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 Engaged in an Endless Pursuit of Dissenters 10/30/00 - by Craig R. McCoy and Linda K. Harris - Philadelphia Inquirer BALTIMORE - Sipping tea, surrounded by jammed bookcases filled with weighty nonfiction and spy thrillers, John H. Rees lays out a dizzying tale. He talks of millions of missing rubles, riches that disappeared when the Soviet Union collapsed. Of how that money resurfaced to bankroll a new anticapitalist movement. He talks of his network of informants, of his prodigious research, and of the naivete of those who think the communist threat is gone. It is a threat, he says, that recently manifested itself in Philadelphia. "I believe that elements of communism still exist and are advanced internationally and in America by groups such as those that tried to disrupt the GOP convention." Though his critics see Rees as an imaginative latter-day Joe McCarthy, Pennsylvania State Police used Rees' findings in seeking a warrant to raid a West Philadelphia warehouse that protesters used as a puppet-making factory and as a staging area. On Aug. 1, the second day of the Republican National Convention and the day of the most intense protests, more than 75 people at the warehouse were arrested and charged with misdemeanors. In hearings today and in coming weeks, defense lawyers hope to convince a judge to dismiss those prosecutions and others, on grounds that the use of Rees' information by police shows the political nature of the arrests. "With a warrant that reads like a political tract, the Philadelphia Police entered the Haverford Avenue workshop and arrested everyone who happened to be present," declares one motion filed by the Defender Association of Philadelphia, whose lawyers represent dozens of protesters. The motion derided the affidavits as being "replete with McCarthyite allegations. Such statements have no role in a probable-cause affidavit, except to smear the defendants as subversives." In court last week, Municipal Court Judge James M. DeLeon questioned the use of Rees' allegations. "Who are these people who gave you this information and what makes it so reliable?" he asked prosecutors. Who, indeed, is John Rees? For four decades, Rees, 74, onetime Washington editor for the John Birch Society, has tracked protest and dissent - from antiwar demonstrators in the 1960s to today's anti-globalization movement. He feeds his research to a special audience - law-enforcement agencies - publishing his findings in a series of obscure periodicals. His alliances in the past with police in Washington, New York state, and Los Angeles have left behind a trail of outrage. Sometimes, Rees has infiltrated groups himself, using a false name on occasion. He also says he has many sources. "We have stringers," Rees said in an interview at his home and office here. "We don't do what the FBI does, which is to go to an unemployment line, give them $10, and ask them to go to the meetings." Rees says that much of the time he draws upon already-published information from newspapers or public petitions and the like. Of late, he has been relying heavily on the Internet. Since 1985, the Maldon Institute - relying on nearly $2million from Pittsburgh philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife - has churned out monographs on everything from protests against the World Bank to rebel movements in Colombia and Uzbekistan. In the search-warrant affidavits, the state police quoted from a recent Maldon Institute report, citing unnamed sources, that linked protesters to Communist money. "Funds allegedly originate with Communist and leftist parties and from sympathetic trade unions," the police declared in the affidavits. Rees said he was surprised that state police had used his information, but he seemed delighted that they had. "The material in the report was, in my opinion, accurate and in the public domain," he said. Moreover, he said, the radical protesters who have torn up property last year in Seattle, and more recently in Prague, were well-deserving of scrutiny. "Do you think it's McCarthyite to criticize people who broke up small businesses?" Rees said. After Rees moved to the United States from England, his career as an anticommunist began in the late 1960s. He had a rocky start. Though Rees has been invited by the FBI to speak at antiterrorism conferences and has addressed one as recently as April, a confidential FBI memo written in 1968, made public later through a civil lawsuit, urged agents not to deal with him. "Rees is an unscrupulous unethical individual and an opportunist who operates with a self-serving interest. Information from him cannot be considered reliable," the memo stated. One of his earliest publications was the mimeographed Information Digest. Rees gathered some of its material by posing as a leftist himself. Among other things, it contained lists of license plates of cars at a Black Panther rally. His activity went largely unnoticed until a scandal broke in New York state as legislators learned that state police had kept files with information on a million citizens. A legislative committee conducted an inquiry. "What was reported by Information Digest was casually used to create dossiers on a wide spectrum of Americans whose only crime was to dissent," the committee's 1976 report found. "Information Digest was the string that held together a network of hidden informants whose information was recorded by police departments throughout the nation without the individual involved knowing of the process and without independent checking by the police as to the validity and source of this derogatory information." The New York State Police abandoned that system of intelligence gathering. In the next decade, a new furor flared involving Rees - this time in Los Angeles. Police officials there disclosed that a detective with the "public-disorder intelligence division" had leaked information to a private intelligence organization called Western Goals, whose editor was Rees. The officer, Detective Paul Jay, had a $30,000 contract with Western Goals to create a data bank of suspected Communists and left-wing groups. The American Civil Liberties Union sued Western Goals in 1984 and won a court order forbidding it to disseminate the information. Undeterred, Rees, in 1985, founded the Maldon Institute - the most polished undertaking of his long career. While the ACLU and others criticized him in those years, he also forged the relationship with the arch-conservative Scaife and met with President Reagan, as memorialized in photographs in Rees' home. The institute, named after an obscure English battle, publishes 10 bound monographs a year and a twice-monthly newsletter called Early Warning. Its board has been made up of conservative journalists, clergy and lawyers. A board chairman in the early 1990s, Michael G. Flanagan, pleaded guilty in 1996 to grand larceny and was sent to prison after the Manhattan District Attorney's Office charged him with stealing $1million from clients in his private practice. Rees still likes to gather information firsthand. In Philadelphia for the convention, Rees said, he toured the puppet warehouse the day before the raid - one more bit of surveillance for an aging agent. To get inside, Rees used media credentials from a previous protest march and he knew how to dress. "Obviously, I don't wear a collar or tie," he said. Rees said he was surprised, however, at the inadequate security at the door. "I just walked in," he said, speaking as a man who clearly enjoys his work. "It's something I'll do." His tour produced little fodder for publishing. "I saw nothing extraordinary," Rees recalled. "Nothing to write about. Not at all." |
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