The Secret Watchers

How the police bureau spied for decades on the people of Portland

By Ben Jacklet

The Portland Tribune, Sep 13, 2002, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Portland police terrorism expert Winfield Falk hated that his life’s work was sentenced to die in the shredder.

So he drove to police headquarters in downtown Portland, loaded his truck with confidential Ñ and by then illegal Ñ intelligence documents, and took them home.

The theft was never officially reported.

The files Ñ 36 boxes stuffed with surveillance photographs, index cards, news clippings and intelligence reports collected between 1965 and the early 1980s Ñ spent the next several years in the garage of Falk’s Southwest Portland home, where he painstakingly continued to add to them.

After he died in 1987, the files ended up in a remote, disintegrating barn. They sat there, unguarded and gathering mold, spiders and mice, for a decade and a half.

Portland Tribune columnist Phil Stanford obtained the files recently through a source the Tribune has agreed not to name. The tattered contents of the 851 manila folders provide a rare window into the world of police surveillance.

The files reveal that, in addition to monitoring groups engaged in criminal actions, the police kept watch over a broad range of harmless political and civic organizations. Intelligence officers built files on the People’s Food Store co-op, the Northwest Oregon Voter Registration Project and the Women’s Rights Coalition Ñ even the Bicycle Repair Collective, a city program offering a $24 course on how to fix flat tires and adjust brakes.

The files obtained by the Tribune focus on organizations, not individual Portlanders. But in the files appear the names of at least 3,000 people from 576 organizations. The names are presented in formal intelligence reports, appear on lists of participants in meetings and groups, are highlighted on posters that advertise events and are underlined in newspaper clippings.

Along with militants and activists are hundreds of regular citizens who were included simply for practicing everyday democracy Ñ writing letters, signing petitions, joining organizations and attending lectures or school board meetings.

“The shame about all these spies is, they didn’t need to go and collect all of that information,” says Bonnie Tinker, whose efforts 25 years ago to set up a shelter for abused women and a rape hot line were characterized as the work of a Marxist terrorist developing safe houses and covert communications networks. “I would have told them É what we were doing.”

Some of Portland’s most prominent citizens are named in the files, including former Gov. Neil Goldschmidt, former city Commissioner Mike Lindberg and recent gubernatorial candidate Beverly Stein. The files contain a 1968 photograph of Vera Katz showing support for a grape boycott, although the future Portland mayor is identified as “Linda Katz.”

Police chiefs from the time say they didn’t know the files existed. Current police officials say today’s intelligence officers abide by laws that prohibit them from spying on people or groups that aren’t involved in criminal activities. Mayor Katz says the police would have “hell to pay” if they broke those rules now.

But the spy files provide a cautionary tale in today’s post-Sept. 11 world. They show how intelligence gatherers can be seduced by their own political convictions. They show how watching one group leads to watching another, and then another. And they show how easy it is for secret files to take on a life of their own.

“People think surveillance will only be used against the bad people, but it never works like that,” says Ron Herndon, a longtime activist in Portland’s black community who was spied on for years. “When you give law enforcement the unfettered authority to snoop into people’s lives in the name of national security, it will be abused.”

Harl Haas, who served as Multnomah County district attorney from 1973 to 1980, was not surprised to learn that the files still exist, or that he shows up in them.

Police surveillance “has always been a problem,” he says. “The files are private, so who knows what’s in them? They get control of it, and they keep control of it.”

The Tribune’s review of Portland’s secret files found:

• The bureau’s Intelligence Division built files on law-abiding groups for at least six years in violation of the bureau’s public statements and its own policies.

• At least one intelligence officer, Falk, continued building files for four years after a 1981 state law prohibited such work.

• The intelligence reports used to justify close surveillance often were inaccurate and clearly biased, implicating people as “militants” or even “terrorists” based on their political beliefs, with little or no supporting evidence.

• Police officers spent long hours watching the homes of political activists who never were involved in criminal activities. They also monitored rallies, school board meetings and lectures, often recording the vehicle license plate number of attendees.

• And when Falk made a truckload of secret intelligence documents disappear, his actions went unpunished. He took home legitimate files on groups involved in breaking the law as well as ones on noncriminal groups. The Tribune was unable to find any sign that officials tried to figure out what happened to them.

Conspiracies and curiosities

The files are arranged in alphabetic order.

A is for America Ñ as in American Indian Movement, American Civil Liberties Union, American Friends Service Committee.

B is for Black: Black Panthers, Black United Front, Black Muslims.

C is for Communists.

Some of the folders consist of little more than a news clipping with names underlined in red marker and checked off in pen.

Others contain dozens of intelligence reports and confidential memos warning of armed insurrections and conspiracies.

Within the mountains of mold-stained, yellowing papers are investigations into the bombings of two draft-recruitment centers and Portland City Hall.

The intelligence unit’s work helped authorities prosecute four would-be revolutionaries for bombing the recruitment centers. No arrests were made in the bombing of City Hall, which damaged the building and destroyed a replica of the Liberty Bell.

Melvin Hulett, the head of the police’s Intelligence Division in the early 1970s, now retired and living in Portland, says surveillance of political groups was justified because many radicals at that time were involved in robbing banks, stealing explosives and committing other dangerous crimes.

They “were up to no good; that’s why we were after them,” Hulett says.

Annette Jolin served in the Portland intelligence unit in the 1970s and today is chairwoman of the Division of Administration of Justice at Portland State University.

“There wasn’t a whole lot of doubt that there were people willing to use violence to further their causes or further their visibility,” she says. The unit’s extensive surveillance was needed, she says, because “we just didn’t want anything to get out of hand.”

Still, for all the insinuated threats in the enormous volumes of material compiled, much of the information gathered so carefully for so long barely passes the straight-face test.

Wedged between fat folders on militant groups such as the White Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society are files on the Sisters of the Road Cafe and the Children’s Club, a day-care center for low-income children that was located on Southeast Clinton Street.

Critics say there are big problems with casting a net so widely.

“Making people paranoid results in exactly the type of thing law enforcement wants to thwart,” says Dennis Stovall, who now teaches book publishing at Portland State University and is in the files because he was active in opposing the war in Vietnam. “It pushes people into actions that are illegal.”

Filed but not forgotten

During the turbulent 1960s and ’70s, there were no Oregon laws or city ordinances that related specifically to intelligence gathering by a police department.

The half-dozen or so intelligence officers who watched political groups worked from a list of parameters composed in 1970 that was more concerned with how to gather information than how to protect civil rights. That changed after the police were criticized for keeping a file on the American Civil Liberties Union.

In a highly publicized gesture, Lt. James Davis, then head of the Intelligence Division, turned over the ACLU file to the organization’s Portland leader, Stevie Remington, in April 1975 with the promise that the remainder of the file would be shredded and then closed. The ACLU auctioned off its file at a charity fund-raiser.

But the police did not give the ACLU its whole file. The secret files show that the police continued to gather information on the ACLU and other law-abiding political groups for another decade.

The post-1975 spying on noncriminal activities was in direct contradiction to the written policies and procedures of the intelligence unit under then-Mayor Neil Goldschmidt and Police Chief Bruce Baker.

Those policies ordered that only information that was “directly and immediately related to (the) police mission” would be collected and kept. Additionally, the policy stated that “the political or religious beliefs or preferences of an individual, group, or organization are not of concern to the Police Bureau.”

Similar policies became state law in 1981 with the passage of Oregon Statute 181.575. That law bars police from gathering or keeping information about the political, religious or social views of any individual or group unless the information directly relates to an investigation of criminal activities.

But Falk, at least, violated this law. The Tribune was unable to determine whether he did this with his superiors’ approval because so many people from that time have died, can’t remember or couldn’t be found.

But the files show that information was added after 1981 to files on such organizations as the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Coalition of Greater Portland, the Portland Central American Solidarity Committee, the fledgling Oregon Citizens Party, the community organizing group Oregon Fair Share, the McKenzie River Gathering Foundation social-justice organization and the Hispanic Political Action Committee.

Some of Falk’s post-1981 reports were directed to superior officers, indicating that at least some officers knew about his activities.

Labels without a cause

The biases of Portland’s intelligence officers are evident not only in the wording of their memos and reports but also in the files they chose to build, such as “Blacks Ð Misc.,” “Arabs Ð Misc.” and “Women Ð Misc.”

One of the strangest folders within the files is labeled “Terrorism Ð General.” Its contents show that the intelligence unit spent more time investigating people who practiced leftist politics than uncovering actual terrorist plots.

Denise Jacobson, a married mother of three who studied at Portland State University in the late 1960s, was tracked closely.

Jacobson was labeled a terrorist for two reasons: She was opposed to the war in Vietnam as early as 1965, and she was a Communist.

As a result, the Jacobsons’ Southwest Portland home was under surveillance in the late 1960s. Undercover officers took and filed photographs of the Jacobsons, their children and their visitors.

Jacobson, who goes by the first name Brooke, now teaches film at PSU. Shown a long list of her friends and colleagues from a police folder marked “terrorism,” she shakes her head: “Never, never in a million years would any of these people do anything remotely terroristic. É The most subversive activity I was involved with was making soup. People used to donate vegetables. My husband was the cook. We’d make this huge pot of soup and bring it over to the campus and give it away.”

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