossible for her to receive a fair trial in North Dakota because of the intense level of negative publicity, pointing to counterinformation efforts by police and DAPL security to push an extremist narrative of the protests.

The attempted murder charges North Dakota initially filed against Fallis were dismissed within a month, but public Facebook posts by the Morton and Cass County sheriff’s departments linking her to the more serious crime have never been corrected. Both departments shared a video in which a Highway Patrol captain claimed it was lucky no officers were shot, but “it wasn’t because she was trying to aim away from law enforcement.” Meanwhile, Energy Transfer Partners singled out Fallis as a “radical eco-terrorist” in its racketeering lawsuit filed against Greenpeace and other groups.

But those who know Fallis describe a woman who had come into her own as a camp medic and mentor to younger activists after traveling to Standing Rock at a crossroads in her own life. Fallis was grieving the recent death of her mother, said Mia Stevens, 23, a family friend. Troy Lynn Yellow Wood was “a really important woman” among indigenous communities in Denver, Stevens said. “After Red Fawn’s mom passed, she just stepped up how she cared about people and took on a bigger role. Everything her mom would say, pray about, and do — that became Red Fawn’s place.”

Fallis developed a close bond with members of the International Indigenous Youth Council, a group of adolescents and young adults at the forefront of numerous demonstrations. Lauren Howland, a 22-year-old member of the San Carlos and Jicarilla Apache tribes and Navajo Nation, who got to know Fallis through the council, described what she viewed as one of Fallis’s defining moments at Standing Rock.

On October 22, 2016, roughly 200 people conducted a prayer walk to a remote part of the pipeline’s path, where protesters had locked themselves to disabled vehicles to block the advance of construction equipment. The group was surrounded by police flanked by armored personnel carriers, Howland recalled, and officers began tackling people and using pepper spray. An officer in military gear clubbed Howland’s hand and wrist with a baton, fracturing her wrist in two places.

Howland said she was attempting to lead a 10-year-old boy away from the melee when the pain overwhelmed her and she had to sit down on a hillside far from the water protectors’ camps. Fallis, who had been riding a four-wheeler in and out of the area to assist vulnerable people, located Howland and the boy and transported them to safety.

“Red Fawn really saved my ass,” Howland recalled. “I don’t even know how many times she went back and forth helping people that day, helping elders and other people who were hurt.”

In his interview with the ATF and North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Harmon said the reason he kept a gun in the trailer at the Rosebud Camp was for “peace of mind” — not because he felt that pipeline opponents presented a threat but “because there was rumors of DAPL security posing as protesters that were armed.”

On the morning after Fallis’s arrest, Harmon said, he called his contacts at the FBI. “I said, you know, the gun that was in that shooting, I said, that’s my firearm. They said, ‘Report it.’ So I reported it stolen.” In an interview with the Mandan Police Department the same day, he claimed the gun had been stolen two to three weeks prior. But he changed his story when talking to the ATF and BCI, saying that he’d last seen the gun a couple of days before the incident. “I left it in the trailer,” he added, “and Red Fawn knew where it was.”

Law enforcement records related to the case suggest the situation was complicated for Harmon, who had come to stay with his mother in Mandan after the downturn in the Bakken oil industry, according to comments she made to the BCI.

Hours of phone conversations recorded by the Morton County jail show Harmon and Fallis planning for their future together and Harmon offering words of encouragement as Fallis coped with the intensity of her legal situation. On one call, Harmon appears to break down as the two discussed Fallis’s uncertain future.

In his December 2016 interview, after telling investigators he had developed a relationship with Fallis after becoming a source for the FBI, Harmon added, “My judgment was wrong.”

At the conclusion of the interview, ATF Special Agent Derek Hill informed Harmon that he might be called as a witness at Fallis’s trial and noted his concern that Harmon’s affiliation with the FBI would leak. “I’m familiar with her family from Pine Ridge and in Colorado,” said Hill, who according to court testimony, spent over a decade based in Rapid City, primarily working on Pine Ridge. “If you start getting harassed in any way, shape, or form, I would like you to reach out to us and let us know.”

The Intercept’s repeated attempts to reach Harmon for comment have been unsuccessful. The FBI did not respond to questions about its use of informants at Standing Rock or Harmon’s connection to Fallis’s case. Spokespeople for the ATF and the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation declined to address questions related to an ongoing case.

The FBI has long relied on informants, from COINTELPRO to the war on terror, who act not only as observers but as agents provocateur, facilitating acts for which their targets are penalized. After 9/11, according to German, the former FBI agent, the bureau adopted what it called a “disruption strategy” that involved “the use of informants as a tool to suppress the activities of targeted groups, even when there is no actual evidence of criminality.”

It was, in many ways, a new name for an old set of tactics. In the 1970s, the American Indian Movement was a target of FBI informants, most notably AIM’s chief security officer, Douglas Durham, a close confidant of the group’s leaders who was on the FBI’s payroll for two years. During that period, various other AIM members were internally accused of working for the bureau. Many have come to believe the rumors began with actual informants like Durham deploying a strategy meant to sow division.

“They had us on their list to be infiltrated and disrupted and neutralized,” said Clyde Bellecourt, who helped found AIM and survived a near-fatal shooting in 1973 he says was fomented by an FBI operation involving Durham. Nearly half a century later, Bellecourt, who is Ojibwe from Minnesota, was among those the North Dakota SLIC put on its links chart of movement leaders at Standing Rock, having traveled there on three occasions.

After the revelation that Durham had worked for the FBI, fears of infiltration would intensify, bringing about one of AIM’s most painful chapters. Some members became convinced that Anna Mae Aquash, an activist from the Mi’kmaq First Nation in Canada, was working for the bureau. Aquash was driven into South Dakota’s Badlands and shot in the back of the head.

Fallis’s mother, Yellow Wood, found herself in the middle of the controversy. She testified in one of the resulting murder trials that Aquash had been staying in her home, which served as a kind of AIM safe house, when she was convinced by a group of visitors to leave. “She said that if this occurred, if they took her back to South Dakota, that I would never see her again,” Yellow Wood stated in 2004.

Decades after Aquash’s body was discovered, two AIM members were convicted of her murder. Meanwhile, the cases of numerous AIM members and supporters believed to be killed by the GOONs have never been prosecuted.

Sunaina Maira, a professor at the University of California, Davis who has studied the effects of FBI surveillance of Muslim and Arab Americans, said a major function of such activity is to fray the bonds of trust that knit communities and social movements together. “One of the implicit, if not explicit, objectives is to try to undermine any kind of organizing, mobilization, and collective solidarity,” she said. “It creates a chilling situation, particularly when it involves the use of native informants from people’s own communities. People start having to wonder who’s who.”

More details on Fallis’s case are certain to emerge at trial, scheduled to begin January 29. After defense lawyers requested her case be transferred out of North Dakota to ensure an impartial jury pool, a judge ordered the trial moved from Bismarck roughly 200 miles east to Fargo, the seat of Cass County, where Sheriff Paul Laney helped spearhead a National Sheriffs’ Association public relations campaign to discredit DAPL opponents. Fallis will be tried in the same federal courthouse where an all-white jury handed down Leonard Peltier’s murder conviction in 1977.

After spending a year in jail, Fallis was recently moved to a halfway house in Fargo. According to Glenn Morris, she “is prepared to defend herself vigorously in court against these fabricated charges.”

Morris believes it was Fallis’s political activism that drew the attention of law enforcement — her belief in indigenous self-determination and role in the largest mobilization against a fossil fuel infrastructure project in U.S. history. “Anyone who believes in the same things Red Fawn does can become the next Red Fawn, can become the next target,” Morris said. “That’s why people need to watch what happens with her case.”

Documents published with this story:
May 2017 Field Analysis Report
April 2017 Joint Intelligence Bulletin
Links Chart on Leaders of the Movement
Intel Thread 2016-10-22
Intel Thread 2016-10-17
SLIC Operations Email 2016-09-01

Top photo: Tires burn as armed soldiers and law enforcement officers stand in formation on Oct. 27, 2016, to force Dakota Access pipeline protesters off private land where they had camped to block construction.

The post An Activist Stands Accused of Firing a Gun at Standing Rock. It Belonged to Her Lover — an FBI Informant. appeared first on The Intercept.

Fallis was arrested on October 27, 2016, during a large-scale law enforcement operation to evict pipeline opponents from a camp alongside North Dakota Highway 1806. After officers tackled Fallis and pinned her on the ground facedown, they allege that she fired three shots from a revolver underneath her stomach, which did not result in any injuries. Last month, The Intercept revealed that the gun in question belonged to a paid FBI informant who was in a romantic relationship with Fallis. The informant, Heath Harmon, had infiltrated the protest camps starting in August 2016 and was near Fallis’s side for much of the day leading up to her arrest.

In a statement explaining Fallis’s decision to accept the plea deal, the Water Protector Legal Collective cited several negative pretrial rulings issued by Hovland, as well as the likelihood of jury bias based on a survey of potential jurors revealing strong antagonistic feelings toward anti-pipeline protesters. U.S. Attorney David Hagler declined to comment for this story. A Morton County Sheriff’s Department spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

While law enforcement frequently cited Fallis’s case to advance a narrative of anti-pipeline protesters as violent extremists, her supporters see her legal plight as only the latest episode in the U.S. government’s long history of hostility toward indigenous people who push back against powerful government and corporate interests. More than 50 people turned out to support Fallis at her federal hearing in Bismarck on January 22; many expressed sadness and outrage about her likely prison sentence.

“As indigenous people, we’re simply not allowed to act in defense of our children, land, or traditions without incurring severe punishment,” said Eryn Wise, a member of the Jicarilla Apache and Laguna Pueblo nations who worked with Fallis at Standing Rock. “We’re horrified they took another person from us who we may not get back for a long time.”

Unanswered Questions

Fallis’s arrest in October 2016 occurred amid a highly militarized police raid on land that would still belong to the Great Sioux Nation had the Fort Laramie treaties of 1851 and 1868 been honored. In a pretrial motion, Fallis’s attorneys attempted to raise the issue in her case, arguing that the government had a burden to establish the law enforcement operation as lawful by addressing treaty rights in court. But Hovland refused to allow consideration of this broader historical context, instead making several orders to limit the case’s scope. “This is not a complex case,” Hovland insisted in a January 2 order.

Fallis’s attorneys also filed several motions asking the government to disclose information related to the sweeping surveillance activities of public law enforcement and private security contractors hired by the company behind the Dakota Access pipeline. Drawing in part on stories and documents published by The Intercept, they argued that Fallis’s case could not be considered apart from this intrusive intelligence gathering, given that an undercover informant employed by the FBI had initiated a relationship with Fallis, and then made available the gun she was accused of firing.

As The Intercept previously reported, Harmon said he was recruited by the FBI after approaching his brother, a Bureau of Indian Affairs police officer, about “being an observer” of the protest movement. He gave conflicting accounts about the gun. On the morning after Fallis’s arrest, he filed a report with the Mandan Police Department claiming it had been stolen two to three weeks prior. Later, in an interview with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, he said he’d last seen the weapon a few days before Fallis’s arrest, having left it in her trailer at the water protectors’ Rosebud Camp.

Defense lawyers for Fallis sought additional materials regarding Harmon’s activities as an informant, contending that prosecutors had only turned over “sparse summaries” of his communications with the FBI rather than the more detailed reports that likely existed if the bureau followed its standard protocols. They also requested information on other covert operatives at Standing Rock. In a pretrial hearing, one of the officers who helped arrest Fallis had testified that law enforcement received a briefing on the morning of October 27, 2016, from either a law enforcement or private security infiltrator who was posing as a protester. Hovland ruled against these requests for discovery information.

Defense filings suggest the documents turned over by the government still included some new information on Harmon’s activities. He had been “instructed to collect information on potential violence, weapons, and criminal activity,” a defense motion noted, adding that Harmon’s FBI contacts had recommended that he receive extra compensation to keep him “motivated for future taskings.” The defense motion suggested that Harmon had been slated to testify against Fallis had her case gone to trial as scheduled.

Additional discovery requests rejected by Hovland pertained to the activities of private security agencies. Fallis’s attorneys had challenged the legality of police operations at Standing Rock due to law enforcement’s close collaboration with TigerSwan, a security firm hired to protect the pipeline. An ongoing lawsuit filed by the North Dakota Private Investigation and Security Board alleges that TigerSwan illegally provided security and investigative services in the state after having been denied a license to do so. A civil trial in that case has been scheduled for October 2018.

Following The Intercept’s publication of a “links chart” prepared by a North Dakota fusion center identifying Fallis as a leader of the protest movement more than seven weeks prior to her arrest, defense lawyers asked the judge to compel the government to turn over all intelligence collected about Fallis and her activities. The judge ordered the government to “disclose all relevant information” concerning Fallis, including but not limited to her placement on the chart — but such disclosure will no longer be required given Fallis’s decision to accept the government’s plea offer.

A Legacy of Activism

Among the water protectors who gathered at Standing Rock, Fallis was known for her work as a medic and mentor to younger activists. According to Mia Stevens, a family friend, Fallis had dedicated her work to her late mother, Troy Lynn Yellow Wood, a prominent activist with the American Indian Movement.

Founded in 1968, AIM fought for the legal rights and cultural survival of indigenous people. According to Phyllis Young, a Standing Rock Sioux tribal member and longtime AIM member, Yellow Wood was at the center of many of the group’s struggles and helped to establish Women of All Red Nations, which fought for an end to forced sterilization of indigenous women, among other causes.

By traveling to Standing Rock, Fallis was almost literally following in her mother’s footsteps. In 1974, Young said, members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe invited AIM to an area at the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball rivers known as Sacred Stone, which would later become the site of the first NoDAPL camp.

Until the 1978 passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, it was illegal for indigenous people to practice many of their traditional spiritual ceremonies. Standing Rock traditionalists decided to carry out a pipe ceremony at the site and sought AIM’s protection to do so. Yellow Wood was among the AIM members who responded to that call, Young said.

Many of Fallis’s supporters contend that her stature as a politically active indigenous woman played a central role in drawing the attention of law enforcement. “They just could not stand for us as Indians to talk back to them, and most of all, they couldn’t stand for us as women to be talking back to them,” Young said.

In early May, Fallis was granted a three-day furlough from jail to attend a memorial in Denver for her mother and grandmother. Young, who accompanied her to the ceremony, said Fallis had a emotional reunion with family members before receiving blessings at traditional ceremonies organized on her behalf. “They honored her far into night,” Young said.

But while an older generation of AIM activists sees Fallis as having carried on the work of the organization, her case also represents a continuation of the infiltration that created fissures within AIM in the 1970s. Standing Rock Sioux tribal member Ladonna Allard, who hosted the Sacred Stone Camp, says people in the movement are “trying to deal with the whole fact of Heath Harmon and how he was able to get so close to everybody.”

After spending a year in jail following her arrest, Fallis was transferred to a halfway house in Fargo. Earlier this month, federal marshals re-arrested her after she failed to attend a mandatory adult education course and returned late to the halfway house. At the January 22 hearing, both prosecutors and defense attorneys expressed supported for returning Fallis to the halfway house with the addition of GPS monitoring.

While Fallis’s case has been one of the highest profile among the hundreds filed against anti-DAPL protesters, she is not the only one to face harsh penalties for her role in the protests. On January 21, attorneys for Michael “Rattler” Markus, another pipeline opponent charged with federal crimes related to the October 27 raid, announced that they had arrived at a plea agreement with the U.S. government. Prosecutors will drop the most serious charge against Markus — use of fire to commit a federal felony offense — in exchange for his plea of guilty to civil disorder. Prosecutors and the defense are jointly recommending a prison sentence of 36 months.

A sentencing hearing for Fallis is scheduled for May 31. Her attorneys intend to call several witnesses, defense attorney Bruce Ellison said at the hearing in Bismarck. Ellison is also a longtime attorney for Leonard Peltier, a member of AIM who was imprisoned for the killings of two FBI agents in the 1970s, in what many indigenous activists and human rights groups have labeled a wrongful conviction.

According to Eryn Wise, a member of the International Indigenous Youth Council, the young people who grew to admire Fallis at Standing Rock have only grown more determined as they’ve followed her case, particularly given the urgency of climate change and other environmental degradation, as well as the prevailing sense that their traditional lands remain under occupation by the U.S. government.

“What’s happened to Red Fawn has only inspired the youth to pursue this line of work more,” Wise said, “because they realize that without people standing up like she has, there won’t be a future for anybody.”

Top photo: Danielle Giagnoli carries a sign in support of Red Fawn Fallis during a “Stand With Standing Rock” demonstration against the Dakota Access pipeline in Santa Ana, Calif., Nov. 26, 2016.

The post A Native American Activist Followed Her Mother’s Footsteps to Standing Rock. Now She Faces Years in Prison. appeared first on The Intercept.

Three blog posts published on TigerSwan’s website in February describe the firm’s response efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and Hurricane Matthew in North Carolina in 2016. TigerSwan, according to the posts, assisted National Guard members in Houston and emergency managers in North Carolina by providing them with access to its GuardianAngel system for monitoring the movement of individuals and sensitive shipments. In Puerto Rico, the company’s work included tracking down the employees of an unnamed client.

At Standing Rock, TigerSwan operatives hired by the pipeline company Energy Transfer Partners used militaristic tactics to disrupt the massive opposition to the project, sending infiltrators into resistance camps, conducting aerial surveillance, and engaging in propaganda efforts. The private security firm routinely coordinated with law enforcement, sharing equipment and intelligence and assisting with arrests. Although preventing water pollution was the Standing Rock movement’s rallying call, many of its organizers were also climate activists; the earliest DAPL opponents were veterans of the anti-Keystone XL pipeline movement, which centered on the harmful climate effects of carbon-intensive tar sands oil.

In essence, TigerSwan has gone from suppressing a movement seeking to slow climate change to marketing itself as a company that can help clients survive climate change’s most severe consequences.

Natural disasters have long been a boon for private security firms. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as Jeremy Scahill reported for The Nation, guards working for the notorious mercenary firm Blackwater, hired to provide security for Federal Emergency Management Agency reconstruction projects, patrolled the streets of New Orleans carrying automatic rifles. Other security companies were brought in to guard hotel chains and private homes. As one Blackwater mercenary told Scahill, “This is a trend. You’re going to see a lot more guys like us in these situations.”

Pamela Spees, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights who represents anti-pipeline groups in Louisiana seeking to keep TigerSwan from operating in the state, said that large-scale natural disasters tend to create a vacuum of accountability as private security, military, and police forces descend on ravaged communities. “It raises a lot of concerns when you have this growing patchwork of private and state interests that are basically executing law enforcement and security functions in these settings,” said Spees.

“Add to that concerns about a company like TigerSwan that was operating in the way it did in North Dakota and coming in with these extremist takes on protesters that served to amplify and inflame the law enforcement response,” she added, referring to internal TigerSwan reports that compared the anti-pipeline movement to a “jihadist insurgency.” “Now it’s holding itself out as some savior that can go in and provide these security services in a situation where there’s extreme vulnerability.”

Indeed, TigerSwan predicts a future in which its disaster response services will become increasingly necessary.

In a February 1 post, TigerSwan included a map created by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the key federal agencies that monitors the changing climate, displaying “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” across the U.S. last year.

“The frequency and cost of 2017’s natural disasters should give all Americans pause. The barrage of hurricanes, unprecedented rainfall and flooding, searing wildfires, and extreme heat affect us all in one way or another,” the post warned. “Emergency preparedness is of the utmost importance as experts believe that years like 2017 may become the new normal in terms of disaster intensity.”

“Your Unblinking Eye”

TigerSwan’s promotional push has focused on the company’s GuardianAngel brand tracking system.

A February 8 post suggested the system played a vital role in the wake of Hurricane Matthew in North Carolina, when TigerSwan co-located with law enforcement and emergency managers for 17 days at the State Emergency Response Center. According to the post, “The GuardianAngel phone app, satellite phones, OBD2 trackers, and other GPS/satellite-enabled devices were distributed to North Carolina National Guard personnel and equipment, State Highway Patrol units, Swift Water Rescue teams, and damage assessment teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.” A year later, the company teamed up with the North Carolina National Guard in its Hurricane Harvey response, according to the February 1 post, planting tracking beacons on National Guard aircraft.

In its simplest format, GuardianAngel is a phone app that allows the security firm to track the user’s location. It’s marketed as “your unblinking eye,” a phrase that’s also used by the military to describe drone surveillance. According to TigerSwan’s promotional material, if GuardianAngel users find themselves in a crisis, they can hit their phone’s SOS button and call the security firm instead of local emergency services. The app also sends push notifications should terrorism or natural disaster strike. And for places where cellphone service is nonexistent, TigerSwan describes satellite-linked tracking and communication devices it can attach to people or equipment.

A tweet from March 2017 referencing an outage that prevented AT&T customers from dialing 911 outlines the type of scenario for which GuardianAngel is built: one in which public services can’t be trusted and dialing 911 no longer brings help — a scenario that becomes more plausible with the deep crises unmitigated climate change is expected to bring with greater frequency.

https://twitter.com/TigerSwan/status/839667104030863360

In March 2017, TigerSwan promoted GuardianAngel on Twitter in response to an account reporting a 911 outage affecting AT&T customers.

But three former TigerSwan contractors who worked with the app, and declined to be named for fear of legal and employment consequences, said it was unlikely to provide protection that emergency services could not. They said the app had a host of problems, including GPS that was frequently imprecise.

“A lot of places you would need something like that are in countries with no infrastructure. So having the button, cool, if you’re in the middle of a city,” said one of the former contractors.

TigerSwan personnel carried the app on their phones while working on the Dakota Access pipeline project, so that managers could track their locations in North Dakota, Iowa, and South Dakota. “Fifty percent of the time you didn’t have a signal, and it didn’t work anyway if you wanted to use it for an SOS,” said one of the former contractors.

In response to questions from The Intercept, a TigerSwan spokesperson stated, “Blogs that continue to base their stories on hearsay from unnamed sources are the very definition of fake news.”

The North Carolina National Guard and North Carolina Emergency Management downplayed their collaboration with TigerSwan. Keith Acree, a spokesperson for the emergency management department, said the agency used TigerSwan’s technology on a test basis twice, placing tracking devices on some vehicles and with some teams during winter storms in early 2016 and Hurricane Matthew that fall. “There is no contractual relationship with TigerSwan. They were paid a flat rate for use of their system on those two occasions, and NCEM has not used them since,” he said.

North Carolina National Guard spokesperson Matthew Boyle told The Intercept, “The only actual time we worked with them was a technology demonstration in the summer in 2016. Other than that, we haven’t utilized their services.” He added, “Their claiming to be on aviation assets — I don’t know if that’s true or not.”

“A Piece of the Pie”

“Puerto Rico is ripe for a corporation like TigerSwan,” said William Ramirez, director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Puerto Rico. Encouraged by the unelected Financial Oversight and Management Board’s privatization efforts, Hurricane Maria led to a rush of profiteers, many of which claimed altruistic intentions, Ramirez said. “Are they truly here for relief, or are they here to cut a piece of the pie for themselves?” he asked.

Shortly after Maria hit, TigerSwan was en route. “Armed with nothing but a list of names and addresses, our team set out on a search and rescue mission to locate displaced employees,” TigerSwan wrote. The security firm described spending 20 days in the territory, tracking down 100 employees of its client “and providing generators, water, and assessing medical needs where possible.”

“From monitoring unique personnel traveling deep into the interior of Puerto Rico via GuardianAngel satellite-enabled beacons, to tracking key assets in the air and on the ground using a variety of cellular or satellite-based beacons, GuardianAngel gave the team a real-time view of actions and activity around the island,” the company wrote.

One of the former TigerSwan contractors, who is now working in Puerto Rico, said he was unaware of any contracts TigerSwan had obtained on the island except for a small company that used GuardianAngel’s satellite tracking beacons on their vehicles.

TigerSwan spokesperson Wesley Fricks declined to name the client in Puerto Rico, saying only, “We provide a range of consultative, risk management services that increase safety and enhance situational awareness.” He added, “As a team leader in Puerto Rico for several weeks, it was very rewarding to be able to assist in the response effort, from managing our client responsibilities to pitching in and supporting other volunteer efforts. Whether it was helping groups trying to rescue abandoned animals or assisting others in unloading planes with donated supplies, there was a great community of support in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.”

TigerSwan was part of an influx of security-oriented groups that arrived on the island as the storm dissipated, including military members and law enforcement deployed from the U.S. mainland. Ramirez said that the out-of-state officers had a tendency to step on Puerto Ricans’ rights. For example, in one complaint filed to the Puerto Rican police department, the ACLU describes how an unidentifiable out-of-state law enforcement officer illegally searched a driver’s glovebox after the driver was pulled over for a traffic infraction.

According to the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, the post-Katrina private security scene was replayed in San Juan’s Santurce neighborhood, where heavily armed, masked private security officers guarded the upscale Ciudadela housing development. The owner of the development, Nick Prouty, told the outlet, “With a substantial reduction in the number of police officers on the streets (due to the government’s reallocation of resources to protect diesel and supply chains), and most streets lights not functioning, Ciudadela has taken the necessary steps to make its residents and commercial tenants feel safe.”

A number of security and infrastructure companies took up arms as they began to rebuild the territory, thanks to an executive order that allowed expedited approval for private employees to carry guns.

TigerSwan personnel were unarmed in Puerto Rico, according to Fricks, but the company’s deepest experience is in war zones. Founded by James Reese, a commander for the elite special operations unit Delta Force, TigerSwan got its start as a military contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan, where it continues to work. A large proportion of its personnel are former special operations members.

Indeed, at the same time that TigerSwan was promoting its hurricane response work, personnel were jetting off to the Kuwait International Conference for Reconstruction of Iraq, where TigerSwan sought some of the $30 billion put up for post-ISIS recovery, yet another conflict wrought by fossil fuel politics.

Top photo: Members of the Texas National Guard drive through the streets of Orange, Texas, as the state works to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Harvey on Sept. 5, 2017.

The post From North Dakota to Puerto Rico, Controversial Security Firm Profits From Oil Protests and Climate Disasters appeared first on The Intercept.

But TigerSwan did not give up on its ambitions to work on another controversial Energy Transfer Partners project, Louisiana’s Bayou Bridge pipeline. Bayou Bridge is a 163-mile oil pipeline that represents the tail end of a massive system that starts in North Dakota’s Bakken fracking region. The system’s northernmost section is the Dakota Access pipeline, which was completed about a year ago and faced a huge, indigenous-led opposition movement.

Not only is TigerSwan appealing the Louisiana denial, but a deposition given to the security board suggests the firm — operated by military special operations veterans of the war on terror — may have set up a front company in order to get around the licensing mess. TigerSwan did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

The same month that the board denied TigerSwan’s license application, a person named Lisa Smith rented office space in Lafayette, Louisiana. She registered her new company, LTSA, with the secretary of state’s office and submitted an application for a license with the private security board.

During the board’s background check process, its investigator uncovered a detail mysteriously missing from Smith’s resume: She worked for TigerSwan. And although a cached version of Smith’s old LinkedIn page showed she once listed TigerSwan on her profile, she had removed the firm’s name from the page.

Seeking to clarify Smith’s connections to TigerSwan, the board deposed her in September.

In the deposition, which the Center for Constitutional Rights obtained via a public information request, security board attorney Adrienne Aucoin asked Smith, “What is your present employment?”

“I work for TigerSwan,” Smith replied.

The board denied Smith’s license application, stating that she had “willfully, knowingly, and in the board’s estimation intentionally engaged in material omission of fact” with respect to her employment history. The board’s executive director, Fabian Blache, told The Intercept, “It appeared that Lisa Smith’s failure to include the information about TigerSwan on her application was a deliberate attempt to keep us from drawing a nexus between the two, and that the application that was being sought at that time could have been, if issued, used to circumvent the denial of the TigerSwan license.” Smith did not respond to a request for comment.

Blache said the board’s background check process also discovered another TigerSwan name associated with the new firm. Brandon Nix, who had previously been listed as TigerSwan’s “qualifying agent” on the company’s application for a license in Louisiana, worked with a rental company to procure office space for LTSA.

Nix, who told The Intercept that he hasn’t worked for TigerSwan since August, said he did not know Lisa Smith and hadn’t heard of LTSA until he found out about the deposition. “Yes, at one point I was given the directive to go pick up a key for an office. What that office is for is none of my business,” Nix said. “There are things that, on my level, were, hey this is what your objective is, go do it, get it done, roger that, move on.”

During the deposition, Smith told the board attorney that she had been the one to pick up the key.  Asked if there would be any reason for the rental company to believe that it was actually Nix, Smith said no. This was another “glaring misrepresentation,” Blache noted in his letter denying the LTSA application.

Nix said he was managing TigerSwan’s licensing efforts in Louisiana at the time of the office rental. TigerSwan’s goal “was trying to get there in time to get a license in order to get work” on the Bayou Bridge pipeline, he told The Intercept.

As Smith was setting up the new security firm, TigerSwan was also bringing on lobbyists from the high-powered firm Southern Strategy Group of Louisiana to lobby the state’s executive branch, which encompasses the Board of Private Security Examiners. Blache said he was unaware of any efforts by the lobbyists to contact board members. “There’s nothing about anything that’s going to influence these board members to do anything other than what the four corners of the law say they can do,” he said.

Cherri Foytlin, a member of the indigenous women’s advisory council for the anti-Bayou Bridge L’eau Est La Vie (Water Is Life) Camp, told The Intercept, “I think that it’s no surprise that TigerSwan is an unethical company. They’re hired mercenaries that will do anything for a buck.” According to documents leaked to The Intercept by a TigerSwan contractor and materials obtained via public records request, the firm oversaw a massive security response to the NoDAPL movement involving undercover operatives, aerial surveillance, social media monitoring, and a propaganda campaign.

“I’m really proud of the board, honestly, for following the law and for not allowing a company like TigerSwan take root in Louisiana communities,” said Foytlin.

Even so, Foytlin says she’s felt the presence of private security as her group has ramped up its blockades and occupations of pipeline construction sites. She’s noticed people filming her as they drive by in trucks, helicopters over protest actions, and out-of-place men in khaki pants at the Piggly Wiggly grocery store in her working-class neighborhood.

In her deposition, Smith denied that her license application had anything to do with TigerSwan, though the firm’s lawyers were present at the deposition. She said she didn’t list TigerSwan as her employer because of a technicality. She had been working on a contract that TigerSwan had with the insurance company MetLife, and because her days were spent at the MetLife Security Operations Center, she listed MetLife as her employer.

When the MetLife contract was finished, Smith decided to start her own business, she said, because she needed a new job. In her deposition, she did not explain why she chose Louisiana for her new venture but told the board that she had worked in North Carolina, where TigerSwan’s headquarters are located, for the past 15 years, and had only ever been to Louisiana on visits.

“What kind of private security prospects do you have for your business?” Aucoin asked.

“I don’t have any,” Smith replied. She said she didn’t know if her company would bid to work on the Bayou Bridge pipeline.

Top photo: A Bayou Bridge pipeline construction site on March 27, 2018.

The post A TigerSwan Employee Quietly Registered a New Business in Louisiana After the State Denied the Security Firm a License to Operate appeared first on The Intercept.

Fallis was arrested in October 2016 when hundreds of law enforcement officers descended on a protest camp in the pipeline’s path to forcibly evict its residents. She was accused of firing three shots from a revolver underneath her stomach after being tackled by several officers and pinned face down in a ditch alongside the highway.

As The Intercept first reported last year, the gun Fallis was accused of firing belonged to an FBI informant named Heath Harmon who had developed a romantic relationship with Fallis in the weeks leading up to her arrest. Harmon told state and federal investigators that he met Fallis at the water protectors’ Rosebud Camp after being tasked by the FBI with serving as an “observer” of the protest movement. He said he had been recruited by his brother, Chad Harmon, a Bureau of Indian Affairs police officer.

Chad Harmon was subsequently appointed by the BIA to serve as acting chief of police of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, a position he held from January to April 2018, BIA spokesperson Nedra Darling confirmed in a statement to The Intercept.

Fallis’s arrest occurred on land that would still belong to the Great Sioux Nation had the U.S. government honored the Fort Laramie treaties of 1851 and 1868. In January, after U.S. District Judge Daniel Hovland rejected attempts by Fallis’s defense team to make treaty rights and the sprawling intelligence apparatus targeting pipeline opponents central to her case, Fallis pleaded guilty to felony counts of civil disorder and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. As part of the plea bargain, prosecutors dropped the most serious charge against her — discharge of a firearm in relation to a felony crime of violence — which could have carried a life sentence.

University of Colorado professor Glenn Morris, a founder of the Colorado chapter of the American Indian Movement who regards Fallis as a niece, told The Intercept that her prison sentence could not be understood apart from a long history of U.S. colonization and the vastly disproportionate violence directed against Indigenous women. “They can bring thousands of guns to stolen treaty territory, and they have the audacity to charge this Native woman who is trying to protect her territory, her land, and the sanctity of her traditions with a crime of violence,” said Morris, who testified in support of Fallis at Wednesday’s hearing.

Morris and Fallis’s sister, Red Dawn Foster, both spoke of Fallis’s generous spirit and her contributions to the camps at Standing Rock and her community in Denver. University of Colorado integrative physiology professor Roger Enoka also testified that a phenomenon called “reactive grip response” can lead to accidental discharge of a firearm during a rapidly unfolding traumatic situation.

Hovland declined to consider Fallis’s intent as part of his ruling. “I’m not going to go down that path, try to determine what Ms. Fallis’s intent was when that firearm was discharged,” he said. The judge noted that he had the discretion to sentence Fallis to a lengthier prison term under the statutes in question, characterizing her nearly five-year sentence as “sufficient to the goals of sentencing and not greater than necessary.” Prosecutors had recommended a seven-year sentence, while Fallis’s defense attorneys had asked for 24 to 30 months.

Hovland said he would recommend Fallis be placed in a federal prison in Phoenix or Tucson. She will receive credit for nearly 18 months of time served. Following her release from prison, currently marked for late 2021, she will be subject to three years’ supervised release.

During brief remarks at the conclusion of the hearing, Fallis said her relationship with Harmon had been an unfortunate influence, and poor choices had hindered her decision-making, according to Frances Madeson, communications coordinator for the Water Protector Legal Collective. Fallis took responsibility for the revolver in her possession and expressed remorse for any danger caused to police officers and other community members. She told the courtroom that she would devote some her remaining time in prison to developing a project called Keepers of the Wisdom, focused on building relationships between Indigenous elders and youth.

Fallis is the second NoDAPL water protector arrested during the police raid on October 27, 2016, to be sentenced to a multiyear prison term. On May 30, Chumash water protector Michael “Little Feather” Giron was sentenced to three years in prison on a federal charge of civil disorder. Oglala Lakota Sioux water protector Michael “Rattler” Markus has pleaded guilty to the same charge in exchange for prosecutors dropping other federal felony counts. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for September.

Glenn Morris sees Fallis’s case as part of a larger Indigenous-led struggle for self-determination and protection of the earth. “This case and this issue is not about her solely,” he said. “What happened at Standing Rock was an inspiration to Indigenous people from around the world. We’re seeing that continuing up in British Columbia with the Trans Mountain pipeline, or the plans to resist the extension of Keystone XL this next year, or the resistance at Ojibwe territory with Line 3.”

Top photo: Red Fawn Fallis waves a flag symbolizing the American Indian Movement at Standing Rock on Aug. 20, 2016.

The post Standing Rock Activist Accused of Firing Gun Registered to FBI Informant Is Sentenced to Nearly Five Years in Prison appeared first on The Intercept.

“They were asking me if I was an infiltrator,” Horne told The Intercept. “My response was absolutely not.”

There was a lot Horne says he didn’t know at the time — for one, that Reznicek and Montoya had recently been involved in a series of acts of pipeline sabotage. Between March and May 2017, above-ground valves along the Dakota Access pipeline in Iowa and South Dakota were pierced with welding torches, creating new costs for the pipeline company, Energy Transfer, and sending its security personnel into a frenzy. A few weeks after their conversation with Horne, the two women would claim responsibility for the sabotage.

Another thing Horne says he didn’t know: that someone he considered a “brother in the cause” was indeed an infiltrator. For months, a man calling himself Joel Edwards had posed as a pipeline opponent, attending protests, befriending water protectors, and paying for hotel rooms, supplies, and booze. He told some people he had a job with a hotel that allowed him to travel, others that he was a freelance journalist reporting on the pipeline resistance. But five former contractors for TigerSwan, the secretive security firm hired by Energy Transfer to guard the pipeline, confirmed to The Intercept that Joel was an undercover intelligence operative. His real name was Joel Edward McCollough, and he had been sent to collect information on the protesters, explicitly targeting those who were down on their luck. Horne, who struggled with addiction, appeared to be a perfect target.

McCollough passed along what he learned to his superiors at TigerSwan, who attempted to use the information to thwart protest activity and identify people or plots that represented threats to the pipeline. Traces of his surveillance turned up in TigerSwan’s daily situation reports, which were written for Energy Transfer and at times passed to law enforcement. The former TigerSwan contractors interviewed by The Intercept, who declined to be named because it would threaten their continued work in the industry, had either worked with McCollough directly or knew of him through internal communications.

Like other contractors working for TigerSwan, McCollough had developed the skills he deployed in the Dakota Access pipeline fight during the U.S. war in Iraq, where he served as a Marine Corps interrogator and counterintelligence specialist. TigerSwan was founded by James Reese, a former commander of the elite special operations unit Delta Force, and the company got its start as part of a boom of mercenary security firms in the early years of the war on terror. McCollough was participating in something akin to a massive experiment in U.S. military-trained operatives applying lessons learned fighting insurgencies abroad to thousands of pipeline opponents engaged in protest against a Fortune 500 energy giant at home.

Behind the operation was Energy Transfer, whose pipeline empire has been key to propelling the U.S. oil and gas boom at a moment when the devastating impacts of climate change demand a rapid halt in fossil fuel production. Were the environmental movement able to convince policymakers to take climate science seriously, Energy Transfer would be out of business.

Instead, the business of building oil and gas pipelines is booming. Construction projects approved across at least two dozen states continue to face fierce resistance — including Energy Transfer-owned projects in Louisiana and Pennsylvania — ensuring that the pipeline security business will keep booming too. Although TigerSwan has failed to win many of the new contracts it once aspired to, few clear incentives exist to deter others from reproducing the mercenary firm’s tactics.

Through interviews with more than a dozen water protectors who were approached or befriended by Joel, The Intercept has tracked the TigerSwan operative’s path from Iowa to North Dakota to Illinois as he attempted to infiltrate an array of DAPL-opposed organizations, including Bold Iowa, Mississippi Stand, and Food and Water Watch, between September 2016 and April 2017. McCollough declined to comment for this story. Neither TigerSwan nor Energy Transfer responded to multiple requests for comment.

It’s unclear how much of a difference the intelligence Joel collected made in the pipeline company’s efforts to shut down opposition, but what is apparent is that a creeping distrust infected the NoDAPL movement as the months wore on and rumors of infiltration proliferated.

Horne had accepted rides from Joel, crashed in his hotel room, and the two kept in touch. A small set of water protectors became convinced that, knowingly or unknowingly, Horne was supplying information to Joel.

“It was a really painful experience,” Horne said. “It fell apart in front of me really quickly.”

More than anything, Horne remains bewildered. “I just can’t think of anything that would be so sensitive that would have led to this,” he said. “I’m wondering what he gained from interacting with me at all.”

1

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TigerSwan

It was early September 2016 and video footage of private security dogs attacking Indigenous pipeline opponents in North Dakota had spread across social media. What began as a small anti-pipeline resistance composed almost entirely of the Oceti Sakowin people exploded into a massive, multinational social movement.

Over the next few months, thousands of people traveled to the rural Midwest to protest the 1,172-mile pipeline, which would carry oil extracted from North Dakota’s Bakken fracking region through South Dakota and Iowa to a storage facility and transport hub in Illinois. Those who flooded in carried wide-ranging agendas, identities, and levels of experience — from longtime Indigenous and environmental activists to hippies fresh off the festival circuit to veterans and former law enforcement officers who felt called to support the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s efforts to protect the Missouri River from the threat of an oil spill. In many ways, the space was primed for infiltration: It was next to impossible to control who showed up.

“I need you guys to start looking at the activists in your area and see if there are individuals who are vulnerable,” Joel McCollough later wrote to a small group of TigerSwan personnel. “They’re broke, always talking about needing gas money or whatever. Maybe they’re disillusioned, depressed a little. Life is fucking them over,” the email continued. “We can buy them a bus ticket to any camp they want if they’re willing to provide intel.”

“We win no matter what. If they agree to inform for pay, we get intel. If they tell our pitchman to go fuck himself/herself, the activist will start wondering who did take the money and it’ll cause conflict within the activist groups and it won’t cost us anything.”

The message was provided to The Intercept by a former TigerSwan contractor. It was sent in May 2017, months after Joel had embedded himself in the anti-pipeline movement. None of the water protectors The Intercept interviewed were aware of instances in which Joel or anyone else had offered explicit bribes for information.

Neither was a former TigerSwan operative who worked on the Dakota Access pipeline contract. Reading the email, though, he shrugged. “It wouldn’t be unreasonable to do something like that. It wouldn’t surprise me or concern me,” he said. “If someone can take a quarter-million in $100 bills and give it to a guy in Ramadi, Iraq, to do something, and that person is working for the government, then why is it a problem to give somebody $200?”

TigerSwan came in after the dog attack to oversee the half-dozen or so companies working security on the pipeline. The firm didn’t get a private security license in North Dakota, an omission over which the state security board would later sue. In the subsequent legal battle, which remains ongoing, TigerSwan has claimed that it simply provided “management and IT consulting.” But two former TigerSwan operatives disputed that characterization. As one of them put it, “TigerSwan had personnel on the front lines doing the exact same things the security guards were.”

The other security companies had varying degrees of autonomy from TigerSwan. Personnel moved between companies, and at times it was unclear who was working for whom. “We had the implants, then we had the mobile teams who took information and followed people around wherever,” one former TigerSwan operative said. Others monitored social media accounts remotely.

For the former TigerSwan contractor who reviewed Joel’s email, the infiltration wasn’t such a big deal. It was the other things that bothered him more, like when a handful of security operatives armed themselves with baseball bats to fend off protesters, or bought paintball guns to shoot down the camera drones that water protectors used to document the protest. He said the weapons weren’t ultimately used, but it was stupid nonetheless. Stupid like when TigerSwan operatives would use the water protectors’ radio signals to exhaust and confuse them — ordering everyone to a location where they’d find nothing happening, or blasting the theme song for the professional wrestler John Cena over the system. “We had a few rogue guys at the highest level at times acting like jackasses, doing stupid stuff, not being professional.”

Another former contractor confirmed activity on the part of the company that seemed to serve no purpose other than to intimidate and stir paranoia. “It was the whispers on the radio at night; it was the lights; it was the helicopter flights at night for no fucking reason. There were strange vehicles that would come up into the camp,” the former operative said. “That wasn’t really the intelligence operation; that was something else.”

The mission was supposed to “have a relaxed defensive posture — to be a good witness and protect the workers if needed, that was our role,” said one of the former contractors. “Some people couldn’t handle how simple and mundane and boring that was.”

“There’s been nothing like this,” he said of the DAPL contract. “People dreamed about making $500 a day stateside just keeping people safe. It was the beginning of something big with all these pipelines getting approved: Keystone, Bayou Bridge, DAPL.”

What he’s certain of is that the glimmer of opportunity he saw at the beginning of the pipeline fight was extinguished when The Intercept published more than 100 TigerSwan situation reports leaked by a former operative, revealing the security firm’s extensive surveillance efforts, coordination with law enforcement, and comparisons of water protectors to jihadi fighters.

“This was the beginning for all of us, not just TigerSwan,” the former contractor reflected. “High-dollar ex-special ops types doing great things in America to keep people safe. They can have a mercenary stigma all they want, 98 percent of those guys I would let babysit my kids.”

He remembers thinking at one time, “If they watch their p’s and q’s, they will be the standard. They’ll be the company that everybody’s gonna use.” The former contractor laughed. “That didn’t happen.”

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Iowa

Selene had been studying business, sculpture, and aromatherapy in Ohio when a friend told her that she was driving to Standing Rock. Selene went along on a whim. She spent about a month in North Dakota, then responded to a call put out by a group in Iowa called Mississippi Stand looking for water protectors to help block construction of the pipeline across the Mississippi River.

Mississippi Stand was the Iowa anti-DAPL group most willing to risk arrest. It was linked to the Catholic Worker, a decentralized organization born during the Great Depression whose highest-profile actions have involved disabling military infrastructure, with the saboteurs staying on site to claim responsibility.

Starting in mid-September, according to Mississippi Stand leader Alex Cohen, Joel seemed to show up to every action held in Iowa. Joel had a big beard and loved Tito’s vodka. He looked “like he could have just popped off a sofa from watching a football game. He had this nice dog, and everyone loves dogs,” said Ed Fallon, the leader of another local anti-pipeline group, Bold Iowa.

Joel never participated in protests that could get him arrested, but Cohen didn’t think much of it. Because of Mississippi Stand’s no-drugs, no-alcohol policy, however, “No one really trusted him,” said Cohen, not because they thought he was an informant, but because of his drinking. When the group’s camp was evicted, they became a convoy — traveling to different construction sites and locking down to infrastructure. They didn’t invite Joel to join them.

But he kept showing up anyway. “He would always message me just wanting to know about anything coming up,” Cohen said. Then, in November, Joel got in touch with an offer. “He called and said, I found a unique way I can help,” Cohen remembers. “I want to find you guys a hotel room once a week so you can shower and do whatever.”

Joel had identified a vulnerability among Mississippi Stand members that would allow him to insert himself into some of their intimate conversations. “We were doing a direct-action campaign. We were all camping, none of us were showering for weeks on end, none of us had the comforts of a bed,” said Joseph Waters, another Mississippi Stand activist. “It was like, yeah, of course we would love to stay in a hotel. We would love to take showers.”

Selene remembers the time she took Joel up on his offer. It was mid-November, and she and another protester had just been released after spending two nights in jail. The group celebrated that night in Joel’s hotel room, where Sully the dog greeted them. “He gave me $50 and told me to go to the liquor store and pick out any alcohol I wanted,” Selene said.

Their Facebook post ran the next day, stating, “We believe that the only thing that is going to kill this snake is warriors showing up on DAPL easement and refusing to leave until construction is shut down in all four states permanently.”

Sure enough, a day later, the post showed up in an internal situation report that TigerSwan submitted to Energy Transfer. The security firm described the post as “significant because this directly ties MS with the Red Warrior Camp and opens up the possibility of the two groups working together in the future.”

Looking back, Mississippi Stand activists struggled to come up with examples of actions that Joel could have swayed or much of significance he could have learned. But perhaps, mused some participants, it wasn’t the intelligence gathered that made the difference. Waters estimated that the biggest damage Joel might have done was to add alcohol to the mix. “People who show up who want to save the earth, a lot of times they are alcoholics and a lot of times they are recovering,” he said. Joel’s biggest harm might have been in “taking advantage of people most vulnerable to succumb to demons.”

Jesse Horne, a web developer from Macon, Georgia, considered himself an atheist and an anarchist, though he’d never been actively involved in a social movement. The contract tech firm he worked for had placed him in a job at DuPont Pioneer’s research and development headquarters just outside Des Moines, one of the world’s largest developers of genetically modified crops. Horne said that soon after he arrived, he began looking for ways to be involved in local activism and stumbled onto the NoDAPL group Bold Iowa.

Bold Iowa was part of the nationwide Bold Alliance, which got its start in Nebraska fighting the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline via alliances between farmers, Indigenous people, and concerned neighbors. Led by Ed Fallon, a former Iowa state representative, Bold Iowa members occasionally participated in actions that got them arrested, but overall, they were less hardcore than Mississippi Stand.

At the first action Horne attended, around 150 protesters blocked workers’ access to the Des Moines River construction site; Horne and 18 others were arrested. “After that whole experience was done, I couldn’t focus on my job anymore,” he recalls. “I wanted to have an action every day because it was like I am actually doing something.”

When Bold Iowa members began to discuss opening a camp, Horne decided that he would quit his job. “It was irresponsible, but I also knew that I had to do it,” he said.

Although Horne said he was never involved in any action to sabotage property, he sympathized with the impulse. “I was completely OK with the idea of someone disabling the hardware that constructed the pipeline,” he said. “It seemed to be more efficient than holding a sign in front of a random building in the heart of downtown Des Moines for an hour.”

It was a point of debate — and at times, contention — among many of the water protector groups, because crossing the line into physically disabling machinery had more serious political and legal consequences, allowing the oil and gas industry and politicians to frame the movement as supportive of “eco-terrorism.”

Heather Pearson, another Bold Iowa activist, recalls that Horne tended to push to take actions to another level. During a protest at a construction site, he ran up a pile of dirt and was tackled to the ground and arrested, something that, according to Pearson, was not part of the plan. His impulsiveness and enthusiasm made him easy to imagine as a provocateur.

Horne doesn’t remember exactly when he first met Joel, only that he was around a lot at the Bold Iowa actions. After the group’s camp closed down, Horne got a ride with Joel 10 hours to North Dakota to visit Standing Rock. A TigerSwan situation report at the time noted, “Jesse Horne traveling to ND this weekend.”

“You can’t fight a 2,000-man force without knowing what they’re thinking. You can’t win without knowing what your enemy is thinking.”

According to one former TigerSwan contractor, a large web board in Iowa displayed the names and pictures of some 60 people the security firm claimed to be tracking, along with their connections to other pipeline opponents. One of the targets was Horne, the contractor said.

“Jesse was not with us,” he said. “He was someone Joel worked to exploit regularly.”

Another former operative explained to The Intercept why infiltration made sense for the company. “When you get a bunch of Delta guys together, they want to do a great job,” he said. “They know the value of intel, so if there’s no law preventing you from getting a few people to act like hippies and go in there and find out what they can, they would be negligent not to do it.”

“You can’t fight a 2,000-man force without knowing what they’re thinking. You can’t win without knowing what your enemy is thinking — they’re the bad guys that we need to protect these workers from,” the former contractor said.

But although some TigerSwan operatives had identified the protesters as the enemy, others were seeing bad actors among their own ranks. According to three former TigerSwan operatives, the security companies were squabbling too. It’s not clear exactly what complaint fueled it, but bubbling discord developed the way it often does — into a leak of information.

In March 2017, Pearson received a strange Facebook message from an account named “Burt Maklin,” a reference to the FBI agent alter ego of a “Parks and Recreation” character. “Heather you don’t know me (and this is a fake FB obviously), but [I] know who the Iowa mole was from the pipeline. I do not want you to do anything for me, I do not want information from you.” Maklin sent a link to a columnist’s bio on the news website Military 1. It was J.E. McCollough: Joel.

“Thank you. I recognize him,” Pearson replied.

“Good luck. Stay safe,” Maklin wrote.

Pearson began quietly warning members of the movement.

Months later, after The Intercept published TigerSwan’s situation reports and Pearson read the note about Horne traveling to North Dakota, she reached out to Cohen. She was convinced that Horne, having spent so much time with Joel, and given his proclivity to push things to another level, was an infiltrator. They should disassociate from him immediately. It was decided that, even if Horne wasn’t intentionally providing information, his struggle with addiction was reason enough to ask him to leave.

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North Dakota

Ali is Palestinian-American and was taught from a young age that Native Americans were going through a parallel oppression to that of her own people. “Especially being here of Palestinian blood, not having the right of return and feeling really impotent,” she remembers thinking, “how can I not be involved with this?”

Left/Top: Tala Ali poses for a portrait in the garden of her home in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Sept. 28, 2018. Right/Bottom: Ali reads quotes from a notebook, recorded during her time at Standing Rock. Photos: Emma Joy Howells for The Intercept

December was a strange time. Donald Trump was the president-elect, and it was all but assured that the pipeline would get the approvals it needed to resume construction once he was sworn in. After a blizzard ravaged the camp, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe urged everyone to go home for their own safety. It was less clear than ever where things were going.

And it was cold as hell. At times, everything was so frozen in the camps that it was impossible to find water for drinking or washing up. The casino, just 10 minutes away, was an important resource for water protectors. Ali would go a few times a week to charge her phone and warm up or grab a bite to eat. On rare occasions, she would get a hotel room for a night.

This was one of those bitterly cold nights. Ali arrived at the casino with a friend from Cincinnati, Jen Mendoza, and headed to what was known as “the pit,” where there were tables and a bar in the midst of the flashing slot machines. Joel sauntered over. “You’re cold, you’re hungry, you’re dirty — at that point, you’re putty in his hands,” Ali recalled feeling at the time. “There’s this huge smile, and come sit at my table, and can I talk to you, and how are you?”

After their first encounter with Joel, Mendoza and Ali became aware that he was a fixture at the bar. Occasionally, he would also make appearances at the resistance encampment. Terrill Goodman, a member of the Navajo Nation from Monument Valley, Utah, remembers seeing Joel at the Oceti Sakowin camp’s sacred fire. He offered Goodman a pack of cigarettes once, which he accepted.

“Everyone was suspicious of everyone. It was infuriating and debilitating for the movement.”

Ali developed a friendly relationship with Joel. He talked with her about his time serving in Iraq, dropping Arabic words he thought she might know. The two debated politics. Mendoza, though, was not a fan. “I’ll be honest — most men creep me out, but he was a particular breed of creep,” she said.

One time, when Mendoza needed to pay her phone bill and couldn’t get the casino Wi-Fi to connect, Joel stepped in. “He was just brazenly like, ‘I’ll take care of that for you,’” she recalled. The way he threw money around weirded her out, but she accepted, thinking, “Yeah, pay my phone bill, dude that creeps me out and I’m definitely never gonna see again.”

Eventually, Mendoza confronted Joel about where all his money came from, and his answer was vague. He had received some kind of military settlement, she said.

Mendoza wasn’t naïve. Anyone who had spent time at Standing Rock was aware of the threat of infiltration — it was discussed constantly. Many of those who first came to camp had links to the American Indian Movement, which was infiltrated extensively by the FBI in the wake of AIM’s 1973 standoff with the federal government at Wounded Knee.

One of the most high-profile AIM infiltrators was Douglass Durham, who presented himself at Wounded Knee as a journalist for a regional publication. He grew to become AIM’s director of security and worked with the organization’s legal team. Later, he admitted that the FBI had paid him $1,000 per month to inform on the group’s activities.

By that December at Standing Rock, “Literally everyone was suspicious of everyone,” Mendoza said. “It was infuriating and debilitating for the movement — it really was. I hate to admit that, because it’s almost an admission of defeat that their tactics are so good that it worked, but no one trusted anyone — family members, people that grew up together, people that had been together since day one.”

In the story Joel told 20-year-old Daniel Younan, a friend of Mendoza’s and Ali’s, he was a reporter working on a story about Standing Rock, and his publication was paying for his hotel room and other expenses.

“His room is empty. It’s just him and his dog, and he pulls out his laptop.”

One day, Joel invited Younan to smoke weed outside of the casino. Once Younan was stoned, Joel asked if he’d like to join some friends in his room for drinks. Younan accepted the invitation. But when they got there, “His room is empty,” Younan said. “It’s just him and his dog, and he pulls out his laptop.”

Journalists and documentarians were everywhere at the time. “Every time you’d go into the food hall, everyone would be sitting there interviewing each other or writing,” Younan said. Some were working for established publications like Al Jazeera, but others were working on zines or blogs, something Younan viewed as a positive thing. But this felt different. “I should have stood up and walked out,” Younan acknowledges now, but because Joel had given him free weed, he felt “this weird obligation.”

Many of Joel’s questions revolved around the controversial Red Warrior Camp. Joel wanted to know whether Younan “had ever been to their headquarters and if there were any drugs or guns there.” Younan said no. He found the questions about drugs particularly bizarre considering they had just smoked weed together. McCollough declined to comment on Younan’s recollection, although Ali remembered Younan describing Joel offering him weed and alcohol around the time of the incident.

Left/Top: Jen Mendoza adjusts a banner from her time at Standing Rock in her home in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Sept. 30, 2018. Right/Bottom: Mendoza poses for a portrait in her backyard. Photos: Emma Joy Howells for The Intercept

Joel repeated the reporter act with Mendoza and Ali, and that’s when their relationship with him soured. Stories had emerged of women being sexually assaulted at Standing Rock, and Joel said he was working on a news story to expose the sex offenders and people with criminal records who were staying in camp. He asked Ali and Mendoza to share the names of women who’d been sexually assaulted.

Ali was uncomfortable. She described to him how camp medics, a security team, and a women’s council dealt with reports on a case-by-case basis. Joel argued that this wasn’t sufficient and an exposé was necessary.

Mendoza was even more irate. “It was like, first of all, you’re a slimeball dude,” she said. “You are not some ally of women. Secondly, no, what permission do you have to gain this access to these women’s stories?”

Although Ali and Mendoza continued to run into Joel up until the camps were evicted by police, they distanced themselves.

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Illinois

“Law enforcement will freak out on whoever posts it,” he continued. “You know anyone who would want to do that? I don’t want to get anyone in trouble, I just would love for it to be out there for the movement.”

Smith had been laid off from construction work when the protests in Iowa kicked off. He had a side gig as a wedding photographer, so when a friend began visiting the protest sites, Smith tagged along to take photos. Eventually he was going every day so he wouldn’t miss a good shot. Inevitably he ran into Joel, but it wasn’t until April, months after the protests had died down, that Joel struck up a conversation on Facebook after Smith posted a meme illustrating the difference between equity and equality. The two discussed philosophies of human rights in the comments, and Joel texted Smith about the drone footage the same day.

Smith attempted to instruct Joel on how to post the video on Facebook anonymously, but Joel demurred. “Man … tell you what, I’ll drive to you tomorrow and just give it to you. Do with it as you will.” He added, “I’ve had bad run-ins with law enforcement before. I don’t need anything more. and I know DAPL will have their dogs out.”

Smith agreed to meet. “I liked the guy,” he said. “It’s hard to run into people that have good conversation.”

In the footage Joel showed him, the drone pans over a field of white tanks, apparently filled with oil awaiting transport. “I didn’t think it was all that compelling or even that anyone was going to care,” Smith said. “It could be any tank farm anywhere in the United States.” Still, he hesitated to agree to post it. It was footage of so-called critical infrastructure, and Smith wasn’t sure that he’d be any more protected from legal consequences than Joel.

Joel let it go and the two talked for a few hours. They were both military veterans and shared an easy rapport. They made plans to go to a climate march in Chicago later that month. Finally, when it was time to leave, Joel left the footage behind, telling Smith that he could post it or not post it.

As the climate march got closer, Smith mentioned to Joel that he’d need a place to crash if he were to come. “Of course!” Joel replied. “Only if you post the Patoka video, though, hahah!”

It was obviously a joke, but at the end of the day, Smith didn’t think the footage was such a big deal. Before he left to meet Joel at the march, he posted it on Facebook.

Preparations for the climate march had just kicked off when Ashley Williams, a volunteer with Food and Water Watch, received a strange message on Facebook from a guy named “Bobby Long.”

“Ashley, if you are currently working with a Joel or JE McCollough, I would recommend breaking contact with them as they work for DAPL,” the message said, adding, “(obviously my profile is fake).”

The message was weird. Wracking her brain, she couldn’t place the name Joel. But the possibility of an infiltrator wasn’t new to Williams. “I think it’s just part of this line of work to anticipate that there’s someone waiting in the wings quietly as a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” she said. “You also think, Is this just my paranoia?”

Jenya Polozova, another Food and Water Watch volunteer, received a similar message. So did the organization’s Midwest region director, Jessica Fujan. According to Fujan, the person behind the sock puppet account said he knew about Joel because he too worked for TigerSwan. The three women agreed to keep an eye out.

Ten days later, Williams spotted him at a screening at Loyola University: a large man sitting in the back of the room — obviously a Marine, she thought. She and Polozova had organized the screening — of a Viceland series that included episodes on the Dakota Access pipeline — not as part of Food and Water Watch, but as politically active students of the university.

She’d met Joel before, she realized, at a climate march kickoff event, where she was stationed at an information table. Joel had hovered for a while, talking to Williams about the march and the frac sand mining community where she grew up.

“He came to almost every single event we put on,” Fujan said, whether the event was in downtown Chicago or deep in the suburbs. He even showed up twice to the same social media training, in two different locations.

Polozova became more conscious of how she talked about her environmental advocacy work. “I would run what I was going to say through my head and think, Is this something that could be used against this campaign?” she said. “I wasn’t getting paid. It was something a bunch of college kids are passionate about. It felt kind of predatory.”

Evidence of Joel’s presence at various Food and Water Watch events appears throughout the situation reports that TigerSwan submitted to Energy Transfer. A report in early April included a detailed description of the climate march kickoff event, while another featured images of Williams and Polozova and a description of the women’s upcoming Loyola screening.

The purpose of the situation reports offers a clue to McCollough’s interest in Food and Water Watch. According to a former TigerSwan contractor who worked on DAPL, “There was pressure from the highest levels to make sure that those reports didn’t make it look like there was no reason to have security. If you put at the bottom or the top of your report that there is little to no threat, you’re basically saying that you don’t need us.”

The reports were apparently meant to communicate to Energy Transfer both that there was a serious threat and that TigerSwan was making a dent in addressing it. That April, both those premises were in question. Overall, anti-DAPL activity had died down significantly since the previous fall. As promised, Trump issued an order within days of his inauguration to expedite approval of the pipeline, and construction was nearly complete. The North Dakota resistance camps had been evicted by police, and Mississippi Stand was no longer active.

Some passages also hinted at the possibility of future vandalism, including at the Illinois Patoka terminal.

There was one thing, though, that kept the contract going. Starting in mid-March, saboteurs had snaked down the pipeline, piercing valves with some type of welding torch. The damage to Energy Transfer’s property was not a good look for the security firm, but it was also the thing keeping so many operatives working. In its reports, TigerSwan described its efforts to find the culprits. Some passages also hinted at the possibility of future vandalism, including at the Illinois Patoka terminal — something that never materialized.

On the day of the climate march, Joel’s tank farm footage was described in a TigerSwan situation report. “Drone footage from the Patoka storage facility was recently published on an activist photographer’s webpage,” the document said, referring to Smith.

Joel showed up to the march with three people carrying nice cameras, whom he described to Fujan as veterans. They spent the day with the organizers and joined them at a restaurant afterward. “He asked about what’s next and talked about us working together,” Fujan recalled. It was time to end this, she felt.

She pulled Joel aside. “I explained that we had heard that he was affiliated with TigerSwan, and I didn’t want him to come around anymore,” she said.

“He just kind of laughed it off awkwardly and was like, ‘You’re kidding, that’s crazy.’ I told him that I knew his real name and … it was creepy that he didn’t use his real name,” said Fujan. She turned away to settle the bill, and Joel faded out of the Chicago activist scene.

About a month later, Joel sent Fujan one last Facebook message. “It sucks not being able to work with ya’ll. I have zero desire to be judged and viewed with suspicion by your people. That said, I really like you. You’re an incredibly fresh, vibrant, beautiful soul. If you ever need my help on a personal basis, hit me up! If I had worked with ya’ll longer I would have wanted to expand your outreach to veterans.”

Smith was there that day at the climate march with Joel — in fact, he was one of the veterans with nice cameras whom Fujan was uneasy about. He had no idea that Joel was expelled from the Chicago activist scene that weekend.

He remembers an exhilarating day. “Oh my god — I was stoked. I get to sit here with the actual organizers, spend all day with them — I don’t have that kind of access,” Smith said. These were the types of contacts that would allow him to take pictures that mattered.

Joel explained to Smith that the hotel he worked for would cover the cost of their room, all their meals, even parking. “We spent a lot of time in the hotel room having a good time. We had time to sit down and have good conversations,” Smith said. They discussed the movement and exchanged war stories.

“He drank a lot. To describe it as excessive is an understatement,” Smith said. “There was a hard edge to him, but any combat veteran’s got a hard edge, and that’s the way it is.”

One of the things Joel wanted to talk about most was Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek. The reports of pipeline valves being pierced had surfaced soon after the women went quiet on social media, and Joel was worried that the duo could be behind it. Smith had wondered too.

Reznicek had a reputation for being what Smith called “committed.” She was willing to do lockdowns. She had conducted an anti-DAPL hunger strike. But Montoya’s tactics seemed more measured.

Joel “was very, very concerned that Ruby had gotten in over her head,” Smith said. “He wouldn’t leave it alone. It was, ‘Who do you know that I can talk to that would know where Ruby is?’”

Smith wrote it off. “I thought he had an infatuation with her,” Smith said. “Ruby has that effect on people. She’s really personable; she’s easy to like.”

Ruby Montoya, left, and Jessica Reznicek at the entrance to the drilling site where the pipeline goes under the Mississippi at Sandusky, Iowa, on Aug. 10, 2016. Photos: Courtesy of Joshua Smith

Joel kept at it even after parting ways with Smith, texting again two days after the march when another report emerged of a valve being sabotaged.

By then, Smith was tired of the conversation. Whatever Montoya was up to, Smith wanted nothing to do with it. “It’s possible,” he told Joel in a text, “but from my vantage point I don’t know them well enough.”

In the months that followed, as The Intercept published a series of articles based on TigerSwan’s situation reports, rumors started circulating about the identities of the infiltrators who had gathered the intelligence. Seeing reference after reference to Food and Water Watch’s planning meetings, Fujan became more convinced than ever that the sock puppet Facebook account was telling the truth about Joel, and she was pissed.

In June 2017, she sent a letter to Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan. “Given your role in ‘protecting the public interest of the state and its people,’” she wrote, “we believe that you should launch an investigation into TigerSwan’s activities in the state.” According to Fujan, Madigan declined. Madigan’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

“When you do this work, you see that the power of the oil and gas industry and monied industries like this is unconquerable,” Fujan said. “They could sue our organization out of existence. They could sue me personally into dire financial straits, and it’s unreasonable to me that we should be incurring that kind of risk for truth-telling.”

5

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Joel

Reflecting on his friendship with Joel Edwards, Smith said he could imagine an alternate reality in which he was in Joel McCollough’s place. After he left the military, he considered going into mercenary work. “I thought about putting in applications with Blackwater, Triple Canopy. The money is just insane,” Smith said. “At the end of the day, I thought, that’s not me anymore.”

In fact, Joel McCollough isn’t all that different from Joel Edwards. As he told many water protectors, McCollough is a former Marine and served in Iraq. It’s also true that he’s a writer. In 2015, he published a book of poetry, called “Aftermath.” One of his most vivid poems describes a gruesome aspect of his military service.

I should have killed him,
Finished it with a knee on his throat,
or a bullet.

Instead I crouched over him
As he lay quietly gurgling in the sand
And went through his pockets
Looking for maps and rosters.

McCollough described his work in prose too. His essays and analysis have been published on veterans’ sites like SOFREP, Ranger Up, Military 1, and Time magazine’s Battleland. “As a Marine Corps counterintelligence specialist and interrogator in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, I had the opportunity to not just fight the enemy, but become intimately familiar with him,” McCollough wrote for Time in 2013. “After conducting more than 400 interrogations as well as working with Iraqi informants, I’ve had the opportunity to see the enemy as he is, a human being with a range of motivations, loyalties and ideologies. I discovered the enemy isn’t crazy, or immoral, or twisted, though his reasoning may be alien to the Western understanding of sanity and morality.”

According to one of his pieces, intelligence McCollough collected in Iraq led to the rescue of seven U.S. prisoners of war. His military records confirm that he was awarded a Purple Heart.

More than anything, McCollough’s writing reveals an understanding of the world that is indelibly shaped by combat.

As McCollough wrote, “There is a sign that has hung in hundreds of infantry headquarters in Iraq and Afghanistan. It says, ‘Complacency Kills.’ Every patrol that would go out would see that sign and be reminded — as if the blood of their brothers wasn’t reminder enough — to be vigilant.”

“I feel bad for the guy,” Smith said. “That is a private military organization operating domestically with no constitutional concerns. The federal government created Joel.”

When Smith got a warning about Joel, he didn’t take it too seriously. He texted Joel.

“I’ve heard it before. Whatever. I’m sure you’ve heard you’re a suspect, too,” Joel responded. He was right. Mississippi Stand organizers had told Smith that at first, they suspected that he might be an infiltrator. “Because of my military background and because I was holding myself aloof,” he said. Smith conceded Joel’s point, saying that he just wanted to give him the heads-up.

“All I’ve done is help people, paid for plane and bus tickets, let them shower in my room, given people rides to Standing Rock and back,” Joel replied. He texted a week later, pointing to others who had been fingered as possible infiltrators on social media. “It’s fucking absurd. I don’t want to get wrapped up in it.”

He proposed a theory. “In fact, this would be beyond devious, but has anyone checked out who the Intercept is working for? All these leaks from TigerSwan have just fueled people’s accusations against each other. They haven’t done the movement any good at all. That would be one hell of a psyop action by TigerSwan, but you and I both know they could do it.”

Smith and Joel communicated again briefly when Montoya and Reznicek publicly took responsibility for the pipeline sabotage in July 2017 — a decision the two women said they came to after The Intercept contacted them for comment on allegations about their involvement included in TigerSwan documents. (As one former TigerSwan operative put it, “We’d been trying to track them for a long time. They eluded us. Those girls were successful.”)

After that, Smith’s communication with Joel tapered off, but his old friend’s name resurfaced in October of last year in a Facebook post by Bold Iowa’s Heather Pearson. “To the 23 people who are still mutual friends with Joel Edwards, it has been confirmed by many sources that he is a paid infiltrator,” she wrote. Some commenters shrugged off the warning for lack of evidence, including Smith. Joel’s Facebook page came down not long after that.

The post How an Undercover Oil Industry Mercenary Tricked Pipeline Opponents Into Believing He Was One of Them appeared first on The Intercept.

There, near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, thousands were camped out as part of the Indigenous-led resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline. Energy Transfer, the venture’s parent company, had plans to run the Dakota Access pipeline under the Missouri River. Calling themselves water protectors, the people in camp objected to the threat the pipeline would present to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s primary drinking water source.

The effort to stop the pipeline had quickly become one of the most important Indigenous uprisings of the past century in the U.S. And McCollough, working for the mercenary security firm TigerSwan, was a key player in Energy Transfer’s multistate effort to defeat the resistance, newly released documents reveal. TigerSwan took a militaristic approach: To McCollough and his colleagues, the anti-pipeline movement was akin to the insurgencies the veterans had confronted in Afghanistan and Iraq. In line with that view, they deployed the same kinds of subversive tactics used in theaters of war.

One of these tactics was the use of spies to infiltrate so-called insurgents. That was McCollough’s goal when, in November 2016, he drove to North Dakota with an unwitting pipeline opponent. A PowerPoint slide titled “Mission” described exactly what he would do once he arrived: “infiltrate one of the Standing Rock camps.” Another slide, titled “Situation,” listed his adversaries, under the heading of “Belligerents”: “Native American activists, anti-establishment radicals, independent press, protester intelligence cells, camp security.”

TigerSwan’s “False” Denial

The newly revealed documents obtained by The Intercept show how security operations like McCollough’s infiltration were carefully orchestrated and managed by TigerSwan — describing in the security firm’s own words activities that it has repeatedly denied ever took place.

The documents make clear just how far security companies hired by energy industry firms — in this case, TigerSwan and Energy Transfer — will go to protect their clients’ business interests against a growing climate movement, and how much the energy companies are willing to spend for these aggressive defenses: An invoice from December 2017 said TigerSwan had billed Dakota Access LLC, a subsidiary of Energy Transfer, some $17 million up to that point.

For movements like the one at Standing Rock — Indigenous land and water defenders, fighting for territory central to their identity and health, and climate activists, staving off a potential future of chaos and suffering — their actions are a matter of survival. But the same can be said for the energy companies, evidenced by their willingness to deploy war-on-terror-style tactics.

Advocates for the activists, though, say the war-like tactics have created harmful conditions for those exercising their right to dissent. “This level of saturated, coordinated attack between private corporate interests, law enforcement, private security to shut down the climate justice movement particularly in the United States is extremely dangerous,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-founder of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, which is working with the Water Protector Legal Collective to represent water protectors in a class-action lawsuit against North Dakota law enforcement officials for using high-pressure water hoses and other aggressive tactics at Standing Rock. The suit notes TigerSwan’s close collaboration with the sheriffs’ officials.

The new documents, which are being reported here for the first time, were turned over as discovery material to the North Dakota Private Investigation and Security Board. The board filed an administrative complaint against TigerSwan and its former CEO, James Reese, a retired commander of the elite special operations military unit Delta Force, for operating without a license in the state — alleging violations carrying more than $2 million in fines. TigerSwan responded to the claim in court by saying the firm only provided consultation for the operations.

The security board made the new material public as exhibits attached to a legal filing alleging that TigerSwan’s denials were “willfully false and misleading” and that the documents proved it.

“This level of saturated, coordinated attack between private corporate interests, law enforcement, private security to shut down the climate justice movement particularly in the United States is extremely dangerous.”

In his responses to the board’s allegations, Reese claimed misinformation was to blame for parts of the security board’s lawsuit against TigerSwan, suggesting the culprit was a series of investigative stories from The Intercept: “The board considers one sided news reports from an anti-energy on-line publication a sufficient basis for calling me a liar,” Reese declared. In the same affidavit, Reese claimed the operation involving McCollough had merely been proposed to the firm and, owing to its lack of a security license, not approved by TigerSwan. (At the end of last summer, TigerSwan and Reese signed a settlement with the board for less than $200,000, admitting no wrongdoing.)

TigerSwan’s own reports, however, offer rich detail about the company’s operations — better than any other source to date. (Neither Reese nor TigerSwan responded to a detailed request for comment for this article. Energy Transfer directed questions to TigerSwan and said, “We have no knowledge of any of the alleged activities.” McCollough suggested that some of the TigerSwan documents included as exhibits in the North Dakota board’s filing — which he incorrectly described as “leaked” — may contain inaccurate information, but declined to point to any specific fact he disputed or item he believed to be false.)

WhatsApp chats, invoices, operational plans, and organizational charts, all made public by the North Dakota security board, show how Reese and TigerSwan were making, according to the board, “willfully false and misleading” claims when they said that the company had not carried out private investigation, security work, or infiltration operations in North Dakota. The company documents show instead that TigerSwan at times promoted its “human intelligence” operation as a driving element of its effort to fight pipeline resistance.

“TS personnel have established eight months of relationships with activists,” a presentation titled “TigerSwan Intelligence” stated. The same slide noted that TigerSwan operatives had gotten to know “Anti-pipeline groups in Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Missouri, and North Dakota” and “Maintain personal relationships with key leaders.”

“No other company has infiltrated these activist groups on a long-term basis,” another slide said. “Our personnel even now develop deeper ties into activist communities and groups that are international in their reach.”

Far-Reaching Surveillance

TigerSwan organized its surveillance work like a full-fledged state intelligence agency but on a smaller scale. The company divided the intelligence operation into teams focused on human intelligence, imagery intelligence, signals intelligence (intercepting communications), and open-source intelligence based on news reports or other publicly available material like social media posts. The TigerSwan teams worked out of “fusion centers” — the same term state law enforcement agencies use to describe a network of post-9/11 information sharing offices — located in Bismarck, North Dakota; Des Moines, Iowa; and Sioux Falls, South Dakota, according to an organizational chart.

The imagery intelligence team included an operative who took photographs of the camps from a helicopter, while the signals intelligence team monitored water protectors’ radio communications. At times, on the radios, TigerSwan operatives would add their own disruptive messages, according to a former member of the intelligence team, who declined to be named out of fear of retribution.

Key to the security operation was the use of infiltrators. “Having TS CI/HUMINT infiltrators on the ground is critical in minimizing lost construction time,” the TigerSwan Intelligence PowerPoint noted, using acronyms for counterintelligence and human intelligence.

The plan for Operation Baratheon describes how the company organized such activities. In advance of McCollough’s election-week trip, TigerSwan meticulously plotted out the mission, compiling a slideshow with the weather forecast, the driving route from Iowa to North Dakota, and a detailed escape plan, including an option for a helicopter evacuation. This calculated approach was new for the company, said the intelligence team member. Recently, a company infiltrator had been hastily removed from the North Dakota camps after his cover was blown, and TigerSwan did not want to be caught unprepared again. Once a day, McCollough was to use code phrases to check in with his handlers on a WhatsApp channel that included six other TigerSwan operatives, according to the documents.

The operation plan warned of certain types of people — referred to as “belligerents” — thought to be dangerous. McCollough, for example, was to be wary of members of the independent press. The former contractor explained the thinking: Independent reporters are “not unbiased,” he said, “and they’re basically an intelligence collection node for whatever movement they’re a part of.”

Framing journalists, camp security, and Native American activists as hostile aggressors was in line with TigerSwan’s view of the protests as an insurgency that must be quelled: “TigerSwan’s counterinsurgency approach to the problem set is to identify and break down the activist network,” the intelligence PowerPoint stated. “TS Intel understands anti-pipeline activists have developed cultural, religious, and ethnic environments which we are uniquely capable of exploiting.”

Framing journalists, camp security, and Native American activists as hostile aggressors was in line with TigerSwan’s view of the protests as an insurgency that must be quelled.

Pipeline opponents have alleged that the counterinsurgency campaign led to civil rights violations. Although the North Dakota security board signed the settlement agreement, at least one other lawsuit against the security firm is outstanding. The suit, which alleges that the closure of the highway passing by the resistance camps infringed on pipeline opponents’ First Amendment rights, says TigerSwan’s close collaboration with police and public officials makes the security firm liable for the abuses.

Water protectors believe that the paltry fines imposed by the security board provide only a semblance/parody of justice. “TigerSwan has not yet been held meaningfully accountable for their actions at Standing Rock,” said Noah Smith-Drelich, an attorney representing water protectors in the highway case. “We’re hoping to change that.”

Infiltrator Chat Logs

Two bearded men wielding swords and wearing wolf skins illustrate the cover of a TigerSwan “Daily HUMINT” report for December 8, 2016. The men represented in the TigerSwan document are úlfhéðnar, a type of elite Viking soldier that goes into a trance-like state as they lead attacks on enemies.

The presentation slides in the HUMINT report offer intelligence on a variety of people, organizations, and other aspects of camp life. The group Veterans for Peace is “a very communist organization,” said one slide. Another, titled “Red Warrior Camp Cell Leader,” tracked the activities of a water protector named Tempeh, who was thought to be involved with a direct action-focused camp. “Tempeh has asked RO” — coded initials for the infiltrator — “to assist him in evaluating weaknesses in the systems for the purposes of exploiting/sabotaging. RO remained non-committal,” one slide said. “Tempeh is also looking for someone to dig up dirt on sex trafficking involving DAPL workers.” The infiltrators, according to the documents, volunteered to collect such information, in an effort to gain the trust of camp leaders.

The slide contained numerous inaccuracies, Tempeh told The Intercept. Tempeh, for example, was close with members of Red Warrior, but he belonged to a separate camp called Heyoka. He said much of the material seemed to be based on rumor or on the kind of directionless brainstorming that occurred around campfires.

The PowerPoint was only the starting point for more than a month of documented spying. The records provided by TigerSwan in discovery show that, the same day the report about Tempeh came in, a human intelligence team member named Logan Davis created a WhatsApp chat group with McCollough and a third member of the TigerSwan team, Zachary Perez, who were both getting ready to enter the North Dakota camps. (Neither Davis nor Perez responded to requests for comment.)

“Joel, first RFI for you,” Davis wrote, using an acronym for request for information, “who belongs to Red Warrior Group.” He wanted the leadership structure, number of members, where they were staying, and a description of their vehicles. He asked the same for Veterans for Peace. Perez, meanwhile, would attempt to gain access to Sacred Stone camp.

“RW is highly guarded,” McCollough replied, referencing Red Warrior camp. “I got extremely lucky meeting Tempeh the way i did.” He asked Davis to get the name of a pimp from law enforcement, so he could “build bona fides” with Tempeh. (Asked about the report, Tempeh did not recall any conversation with McCollough.)

Davis delivered a name and then sent the operatives into action: “Start reengaging your sources. We don’t have the luxury of time.”

The infiltrators did just that, according to the TigerSwan documents attached to the Board’s filing. They attended courthouse support protests, offered to be drivers for direct actions, invited water protectors to crash in their hotel rooms, and provided them with gear. They filed intelligence reports and details of their movements back to Davis, who at times mingled among water protectors himself, and later to other handlers, Nik McKinnon and Will Janisch. (McKinnon and Janisch did not respond to requests for comment.)

The chat logs describe the role Reese, then TigerSwan’s CEO, played in managing the HUMINT operation. “When Jim Reese visited a while ago he said the collectors” — a term for intelligence collectors, including infiltrators — “could have 1k in petty cash,” McCollough told the group, explaining that he didn’t want to use his credit card in front of the pipeline opponents. “I told him 500 would be plenty.”

McCollough’s Machinations

Throughout December 2016, McCollough developed relationships with various water protectors. According to the TigerSwan chat logs in the North Dakota security board’s filing, he repeatedly referred to them in the chats as “muj,” shorthand for mujahedeen, a reference to Muslim religious fighters. TigerSwan operatives exchanged crude banter about women and racist jokes, including about “drunk Indians.” The chat itself was titled “Operation Maca Root 3,” a supplement known for increasing libido and fertility in men.

As the former member of the TigerSwan intelligence team put it, “At some level you naturally dehumanize the enemy. They do the same thing.” He added, “This isn’t a Brooklyn tech startup, it’s a bunch of mercs in a private chat supposedly.”

Advocates for water protectors noted that such dehumanizing language speaks to the mercenaries’ militaristic approach. “It’s the same type of racism that’s employed by the military in other countries to dehumanize and demonize a population under attack or under occupation,” said Verheyden-Hilliard.

At one point in the chats, Davis indicated ambitions to do more than just observe water protectors’ activities. He flagged the presence of an organization of veteran volunteers called The Mission Continues, telling the chat group, “I can see this being something we can develop and infiltrate rather easily, if not completely take over.”

On a different day, after noting that few supporters turned out at a trial for a water protector, Davis joked, “It’s pretty bad, I’m gonna eat breakfast and think about how much we have destroyed a grass roots movement.”

The assessment of TigerSwan’s efficacy was shared by the former member of the intelligence team: “Demoralization, destabilization, fake crisis, ideological subversion, active measures, or psychological warfare — these had all taken their toll,” he said.

The most active infiltrator in the chat group was McCollough, according to the logs made public in the security board filing. Throughout December and January, he attempted to identify weapons in the camps. He described interpersonal disputes between members of the camp security groups and drug and alcohol use among the pipeline opponents. And he showed a special interest in violence against women. Previous reporting by The Intercept shows that he asked two water protectors for names of women who had been assaulted, claiming he was a journalist writing an article about it; they declined. The chat provides evidence of that approach. “Working on the pirs” — priority intelligence requirements — “with a muj who thinks I’m gonna write an article about the rapes in camp,” he told the chat group at one point.

McCollough floated another idea for obtaining information that water protectors didn’t offer voluntarily. “Can we get micro recorders for a hotel room? If its legal, of course,” he suggested. (In fact, water protectors had found what appeared to be such a device at the hotel and casino back in October.) “Tempeh used the bathroom to have private discussions even when the room was full. If i had had a recorder I could turn on remotely it would have been great.”

“You can do it but can’t be used in court,” the other infiltrator, Perez, responded. “Only with consent or in a ‘public Setting.’”

McKinnon, the handler, jumped in. “It would depend on ‘who’s dwelling’ it is. And what Zach said.”

“If i paid for the room, its mine, right?”McCollough asked.

“Correct,” McKinnon replied.

They were mostly wrong. In North Dakota, using recording devices, even in your own home, would amount to felony eavesdropping in a space like a bathroom, where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy — unless at least one person present agreed to the recording, according to North Dakota’s wiretapping laws.

Tempeh, who remembered seeing McCollough that day in the hotel room, said that operational security was essential to planning nonviolent direct actions and likely prevented McCollough from getting much meaningful information. “If you weren’t in our family, we didn’t talk to you,” he said. “We didn’t even talk around you.”

Vanessa Dundon, a plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit related to the water hoses, was also mentioned in the documents. Dundon, who is Diné, lost vision in one eye after being hit by a tear gas canister at Standing Rock. In the chat logs filed by the security board, McCollough claimed to have spent a night in Dundon’s room, to which Davis replied that he hoped McCollough would “make little martyrs” with her. “Cyclops babies,” Perez replied in the chats, a crass reference to Dundon’s lost eye.

Dundon said she didn’t remember McCollough. “It disappoints me how childish all of the security firms are and that they are in any position of power,” she said. Even as she continues, four years later, to undergo surgeries on her eye, however, Dundon finds humor in the infiltrators’ boorish exchange. “It’s funny in a way,” she said. “Being Native, the way we take in hate or shaming — we turn those things to make them laughable.”

Ultimately, for Dundon and others, it’s their communities’ health at stake. Kandi Mossett, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation from the Fort Berthold reservation in the heart of North Dakota’s fracking region, developed cancer when she was 20 years old, which she believes was linked to pollution in her community.

Mossett, who was also mentioned in the WhatsApp chats filed by the security board, said the surveillance she and others experienced at Standing Rock has indelibly changed the Indigenous environmental justice movement. “It’s still affecting people four years later with PTSD,” she said. She and others have become more cautious about who they trust and how they use technology. The surveillance, she added, “is a form of trying to shut us up and shut us down. And for most of us, it didn’t work.”

“Proprietary Databases on Activists”

The WhatsApp chats continued into mid-January, though McCollough worked as an infiltrator through the spring, long after the camps closed down in February. The documents obtained by The Intercept leave a paper trail of his work. An invoice dated March 23, 2017, listed him as “HUMINT ND” — human intelligence North Dakota — and an April 2017 image of McCollough at a Chicago meeting of the nonprofit Food & Water Watch appeared in the PowerPoint titled “TigerSwan Intelligence.”

TigerSwan saw opportunity on the horizon: anti-pipeline insurgency everywhere.

By then, the movement at Standing Rock had quieted down, and it was becoming increasingly clear that the counterinsurgency force envisioned by TigerSwan at Standing Rock was no longer needed, even on its own terms. TigerSwan, however, saw opportunity on the horizon: anti-pipeline insurgency everywhere. The internal company documents hint at plans to build out the firm’s own cottage industry of squelching pipeline protests. One presentation, which appears to be a pitch to fossil-fuel companies, lays out the services TigerSwan hoped to provide.

Law enforcement was no match for pipeline opponents, the pitch began. “The activist mindset places them in at the same level as an insurgency, which is outside current law enforcement capabilities,” a slide said. It was TigerSwan’s human intelligence capabilities that truly set it apart from law enforcement, because police had to “rely on warrants to obtain information rather than improvising and having the information freely provided by the activists themselves.” Instead of “turning” activists, a slide said, “We rely on elicitation primarily.”

Unlike law enforcement officers, private security operatives work outside of many constitutional restraints, such as those laid out in First Amendment law, said Verheyden-Hilliard. “When you start to bring in these private entities, they’re also often operating as an illegal proxy force to be a hidden hand to do what official law enforcement may be restricted from doing, which is a lot of what we’re seeing here,” she said. “The fact that you have law enforcement that is commissioned by the state with the authority to use lethal force and to deprive people of their liberty — that law enforcement is being informed in its actions by an entity whose pecuniary interest is in suppressing protest activity.”

Cooperation along those lines was evident in the TigerSwan presentation. “Advanced warning of protester movement allowed TigerSwan security to liaise with local Law Enforcement (LE) in a timely manner,” the documents said.

“They’re also often operating as an illegal proxy force to be a hidden hand to do what official law enforcement may be restricted from doing.”

At fusion cells “set up to imitate military regional operations centers,” analysts combined data from their 24-hour media monitoring with the human intelligence collected on the ground to create maps of networks and detailed profiles of activists.

The product TigerSwan could offer, the presentation said, was more than just former military members who know how to break into a movement. “Utilization of CI/HUMINT” — counterintelligence/human intelligence — “techniques and military fusion cells have allowed TigerSwan to develop proprietary databases on activists,” the presentation stated.

And the data could be reused: “TigerSwan analysts now have a well-developed intelligence picture of key bad actors, the groups they belong to, how they are funded, and where they come from,” the PowerPoint read. “This enormous amount of historical data is proprietary to TS.”

The former intelligence operative scoffed at the idea that TigerSwan’s database contained meaningful threat information. “So there’s a databases of people and things and events that’s so big it really doesn’t mean anything,” he said, but explained the claims: “More threats made them more money. It was just promo to get contracts.”

TigerSwan’s “Fraud”

TigerSwan’s path to expansion, however, was obstructed after The Intercept’s investigations revealed the company’s invasive, militaristic tactics. As its business suffered, TigerSwan fought to evade legal accountability.

Despite the internal company documents included in the security board filing, TigerSwan and Reese have continued to deny they provided private investigative and security services in North Dakota. In June, in response to a list of questions posed by the North Dakota Private Investigative and Security Board with their discovery request, Reese submitted a lengthy affidavit challenging accounts of TigerSwan’s activities. “Did any of OUR employees provide investigative or security services in North Dakota. They did not. Anyone inside the camp providing investigative services were hired by someone else,” Reese wrote on June 24. “HUMINT does not mean they were in the camp. Those assigned as HUMINT were research/reports writers who focused on information from sources along the pipeline,” Reese claimed, even though all three “HUMINT” operatives discussed infiltrating North Dakota camps in real time over WhatsApp.

As for McCollough, Reese declared, “The intercept article alleges he was in ND and spent a few days in the Casino. We understand that he came on his own accord as he was writing an article. Mr. McCullough has had several articles published over the years on a variety of veteran views and activities. TigerSwan hired him for work in Iowa and North Carolina.” Operation Baratheon was “a PROPOSED idea that was NOT APPROVED BY TigerSwan. It was disapproved because TigerSwan was not licensed to do this type of private investigator work and our former military intel analyst were looking at this from their experiences abroad and not domestically.”

As The Intercept has previously reported, McCollough did indeed follow the plan outlined in the document, and the new documents show that TigerSwan managers ran at least one similar operation. (According to an invoice, McCollough billed $450 a day for his work as a human intelligence operative.)

The board’s lawyer characterized Reese’s claims as part of an attempt by TigerSwan “to perpetuate a fraud on this court through their intentional misrepresentation and omissions related to Joel McCollough, Logan Davis, and Zach Perez.” The judge agreed that sanctions would be necessary. For failing to provide full responses to discovery requests, she declared TigerSwan and Reese in default and said the board should apply an administrative fee. TigerSwan asked the board to reconsider, claiming that they had provided substantive answers to the requests and that they stood ready to provide additional information.

With TigerSwan continuing a years-long legal battle in response to the judge’s ruling — the board suggested in a legal filing that “TigerSwan seeks to win this action by attrition” — the two sides reached a settlement in September of this year. TigerSwan agreed to stay out of North Dakota and to pay a fine of $175,000 — a fraction of the standard fines for violations laid out in the North Dakota Private Investigative and Security Board’s complaint — in exchange for admitting no wrongdoing.

The settlement did not, however, prevent TigerSwan from turning over 16,000 documents to the board about its activities at Standing Rock, putting them into the public record. Energy Transfer is now suing TigerSwan and the security board, claiming that the security company breached its contract by providing the material and that the board should return the material. A judge has granted a temporary restraining order preventing North Dakota from providing citizens access to the material.

By the time the administrative case was settled, Reese had already moved on to new ventures. After Trump’s election, a friend of Reese’s at the Washington Examiner published an op-ed suggesting the TigerSwan chief ought to be appointed FBI director. At the same time, Reese fashioned himself into a right-wing pundit, commenting on relations with Russia, mass shootings, and the war in Syria — all through a contributor gig at Fox News, where Trump might see him speak. Though the FBI job never materialized, this summer Reese obtained a U.S. government-approved contract to export oil from the Kurdish-controlled region of Northeast Syria, a deal the Syrian foreign ministry said amounts to the U.S. “stealing” Syrian oil.

Meanwhile, the idea that counterinsurgency tactics should be used to quell domestic uprisings has proliferated. David Kilcullen, a top war-on-terror adviser to the U.S. government, recently wrote that the nationwide uprisings in the wake of George Floyd’s killing might be viewed as an “incipient insurgency.” What happened at Standing Rock reveals the results such logic can produce.

Last month, private security firm Atlas Aegis put out calls for special operations veterans to apply to defend Minneapolis businesses and polling places during the November election from “antifas.” In response, Minnesota voting rights advocates sued the company, and the state attorney general’s office launched its own investigation.

“There has to be a crackdown,” said Verheyden-Hilliard. She said the big question would be whether legislatures would be willing to rein in security companies. “Or do they just want to endorse and support a sprawling paramilitary, law enforcement, surveillance industry that has tentacles throughout the country and can act at the whim of any private corporation?”

The post In the Mercenaries’ Own Words: Documents Detail TigerSwan Infiltration of Standing Rock appeared first on The Intercept.

“This is the first opinion that I’ve been aware of that’s made it clear that when you give records to a public entity like this private investigation board, they become public records,” said Jack McDonald, attorney for the North Dakota Newspaper Association. “What relationship there was between Energy Transfer and TigerSwan — that doesn’t affect the records.”

The North Dakota case revolves around 16,000 documents that an administrative law judge forced TigerSwan to hand over to the state’s Private Investigation and Security Board in the summer of 2020 as part of discovery in a lawsuit accusing the company of operating without a security license. TigerSwan was hired by Energy Transfer in September 2016 to lead its security response to the Indigenous-led movement to stop construction of the Dakota Access pipeline, or DAPL, at the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

A portion of the discovery documents were already made public in court filings. The documents provided unprecedented detail about the security firm’s activities against members of the anti-pipeline movement, known as water protectors, and raised questions about whether public officials’ responses to Energy Transfer’s activities were appropriate.

In October 2020, I made a public records request under the aegis of The Intercept for the full set of documents that gave rise to the court case. This week, Energy Transfer attorneys said they plan to appeal the latest ruling and requested a stay to prevent the North Dakota security board from releasing the material.

Led by a former commander of the elite Army unit Delta Force, TigerSwan approached the water protectors as “an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component,” according to internal documents leaked to The Intercept. Company tactics — including aerial surveillance, communications monitoring, infiltration of activist circles, and coordination with law enforcement agencies — were revealed by The Intercept in an investigative series. In one of the discovery documents that has already been released, TigerSwan bluntly said that its “counterinsurgency approach to the problem set is to identify and break down the activist network.”

Energy Transfer is pouring money into fighting more documents disclosures. The pipeline company hired Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP, a law firm founded by Marc Kasowitz, one of former President Donald Trump’s longtime attorneys. Critics say the firm’s aggressive lawsuits against environmentalists are designed to strain its opponents’ resources and chill public debate.

Kasowitz Benson Torres represented Energy Transfer in a federal suit accusing Greenpeace and others of launching the Standing Rock movement through a misinformation campaign and of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, which was designed to take down the mob. The suit against Greenpeace was dismissed by a federal judge, who said that its RICO interpretation was “dangerously broad.” (Energy Transfer and Kasowitz Benson Torres declined to comment for this story.)

“The dehumanization, demonization, and lawfare tactics used against water protectors … are bankrolled by private fossil fuel corporations with endlessly deep pockets.”

“The dehumanization, demonization, and lawfare tactics used against water protectors from Standing Rock and Line 3” — another contested pipeline — “to front lines across the world are bankrolled by private fossil fuel corporations with endlessly deep pockets,” said Natali Segovia, legal director of the Water Protector Legal Collective, which represents opponents of the Dakota Access pipeline and other polluting projects. “These documents are crucial to understanding just how far those tactics run and the extent of the harm they have already caused to those that were at Standing Rock.”

Shortly after TigerSwan handed over its documents to the North Dakota Private Investigation and Security Board, Energy Transfer began fighting to get them back, including by suing the board itself. The fight continued after TigerSwan and the board agreed to a settlement in the licensing dispute, in which TigerSwan affirmed that it would not operate in the state and would pay $175,000 but admitted no fault.

Meanwhile, the board denied The Intercept’s public records request for the documents, in part by citing pending litigation. When The Intercept sued for the documents, the two cases were combined.

Energy Transfer argued that the documents don’t count as public records because, it claimed, TigerSwan had inadvertently supplied material that went beyond the discovery request, violating its contract with Energy Transfer. TigerSwan agreed in court filings that the material should be returned and kept from release.

Feland, the judge, dismissed the claim and others, affirming that Energy Transfer’s contract with TigerSwan does not override North Dakota’s open records laws.

Although the ruling only directly applies to a handful of North Dakota counties, it could have consequences beyond the region. “State law rulings can really spread,” said Victoria Noble, a First Amendment fellow at The Intercept and one of the lawyers representing the news outlet in court. “If Energy Transfer had prevailed here, that would have given a blueprint both for Energy Transfer and for other companies to make the same arguments in other states, in other cases.”

“If Energy Transfer had prevailed here, that would have given a blueprint both for Energy Transfer and for other companies to make the same arguments in other states, in other cases.”

The ruling does not mean that the North Dakota board will immediately hand over the documents, in part because the judge did not rule on whether a public records law exemption asserted by the security board applies. Energy Transfer’s appeal and request for a stay are likely to halt any potential release for the time being.

Separately, the company is still fighting in North Dakota’s Supreme Court to intervene in the security board’s now-settled administrative case against TigerSwan, aiming to get the administrative law judge to issue a protective order forcing the board to withhold the documents.

In an amicus brief, news organizations characterized Energy Transfer and Kasowitz Benson Torres’s arguments to the Supreme Court as “abusive litigation tactics.” The signatories — the North Dakota Newspaper Association; HPR LLC, which publishes Fargo’s High Plains Reader; and First Look Institute, The Intercept’s parent company — said that allowing Energy Transfer to make arguments similar to those already presented in district court again to an administrative law judge would be “duplicative litigation” and would “seriously impair the rights of the press and public under the Open Records Act” because of the high expense of fighting the Fortune 500 company in multiple venues.

The aggressive approach is nothing new for Energy Transfer. In 2019, when Energy Transfer’s RICO suit against Greenpeace was dismissed, its Kasowitz Benson Torres attorneys filed a new version of the suit in a North Dakota state court within a week; that case is ongoing. Last spring, the attorneys filed wide-ranging subpoenas against individuals and groups associated with the Standing Rock movement — including press. Among the subpoenas was one demanding that the nonprofit news organization Unicorn Riot turn over audio, communications, and article drafts related to Standing Rock reporting.

The post Judge Rules Against Pipeline Company Trying to Keep “Counterinsurgency” Records Secret appeared first on The Intercept.

By October, TigerSwan — founded by James Reese, a retired commander of the elite special operations Army unit Delta Force — had established a military-style pipeline security strategy.

There was one nagging problem that threatened to unravel it all: Reese hadn’t acquired a security license from the North Dakota Private Investigation and Security Board. Although Reese claimed TigerSwan wasn’t conducting security services at all, the state regulator insisted that its operations were unlawful without a license.

TigerSwan turned to Jonathan Thompson, the head of the National Sheriffs’ Association, a trade group representing sheriffs, for help. The security board “has a problem understanding and staying within their charter,” Shawn Sweeney, TigerSwan’s senior vice president, wrote to Thompson. If he could “discuss possible political measures to apply pressure it will assist in the entire project success [sic],” the employee appealed.

Thompson was enthused to work with TigerSwan. “We are keen to be a strong partner where we can help keep the message narrative supportive [sic],” he wrote back. “[C]all if ever need anything.”

Despite Thompson’s offer of assistance, TigerSwan continued to operate in North Dakota with no license for months. The company managed dozens of on-the-ground security guards, surveilled and infiltrated protesters, and passed along profiles of so-called persons of interest to one of the largest midstream energy companies in North America.

A discovery request filed as part of the case forced thousands of new internal TigerSwan documents into the public record. Energy Transfer’s lawyers fought for nearly two years to keep the documents secret, until North Dakota’s Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that the material falls under the state’s open records statute. Because an arrangement between North Dakota and Energy Transfer allows the fossil fuel company to weigh in on which documents should be redacted, the state has yet to release over 9,000 disputed pages containing material that Energy Transfer is, for now at least, fighting to keep out of the public eye.

The released documents provide startling new details about how TigerSwan used social media monitoring, aerial surveillance, radio eavesdropping, undercover personnel, and subscription-based records databases to build watchlists and dossiers on Indigenous activists and environmental organizations.

At times, the pipeline security company shared this information with law enforcement officials. In other cases, WhatsApp chats and emails confirm TigerSwan used what it gathered to follow pipeline opponents in their cars and develop propaganda campaigns online. The documents contain records of TigerSwan attempting to help Energy Transfer build a legal case against pipeline opponents, known as water protectors, using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, a law that was passed to prosecute the mob.

The Intercept and Grist contacted TigerSwan, Energy Transfer, the National Sheriffs’ Association, as well as Thompson, the group’s executive director. None of them responded to requests for comment.

To TigerSwan, the emergence of Indigenous-led social movements to keep oil and gas in the ground represented a business opportunity. Reese anticipated new demand from the fossil fuel industry for strategies to undermine the network of activists his company had so carefully gathered information on. In the records, TigerSwan expressed its ambitions to repurpose these detailed records to position themselves as experts in managing pipeline protests. The company created marketing materials pitching work to at least two other energy companies building controversial oil and gas infrastructure, the records show. TigerSwan, which was staffed heavily with former members of military special operations units, branded its tactics as a “counterinsurgency approach,” drawing directly from its leaders’ experiences fighting the so-called war on terror abroad.

TigerSwan did not just work in North Dakota. Energy Transfer hired the company to provide security to its Rover pipeline, in Ohio and West Virginia, the documents confirm. By spring 2017, TigerSwan was also assembling intelligence reports on opponents of Energy Transfer and Sunoco’s Mariner East 2 pipeline in Pennsylvania.

The documents from the North Dakota security board paint a detailed picture of counterinsurgency-style strategies for defeating opponents of oil and gas development, a war-on-terror security firm’s aspirations to replicate its deceptive tactics far beyond the Northern Great Plains, and the cozy relationship between businesses linked to the fossil fuel industry and one of the largest law enforcement trade associations in the U.S. The impetus for spying was not simply to keep people safe but to drum up profits from energy clients and to allow fossil fuels to continue flowing, at the expense of the communities fighting for clean water and a healthy climate.

“For them, it was an opportunity to help create a narrative against our tribe and our supporters.”

“For them, it was an opportunity to help create a narrative against our tribe and our supporters,” said Wasté Win Young, a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and one of the plaintiffs in a class-action civil rights lawsuit against TigerSwan and local law enforcement. Young’s social media posts repeatedly showed up in the documents. “We weren’t motivated by money or payoffs or anything like that. We just wanted to protect our homelands.”

The Intercept published the first detailed descriptions of TigerSwan’s tactics in 2017, based on internal documents leaked by a TigerSwan contractor. Nearly six years later, there have been no public indications that the security company obtained major new fossil fuel company contracts. Meanwhile, corporate lobbyists spurred the passage of so-called critical infrastructure laws widely understood to stifle fossil fuel protests in 19 states across the U.S. Collaborations between corporations and law enforcement against environmental defenders have proliferated, from Minnesota’s lake country to the urban forests of Atlanta.

No significant regulatory reforms have been enacted to prevent firms from repeating counterinsurgency-style tactics. And TigerSwan is far from the only firm to use invasive surveillance strategies. The North Dakota documents show that at least one other private security firm at Standing Rock appears to have utilized similar schemes against pipeline opponents.

“We need to always be very clear that the industry knows what a risk the climate movement is,” said May Boeve, the executive director of 350.org, a climate nonprofit that was repeatedly mentioned in TigerSwan’s marketing and surveillance material. “They’re going to keep using these kinds of strategies, but they’ll think of other things as well.”

TigerSwan’s Surveillance Gospel

“Gentlemen, as you are aware there has been a shift in environmentalist and ‘First Nations’ groups regarding the tactics being used to prevent, deter, or interrupt the oil and gas industry,” said a February 2017 email drafted by TigerSwan employees to a regional official at ConocoPhillips, a major oil and gas producer — and a potential TigerSwan client.

“Recently in our area the situation has become extremely tense with ‘protestors’ using terrorist style tactics which are well beyond simple civil disobedience,” the email continued. “If steps have not already been taken to prevent and plans to mitigate [sic] an event or events like these to Conoco I may be able to suggest some solutions.”

TigerSwan’s marketing materials read like a playbook for undermining grassroots resistance. ConocoPhillips was just one of the companies the private security firm had in its sights.

In another case, a PowerPoint presentation drafted for Dominion, which was building the Atlantic Coast natural gas pipeline through three mid-Atlantic states, offered detailed profiles of local anti-pipeline groups and individuals identified as “threat actors.” (The planned pipeline was canceled in 2020.) TigerSwan laid out the types of services it could provide, including a “Law Enforcement Liaison” and access to GuardianAngel, its GPS and mapping tool. (Neither ConocoPhillips nor Dominion responded to questions about whether they hired the security firm.)

In January 2017, a TigerSwan deputy program manager emailed a presentation titled “Pipeline Opposition Model” to Reese and others, explaining that it was meant to serve as a business development tool and a “working concept to discuss the problem.” The presentation claimed external forces had helped drive the Standing Rock movement and pointed to outside tribes, climate nonprofits like 350.org, and even billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who had a “vested interest in DAPL failure” because of their investments in the rail industry.

Water protectors used an elaborate set of social movement theories to advance their cause, another slide hypothesized, including “Lone Wolf terror tactics.” Specifically, TigerSwan speculated that pipeline opponents could be using the “hero cycle” narrative, a storytelling archetype, to recruit new movement members on social media and energize them to take action — a strategy, the presentation said, also used by ISIS recruiters.

Anyone whose work had touched the Standing Rock movement could become a villain in TigerSwan’s sales pitches. One PowerPoint presentation included biographical details about Zahra Hirji, a journalist who worked at the time for Inside Climate News. Another included a photo of a water protector’s former professor and her course list.

As a remedy, the company offered up a suite of “TigerSwan Solutions.” To the security firm, keeping the fossil fuel industry safe didn’t just mean drones, social media monitoring, HUMINT (short for human intelligence, such as from undercover personnel), and liaising with law enforcement officials and agencies — all included on its list — it also meant local community engagement, counter-protesters, building a “pipeline narrative,” and partnering with university oil and gas programs.

“Win the populace, and you win the fight,” the presentation stated, repeating a key principle of counterinsurgency strategy.

Reese approved: “I’d like to have these cleaned up and branded so I can use,” he wrote back.

Reese used similar material to shore up his relationship with existing clients. In December 2016, he requested a copy of a presentation titled “Strategic Overview,” which he hoped to send to Energy Transfer supervisors working on building the Rover natural gas pipeline. The presentation, a version of which The Intercept previously published, draws heavily from a 2014 report by the Republican minority staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, claiming that a “club” of billionaires control the environmental movement.

In a memo called “The Standing Rock Effect,” TigerSwan lays out a set of seven criteria the company had developed for identifying anti-pipeline camps sprouting up across the country. “TigerSwan’s full suite of security offerings offsets the risk these camps pose to a company’s bottom line,” the company concluded.

TigerSwan utilized its promotional materials to target both energy companies and states with oil and gas resources. In April 2017, the security firm and the National Sheriffs’ Association planned to brief more than 50 state employees in Nebraska, including staffers in the governor’s office, the state Emergency Management Agency, and the State Patrol, on the “lessons learned” from the Dakota Access pipeline protests. A contractor for the National Sheriffs’ Association wrote that the briefing was in part “to prepare the state of Nebraska for the Keystone Pipeline issues coming in months ahead.”

Target: Water Protectors

TigerSwan’s obsessive tracking of environmental activists is laid out in detail in the North Dakota documents. Assisted at times by National Sheriffs’ Association personnel, the company targeted little-known water protectors, national nonprofits, and even legal workers.

The first page of a template for intelligence sharing encouraged TigerSwan employees to enter information about any “New Person of Interest.” TigerSwan personnel routinely referred to its targets as “EREs,” short for environmental rights extremists, apparently a version of the Department of Homeland Security’s classification of “Animal Rights/Environmental Violent Extremist” as one of five domestic terrorism threat categories.

A document labeled “Background Investigation: 350.org” helps explain why the company kept tabs on a national environmental organization with little visible presence on the ground at Standing Rock. Using an “Influence Rating Matrix,” TigerSwan ranked 350.org’s “formal position in organization/movement” and its “criminal history” as 0 — but gave its highest rating of 5 to the group’s size, funding, online presence, and history with similar movements.

TigerSwan also attempted to dig up dirt on legal workers with the Water Protector Legal Collective, which represented pipeline opponents. The security company used the CLEAR database, which is only available to select entities like law enforcement and licensed private security companies, to dig up information on attorney Chad Nodland. The company concluded that Nodland was also representing a regional electric cooperative that generates some of its power through wind — apparently considered a rival energy source to the oil the Dakota Access pipeline would carry. (Nodland told The Intercept and Grist he never worked for the cooperative.) TigerSwan also put together a whole PowerPoint presentation on Joseph Haythorn, who also worked for the legal collective and submitted bail money for clients to be released.

At the same time, the National Sheriffs’ Association was building its own profiles and sharing them with TigerSwan. In one instance, a contractor for the sheriffs’ group passed along a six-page backgrounder on LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, a prominent Dakota Access pipeline opponent and historian, to TigerSwan. The document included statements Allard made to the press, her public appearances, social media posts, and details about tax liens filed against her and her husband.

Targeting individual pipeline opponents like Allard seems to have been part of TigerSwan’s strategy particularly when it needed to have something to show its client, Energy Transfer Partners. In one exchange with employees, Reese suggested digging up more intelligence on a pipeline opponent who goes by the mononym Tawasi.

“We need to start going after Tawasi as fast as we can over the next couple weeks so we can show some more stuff to ETP.”

“We need to start going after Tawasi as fast as we can over the next couple weeks so we can show some more stuff to ETP,” Reese wrote, using an abbreviation for the company’s old name, Energy Transfer Partners. The documents show that TigerSwan kept close tabs on Tawasi, reporting his movements in daily situation reports, monitoring his social media, and at one point noting that he had gotten a haircut.

Tawasi, who had a large social media following but was not a prominent leader of the anti-pipeline movement, was bewildered that he had been so closely monitored. “They didn’t have anything at all,” he told The Intercept and Grist. “And they picked me as somebody that they thought they could make something out of.”

“It makes me feel unsafe,” he said, “because the same contractors could be working for a different company, still following me around under a different contract from the next oil company down the line.”

Prairie McLaughlin, Allard’s daughter, said records of TigerSwan’s activities remain important, even six years later. “It matters because it gives somebody a handbook on what could happen — what might happen.”

Not a “Mercenary Organization”

After The Intercept published its first set of leaked TigerSwan documents in 2017, the company attempted to downplay the impact of the revelations. In a memo, TigerSwan shrugged off the story’s importance. “The near-term impact of the article is positive for the company,” TigerSwan claimed. The revelations had caused water protectors to limit their social media activity, rendering them “incapable of effectively recruiting members, raising operational funding, or proselytizing,” TigerSwan wrote.

Related

Leaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics Used at Standing Rock to “Defeat Pipeline Insurgencies”

The company intended to use “information operations” to maintain the paranoia: “This looking over-their-shoulder behavior will continue for several months because of internal suspicions and targeted information operations.”

Internally, the company scrambled to mount a public relations response, calling on help from Chris LaCivita, a Republican political consultant now reportedly being considered for a senior role in Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. A memo emailed to LaCivita by TigerSwan’s external affairs director said that, as a defensive strategy, the company would assert on background that “TigerSwan is not a ‘mercenary organization.’” It was a point that must never be made on the record, the document says, because it “would be like saying ‘no I don’t beat my wife.’” (LaCivita did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

TigerSwan’s offensive strategy primarily consisted of trying to marshal evidence showing that water protectors were violent lawbreakers, professional protesters, un-American, and not even very Indigenous. The document author advised TigerSwan to locate “Any visuals, video of demonstrators waving flags or using insignia of an enemy of the United States.” Another suggested talking point said, “Upon our arrival, we quickly learned that a vast majority of the protestors were not indigenous not [sic] part of the peaceful water movement.”

In a final act of law enforcement collaboration, the memo advised TigerSwan to identify one local and one federal law enforcement source who could defend them — but only off the record.

Outside the public relations strategy, TigerSwan didn’t dramatically shift its tactics in response to the story, the documents suggest. In an email dated June 20, 2017, nearly a month after The Intercept’s first exposé, an intelligence analyst distributed a list of anti-pipeline camps across South Dakota, where the Keystone XL pipeline was supposed to be built.

“Maybe your folks can take a look at the list, check the social media for the sites, and figure out if A) you can get in and B) if there’s value to being inside and C) do you have the creds you need to get in. If you figure out that you need to attend some more events to build cred and access we can do that,” he said. “That should feed the beast until the next shiny thing.”

The post After Spying on Standing Rock, TigerSwan Shopped Anti-Protest “Counterinsurgency” to Other Oil Companies appeared first on The Intercept.

Native leaders and activists, calling themselves water protectors, wanted to show the newly elected President Donald Trump that they would continue to fight for their treaty rights to lands including the pipeline route. The march would be called “Native Nations Rise.”

Law enforcement was getting ready too — and discussing plans with Energy Transfer, the parent company of the Dakota Access pipeline. Throughout much of the uprising against the pipeline, the National Sheriffs’ Association talked routinely with TigerSwan, Energy Transfer’s lead security firm on the project, working hand in hand to craft pro-pipeline messaging. A top official with the sheriffs’ PR contractor, Off the Record Strategies, floated a plan to TigerSwan’s lead propagandist, a man named Robert Rice.

“Thoughts on a crew or a news reporter — or someone pretending to be — with a camera and microphone to report from the main rally on the Friday, ask questions about pipeline and slice together [sic]?” Off the Record CEO Mark Pfeifle suggested over email.

A security firm led by a former member of the U.S. military’s shadowy Special Forces, TigerSwan was no stranger to such deception. The company had, in fact, used fake reporters before — including Rice himself — to spread its message and to spy on pipeline opponents. The National Sheriffs’ Association’s involvement in advocating for a similar disinformation campaign against the anti-pipeline movement has not been previously reported.

The email from the National Sheriffs’ Association PR shop was among the more than 55,000 internal TigerSwan documents obtained by The Intercept and Grist through a public records request. The documents, released by the North Dakota Private Investigation and Security Board, reveal how TigerSwan and the sheriffs’ group worked together to twist the story in the media so that it aligned with the oil company’s interests, seeking to pollute the public’s perception of the water protectors.

The documents also outline details of previously unreported collaborations on the ground between TigerSwan and police forces. During the uprising at Standing Rock, TigerSwan provided law enforcement support with helicopter flights, medics, and security guards. The private security firm pushed for the purchase, by Energy Transfer, of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of radios for the cops. TigerSwan also placed an order for a catalog of so-called less-lethal weapons for police use, including tear gas. The security contractor even planned to facilitate an exchange where Energy Transfer and police could share purported evidence of illegal activity.

Meanwhile, communications firms working for Energy Transfer and the National Sheriffs’ Association worked together to write newsletters, plant pro-pipeline articles in the media, and circulate “wanted”-style posters of particular protesters, the documents show. And the heads of both the National Sheriffs’ Association and TigerSwan engaged in discussions on strategy to counter the anti-pipeline movement, with propaganda becoming a priority for both the police and private security.

“It is extremely dangerous to have private interests dictating and coloring the flow of administrative justice,” said Chase Iron Eyes, director of the media organization Last Real Indians and a member of the Oceti Sakowin people. Iron Eyes was active at Standing Rock and mentioned in TigerSwan’s files. “We learned at Standing Rock, law and order serves capital and property.”

Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier, whose jurisdiction in Morton County, North Dakota, abuts the Standing Rock reservation, said collaboration with pipeline security was limited. “We had a cooperation with them in reference to the pipeline workers’ safety while conducting their business,” he said in an email. “TigerSwan was not to be involved in any law enforcement detail.” (TigerSwan, Energy Transfer, and the National Sheriffs’ Association did not respond to requests for comment.)

Rice, the TigerSwan propagandist, had posed as a news anchor for anti-protester segments posted on a Facebook page he created to sway the local community against the Standing Rock protests. But when Pfeifle, the sheriff group’s PR man, suggested pretending to be a reporter at the Native Nations Rise protest, Rice was unavailable. (Off the Record did not respond to a request for comment.) Pfeifle found another way to tell the pipeline and police’s story: a far-right news website founded by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Pfeifle wrote to Rice: “We did get Daily Caller to cover event yesterday.”

Law Enforcement Collaboration

The idea of working with police was baked into Energy Transfer’s arrangement with TigerSwan. The firm’s contract for the Dakota Access pipeline specifically assigned TigerSwan to “take the lead with various law enforcement agencies per state, county, state National Guard and the federal interagency if required.”

Cooperation between Energy Transfer’s security operation and law enforcement agencies, however, began even before TigerSwan arrived on the scene. A PowerPoint presentation from Silverton, another contractor hired by Energy Transfer, described its relationship with law enforcement as a “public private partnership.” The September 2016 presentation said that a private intelligence cell was “coordinating with LE” — law enforcement — “and helping develop Person of Interest packets specifically designed to aid in LE prosecution.”

Multiple documents make clear that part of the purpose of Energy Transfer’s intelligence collection was to support law enforcement prosecutions. A September 2016 document describing TigerSwan’s early priorities said, “Continue to collect information of an evidentiary level in order to further the DAPL Security effort and assist Law Enforcement with information to aid in prosecution.” 

The collaboration extended to materiel. TigerSwan operatives realized soon after they arrived that local law enforcement officials lacked encrypted radios and could not communicate with state or municipal law enforcement agencies — or with Dakota Access pipeline security, according to emails. Energy Transfer purchased 100 radios, for $391,347, with plans to lease a number of them to law enforcement officers.

”We want them to go to LEO as a gift which represents DAPL’s concern for public safety,” wrote Tom Siguaw, a senior director at Energy Transfer, in an email.

During large protest events, TigerSwan and police worked together to keep water protectors from interfering with construction. On one day in late October 2016, the day of the protests’ largest mass arrest, Energy Transfer’s security personnel “held law enforcement’s east flank” and supported sheriffs’ deputies and National Guard members with seven medical personnel and two helicopters, named Valkyrie and Saber.

After the incident, TigerSwan planned to set up a shared drive, where law enforcement officials could upload crime reports and charging documents, and TigerSwan could share photographs and pipeline opponents’ social media. Documents show other instances in which TigerSwan set up online exchanges with law enforcement. In a February 2017 PowerPoint presentation, TigerSwan described plans to use another shared drive to post security personnel’s videos and photographs, taken both aerially and on the ground during a different mass arrest.

A Dakota Access Pipeline helicopter also supported law enforcement officials during one of the most notorious nights of the crackdown, in November 2016, when police unleashed water hoses on water protectors in below-freezing temperatures. By morning, police were in danger of running out of less-lethal weapons — which can still be deadly but are designed to incapacitate their targets. TigerSwan and Energy Transfer again stepped in.

TigerSwan founder James Reese, a former commander in the elite Army Special Operations unit Delta Force, reached out to a contact at the North Carolina State Highway Patrol. North Carolina had recently used TigerSwan’s GuardianAngel mapping tool to respond to uprisings in Charlotte, in the aftermath of the 2016 police killing of Keith Scott. (A spokesperson from the North Carolina Department of Public Safety said the agency does not currently have a relationship with TigerSwan.)

Reese sent a list of weaponry sought by North Dakota law enforcement to an officer from the Highway Patrol. The list included tear gas, pepper spray, bean bag rounds, and foam rounds. The official referred Reese to a contact at Safariland, which manufactures the gear.

“We will purchase the items, and gift them to LE,” Reese told the Safariland representative. “We need a nation wide push if you can help?”

Meanwhile, another TigerSwan team member sent the Minnesota-based police supply store Streicher’s an even longer list of less-lethal weapons and ammunition. “Please confirm availability of the following price and ship immediately with overnight delivery,” TigerSwan’s Phil Rehak wrote. 

“I would be given an order by either somebody from TigerSwan or maybe even law enforcement, being like, ‘Hey, can you find these supplies?’”

Rehak told The Intercept and Grist that his job was to procure equipment — including for law enforcement. “I would be given an order by either somebody from TigerSwan or maybe even law enforcement, being like, ‘Hey, can you find these supplies?’” He said he doesn’t know if the less-lethal weaponry was ultimately delivered to the sheriffs.

“I am not aware of any radios for Morton County or any less lethal weapons from Tiger Swan,” Kirchmeier, the Morton County sheriff, told The Intercept and Grist in an email. “I dealt with ND DES for resources.” (Two other sheriffs involved with the multiagency law enforcement response did not answer requests for comment. Eric Jensen, a spokesperson for the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services, said the agency had no arrangement with TigerSwan or Energy Transfer to provide less-lethal weapons, and that they wouldn’t have knowledge of any arrangements between law enforcement and the companies.)

The “partnership” went both ways, with TigerSwan sometimes viewing law enforcement weapons as potential assets. In mid-October 2016, as senior Energy Transfer personnel prepared to join state officials for a government archeological survey to examine the pipeline route, three law enforcement “snipers” agreed to be on standby with an air team, according to a memo by another security company, RGT, that was working under TigerSwan’s management. A Predator drone was listed among “friendly assets” in the memo.

TigerSwan routinely shared what it learned about the protest movement with local police, but most of what the documents describe in the way of reciprocal sharing — from law enforcement to TigerSwan — came from the National Sheriffs’ Association.

In March 2017, the sheriffs’ group helped the South Dakota Legislature pass a law to prevent future Standing Rock-style pipeline uprisings, the documents say. To support the effort, the Morton County Sheriff’s Office sent along a “law enforcement sensitive” state operational update from the North Dakota State and Local Intelligence Center. National Sheriffs’ Association head Jonathan Thompson forwarded the document to TigerSwan executive Shawn Sweeney. Thompson recommended Sweeney look at the last page, which included a list of anti-pipeline camps across the U.S.

TigerSwan also recruited at least one law enforcement officer with whom it worked on the ground. In November 2016, Reese requested a phone call with Maj. Chad McGinty of the Ohio State Highway Patrol, who had acted as commander of a team from Ohio sent to assist police in North Dakota. By February 1, McGinty, who declined to comment for this story, was working for TigerSwan as a law enforcement liaison, earning more than $440 a day.

Spreading Stories

TigerSwan’s contract also mandated that the firm help Energy Transfer with telling its story. The firm was expected “to help turn the page on the story that we are being overwhelmed with over the past few weeks,” according to a document from mid-September 2016.

Energy Transfer’s image was in trouble early on. Critical media coverage of Standing Rock grew dramatically in early September after private security guards hired by the company unleashed guard dogs on protesters. A flood of reporters arrived on the ground to cover the protests. Social media posts routinely went viral. The narrative that took hold portrayed the pipeline company as instigating violence against peaceful protesters.

Energy Transfer recruited third parties to spread its messaging and counter the unfavorable storyline. At least two additional contractors — DCI and MarketLeverage — joined TigerSwan in trying to burnish Energy Transfer’s image. TigerSwan recruited retired Maj. Gen. James “Spider” Marks, who led intelligence efforts for the Army during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and served on TigerSwan’s advisory board, to write favorable op-eds and deliver commentary. (Marks did not respond to a request for comment.) With its veneer of law enforcement authority, the National Sheriffs’ Association would become Energy Transfer’s most powerful third-party voice.

Together, TigerSwan, the National Sheriffs’ Association, and the public relations contractors formed a powerful public relations machine, monitoring social media closely, convincing outside groups to promote pro-pipeline messaging, and planting stories.

Off the Record Strategies, the public relations firm working for the National Sheriffs’ Association, coordinated with the opposition research firm Delve to track activists’ social media pages, arrest records, and funding sources. The companies sought to paint the protesters as violent, professional, billionaire-funded, out-of-state agitators whose camps represented the true ecological disaster, as well as to identify movement infighting that might be exploited. Both companies were led by Bush administration alumni. (Delve did not respond to a request for comment.)

Framing water protectors as criminals was a key National Sheriffs’ Association strategy. ”Let’s start drumbeat of the worst of the worst this week?” Pfeifle, Off the Record’s CEO, suggested to the head of the sheriffs’ group in one email. “One or two a day? Move them out through social media…The out of state wife beaters, child abusers and thieves first… Mugshot, ND arrest date, rap sheet and other data wrapped in and easy to share?”

The result was “wanted”-style posters — called “Professional Protestors with Dangerous Criminal Histories” — featuring pipeline opponents’ photos and criminal records, which Pfeifle’s team circulated online and routinely shared with TigerSwan. The National Sheriffs’ Association repeatedly asked TigerSwan to help “move” its criminal record research on social media, and TigerSwan repurposed the sheriffs’ group arrest research for its own propaganda products.

Pfeifle also made summary statistics of protesters’ arrest records and a map of where they were from. The color-coded map came with a running tally of the number of protesters. The details collected by Pfeifle then began showing up in blogs and remarks by police to reporters. One piece by KXMB-TV, a television station in Bismarck, North Dakota, repeated almost verbatim statistics summarizing the number of protesters arrested and their criminal histories, noting that “just 8 percent are from North Dakota.”

“They make it harder for people to engage in peaceful protest. People are arrested and they say, ‘See, those people are criminals.’”

Naomi Oreskes, a science historian who has researched the fossil fuel industry’s communications strategies, said the attempt to frame environmental defenders as criminals was consistent with the long trend of attempts to discredit activists. However, it was also “particularly noxious,” she said, because the energy industry has pushed for stronger penalties against trespass and other anti-protest laws. “They make it harder for people to engage in peaceful protest,” said Oreskes. “People are arrested and they say, ‘See, those people are criminals.’”

DCI, which got its start “doing the dirty work of the tobacco industry” and helped found the tea party movement, was also a key player influencing media coverage, placing and distributing op-eds. In one exchange between DCI partner Megan Bloomgren, who would later become a top Trump administration official, and Reese, Bloomgren sent a list of 14 articles “we’ve placed that we’ve been pushing over social media.” The articles ranged from opinion pieces in support of the pipeline in local newspapers to posts on right-wing blogs.

Oreskes said using opinion articles in this way is a common strategy pioneered by the tobacco industry, among others. “You push that out into social media to make it seem as if there’s broad grassroots support for the pipeline,” said Oreskes. ”The reader doesn’t know that this is part of a coordinated strategy by the industry.”

MarketLeverage, another Energy Transfer contractor, also spent a considerable amount of its resources tracking social media and boosting pro-pipeline messages. In the weeks following the dog attacks, for instance, Shane Hackett, a top official with MarketLeverage, suggested highlighting a Facebook post by Archie Fool Bear, a Standing Rock tribal member who was critical of the NoDAPL movement. “We need to exploit that shit immediately while we have a chance,” a TigerSwan operative wrote in response to an email from their colleague Rice, the chief propagandist. (Neither DCI nor Market Leverage responded to requests for comment.)

Hackett suggested creating a graphic out of the tribal member’s post and having “other accounts share his post with the same hashtags.” Rice provided the social media text and hashtags, including, “Respected Tribe Members Call Attention to Standing Rock Leadership Lies and Failures #TribeLiesMatter #NoDAPL #SiouxTruth.” Obscure social media accounts then repeated the exact language.

“These people who are trained to use whatever publicity they can for their advantage, they’re going to do what they want anyway,” Fool Bear told The Intercept and Grist. “They don’t live in my shoes, and they don’t believe in what my beliefs are. If they’re going to take what I say and manipulate it, I can’t stop them.”

Sheriffs vs. Indigenous and Environmental Justice

Off the Record Strategies and the National Sheriffs’ Association didn’t just focus on issues of law-breaking. The association parroted some of the same messages that TigerSwan — as well as climate change deniers in Congress — were trafficking. Notable among them was a right-wing conspiracy theory that the environmental movement was “directed and controlled” by a club of billionaires.

The National Sheriffs’ Association also tried to undermine the credibility of well-known advocates Bill McKibben and Jane Kleeb, who founded the environmental organizations 350.org and Bold Alliance, respectively. Pfeifle circulated memos on the two movement leaders. “McKibben is a radical liberal determined to ‘bankrupt’ energy producers,” said one, adding, “McKibben will join any protest because he enjoys the fanfare.” Another memo said, “Kleeb admitted her pipeline opposition was about political organization and opportunity, not the environment.”

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Kleeb and McKibben expressed bemusement at TigerSwan and the sheriffs’ association’s fixation on their work. “It’s all pretty creepy,” McKibben, a former Grist board member, said in an email. “I live in a county with a sheriff, and it seems okay if he tracks the speed of my car down Rte 116, but tracking every word I write seems like… not his job.”

The sheriffs’ group also listed the nonprofit organizations Center for Biological Diversity, Rainforest Action Network, and Food & Water Watch as “Extremist Environmental Groups” — a pejorative used by some authoritarian government officials, including from the Trump administration.

“Campaigning against corporations driving our climate crisis and human rights violations is not extremist,” said Rainforest Action Network Executive Director Ginger Cassady. Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said the association’s flyer contained “categorically false” information about the organization — a sentiment repeated by others mentioned throughout TigerSwan’s other records.

“We would urge the Sheriffs’ Association to focus on its own responsibilities instead of attempting to undermine well-meaning organizations like ours,” added Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water Watch’s executive director.

Both the National Sheriffs’ Association and TigerSwan took pride in meddling in tribal affairs. Reese enthusiastically encouraged his personnel to spread a story that the Prairie Knights Casino, run by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, was discharging sewage into the Missouri River watershed. Meanwhile, the sheriffs’ association worked with TigerSwan to push a story about a drop in revenue at the casino. In an email to TigerSwan’s Rice, Pfeifle noted that the issue had been raised at a recent Standing Rock tribal council meeting.

“We moved this story on front page of Sunday Bismarck Tribune and in SAB blog Friday, playing perfectly into the ‘get-out’ narrative going into next week,” Pfeifle wrote to Rice a few days later, referring to the conservative Say Anything Blog. “Please help echo and amplify, if possible.”

Using newsletters and news-like web sites to discredit pipeline opponents’ concerns as “fake news” was a top tactic for both TigerSwan and the National Sheriffs’ Association. The irony of the strategy was not lost on its protagonists.

Over WhatsApp, in June 2017, Rice, the propagandist, chatted with Wesley Fricks, TigerSwan’s director of external affairs, about a possible response to a Facebook video in which an unnamed reporter described recently published news reports on TigerSwan’s tactics. They would post it on one of the astroturf sites Rice created and describe it as “fake news.”

“That will cause a few people’s brains to explode,” Rice wrote in a WhatsApp message. “fake news calling fake news fake which is calling other news fake?”

Frick replied, “One big circle.”

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