A Suspect Roundup

The knocks on Josh Harper's door in Seattle came at 7 a.m. on May 26, just 20 minutes after he'd been awakened by a telephone call from California. There, federal agents, accompanied by a helicopter overhead, had just arrested three animal-rights activists. The caller warned Harper that he could be next. The California trio was taken into custody on an array of federal terrorism charges related to an aggressive campaign aimed at closing down Huntingdon Life Sciences. HLS, based in England but with facilities in the U.S., uses animals—dogs and nonhuman primates, for example—to test products for an array of pharmaceutical and biomedical companies.

After hanging up, Harper thought for a moment. From 2001 until last fall, he'd been involved in the anti–HLS movement, known as Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), in both England and the States, principally organizing protests in the southern U.S. and editing videos for the group. Last year, the feds raided his apartment in Seattle's University District and seized his computer and other property in connection with an investigation into SHAC. Although arrested at least a dozen times previously in the course of environmental and animal-rights activism, Harper reasoned that he was in the clear this time. He says he's had no involvement with SHAC for much of the past year. "I told myself I was paranoid," Harper says. He went back to bed.

But the knocks came, and they were for him. When he opened the door to the apartment he shares with his girlfriend, the FBI arrested him. Later that day, he was read an indictment in U.S. District Court in Seattle, charging him and six other SHAC activists with conspiring to violate a federal animal-enterprise terrorism law by taking actions against HLS, its suppliers and financial partners, as well as individual employees—crimes that largely amount to harassment and property damage. "It really is a form of domestic terrorism," insists Michael Drewniak, a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney's office in Newark, N.J. HLS's American operations are in New Jersey.

Other legal experts see it differently. They call the move by the feds overreaching, a misapplication of laws designed to combat real terrorism, and an assault on the First Amendment. "It's almost a little like charging Malcolm X with criminal acts for saying, 'By any means necessary,'" says Harper.

There are many companies around the world that test potential medical innovations on mammals. But HLS became a big target of activist ire in 1999 after a BBC cameraman sneaked inside a company facility in England and videotaped an employee repeatedly punching a beagle. It was the video seen round the animal-rights world.

The response in England was to mount a protest campaign unlike any before. The goal wasn't merely to protest against the company and force legislative change on animal research. They wanted an end to all such research, and HLS was the rallying point. The goal was to shut down the company by any means necessary. For the past five years, SHAC activists in the U.K. have protested at company facilities, raided its laboratories and freed animals, harassed employees, and targeted companies and individuals that do business with HLS—from customers to investors to insurers. The idea was to bleed HLS to financial death by holding anyone who did business with HLS accountable for the perceived ethical violations of the company's research. At times, SHAC's tactics were successful. Several companies quit doing business with HLS. At times, the campaign was violent. In 2001, masked men with baseball bats attacked Brian Cass, HLS's managing director.

In 2001, SHAC came to America. The activists here differ from their British counterparts in that their protests have been largely under the public radar, the participants loosely organized. Along the lines of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), SHAC USA had spokespeople articulating the group's philosophy for reporters and a Web site devoted to posting communiqués from anonymous activists. But the tactics were in keeping with those used in Europe. SHAC activists regularly protested outside the homes of people connected to HLS. The SHAC USA Web site sometimes featured the names and home addresses of HLS employees. Some postings said that SHAC activists knew where a particular employee's children went to school, what their names were, what color and make of car the parents drove, and who insured the car. This information was contained in anonymous communiqués posted to the SHAC USA Web site, according to Andrea Lindsay, SHAC spokesperson in San Francisco.

In addition, companies doing business with HLS in the U.S. have been targeted with e-mails, Internet attacks, letters, phone calls, and protests. That's what happened to Warren Stephens, a large investor in HLS, and Marsh Insurance. Both Stephens and Marsh stopped doing business with HLS.

Harper helped organize the protests against Stephens' financial firm in Little Rock, Ark., in October 2001. Last September, he shouted through a bullhorn during a protest outside the Seattle offices of Chiron, an Emeryville, Calif.–based biomedical company, purportedly a customer of HLS. The previous month, an anonymous person claiming to be connected with a group called Revolutionary Cells set off a pipe bomb at Chiron's headquarters. SHAC USA posted a communiqué but denied any connection to the bombing.