Date: Mon, 30 Mar 1998 10:27:36 +0200
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-NEWS: The secret police in Soc-Dem Denmark (fwd)


This is from the USec via Labor-L. Shows that even the nicest and most
cuddly revolutionaries are in the class war up to their necks, like it or
not.

Cheers,

Hugh

_________________________________


(fwd)
>An interesting example of info revealed on revolutionary orgs infiltrated
>by spies. Note the reference to agents knowing about threats on Danish IS
>people's lives, well before a fatal bombing. -T.P.
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Tue, 17 Mar 1998 08:57:01 -0500
>From: International Viewpoint <100666.1443-AT-compuserve.com>
>To: ".Press English" <fi-press-l-AT-mail.comlink.apc.org>
>Subject: Denmark/SAP infiltrated by intelligence services
>
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>Denmark
>
>Intelligence agent speaks out
>
>The Danish intelligence service has had secret agents
>inside the Socialist Workers Party (SAP) since 1982.
>Age Skovrind and Bodil Rasmussen report.
>
>The first known infiltration happened in 1982. Since
>that time, the Danish intelligence service has
>collected membership details, and reports about
>political debates within the SAP - Danish section of
>the Fourth International. The spies were particularly
>interested in the party's international links.
>
>Television exposure of this and other intelligence
>activity came suddenly, in the midst of the election
>campaign, and provoked a national debate about
>intelligence work and political control.
>
>The exposure was made in a two-part program by one of
>the two national TV channels. The former SAP agent
>explained how he was ordered to apply for membership in
>order to infiltrate the party and get information about
>its members and party activities. When the mission was
>concluded, in 1984, he copied the keys to the SAP
>national office and gave them to the intelligence
>service.
>
>In 1981 and 1984, SAP ran for the first time in
>parliamentary elections. The intelligence service
>copied and recorded most of the 20,000 signatures
>gathered to enable the party to present a national
>slate. This contravenes a 1968 government ruling
>forbidding the registration of legal political
>activities.
>
>Long-standing SAP member S=F8ren S=F8ndergaard, currently a
>Member of Parliament for the Red-Green Alliance, told
>television journalists that he "was not taken by
>surprise, given that this was a confirmation of the
>SAP's analysis of the role played by the intelligence
>practice to protect the capitalist system even by
>illegal methods." He added that, "since SAP has always
>worked inside a legal framework, there is no reason to
>fear any damage to the party." Nevertheless,
>S=F8ndergaard and other SAP members are "worried about
>possible intelligence information about SAP relations
>to organisations in countries where the political
>struggle, and communist commitment is a question of
>life and death."
>
>According to S=F8ndergaard, the risks of infiltration do
>not, in a country like Denmark, justify secret
>organisation of anti-capitalist parties. Work in the
>mass movement can best be carried out by genuinely
>non-secret organisations - like SAP, he said.
>
>The intelligence service agent assigned to SAP also
>spied against legal activity by militant trade
>unionists. His targets included striking bus drivers,
>union activity during the Easter 1985 general strike,
>and solidarity actions related to boycott campaigns
>against the South African apartheid regime.
>
>Since the television programmes the press have
>uncovered further cases of intelligence service spying
>against the trade unions. The telephones of the
>National Union of Unskilled Workers (SiD) were tapped
>during the 1994 bus drivers' strike, and there was
>close monitoring of the striking Ri-bus drivers in
>1995.
>
>Another agent has admitted recorded a 1996 meeting
>about the Kurdish question, sponsored by the national
>union confederation and featuring a Social Democratic
>leader as speaker. The same agent told one newspaper
>that he supplied the intelligence service with a tape
>recording containing threats by a far-right leader to
>implement an assassination plan against the
>revolutionary organisation International Socialists.
>The intelligence service never informed the
>organisation itself about this warning. Two months
>later, on March 16, 1992, the secretary of IS was
>killed by a bomb attack which remains unsolved.
>
>The TV and press debate has focused on the way
>government and parliament are informed - or not - of
>the activities of the intelligence service. The Social
>Democrat ex-Minister of Justice told television
>journalists that he had never authorised the
>infiltration of SAP. A few day after that programme was
>aired, the press revealed that the chief of the
>intelligence service, Birgitte Stampe, had misinformed
>another Social Democratic Minister of Justice about the
>supervision of the Kurdish solidarity meeting.
>
>In response, SAP member and Red Green Alliance MP S=F8ren
>S=F8ndergaard demanded Stampe's resignation. It seems
>increasingly clear that successive Social Democratic
>governments have been misinformed more than informed
>about intelligence service activities. A right-wing
>ex-Minister of Justice admitted and still defends the
>intelligence operation against the trade unions in the
>early 80s. "They stopped the society by their strikes
>and pickets lines and were throwing bottles at the
>police. It was surely a task for the intelligence
>service", he said.
>
>The initial revelations were televised on March 1st,
>just after Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen
>unexpectedly called a general election for March 11th.
>So all political parties were forced to comment on the
>question of intelligence practice.
>
>The Red-Green Alliance - and SAP - proposed the
>appointment of an independent commission of inquiry to
>investigate the activities of the intelligence services
>since the start in the forties. The results of the
>commission should - according to SAP - be public and
>form the basis of a discussion about the future of the
>intelligence services in Denmark.
>
>This proposal was supported by the Socialist Peoples
>Party, a little bourgeois party in the government
>coalition, and, more surprisingly, by a leading member
>of the conservative party, who argued that an
>independent commission was necessary to rebuild public
>trust in the intelligence services. Several leading
>member of the trade union movement have supported the
>idea of an independent commission, and the chairman of
>the National trade union confederation (LO) has asked
>the minister of justice to take immediate steps to make
>a new and more strict law ensuring parliamentary
>control of the intelligence services. Several political
>parties have also demanded more parliamentary control
>of and information about the intelligence services.
>
>So far, however, the absence of public knowledge,
>political regulations and budget limits for
>parliamentary work enables the Danish intelligence
>service to operate as an even stronger "state inside
>the state" than their Norwegian and German
>counterparts.
>
>Despite the anger and demands from trade unions and
>other social democratic victims of intelligence
>activities, the current Social Democratic Minister of
>Justice has merely asked the intelligence service to
>make an internal review of its activities since the
>late seventies. And even this request came only after a
>week of debates in which more and more social democrats
>and others began to ask for a closer control over the
>intelligence services.
>
>>From the beginning of this scandal, the main right wing
>opposition party, the Liberals, have defended the
>intelligence service and justified the infiltration of
>SAP. Like some of the editorials in the big bourgeois
>newspapers, the chairman of the Liberals has argued
>that it was necessary to survey the far left, "not
>because of the activities of SAP or others, but because
>you never know what people who talk about revolution
>will do!" Like a number of journalists, he suggested
>that the SAP may have had similar plans to the
>"Blekingegade group" which robbed a bank in the late
>80s, planning to give the money to guerrilla groups in
>the third world.
>
>Other journalists have tried to justify the
>infiltration of SAP by throwing suspicion on the
>party's international solidarity work. Their difficulty
>has been that, during the period of deep infiltration,
>SAP's main solidarity activities were solidarity with
>the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, and support for
>political prisoners in Czechoslovakia. As a result,
>there have been some quite absurd articles in the
>press, trying to link SAP to the bomb attack against
>Eden Pastora in Nicaragua in 1984. One - anonymous -
>former member of SAP, is widely quoted as saying "there
>have always been open doors between SAP and terrorism",
>without any examples or evidence.
>
>Nevertheless, accusations of this kind have not been
>the general picture in the press, and the SAP has been
>able to explain its open style of work, particularly
>during the period in question, as well as publicising
>the general views of the party about how to fight for
>social and democratic rights through mass-organisation.
>
>Though the attempts to represent SAP as some kind of
>international terrorist organisation have failed, it is
>likely that exactly the international work of SAP,
>particularly its membership of the Fourth
>International, were one of the real reasons for the
>infiltration. On the 15th of March a leading newspaper
>wrote that "according to our information, NATO decided
>in the eighties to keep an eye on the Fourth
>International." The reason, apparently, was that "The
>Fourth International had contacts to guerrilla
>movements in Latin America and Africa".
>
>Though there has been wide debate about the nature and
>context of intelligence service work, there has not yet
>been much political activity and organising around the
>issue. This may change now that Frede Jakobsen, former
>editor of the SAP weekly "Klassekampen" (Class
>Struggle) and other party members have demanded to see
>their intelligence service files.
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