Antifa: its Evolution from a Pair of Liberation Fronts a Generation Ago
In 2001, I infiltrated Portland’s Earth Liberation Front (ELF) for the FBI.
My method was simple: sell its self-appointed spokesman, Craig Rosebraugh, on a book deal. He wanted to write his manifesto; I’d be his editor, publisher, and, as my old mentor Clair George of the CIA liked to say, his “new best friend.”
The ELF, and its animal-rights cousin ALF, were the warm-up act for what Portland now calls Antifa: amorphous, leaderless clusters of angry idealists who justified arson as “direct action.”
Same dress code, same secrecy; same conviction that smashing things up equates to moral purity.
Rosebraugh was as close to a face as anarchism tolerates. Pasty, intense, wired glasses, a head full of paranoia. Acne, canines, and the thousand-yard stare of a man who was certain the latte drinkers at his local café were undercover Feds.
“I need to be serious and paranoid,” he told me the first time we met. “I walk by my coffee shop and there they are, looking out at me.”
He wasn’t wrong. And now I was looking straight at him.
My “book infiltration model” had precedent and worked like a charm. I’d used the same playbook against Edward Lee Howard—the CIA defector—meeting him in Moscow, Havana, Geneva, and Zurich to extract “positive intelligence” of interest to the FBI by penetrating his circle of Russian and Cuban intelligence contacts. This was in addition to a plan—forever put on hold due to political interference by the Clinton White House and DOJ—for renditioning him home to face the music.
Craig’s background—and mindset back then—offers contextual insight into today’s Antifa.
Rosebraugh told me he’d been vegetarian for 12 years; that he drank only water because he was allergic to alcohol from abusing it as a teen.
“I drank everything,” said Craig with a grin that suggested he’d drunk everything all at once. “And I’m sugar intolerant,” he added. No soda or fruit juice. And no caffeine because he would suffer heart-palpitations and shortness of breath.
Rosebraugh told me he once worked late into the night, but no longer possessed such energy. And it was all about work, no play; very one-dimensional. I listened to him ramble on about how he’d joined the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) after taking part in demonstrations against the Gulf War in 1991. He soon left the ALF, he said, because “they didn’t see the whole picture” (meaning, the environment).
These movements were just steppingstones in Craig’s personal odyssey of self-discovery to become, it seemed to me, The Rebel with the Right Cause. To this end he was working on a Ph.D. program at Goddard College in Vermont. His thesis? Rethinking Nonviolence: Arguing for the Legitimacy of Armed Struggle. A doctoral degree, he told me, would enable him to teach.
Over the next nine months, Rosebraugh wrote 395 pages—his book, Burning Rage of a Dying Planet—spelling out everything the FBI always wanted to know about the ELF but didn’t know how to ask.
Craig also sent me his doctoral thesis—another 379 pages. This was a syllabus for rejecting the peaceful techniques of Mahatma Gandhi and join him in “an effective revolutionary movement within the United States.”
His ambition: To motivate others to take “direct action” (a euphemism for violence) and choreograph them from behind the scenes.
When I asked Craig where he saw himself in five years, he dreamed of teaching from a farm retreat, maybe rural Montana.
My proposal to the FBI: fund the farm, let Craig gather every would-be revolutionary from Portland and elsewhere around the country under one leaky roof,—and we’d be inside the beast.
The Bureau didn’t bite. They wanted indictments, not experiments.
Rosebraugh got a law degree and now lives in LA. He grew up. The movement did not die—it mutated.
Those masked ELF/ALF moralistic cells that once torched research stations and timber contractors reinvented themselves on city streets. The security culture, the affinity-group logic, the black-bloc tactics—all migrated. Fur farms and spiked trees for forest defense gave way to opposing fascists and cops, but the DNA stayed the same.
Even then I saw the kids for what they were: not revolutionaries but auditioning radicals—cultish, attention-hungry, theatrical. Same as the “Class War” anarchists I’d infiltrated for a British Sunday newspaper in the ’80s
What Craig Rosebraugh — America’s “number-one domestic terrorist”— needed most, I thought, was a hug.
What the Bureau needed was imagination.
Had they let me run the farm, we could have owned the movement.
Today, the kids in black hoodies think they’re revolutionaries.
They’re not.
They’re just a bunch of out-of-control wannabe “rebels” in the throes of recycling someone else’s “revolution”— same anger, different hashtag.
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Wow, Robert, thank you. We need more articles like this because too many Santa Barbarans are very very ignorant about Antifa and defend it. I have a question. How did the Left take over what was originally anti-globalist and turn it into what it into the globalist/Marxist army it is today? My husband I were living in NYC during Occupy Wall Street and went to join the protest. As my husband says it was a carnival of protest against Wall Street misdeeds, from the left, right and center. There were the early Antifa types there, but they were so different than what we see now. Then during the Obama years we joined a Union Square protest against his NSA policies. The Left tried to take it over. We applauded that the organizers of it shooed those assholes out. And btw, we saw none of our liberal NYC media friends there. They didn't approve of protesting against Saint Barack. (I voted for him twice, but the Obama years drove me out of the Democratic Party.) Thank you.
WE need to straighten out their thinking by NOT letting them do what they are doing!