Heads up Portland: Watch out for FBI Trainer Vahid Brown

[The Feral Underclass]

http://thetbf.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/j-_vahid_brown_8325a_large.jpg?w=800&h=539

Vahid Brown was or is an FBI instructor at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, who has recently been attempting to integrate himself into radical and activist scenes in Portland.

As an instructor for the CTC’s FBI counter-terrorism training program, he designed curricula on Islamist terrorism and taught regular courses both at the FBI Academy and for Joint Terrorism Task Force training events at FBI Field Offices throughout the United States.

According to FOIA records obtained by the ACLU, it is clear that Vahid was training new FBI recruits for the CTC from 2008-2010. His classes included: Origins of Islam, Islam and Militancy, Modern Jihadist Groups, Islamic Terrorism and the Internet, How Terror Networks Use the Internet, and Radicalization.

Vahid Brown attended Reed College in Portland from 2003 – 2006, and recently has been attempting to re-integrate himself into radical and activist scenes in Portland. He portrays himself as “an activist and woodland creature who has been reading poetry at Portland coffeehouses, ballrooms, and basement bars for nearly twenty years.”

Vahid Brown works for the FBI, and as such should be thoroughly unwelcome among anarchists, radicals, and activists. Though his area of expertise is Islamic militancy rather than anarchism, he is still a threat and should not be tolerated, just like any other FBI employee, agent, informant, infiltrator, or cop who attempts to become friendly with radicals.

An agent of the state who has the same subcultural interests as you is still an agent of the state.

An agent of the state who calls himself an activist is still an agent of the state.

An agent of the state who works to destroy the lives of people who aren’t necessarily anarchists is still an agent of the state.

Sources:

Haqqani Network’s Reign Of Terror On Afghanistan

Bombers, Bank Accounts, and Bleedouts

FOIA files on Vahid Brown

Vahid Brown’s activist/poet mini-autobiography

Link (http://seattlefreepress.org/2013/10/03/heads-up-portland-watch-out-for-fbi-trainer-vahid-brown/)

[Creative Destruction]

He portrays himself as “an activist and woodland creature who has been reading poetry at Portland coffeehouses, ballrooms, and basement bars for nearly twenty years.”

As a matter of course, I try not to associate myself with people like this anyway.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

As a matter of course, I try not to associate myself with people like this anyway.

This makes me think of a talk I went to, given by a radical who'd been through the COINTELPRO meatgrinder of the 60s/70s, and seen many good folk set up, tricked, snitched out, etc. His big point was this: good politics are what will keep you safest. Douchebag white hipsters who call themselves "woodland creatures" = bad politics.

[bcbm]

Douchebag white hipsters who call themselves "woodland creatures" = bad politics.

i would hope no self-respecting hipster would be caught dead in that awful hat. and reading a bit more into this character he sounds like he was one of those hakim bey type weirdos who go into 'mystical islam' and 'heresy' and that kind of dogshit and then suddenly churned out a few papers on 'radical islam' and teaching at west point. and poetry? i can't imagine a more disgusting creature.

[Ocean Seal]

He portrays himself as “an activist and woodland creature who has been reading poetry at Portland coffeehouses, ballrooms, and basement bars for nearly twenty years.”


Ok I understand how this is an activist stereotype, but what kind of terrorists is this supposed to catch? Or does he seriously think that he's making a deep infiltration into the lives of the rebellious coffeehouse activists.

[Sasha]

Ok I understand how this is an activist stereotype, but what kind of terrorists is this supposed to catch? Or does he seriously think that he's making a deep infiltration into the lives of the rebellious coffeehouse activists.

Apperently the most effective infiltrator in the Canadian anarchist movement where not the brazen guys trying to be leaders, inviting people to armed action, it was this unasuming older woman who ran the soupkitchen for years. Being the center of social life without an obvious intrest in radical politics she was never suspected, trusted by everyone, everyone gossipped to her so the spooks got intimate knowledge of the whole movement, of who knew and slept with who and by planting rumors she all but destroyed the movements organizing capabilities.

[The Feral Underclass]

Apperently the most effective infiltrator in the Canadian anarchist movement where not the brazen guys trying to be leaders, inviting people to armed action, it was this unasuming older woman who ran the soupkitchen for years. Being the center of social life without an obvious intrest in radical politics she was never suspected, trusted by everyone, everyone gossipped to her so the spooks got intimate knowledge of the whole movement, of who knew and slept with who and by planting rumors she all but destroyed the movements organizing capabilities.

That's fascinating. Sneaky fuckers.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Apperently the most effective infiltrator in the Canadian anarchist movement where not the brazen guys trying to be leaders, inviting people to armed action, it was this unasuming older woman who ran the soupkitchen for years. Being the center of social life without an obvious intrest in radical politics she was never suspected, trusted by everyone, everyone gossipped to her so the spooks got intimate knowledge of the whole movement, of who knew and slept with who and by planting rumors she all but destroyed the movements organizing capabilities.

Brenda didn't run the "soup kitchen" for years - she did kick around and help with the Guelph Union of Tenants and Supporters weekly serving for a few months before they stopped happening. Hilariously, at the first serving she showed up to, after having talked at some length about being vegan, she brought butter tarts. Way to understand your cover politics, goof.
Anyway, I think Brenda is an excellent example of why it's important to actually challenge people on their politics, rather than just assuming, "Oh, they're in the milieu, and therefore they must have solid understandings." On the surface this seems obvious, but in practice it's rarely implemented.
Another example is the case of the LA5, members of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee who were set up by an agent: This guy had come to meetings for years without ever being made to spell out explicitly where he was coming from, keeping his mouth shut, never being made to demonstrate a real theoretical grasp of the organization's political basis. He simply said, "I'm a disenchanted 'Nam vet," and it was sufficient.
This isn't important only because of agents, but also because ignoring it leads us down the path of relying on a small number of theoretically well-versed de facto leaders - if they're picked up, drop out, or start making bad calls, what happens? Not only does it leave a space for agents to exploit, it means generally that we're going to be ineffective.

[Ele'ill]

there have been quite a few fed agent infiltrators/snitches called out on the west coast this year

[bcbm]

there have been quite a few fed agent infiltrators/snitches called out on the west coast this year

http://pugetsoundanarchists.org/content/snitch-alert-jennifer-kolar-creeps-around-seattle

[Ocean Seal]

Apperently the most effective infiltrator in the Canadian anarchist movement where not the brazen guys trying to be leaders, inviting people to armed action, it was this unasuming older woman who ran the soupkitchen for years. Being the center of social life without an obvious intrest in radical politics she was never suspected, trusted by everyone, everyone gossipped to her so the spooks got intimate knowledge of the whole movement, of who knew and slept with who and by planting rumors she all but destroyed the movements organizing capabilities.
You see that makes sense to me. However, this guy is looking to be the center of attention, and I would think that the only activists that he is attracting are those who like to sit around coffeeshops and vote for the democrats. They don't strike me as militant organizers or even the black bloc types. I would think that unless he is targeting the "eco-terror" types.

[bcbm]

You see that makes sense to me. However, this guy is looking to be the center of attention, and I would think that the only activists that he is attracting are those who like to sit around coffeeshops and vote for the democrats. They don't strike me as militant organizers or even the black bloc types. I would think that unless he is targeting the "eco-terror" types.

well they aren't calling him an infiltrator/snitch per se, just pointing out that he has/does work with the fbi so radicals should stay clear of him

[Ele'ill]

I would think that unless he is targeting the "eco-terror" types.

what?

[CECE]

what?

Eco-Terrorism groups, like the Earth Liberation Front. They may not technically be referred to as such but they have committed 'eco-terrorism' by definition.

If that was what you were referring to...?

[Ele'ill]

Eco-Terrorism groups, like the Earth Liberation Front. They may not technically be referred to as such but they have committed 'eco-terrorism' by definition.

If that was what you were referring to...?

(I'm aware of that, thanks) My confusion is over Ocean Seal's comment about 'unless' as if 'eco-terror' types are known for being shitty hipster assholes hanging out in shitty hipster asshole cafes. I might be misreading their post though.

[Lily Briscoe]

Dude looks like Marley and Marley from the Muppets.

[Ele'ill]

http://pugetsoundanarchists.org/content/vahid-brown-agent-state-or-are-portland-anarchists-witch-hunt


Is Vahid Brown an Agent of the State, or Are Portland Anarchists on a Witch Hunt?

Tue, 10/22/2013 - 10:48pm
From: VICE (http://www.vice.com/read/is-vahid-brown-an-agent-of-the-state-or-are-portland-anarchists-on-a-witch-hunt)
Is Vahid Brown an Agent of the State, or Are Portland Anarchists on a Witch Hunt?
By Daniel Denvir
A link was posted on my Facebook wall a few weeks back warning that a man I knew from Reed College was "an agent of the state."


"Vahid Brown was or is an FBI instructor at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, who has recently been attempting to integrate himself into radical and activist scenes in Portland," according to the dossier posted on the website of the Committee Against Political Repression, an anarchist group in Portland, Oregon.

 As such, he is "a threat and should not be tolerated."
Brown, however, has never worked for the FBI. He taught classes on political Islam to FBI agents at West Point while he was a scholar at the university's Combating Terrorism Center think tank.
The post has gone viral amongst radical leftists, and has been shared more than 1,000 times on Facebook. In Portland, this amounts to a lot of people. Brown is now "anxious in public space because of this hostility," he told me recently when I spoke to him in a series of Facebook messages, and then by phone. 


A photo of Brown appears at the top of the post. In Portland, his beard and stylish attire fit in. For the Committee, this is a warning sign: "An agent of the state who has the same subcultural interests as you is still an agent of the state."
Brown is a scholar of Islam, the author of Cracks in the Foundation: Leadership Schisms in al-Qa'ida from 1989-2006, which argues that the Iraq War "created a market for [the group's] message."
"I was not training law enforcement on how to do law enforcement," Brown said. "I was trying to educate these folks about these issues and directly address misconceptions and simplistic nonsense about 'dangerous Muslims.'"
Indeed, Brown said that his lessons countered the basic falsehoods upon which the United States' endless and catastrophic War on Terror are premised.
"Two basic conclusions," he said, are that "al Qaeda's size, scope, and influence has been vastly exaggerated" and that "the al Qaeda-Taliban merger, a premise upon which the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan has been based, is false and [refuted] by my research."
Kristian Williams, an anarchist author and member of the Committee Against Political Repression, told me by email that it does not matter what Brown taught; any such interaction with federal law enforcement is condemnation-worthy. (For the record, Williams says that he’s not speaking for the Committee.)
"Political repression has been the FBI's specialty since J. Edgar Hoover helped coordinate the Palmer Raids" against suspected radicals and immigrants after the Russian Revolution, Williams said. "We don't need a better educated, better trained, more sensitive or self-critical FBI. This institution cannot be fixed; it must be destroyed.”
Williams is right about the FBI's history of political repression. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the Bureau's Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) surveilled and destabilized radical and civil rights groups. Today, a so-called "Green Scare" targets animal rights and environmental activists. And Muslim-American communities, of course, have been the target of aggressive—and civil liberties-violating—spying and infiltration.
Informants are often a key FBI resource. Some are paid, others are offered a break from prosecutors. Perhaps nowhere do radicals feel more besieged than in the Pacific Northwest, where activists were called to testify before a grand jury investigating vandalism at a 2012 May Day march in Seattle, after the windows of a federal courthouse were smashed and someone tried, but failed, to throw a smoke bomb inside.
In response, the FBI raided multiple homes in Portland, searching, according to the newspaper the Oregonian, for "anti-government or anarchist literature or material; black clothing, backpacks, face coverings and shoes; green, red, black, grey or blue/purple paint; sticks and flags carried during the commission of the offenses and material for making flags; computers, cell phones and electronic storage media, and flares or similar incendiaries." Similar raids took place in Olympia and Seattle.
Activists refused to answer grand jury questions and were jailed. Anarchists and supporters describe the episode as a "witch hunt" aimed to silence controversial political viewpoints. Many activists are, to put it mildly, on edge.
"This is a small group of people who feel extremely brutalized and repressed by the state [and] especially [by] the FBI,” Vahid Brown told me, adding that they are “saying I am that enemy, trying to get in there and hurt them more.”
In April, bike activists took to the internet and accused an unfamiliar and unfashionably dressed Asian man who took part in a protest ride of being a Portland Police captain, who is also Asian.
Wrong Asian, it turned out. Oops.
For Brown, the experience has been "traumatic," he said. "Internet fame for being a suspected government infiltrator is nobody's idea of a good time." Especially in Portland, which can feel like a very small town—particularly amongst activists.
He did not move back to Portland full-time until late last year. Before that, he traveled to the city once a month to visit his two daughters, who are ten and 12 years old.
"I took my kids to a lot of the Occupy Portland stuff. An anti-war march. To go to the General Assembly and see the Occupy camp," Brown says.
Brown has frequently attended protests since returning, including against fossil fuel exports and police brutality. He has not taken part in organizing anything, attending only open-to-the-public demonstrations. He volunteered to canvass door-to-door for an environmental group.
"Brown had been showing up in leftist circles for some little while," Williams said. "Clearly something about him made some people uncomfortable, or seemed off, at least enough that they typed his name into Google to see what showed up. What they learned is that he helped to train the FBI in counter-terrorism."
Whoever posted Brown's public denunciation—it's still unclear who made that decision—did not bother to speak to Brown beforehand.
Williams defends the Committee Against Political Repression, saying that Brown’s "role as a [counter-terrorism] trainer isn't in dispute."
Actually, that question is the crux of the dispute.
The politics of Brown's decision can be debated. Can an anti-war scholar make the world a better place by teaching FBI agents about the problematic underpinnings of the War on Terror? Or does any interaction with the National Security State automatically and unequivocally equal complicity with its crimes?
What does seem clear is this: anonymously made public denunciations of semi-private individuals are unsettling and exhibit a face of the radical left that is not exactly welcoming. This is a problem for a sometimes-isolated political movement too often content to make a revolution by itself.
"It's been sort of difficult thinking about how to respond, or to whom to respond," Brown said, describing a scenario much like Kafka's The Trial. He does not know to whom he can appeal his sentence, and what, exactly, he can do to prove that he is not a government agent.
It is "an anonymous claim that is unverifiable and unfalsifiable," he says. "I didn't work for the FBI, and I don't, and I've never worked for any law enforcement agency. I was out at the marches because I care about the issues."
Williams agreed that "the FBI has deliberately sown paranoia within social movements to create rifts" and that "it's vitally important that no one make allegations that they can't support with evidence." The fact that Brown taught the FBI, regardless of what the class was about, is the evidence—period.
Recently, Brown had to explain the situation to his 12-year-old daughter. She offered tips that she has picked up dealing with bullies in middle school.
"This was a big part of their experience with dad," he said. "Going to marches and going to rallies. And talking to them about why we're there and what the issues are, and effecting social change." This "kind of exposure" is "one of the most important things I see in my role as the father."
Repression is a particularly effective strategy when police can depend upon the radicals they target to finish the job. As for Brown, he won't be taking his daughters to another protest any time soon.
Follow Daniel on Twitter: @DanielDenvir

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Even if he isn't an active snitch he still sounds like trouble. The kind of person that thinks you can change things by having fbi field agents attend a crappy seminar is still brimming with the kind of politics you shouldn't want to mix with.

[synthesis]

Even if he isn't an active snitch he still sounds like trouble. The kind of person that thinks you can change things by having fbi field agents attend a crappy seminar is still brimming with the kind of politics you shouldn't want to mix with.

Not that I'm defending this guy, but it kind of seems like he could have just seen it as another job that will pay him for having a political science major or whatever.

In any case, he's not helping anything by belittling the people he's trying to fit in with and denying that they have any reason to be suspicious.

[HoboHomesteader]

homie is against the "underpinnings" of the war on terror, but not the War itself and not war in general? he just wants a kindler, gentler FBI.

Fuck this dude.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Not that I'm defending this guy, but it kind of seems like he could have just seen it as another job that will pay him for having a political science major or whatever.

In any case, he's not helping anything by belittling the people he's trying to fit in with and denying that they have any reason to be suspicious.

I can appreciate doing what you need to do to get by, but that kind of thinking on his part stands out as a red flag to me. Someone who thinks they can end the war on terror or make it more humane by having feds sit through a power point presentation is exactly the kind of person thats going to go squealing to the authorities once they get involved in or get wind of something they think is too extreme, dangerous, unethical, whatever. I don't feel like anyone is trying to say that people should attack him on the street when they see him, just that no one should be planning any kind of direct action with him.

[synthesis]

I can appreciate doing what you need to do to get by, but that kind of thinking on his part stands out as a red flag to me. Someone who thinks they can end the war on terror or make it more humane by having feds sit through a power point presentation is exactly the kind of person thats going to go squealing to the authorities once they get involved in or get wind of something they think is too extreme, dangerous, unethical, whatever. I don't feel like anyone is trying to say that people should attack him on the street when they see him, just that no one should be planning any kind of direct action with him.

I totally agree that nobody should be colluding with him politically. I guess what I'm trying to say is that all that talk about how he's helping the world by training the FBI sounds like the kind of justification people make up after the fact to justify why they took a job that would look good on their resume.

There was a study where one group of people was paid $1 to do something and another group was paid $20 to do the same thing. Then they asked both groups to rate how "fun" they thought it was to do that thing. The $1 group as a whole rated it significantly more "fun," the assumption being that they needed to justify to themselves why they did such a pointless thing for so little. This strikes me as sort of the same thing.

[AmilcarCabral]

Dear friends, you know how most people blame the oppressed poor americans of the lower-classes for hating politics, for staying away from politics altogether and for being so anti-revolution, so anti-change. I think that the real cause and reason of why most adult parents do not want their children to be into political activism is that there is fascist infiltration of US covert government workers all over the place in America. Dumb people think that the only evil oppressors are the police men in uniform and in police cars. But they forget that there are lots of way that US national security fascist governments infiltrate the lives of americans, to see what americans are doing, what are they eating, and what are they thinking about.

And humans have a survival mechanism and I think that this is a powerful reason for american parents and for young americans to hate politics altogether. Because they don't wanna be lynched by the media like the media here in USA lynched Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning and all the whistle blowers.

I heard that another thing that these covert people hired by US government do is that they infiltrated organizations that are real revolutionary, and are very angry against the US government and against capitalism. And what they do is that they stimulate and motivate rebellious militant groups to perform acts of political revolutionary actions against US government or against any public building, they provide them with the weapons, bombs, and technology. And then after the real-revolutionaries perform their revolutionary actions, the fake-revolutionary (covert operative hired by US gov.) contacts the FBI and accuses them of domestic terrorism.

Who knows if that's how US government did 9-11, and many other domestic terrorisms as pretexts and tools to have a justified reason to keep the fascist police state at home, and the imperialist military machine abroad, and to keep most americans (Who are very brainwashed by CNN, FOX, Univision etc.) more brainwashed and more scared than most americans are already. And to keep most americans citizens loyal supporters and voters of the Democratic Party and the Republican party, and of the whole police fascist oligarchic plutocratic capitalist system

.



Apperently the most effective infiltrator in the Canadian anarchist movement where not the brazen guys trying to be leaders, inviting people to armed action, it was this unasuming older woman who ran the soupkitchen for years. Being the center of social life without an obvious intrest in radical politics she was never suspected, trusted by everyone, everyone gossipped to her so the spooks got intimate knowledge of the whole movement, of who knew and slept with who and by planting rumors she all but destroyed the movements organizing capabilities.

[synthesis]

So I met my mom at this restaurant for lunch last Tuesday and what did I find by the door but a front-page story in the Willamette Week about this guy. I distinctly remember the print article saying with certainty that "activists outed the wrong guy" but it seems to have been amended here.


Whack-A-Mole

Portland activists may have outed the wrong guy as an FBI snitch—here’s why they still should be paranoid.

SECRET AGENT MAN?: Vahid Brown says that since his past as a counterterrorism expert who taught FBI agents has gone viral, he’s been anxious about going out in public and attending activist events. Portland radicals say he’s too big a threat to allow into inner circles.

_____


It was a perfect day for a protest.

July 27 broke beautifully—not too hot, a light breeze, Mount Hood gleaming in the distance. At least 1,000 people, from old hippies to young anarchists, took to the walkway on the Interstate Bridge over the Columbia River while dozens of kayakers dipped their paddles into the blue-gray water below.

Three people rappelled down the side of the southbound span and unfurled a massive banner reading, “Coal, Oil, Gas, None Shall Pass.”

TV and newspaper cameras ate it up and spit it out—a loud message against fossil fuel exports through Oregon, and just the splash hoped for by the environmental group Portland Rising Tide.

But even as they marveled at the spectacle, Rising Tide leaders kept their eyes on one man.

Vahid Brown looked like any young guy in the city: slender and bearded, with a bandana tied over his sandy brown hair. He’d been showing up at activist events in Portland for the previous 18 months, spotted at Occupy Mount Tabor a few weeks before, and also at a march protesting the not-guilty verdict of George Zimmerman in the killing of Treyvon Martin.

Brown brought friends and earned an epic sunburn holding a sign with the words “fossil fuel exports” crossed out in red. “People were honking and cheering, and people were flipping us off, saying, ‘Go get a job,’” Brown tells WW. “It was great.”

He had no idea fellow radicals were watching him, or why: He’d been marked as a snitch, and three weeks ago Brown was named—and smeared—on the Internet with an allegation he was an FBI mole.

It hardly mattered if the accusation was true.

_____


We live in a time of intense paranoia. Thanks to the revelations brought by Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, we know none of us are free of the prying eyes of the United States government. The daily news is filled with stories of the National Security Agency, without a warrant, wiretapping our calls and monitoring the things we Google.

Activists know the feeling: The U.S. government has spied on or infiltrated political groups for decades.

The degree to which law enforcement has successfully gotten inside activist groups working today is unknown. But activists say they’re right to believe there’s always a mole.

“You have to assume everyone you didn’t give birth to is an FBI agent,” says Jessie Sponberg, an activist who recently led Occupy Mount Tabor.

So what’s happening to Vahid Brown in Portland is the extreme outcome of that history.

Brown, 36, says he is a progressive and, as he once described himself, “an activist and woodland creature who has been reading poetry at Portland coffeehouses, ballrooms, and basement bars for nearly twenty years.” He helped lead an Occupy movement at Princeton University.

Brown has been attacked anonymously on several websites as an “agent of the state”: Brown, a nationally recognized expert on Islam, once taught FBI agents about terrorism. And that has led to him being blacklisted.

“I’m not a government agent,” Brown, a 2007 Reed College grad, says. “I’m not going to inform on anyone. I’m not a threat to anyone.”

Dale Carpenter, a constitutional law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, says what the activist community has done is legal. After all, the information is public, he says, and in light of the national revelations on spying, groups are understandably leery. (The American Civil Liberties Union said the same thing when declining to comment to WW.) But Carpenter says there’s a larger gray area about whether it was the right thing to do.

“If he’s really not a government agent, and I have no way of knowing, what a horrible Kafkaesque world he’s living in,” Carpenter says. “He’s trying to fight the government while he’s outed publicly as an agent. It’s an impossible situation to be in. You cannot prove your innocence—you’re just trapped.”

Activists say they have no idea if Brown is a snitch—his association with the enemy is all they need to know about him.

“We’re not putting him on trial here,” Portland Rising Tide organizer Trip Jennings says. “We just have to decide if he’s somebody we want to be working with. He sketches people out—and that’s a good enough reason.”

Brown has hardly left his apartment in the days following Oct. 4, when an anonymous post on several activist websites first declared, “Watch out for FBI trainer Vahid Brown.”

He recently agreed to talk to WW at a picnic table at Gigantic Brewing, near his home. He feels comfortable here, one of the few places he’s gone to since the news of his past went viral.

“I’ve been anxious as hell,” Brown says, taking a drag from an organic American Spirit. “I’ve been dealing with the expectation that I’m going to be recognized—and recognized with hostility.”

It was not the welcome he expected upon his return to Portland in 2012.

Brown spent his first 10 years in Evansville, Ind., where his father was a doctor. He was raised in the Baha’i faith, which preaches peace, believes all religions come from the same god and is uncommon in the United States.

Always an outsider, Jacob Vahid Brown (who goes by his middle name, which means “unique” in Persian) says he recalls being terrified by the prospect of nuclear war and environmental destruction.

“Sometimes it felt like I was the only one paying attention as the world was falling apart,” he says. “I was having recurring nightmares about a nuclear holocaust at 7 and 8 years old.”

That overarching sense of justice, says Sara Brown, his ex-wife and mother of his two daughters, was “really heavy for a kid.” She says Brown told her stories about getting suspended for fighting because he was for standing up for other kids. “He has always had that extra awareness and sensitivity,” she says.

Brown’s family moved to Redmond, Wash., in 1989, when Brown was in seventh grade. By then, he’d grown a short mohawk. Within months, he was at the head of a multischool walkout of Redmond ’tweens, who left classes and marched on city hall to protest the Persian Gulf War.

After just six months at Redmond High School, he dropped out, moved to Woodburn to teach English to migrant groups, taught classes on a Lakota Indian reservation in South Dakota and landed for a while in Portland, where he immersed himself in the city’s slam poetry scene. He spent three years between 1995 and 1998 teaching English in China.

“My politicization happened when I was living in China,” he says. “We wanted to save the world, and had these notions about what we were going to do.”

Damien-Adia Marassa, a friend from Portland who was with Brown in China, says he and Brown spent their free time in Guangdong reading Malcolm X, Karl Marx and Paulo Freire.

“Vahid has always had radically democratic politics,” Marassa says. “FBI? Yeah, right. He’s zero threat.”

_____


Since returning to Portland last year, Vahid Brown has signed up on Facebook for protests related to social justice and environmentalism, including those against Trayvon Martin’s killing and supporting Occupy Mount Tabor. But activists say they’re worried their organizational structure may be the subject for Brown’s next book.

Activists in Portland should be suspicious about the FBI and other government agents: Their ranks have been infiltrated many times.

Starting in the 1930s, the city’s police force formed a “Red Squad” aimed at “monitoring, tracking, collecting information, infiltrating, harassing, and intimidating members of the Communist Party and labor organizers,” according to Lewis & Clark College’s Portland Social History Tour. The police kept up the practice until the early 1980s.

The tradition continues. Portland and Eugene were home to the largest U.S. branch of the Earth Liberation Front. The FBI labeled ELF as America’s “top domestic terrorism threat” after the group put environmental radicalism on the front page. ELF “elves” claimed credit for burning down the Oakridge Ranger Station in 1996 and torching 30 SUVs at a Eugene dealership in 2001. According to Mother Jones, the FBI used informants to help convict 14 ELF members since 2006.

Lauren Regan, founder of the Civil Liberties Defense Center in Eugene, says activists call that time the “Green Scare.”

The FBI, she says, holds extensive training for agents to transform themselves into elves.

“The FBI was trained on how to walk the walk,” Regan says. “They were taught to wear the black hoodies and Carhartts. They were taught the language, how to ‘talk vegan.’”

Sometimes agents are there to simply gather organizational data, Regan says, and other times they’re planted to catch or even encourage crimes.

That’s intentional, says James Wedick, a retired FBI agent who is now a consultant and expert witness in Sacramento.

“They need informants,” Wedick says. “The bureau needs info to uncover plots out there where individuals are conspiring to do harm to other folks. They need to put out feelers, they need to be collecting intelligence to build a case, arrest them and bring them to justice before something bad happens.”

More recently, documents released by police last year related to Occupy Portland mention “a source” who helped cops gather information on the movement. Also last year, several Pacific Northwesterners were jailed for refusing to talk about other protestors at the 2012 May Day riots in Seattle. Media coverage revealed the FBI had been monitoring the jailed activists’ movements even before the event.

It’s a page from the agency’s playbook, says Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism. It’s all about having a chilling effect on potential activists.

“By inserting informants into some groups, you create the perception they’re inserting someone into all groups,” Aaronson says. “In a way, that works to undermine the group itself.”

_____


Brown in 1999 moved back to Portland, where he met his wife. He later enrolled at Indiana University, where he says he studied Near Eastern cultures and refined the six languages he now speaks: Persian, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, French, German and Spanish.

Then 9/11 happened. Brown recalls a Muslim woman being punched in the face on campus and Muslim friends having food thrown at them in a Pizza Hut.

Sara Brown recalls her then-husband escorting Muslims to and from class, for protection. “He would leave early, stay late and be late for his own classes so he could walk them to theirs,” she says.

Brown left Indiana University in 2003 and enrolled at Reed College, majoring in Islamic studies. His Reed classmates don’t recall Brown being all that politically active.

“He struck me as a very brilliant person but also a very insightful person,” says Margot Kniffin, a fellow religion major at Reed. Brown’s thesis adviser, Professor Steve Wasserstrom, called Brown “brilliant” in an email and wrote he was among the best students he’s had in 27 years.

After graduation, Brown landed a job at the Combating Terrorism Center in West Point, N.Y., a think tank founded in 2003 by Vincent Viola, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and former chairman of the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism expert who worked with Brown, says the center allows researchers to work without any agenda imposed. (The center recently released a paper on far-right domestic terrorism that ignited the outrage of the Tea Party.)

Fishman, now working with the New America Foundation and living in Menlo Park, Calif., says Brown didn’t fit the mold of a traditional counterterrorism researcher.

“We always understood Vahid to be this sort of nutty environmentalist from Portland,” Fishman says. “I really do mean that in a positive way.”

At the Combating Terrorism Center, Brown taught FBI agents courses such as Origins of Islam, Islam and Militancy, Modern Jihadist Groups, and Radicalization. (Brown is named in records on FBI training obtained by the ACLU and posted on its site.)

Brown says he struggled with the decision to take the job but thought it important to teach law enforcement about the complex reasons al Qaeda and other terrorist cells exist.

“The FBI is the executor of policy in this discursive Islamophobic atmosphere,” he says. “I had an opportunity to help a group of people untangle that complexity.”

Brown’s prominence grew. He was twice featured on NPR as a “terrorism expert and teacher.” And he co-authored a book on terrorism, Fountainhead of Jihad: The Haqqani Nexus, 1973-2012, published this year.

All of this was easily found on Google and his Linkedin profile—something he would not have allowed, he says, if he were an FBI mole.

“I can’t figure out why the FBI would choose to use someone who has a very public association with them,” Brown says.

_____


GET UP, STAND UP: Vahid Brown stands with a sign July 20 protesting the not-guilty verdict of George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin slaying. Brown was captured on camera by activist Hart Noecker. Brown says he’s hesitant to attend public events for fear of being recognized, harassed or hurt. A flier, put out in early October, outlined Brown’s past as a trainer for the FBI.

For Jessie Sponberg and many others in the Portland activist community, any association with the FBI—academic or not—is unacceptable.
“The only way you will ever see my name and the FBI’s name on the same piece of paper is if the word ‘Wanted’ is also on it,” he says.
He and other radicals say that’s because law enforcement continues to watch them.

_____


Portland Rising Tide has been growing steadily stronger and more influential in environmental activism since it started in 2007 to stop liquefied natural gas.
Rising Tide preaches nonviolent protest, but member Trip Jennings says if fossil fuel export terminals are built in the Pacific Northwest, “We are willing to put our bodies on the line.”

“The point of the FBI is to suppress anything that challenges the status quo,” adds organizer Hart Noecker. “If we get 50,000 people who are willing to go get arrested to stop something, that will actually stop something. That is a threat to the status quo. There are people who make hundreds of millions of dollars on fossil fuel extraction.”

Jennings says FBI agents have been visiting the homes of family of Rising Tide members.

“Why would the FBI need to visit our parents?” he asks. “We’re an above-ground group. All of our actions get press. There’s nothing to hide. It’s intimidation.”

Activists elsewhere say Brown’s background didn’t bother them.

Brown quit working at the Combating Terrorism Center in 2010 and went to Princeton to earn his Ph.D. As the national Occupy movement took off, he was a key member of Occupy Princeton, helping to infiltrate and demonstrate at recruitment meetings for JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs on the New Jersey campus.

Occupy Princeton organizers Derek Gideon and Josh Shulman say Brown was a steady force. (Gideon says Brown told him early on about his work with the Combating Terrorism Center.) Brown kept in touch with other Occupy groups, reporting back with accounts of police and FBI infiltrations in other branches.

“He always seemed very brave about these things,” Shulman says. “I think it motivated a lot of other people. Not only did he seem brave, he was consistently there.”

When he returned to Portland last year, Brown signed up for rallies and marches on Facebook, tied prayer flags on the trees in Chapman Square in solidarity with Turkish protestors and demanded the city protect Mount Tabor’s reservoirs. At the coal export protest in July, Noecker says Brown volunteered to be a police liaison—something few organizers do. “Once people found out who he was, it was like, ‘Wow,’” he says.

Brown says he didn’t work as a police liaison; he ferried messages between protestors on both ends of the Interstate Bridge. That behavior (related only in hindsight by other activists) didn’t lead to accusations against Brown.

That happened because Brown was lonely.

Brown and his wife, Sara, had divorced in 2009, and he signed up on the Internet dating service OKCupid. Sources in the activist community say in July a woman checked out Brown’s OKCupid profile, Googled his name and found out about his work as an FBI trainer at the Combating Terrorism Center. Alarmed, she told a friend who was active in Portland Rising Tide.

Two months ago, Brown heard from Facebook friends who told him other activists had contacted them and warned them about his past.

“They didn’t say who contacted them and I didn’t ask,” he says. “I was just hoping that they would reach out to me.”

On the morning of Oct. 4, Brown says he got an email from Rising Tide asking him directly about his FBI involvement. “If you don’t answer,” the email said, “I’ll have to assume the worst.”

Brown was at his neighborhood coffee shop for his morning ritual—a fried egg sandwich and a coffee with soy milk—when a friend sent him the post from activist site Seattle Free Press linking him to the FBI. Two Reed students at the shop told Brown they’d just seen the post.

“I thought, ‘Oh, wow, strangers in public are going to see this in my own neighborhood,’” Brown says. “That was the beginning of my anxiety about this whole thing.”

He returned to his apartment and answered the email from Rising Tide. By then, the post was all over the Web. Online comments were laced with anger and profanity: “The information this scumbag provides the FBI with will, without any doubt, be used to further their insanely fucked up mission,” Seattle Free Press posted on Facebook.

The hatred directed toward Brown shocked his friends and family, especially his ex-wife, with whom he remains close. Sara took to the Web to defend the man whom she says knows her better than anyone in the world.

“I was attacked by other people who asked, ‘Are you collecting a paycheck with the FBI, too?’” she says. “On another one, they said I’m the chick who used to screw him. Nice misogyny from the left.”

Noecker denies writing this month’s blog post outing Brown. But he defends it. “There’s too much of a risk to have someone around who not only worked for the FBI but trained them,” Noecker says.

Following the posts, Portland Rising Tide asked Regan, from the Civil Liberties Defense Center, to hold a training session on how to spot a mole. Potential warning signs: anyone who asks too many questions or urges members to take extreme actions.

Regan says she does not trust Brown. She’s advised Rising Tide to disassociate itself from him.

“The fact that he is or was an FBI employee makes it so he needs to find another form of activism,” Regan says.

Brown says the attacks have succeeded in one way: He fears he cannot take part in local activist events, which now could be wrought with potential for confrontation.

“Are they going to pelt me with eggs?” he asks.

While talking at Gigantic Brewing, Brown tenses a bit as a man approaches. The man extends his hand to Brown to introduce himself. It turns out he’s one of the brewery’s owners.

He releases Brown’s hand. “I heard about everything that’s going on,” the man says. “My dad didn’t teach me much, but he did teach me one thing: Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

tl;dr This guy got called out for wandering in leftist circles but not disclosing the fact that he used to work for the FBI, and the Willamette Week thinks you should feel sorry for him for being mistreated by all those mean leftists even though they simultaneously acknowledge that people "should be suspicious" of infiltration by police agents.

link (http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-21434-whack_a_mole.html) - I didn't include the article's images/graphics here but it's worth checking them out.