ILLUSTRATION BY GIA-BAO TRAN The arrest of three alleged eco-terrorists on January 13 was thanks to the work of a mysterious FBI informant who went by the name of Anna. Advertisement



On the morning of January 13, the FBI was keeping a close eye on a cabin in Dutch Flat, about a half-hour north of Auburn. The government had the cabin and its four occupants—two men and two women—under 24-hour surveillance for nearly a week because the group was suspected of plotting acts of domestic terrorism in the name of the Earth Liberation Front.

The four left the cabin at around 10 a.m. in a 1997 maroon Chevy Lumina and traveled about 30 miles to a Kmart in Auburn. There were agents inside the store, watching them shop.

Agents outside watched the parking lot, too, as one of the men, 28-year-old Eric McDavid—tall and athletic, who wore his red hair short under a baseball cap—returned to the car with his companion, Anna, a pretty, dark-haired woman in her mid-20s. Inside, 20-year-old Lauren Weiner and 20-year-old Zachary Jenson continued to shop, stopping a clerk to inquire about Pyrex cookware. All the while, agents watched and waited.

Once all four reassembled in the parking lot, carrying bags full of household cleaning supplies and a Pyrex bowl—bomb-making materials, according to the government—members of the FBI, the SWAT team and the Joint Terrorism Task Force moved in.

It wasn’t a violent takedown.

Three from the group were quietly handcuffed and loaded into patrol cars. Their shopping bags were inspected, quickly inventoried and loaded into the trunk of another. All but Anna were taken to the Sacramento County Jail and then charged with conspiracy to commit arson. The government alleged that the conspiracy was part of a planned terrorist bombing campaign targeting power stations in San Francisco, a forest-genetics research lab in Placerville and even the Nimbus Dam.

The three never saw Anna again. She had befriended them, brought them together, paid the rent on the Dutch Flat cabin and encouraged them every step of the way. She had been an FBI informant all along.

According to a report from FBI agents, Jenson muttered, “Friday the 13th, what a day,” from the back of the squad car as they drove away to jail.

The green scare

The arrest of the three would-be eco-terrorists was part of a larger crackdown on what the government considers one of the most fearsome domestic terrorist organizations in the United States: the Earth Liberation Front.

That same month, with great fanfare, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrests of 17 alleged members of ELF, charged with 65 counts of arson and conspiracy. That investigation was called Operation Backfire.

But critics, like the National Lawyers Guild, call Operation Backfire and other investigations and arrests of eco-radicals the “green scare” and a misuse of resources to fight terrorism.

“The indictment tells a story of four-and-a-half years of arson, vandalism, violence and destruction claimed to have been executed on behalf of the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front—extremist movements known to support acts of domestic terrorism,” said Attorney General Alberto Gonzales at the press conference announcing the results of Operation Backfire, on January 20, just a week after the arrests of Weiner, McDavid and Jenson.

“Investigating and preventing animal-rights and environmental extremism is one of the FBI’s highest domestic-terrorism priorities,” said FBI Director Robert Mueller at the same press conference.

That quote was widely reprinted in newspapers all over the country. Here’s another, which didn’t make it into most media accounts: “The FBI becomes involved, as it did in this case, only when volatile talk crosses the line into violence and criminal activity,” Mueller also said.

Keep that in mind as you read further. The government says that its confidential source, Anna, foiled the plot cooked up by McDavid, Jenson and Weiner. But court documents suggest that it took a lot of care and feeding, encouragement and money from the FBI informant, Anna, to get this particular conspiracy to hatch.

In May, Weiner agreed to plead guilty. She faces a maximum of five years in prison and is free on bail, living with her family in New York.

Last week, after more than six months in the Sacramento County Jail, Jenson also agreed to a plea bargain, and to testify against McDavid. He’s been released on bail and is scheduled to be sentenced in early October.

That leaves McDavid left to stand trial. He’s the oldest, and the one prosecutors say was the real leader behind the plot. He was also the one who was closest to Anna, the FBI informant who stuck with McDavid for a year-and-a-half, asking him questions, making suggestions and acting as if she were his lieutenant while reporting on his every move to the FBI. According to testimony from Sacramento-based FBI Special Agent Nasson Walker, she got paid at least $75,000 for her work.

The defendants’ lawyers say that there could have been no conspiracy at all without Anna. Documents from the investigation reviewed by SN&R suggest that Anna provided much of the financial support, the encouragement and the know-how needed to turn their talk into action. They also show that whenever the group started to lose focus, or to have second thoughts, Anna badgered them about being all talk and not sticking to an action plan.

“She was the glue,” said defense attorney Mark Reichel, who represents McDavid. “Take away Anna, and they would have scattered in the wind like so many tumbleweeds.”

Anna the anarchist

ELF, and its sister group, ALF, the Animal Liberation Front, has been a tough organization for the FBI to crack—mostly because, as U.S. Attorney Steven Lapham notes, “it’s not an organization.”

It’s not an organization in the sense that a criminal gang, or the Mafia, or a group like Al Qaeda is an organization. Federal law enforcement works against these groups in large part by arresting the foot soldiers and prying information out of them about the higher-ups. With perseverance, and enough underlings flipping on their bosses, you’ve got a shot at decapitating the organization.

Not so with ELF. These folks are, after all, anarchists who believe in an anti-authoritarian way of organizing society. Nobody pays membership dues; there are no bosses or foot soldiers. They carry out their actions, from simple tagging and vandalism to firebombings causing millions of dollars’ worth of damage, under the banner of ELF. They have been credited with $110 million in property damage to date, from car dealerships to ski resorts since 1997. Though the government considers ELF one of the most important domestic terror groups in the nation, if not the most important, so far, nobody has died as a result of an ELF action.

Lapham prosecuted the ELF firebombing of a UC Davis veterinary clinic in 1987. He also prosecuted the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, in 1998 and members of the San Joaquin County Militia for conspiring to blow up two large propane tanks in Elk Grove—in order to start the second American Revolution—in 2002. And he’s the lead prosecutor against McDavid, Weiner and Jenson.

ILLUSTRATION BY GIA-BAO TRAN Anna pushed the others constantly to stick to the plan. She told them she liked the idea of taking out the Nimbus Dam.



He claims ELF is a serious threat. “These people are committed to a cause, a cause that has as its tenets property destruction and violence.”

Cracking ELF requires a special approach. And that’s where someone like Anna comes in.

In an affidavit filed in the case, FBI Special Agent Walker said that the “confidential source” (the government never refers to Anna by name; it’s always the “source”) had been used in at least 12 prior investigations of anarchists and anarchist groups. “Her information has proved accurate and reliable,” Walker said, and she was “granted authority to participate in Tier 1 Otherwise Illegal Activity” as part of the investigation. Tier 1 means investigations of the most dangerous criminals: terrorists. OIA means just that. Anna was allowed to break the law in order to get her collar.

McDavid first encountered Anna in Iowa in 2004, at an anarchist convention called CrimethInc. He was already friends with Jenson, who also went to Iowa that time.

“She showed up with this pink hair and camo miniskirt. I guess she was pretty cute,” said Reichel.

According to Reichel, Anna and McDavid never slept together, but there was romantic tension between the two over the next year-and-a-half. “They argued like a couple. Everyone around them assumed they were sleeping together. She definitely had my boy after her.”

The two would see each other again about a year after the Iowa convention. In the meantime, it seems, Anna had work to do in southern Florida.

According to accounts of organizers of a protest against the Organization of American States in June 2005, Anna showed up in the Miami area, posing as an activist and volunteer medic.

Miami organizer Ray Del Papa said he believes the FBI was monitoring organizers of the demonstrations, even though they were legal, permitted and not intended to include any civil disobedience or “direct action.”

“I was on the phone one day, complaining to someone that we only had one volunteer medic,” Del Papa explained.

“I think the phones were tapped, because the next day, this woman Anna shows up, with short blond hair, in these leather pants, with a medic bag.”

But Del Papa said Anna didn’t seem very interested in offering medical care and comfort to protesters. She was more curious about the protest organizers.

“She started asking all of these really specific questions about who was coming and how many people were coming. She got really aggressive about wanting detailed information about our plans.”

During the march, Del Papa said, Anna started recruiting high-school students to stage a sit-in to block traffic, right in front of a large group of Broward County sheriff’s officers in riot gear. Del Papa was sure the provocation would lead to arrests and to the police clearing protesters from the area around the Fort Lauderdale Convention Center where the protest was being held. “It was a trap,” Del Papa told SN&R. That’s when Del Papa was sure that Anna was a government agent. Not that it’s uncommon for political demonstrations and meetings to have an undercover agent or two in their midst.

“What bothers me is that they’ve gone from being information gatherers to being provocateurs. To provoking people into these actions.”

Mark Reichel went to Miami to check it out. He brought a photo of the Miami Anna, taken by organizers there, back to his client in the Sacramento jail. It was the same Anna, McDavid told him.