Phil Chinn's Ford Taurus moved along with the traffic on Highway 12, heading west in Grays Harbor County and beneath the Devonshire Overpass, where Washington State Patrol trooper Ben Blankenship was waiting. Blankenship put his cruiser in gear and moved down to the four-lane highway, pulling in behind Chinn's vehicle. Within a few miles, he hit his emergency lights. Chinn pulled over. It was May 6, 2007, early afternoon, the beginning of what the state patrol considers a routine traffic stop, but one that would cost taxpayers a half-million dollars.
Ana Benaroya
The monitoring, and arrests, of local antiwar demonstrators may have crossed the legal line.
Zoltán Grossman
Blocking Army vehicles at the Port of Olympia in 2007.
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A student at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Chinn and four friends were en route to Aberdeen for a second day of protests against the United States' wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They considered themselves anarchists in the Tiananmen Square mold, protesters in a peace movement called Port Militarization Resistance. It comprised mostly Olympia and Tacoma members of revived historic protest groups—Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Wobblies, among others. Many were students at idealistic Evergreen, where the curriculum includes Imperialism, Marxist Theory, and Alternatives to Capitalism.
Beginning in 2006, protesters hoisted antiwar signs, marched arm-in-arm in the streets, and engaged in acts of civil disobedience, which were rewarded with streams of pepper spray and drag-away arrests. They attached their own locks to military gates and sat down in front of the chrome bumpers of Army semis loaded with war machinery. It could be exhilarating. After one demonstration, a 15-hour standoff at the Port of Olympia in 2007, Chinn wrote down his fond recollections:
The most vivid memory in my mind at the moment is huddling under a tarp, in a makeshift tent at 3:00 AM in the pouring rain. I remember being soaked to the bone, drinking hot tea with a few unfamiliar faces. We had constructed the tent out of a tarp and a barricade, which was blocking the street on two sides...We had held the road for nearly 12 hours at that point, with another barricade at the main entrance to the port blocking off every path that military vehicles and equipment could be driven down. Somewhere, between the rain and the cold wind, was a sense of joy. We had turned back police from our barricades, and we were going to maintain them as long as we could. While in most other situations the chant "Whose port? Our port!" would be little more than wishful thinking, for a while, it was true.
Impeded by the activists in sending its convoys to and from the ports of Olympia and Tacoma, the Army was forced to launch Plan C: shipping Fort Lewis Stryker vehicles and other heavy equipment out of Grays Harbor, about five miles from where Chinn had just been pulled over.
Trooper Blankenship came to the Taurus' window. In his mirror, Chinn could see other state patrol vehicles pulling onto the highway shoulder, along with a Grays Harbor County sheriff's deputy. As Chinn, now 22, recalled in a recent interview, Blankenship asked if Chinn knew how fast he was going. The speed limit, 55, Chinn said. No, the trooper said, he'd been doing 53, and was hitting his brakes erratically.
Chinn was asked to step out of the car and take a sobriety test. Blankenship would later claim Chinn's eyes were bloodshot and that he had white spots on his tongue, suggesting he was under the influence of drugs, likely marijuana. Chinn performed the coordination tests successfully, he recalls, but wobbled a bit on one leg due to an ear infection. That was enough for Blankenship: Chinn was arrested for DUI and put in the trooper's car.
That's when Chinn noticed, on the trooper's dashboard, a computer printout with a picture of Chinn's car—actually, his parents' vehicle, a Ford Explorer. He'd been driving it the day before. Today he was driving his Taurus. Chinn suddenly realized this was hardly a routine stop: They'd been looking for him, in either car.
Unbeknownst to Chinn and others at the time, Port protesters had a double agent in their ranks. He went by the name John Jacobs and identified himself to fellow demonstrators as a civilian employee at Fort Lewis. When he joined the movement in early 2007, he offered to provide the inside scoop on Fort operations, and over the next two years would prove a trusted, loyal anarchist. He was given access to the activists' confidential communications, and told his new friends he wanted to start his own faction of war resisters.
Most of his inside information, it turns out, was flowing the other way, according to interviews, court documents, and public records reviewed by Seattle Weekly. He was indeed a civilian employee at the fort—in its Army Force Protection intelligence unit. His true name was John Towery, and his mission was to spy on the protesters from within.
While posing as both sympathizer and faithful organizer, Towery secretly communicated with military and law-enforcement agencies throughout Western Washington. He tipped off the Army about some of the same demonstrations he was helping to coordinate, and at times gave local police play-by-play details on demonstrators' movements. Protesters believe that collaboration violated federal law.
