by Eveline Lubbers Going through your opponent's garbage to collect information--in detective slang, "garbology"--is a particularly dirty kind of research. A Dutch information broker developed a new cover for the collection of wastepaper: its collector said he wanted it so he could sell it to recyclers to raise money for charity.
Activists and advocacy groups in the Netherlands knew their garbage was being gathered, but not what it was being "recycled" into: intelligence files for companies those groups were boycotting. Little did they realize how interesting their paperwork could be to the companies they campaigned against, tabloids, and occasionally even the police, public prosecutor or secret service.
Paul Oosterbeek worked for a company called ABC (the Dutch abbreviation for General Security Consultancy). Posing as a volunteer, he told various activist groups that he had computer skills and wanted to help them automate their data. Oosterbeek helped them do archival work, installed software, set up computer databases and entered the contact addresses of new subscribers and possible sponsors. (Years after he was exposed, one group found its contact database software was registered to ABC.) To save time, he asked if he could take the groups' Rolodexes with him and finish the copying elsewhere. Meanwhile, he took advantage of his position to collect the groups' discarded paperwork, saying he wanted to sell it to recyclers for charity.
Oosterbeek was unmasked in summer 1994 by Bureau Jansen & Janssen, an activist group that I helped establish which conducts independent research into police and secret service agencies that spy on activists. We began looking into his activities after several organizations he worked with approached us. They were suspicious because Oosterbeek had no activist background, and he was secretive about his address, phone number, motivation and interests. Every time people started asking questions, he disappeared for a while.
When we began to investigate, we learned that had been collecting wastepaper for eight years from at least 30 organizations, ranging from small activist groups to big church-affiliated research foundations. He said he was selling it to recyclers to benefit a school in Amsterdam or an educational project in Zimbabwe. In fact, he was delivering the boxes of faxed originals, rejected photocopies and printouts to the offices of ABC. There, behind a high wall and a sharp-pronged iron fence and under guard of security cameras, the loot was processed. Every sheet was carefully scrutinized for bits of information, from financial facts and figures to the ins and outs of internal strategy discussions. The special interests of groups' individual members were scrutinized, as were interorganizational connections and personnel overlap. ABC thus fattened its numerous files on activists and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), fleshing them out with information available from public sources. ABC also collected annual reports and financial records of campaigning groups and thoroughly studied Chamber of Commerce records to check who was on their boards, make connections between them and see who funded them and for how much.
The Reputation War
With more and more companies selling brands rather than products these days, a company's image is increasingly important. Now that a company's reputation is its most valued asset, every company needs information on its market position. Business intelligence is no longer restricted to details about the world economy, faraway wars and news about the competition. It now includes assessment of the risks of becoming a target for campaigners, boycotters or Internet activists.
Publicly available information about activist groups is no longer sufficient for some companies. Informal data, however obtained, can be worth its weight in gold. In addition to concrete action scenarios, companies seek information that can be as broad (and vague) as discussions of long-term strategy, impressions of the atmosphere within a group, links between organizations, or details of funding. ABC's wastepaper service seems to have been a logical activity of today's information brokerage business, albeit a niche one because of its cloak-and-dagger methods.
Inside information gives companies a strategic advantage. Used at the right moment, it can be an effective weapon. Wemos, a Dutch activist group that provides information on drug companies and aggressive marketing of infant formula in developing countries, learned this firsthand when it discovered that a company had gotten hold of its internal documents. The company, Nutricia, had obtained a copy of a letter Wemos had sent to its partners in the Nestlé boycott campaign. The infant formula industry had also gotten its hands on a draft proposal by baby formula campaigners seeking European Commission funding of a joint project. Within six weeks after the document was faxed to Wemos, it wound up in the hands of the industry. Wemos spent a lot of time trying to locate the leak. They wondered if maybe their fax machine was tapped, but they didn't think of the garbage. Every incoming fax message was photocopied and the thermal original thrown away.
Companies don't always admit that they have inside information on their critics. Using the information to anticipate future actions can be advantageous enough. In 1990, the Clean Clothes Campaign initiated a protest action against the clothing store chain C&A, in which customers were encouraged to ask at the checkout counter where their clothes had been manufactured.
No sooner had the campaign begun than C&A came out with printed answer sheets. Until then, it had been known as a closed, family-run company that didn't even publish annual reports. Its rapid response to the Clean Clothes Campaign was remarkable. In hindsight, it appears that Oosterbeek, then "volunteering" for the CCC, helped C&A anticipate and prepare its response.
Media fallout
In Europe, the tabloid media have traditionally contributed to activist-bashing by publishing full-page mudslinging articles. In the Netherlands, the main such paper is the daily
De Telegraaf. The paper typically tries to discredit mainstream NGOs like Friends of the Earth or church-affiliated groups that support refugees or asylum-seekers by associating their activities with more radical groups or events.
In October 1996, Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth in the Netherlands) was planning to launch balloons near Schiphol Airport to protest the airport's expansion plans. De Telegraaf targeted the group's campaign leader, Wijnand Duyvendak, in two articles titled "Secret service fears terrorist action at Schiphol" and "Wijnand Duyvendak: a life of resistance." Highlights of Duyvendak's activist past were tendentiously presented in an attempt to discredit him. The paper claimed he had been once number four on a list of activist arson suspects, and produced ancient mugshots as "proof."
In the midst of an interview, Duyvendak recalls, the Telegraaf journalist suddenly produced a stack of paperwork. "It was as if I was being questioned by the police," Duyvendak said. "He had a lot more information than he ended up using in his article. He had all sorts of internal documents, although they kind of jumped around in time. He was obviously trying to rattle me." In hindsight, Duyvendak believes ABC was the likely source of this information. "The only thing linking the documents he produced was the wastepaper affair."
Even after ABC was exposed, De Telegraaf published articles based on confidential material that could be traced back to the wastepaper affair. The paper suggestively presented facts and selectively quoted internal documents to suggest guilt by association. Wastepaper-based articles like these can do far more than damage an organization's image, as is illustrated by what happened to the left journalists' collective Opstand ("Revolt"). For 18 months, Opstand journalists Hans Krikke and Jan Müter were the victims of a miscarriage of justice. A government prosecutor accused them of "intellectual involvement" in two bombings protesting the Dutch government's asylum policy in the early 1990s. In September 1994, their homes and office were searched at dawn. Six months later, Krikke and Müter were arrested.
Police files given to the defendants' lawyers revealed that the major source of "evidence" had been a full-page 1993 article in De Telegraaf. The story, written by the usual journalists and illustrated with a complicated diagram, insinuated a direct link between 1970s armed resistance groups and 1990s radical activists. A number of organizations, the paper alleged, were forming an "underground network" around solidarity with illegal refugees. In light of the bombings, the Secret Service was identifying the network as potentially terrorist, said the Telegraaf. Every group mentioned in the article could be found on Paul Oosterbeek's wastepaper collection list.
In the end, the case was dismissed, and together Krikke and Müter received almost $100,000 in compensation. But it was too late for Opstand. The collective had broken up as a result of the investigation, searches and arrests. Normal reporting and research operations became impossible, and then the incrimination began to take its toll and clients walked out.
The End of the Story?
My group, Jansen & Janssen was forced to end our investigation of the wastepaper affair in summer 1994, slightly earlier than planned. We had spent many weeks asking various groups about Oosterbeek, and he had gotten wind that we were onto him. He never turned up at an appointment we had made at which we planned to confront him with our findings.
We had a lot of material incriminating Oosterbeek, ABC and ABC Director Peter Siebelt, and we wanted to take legal action. But although the evidence we had was more than circumstantial, it comprised a picture only when looked at together, like a reconstruction. Even when we knew that a corporate representative had obtained a group's internal document, we couldn't get conclusive proof that it had been acquired via the wastepaper route without visiting ABC's premises.
Worse, there is no law against collecting wastepaper, even under false pretenses, nor against the kind of espionage we could prove had occurred. Several of the groups involved sued the company and the infiltrator for "fraudulent conspiracy," which was unfortunately the only possible legal action under Dutch criminal law. Siebelt and Oosterbeek were detained overnight and questioned, but the prosecutor decided not to indict in the absence of "legal and convincing evidence."
Oosterbeek has since vanished into obscurity. ABC all but shut down after we exposed them, but Siebelt continues to market himself as a specialist in monitoring national and international activist groups.
The ABC material remains potentially dangerous even today, since it contains personal information about some activists who need to be anonymous to do their work. For example, the Fascism Research Collective (FOK) traces the activities of far-right splinter groups in the Netherlands. When a right-wing group accused the FOK of slander in 1998, ABC provided the plaintiffs' lawyers with the names and addresses of people who its wastepaper said were members of the FOK. Fortunately, the material was never used in court, but being identified as an antifascist researcher in extreme-right magazines can have potentially dangerous consequences.
Lessons to be learned
The big question is how the wastepaper-gathering process was kept going for so long. Paul Oosterbeek kept his real identity a secret for almost eight years. Nobody knew his background or where he lived, but no group bothered to thoroughly check his credentials.
Oosterbeek's demeanor helped him fly under the radar. He was elusive, missed appointments and generally didn't act like an obvious infiltrator. He never tried to gain access to "core people" or any real secrets. He hardly ever went to meetings, never read the minutes and ignored incoming mail, which as a volunteer he would have seen. His information-gathering activities were deliberately low-key to avoid attracting attention.
Oosterbeek's computer expertise--still rare in the early 1990s--helped him gain entry. Groups welcomed his skills. His understanding of the left's loose organizational structures also helped pave his way. In radical circles he posed as a "softie" working for a mainstream NGO. In more moderate groups, he hinted vaguely of "heavier" contacts. Sometimes he made use of his connections, but often getting into a new group was as easy for him as answering an ad for volunteers. He exploited the fact that mentioning the name of a mutual acquaintance is the preferred access code in some circles.
As the piles of wastepaper began to mount, Oosterbeek almost blew his cover. He began turning up irregularly, failed to keep to his paper-collecting schedule, and was unreachable at the phone numbers he gave people. And his odd preference for "recycling" unsorted paperwork should have been a tipoff. He left behind boxes of outdated brochures printed on valuable paper--his car was too small, he said. Groups didn't understand until too late why he had persistently turned down the offer of a van: ABC wasn't interested in multiple copies.
Oosterbeek's wastepaper scheme nearly fell apart again in the early days of the Clean Clothes Campaign. CCC activists called a school listed on Oosterbeek's leaflet and learned that his wastepaper was being stored at the premises of Siebelt's security firm. When they confronted him about this, he changed his story three times. They tried to find out more about Siebelt Security, but since its phone number was not publicly registered, and nobody associated security companies with corporate public image management back then, the inquiry ended there, and ABC remained out of view.
Later it became apparent that a number of groups had felt uncomfortable about Oosterbeek all along. Shared experiences shed new light on the contradictory stories he had told. For instance, he had alluded several times to a family feud with some multinational company to explain his need to be discreet, but nobody ever got the entire story. He sometimes pretended to be especially interested in a certain corporation or family business, but the specific name of the company varied from telling to telling. (These companies were probably ABC clients.)
Preventing future leaks
Openly bringing charges against an infiltrator poses an unwanted risk for a contemporary interest group: public association with espionage and other sinister goings-on is bad for a group's image. As a result, only seven of the more than 30 groups targeted by Oosterbeek were willing to cosign a complaint to the police, even after his operation was exposed.
The other groups were understandably uncomfortable with the story being made public. Some of them relied on confidential sources in their own research, and they didn't want to be known as "leaky." Some also wanted to remain on speaking terms, even with the companies that had spied on them. Many groups didn't want a public fuss to interfere with ongoing research or pending grant proposals.
As activist groups institutionalize, they find it difficult to directly confront companies, even when the companies hire someone like Oosterbeek. Groups drifting towards a liberal, "insider" organizing model don't want to seem paranoid or secretive. In this context, some activists dismiss the need to take internal security measures.
Activists needn't be secretive about everything, but in a world where spies deliberately infiltrate the organizations of corporate critics, some kind of security awareness is essential. Screening new staff, being careful with papers, locking filing cabinets, emptying desktops at the end of the day, and changing passwords regularly can all hinder covert information-gatherers.
This story is adapted from Battling Big Business: Countering Greenwash, Front Groups and Other Forms of Corporate Deception, edited by Eveline Lubbers. To order, call 1-800-497-3207 or mail order to Common Courage Press, Box 702, Monroe, ME 04951.
Normally priced at $17.95, Battling Big Business is available from the publisher at a 25% discount ($13.46) if you request the "PR Watch special." Make sure you mention the PR Watch discount when you place your order. Shipping and handling charges are an additional $5 for a single copy, plus $1 per additional book.
