#Vats #punk #SanFracisco #neoNazis #ACAB #history

"I have personally observed neo-Nazis function as plausibly deniable, irregular auxiliaries of local law enforcement, specifically the SFPD. Here’s the story of one such encounter. Extrapolate what you will.

In 1984 the Squatters Federation attempted to stage a building take-over at a former brewery called The Vats, from which a great many young artists and musicians, mostly punks, had recently been evicted. We had an elaborate plan, but it was foiled because our OpSec was not up to MilSpec. The SFPD knew our plan in advance, and moved to counter it at a critical moment.

Undoubtedly we had been infiltrated. The old COINTELPRO era analysis still stands. If there are a dozen radicals at a meeting, it's best to assume at least one is a cop, and two more will roll over on you as soon as they get busted and squeezed. For a more in depth study of infiltration, search DuckDuckGo for 'Quicksilver Indymedia'. It's a long, dense thread, but a lot of it reads like a thriller. Potential film scripts just jump off the page at you. It's all stuff you'd be a much better activist if you knew about. You'd last longer, too. Unfortunately, the Vats action preceded its publication by over a decade.

Clueless and vulnerable, we had planned our action anyhow, foolishly trusting in our OpSec prowess, which we had vastly overrated. It's a common error. The Greeks had a word for it: hubris. On the day of the action, I was at my post, concealed in a spotter’s nest on a second story fire escape on the side of the building. A select group of trouble makers had already infiltrated the building and made a number of modifications. This is what the military calls 'preparing the terrain.'

My post on the fire escape was as easy to construct as a hunting blind. It was built on the same principles, with locally scavenged materials arranged so as to blend in with the background. The fire escape looked like it was randomly heaped up with trashed cardboard boxes, a not uncommon sight at the time. Actually it was carefully constructed camouflage. I was out of sight of the demo but in contact with the handful of other people who had preemptively occupied the building. I could also see anybody entering the parking lot from Mariposa Street. Except for a couple secret bolt holes, we had sealed ourselves in behind locked steel doors, all but one. At a predetermined time, it was to be thrown open and the crowd was to rush in, the door was to be first bolted, then welded shut, securing the building, and forcing a confrontation. That was the plan, anyhow.

We had stashed food and water inside. We could have
held out in there for days, but that probably would never have happened because the cops would almost certainly have cut their way in with acetylene. This would actually have made for even better optics than a prolonged siege. At this point in history, the internet wasn't available outside of the military and academia, so we were dependent on mainstream news to get our message out. It was fairly difficult to pull off. It often involved audacious, sometimes elaborate, media stunts. At The Vats, we were a little too elaborate for our own good. Our plan relied on exact timing, precise execution, lengthy planning and above all, airtight OpSec. We should have been able to pull it off, but no. KISS? What's that? We didn't know. Hubris? Didn't that die out with the Greeks? Not so much, it turns out.
Had we succeeded, the elaborate media stunt we had concocted would have been covered by the local news, and maybe even the networks. The viewers would have been shown the absurdity of TPTB using naked force to create, not just another vacant building in a city with a surplus of vacant buildings (as it was at the time), but also to create more homeless people in a city that already had homeless people galore. It was to be political theater, a morality play of sorts, in a time where social media as we now it didn’t exist and corporate news media controlled what information reached the masses. The only way to get them to tell any of the truth at all was to employ the psycho-social jui-jitsu of absurdist, political street theater. This is psy-war.

Used correctly, psy-war is our most potent weapon. The key words to remember here are 'used correctly.' Used correctly, psy-war gets the goods. Used incorrectly, it can be worse than doing nothing.

We had live bands and a generator set up on an adjacent lot. The lot was owned by a railroad company. The railroad company either didn’t know or didn’t care that we were there. The cops had no legal right to disperse us from there unless there was trouble or the owner complained. Neither happened. We’d been throwing this party once a week for nearly two months. Word got around. It grew to the point where we finally had enough people to rush the building through the one unsealed door, lock ourselves in and pull off the occupation.

We had positioned the spotters in a number of locations to prevent ourselves being surprised from behind. I was one of them. My role for the day was to watch our back. So I did, and what a show I saw. As H-hour, M-minute approached, a couple dozen skinheads coagulated right under my concealed position on the fire escape and began milling around. They couldn't be seen by the partiers, and I couldn't be seen by them. I wasn’t spotted. They were. OK, one point for our side. Or so I thought.

I passed the info along, held my position, and awaited further developments. I rather imagined that some anarchist punks would detach from the party, circle around to the side of the building and see off the skins by whatever means necessary. Before that could happen, two SFPD patrol cars rolled up and summoned a couple specific skins over to talk. I couldn’t tell who they were because skinheads looked an awful lot alike, especially from above. But I could hear. I saw and heard them taking orders from the cops to go around the other side of the building and start trouble.

They did, but I did not witness or participate in it, as I had exfiltrated the area, with guerrilla style stealth, posthaste and forthwith. This was in compliance with our mutually agreed upon rules of engagement, especially the part about not engaging with the cops unless and until we had secured the building. We had never planned to fight the cops there. We planned to stall them long enough for the news crews to arrive, then negotiate an eloquent surrender polemic that would be played on the evening news. It would have been an elegant plan had we'd been able to pull it off. We weren't. That's OK. If we're not failing more often than we succeed, we're not trying enough new things. As long as we keep making new mistakes, each stumble drives us forward.

The trouble the skins caused was out of view from my position, but I could hear the commotion. That was enough to get me off my ass. Other squatters saw it. Word got around quickly. it was immediately obvious that we had to abort the mission and withdraw in an orderly fashion as previously stipulated in plan B. That part we actually did pull off. Always have a backup plan, every time, no exception. Just a suggestion.

I alerted the other occupiers and we made our escapes and scattered. I went out the other side of the building. My bike was parked a few blocks away. A few people allegedly went through a tunnel and emerged on the other side of the street. I didn't see this happen and never saw the tunnel personally. We had tried to protect against spies by compartmentalizing our escape routes. This part of our OpSec at least actually worked. None of the escapees were ambushed, not even me.

When the trouble broke out, the cops had a legal excuse to pour in and 'break it up.' They let the skins go, drove off the punks and stole all the beer. Or so I heard. Like I said, I didn't see it happen. I was busy hightailing it to a preselected rendezvous point. At the time it was happening, I realized immediately that the skins were functioning as the plausibly deniable, irregular auxiliaries of the local police. It was obvious and self evident, not rocket science. It didn’t occur to me till years later to even contemplate how much higher up their chain of command actually went. This was an inexcusable mistake on my part. I thought these chuds were mere wannabees. They weren't. They'd already advanced to the rank of puppet.

Of all people, I should have known better because so much of my personal life has been shaped by a COINTELPRO frame-up in 1967.

(. . .)

It took me eight years and the Church Committee Hearings to learn that what had happened to me in NYC had a federal etiology, called COINTELPRO. At that point, I started to study this, and related phenomena, in earnest. I learned, among other things, that COINTELPRO made use of plausibly deniable, irregular auxiliaries. For example when the first Panthers were shot it was not by the cops. A decade later, when I witnessed an obvious COINTELPRO redux scenario play out before my eyes at the Vats, I really should have sussed it immediately for what it was. I didn’t. Once again I attributed the fascist/police collaboration to America's ubiquitous local police corruption. Wrong again.

But I did learn this: Never assume that any fascist formation, even a petty, racist street gang, doesn’t have friends on the force. It’s not called the Blue Klux Klan for nothing. This bears repeating, lest we forget again and have to once again reinvent the wheel." -- excerpt from my (as yet) unpublished book *Punching Nazis*