Who was Karen Sullivan? Minnesota activists remember the undercover government agent

[Magda Hassan]

Who was Karen Sullivan? Minnesota activists remember the undercover government agent

By Nick Pinto, Thu., Jan. 20 2011 @ 7:11AM


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Who was Karen Sullivan?​Prosecutors investigating more than a dozen Minnesota anti-war activists recently confirmed that the charges rely on an undercover agent who spent two and a half years infiltrating their organization. This is how the woman who called herself Karen Sullivan insinuated herself into the lives of local protesters, and how she mysteriously vanished just before FBI agents raided their homes.
In early 2008, the members of Minneapolis's Anti-War Committee were starting to plan their licensed protests against the upcoming Republican National Convention. There were a lot of new faces getting involved at the time, and the Committee was holding meetings for new members.
Sometime in winter or early spring, Karen Sullivan came to her first meeting.
"She came with her girlfriend, whose name was Joy," recalls Meredith Aby, one of the founders of the Anti-War Committee. "We never saw Joy again. I don't know what happened to her."
But Sullivan came back, to meeting after meeting. A woman in her early 40s with short, sandy hair and a Boston accent, Sullivan was quiet, and kept to herself for the most part. But she volunteered when tasks were handed out at the meetings, and always followed through.
"We were pretty excited that here was this person who seemed pretty reliable," Aby says.
It took a few months after Sullivan first started showing up before Aby really got to know her at all. The two went on a flyering run together, driving around to coffee shops to put the group's literature up on bulletin boards. They got into a conversation, asking about each others' lives.
"That was the first time we heard this story about her horribly tragic youth," Aby says.
The story Sullivan told Aby was the same she would eventually tell, with varying degrees of detail, to several members of the group with whom she became closest. In each case, it wasn't some polished biography. It came in dribs and drabs, a vague and tantalizing patchwork. "The way she told it, she seemed like a real person with an actual backstory," Aby says.
"Karen Sullivan" at dinner with the anti-war activists​Sullivan said she had grown up in Boston, but left home at an early age because her family couldn't deal with her being gay. She was homeless for a while, drifting over to the Twin Cities. She gave the impression that she might have been the victim of violence or abuse during this time. Eventually, Sullivan said, she joined the armed forces to put a roof over her head and get her life in order. But she said she was kicked out for violating the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" provision.
After that, Sullivan became more politically aware, spending time in Northern Ireland working for the Irish Republican Army, she claimed.
Somewhere along the way, she and a woman named Lee, who lived in Minnetonka and had an art-framing store, conceived a daughter through in-vitro fertilization. But Lee was jealous, and didn't like Sullivan's politics. The relationship soured.
After more restless moving around, Sullivan had finally returned to Minnesota to be close to her daughter, Taylor, who was enrolled in seventh grade at Hopkins Jr. High.
Sullivan was working for a friend as a property inspector, and though her existence seemed tenuous, she drove an expensive black SUV that she said her boss let her use.
"I thought, 'Wow, your boss is cool,'" Plotz remembered. "I hadn't thought that would be part of a gig like what she was doing."
Who was Karen Sullivan? Minnesota activists remember the undercover government agent

By Nick Pinto, Thu., Jan. 20 2011 @ 7:11AM

Categories: Protest News






Continued from page 1
After the Republican National Convention, many of the short-term enthusiasts in the movement faded away, but Karen stayed on, becoming one of the most regular attendees of the group's meetings. Sullivan was becoming indispensable, and at the same time, she was expanding her connections beyond the Anti-War Committee. She volunteered to represent the group at various other coalitions, and attended the meetings of other activist groups.
Sullivan posing with Meredith Aby's daughter​Mick Kelly, whose home would later be one of those raided by the FBI, met Sullivan through his work on the Minnesota Coalition for the People's Bailout, fighting for a moratorium on home foreclosures. Then he started seeing her everywhere. "She was definitely around," Kelly says. "She was always talking with a lot of people."
Dan Dimaggio met her when she started attending meetings of the Iraq Peace Action Committee.
"She was at every frickin' demonstration, she went all in," Dimaggio says. "It can be really exciting to find somebody like that, somebody who's a bit older, who seems like a working-class person. A lot of times the meetings are dominated by the same old faces."
In November of 2008, Sullivan and other members of the group piled into a van for a road trip down to Columbus, Georgia, for the annual protest against the School of the Americas at Fort Benning. Aby, who has traveled several times to Colombia in support of trade unionists there, was giving a talk.
After the talk, she was approached by a Colombian woman who introduced herself as Daniela Cardenas, who thanked her for speaking. A few minutes later, Cardenas was back again, this time with Sullivan. They said they had struck up a conversation in the bathroom.
Daniela Cardenas with Karen Sullivan​"I remember thinking Daniela was really weird," says Plotz, who was also on the trip. "She was talking really fast, and something just seemed off with her personality. But it seemed like she was really flirting with Karen." Cardenas gave Sullivan her number that night, leading to lots of teasing from the others. The two didn't reconnect that trip, but a few weeks later, Sullivan admitted that they had been really hitting it off over email, and she was planning to visit her home in Miami. Soon Cardenas was making regular trips to Minneapolis, her visits often coinciding with the Anti-War Committee's major demonstrations.
Aby found the new romance baffling. For one thing, Sullivan had long repeated that she didn't want any long-term relationship.
"But also, I remember thinking there wasn't any sexual tension at all. I didn't even think Daniela was a lesbian. But what can you say? You can't say, 'She's an 8, you're a 4, this doesn't make sense.'"
The relationship makes more sense now: Prosecutors recently confirmed that Cardenas, like Sullivan, was an undercover federal agent sent to spy on the activists.
In March 2009, Aby gave birth to a baby girl. Shortly afterward, Karen came by to visit, bringing a gift.
"It was a stuffed animal, literally the ugliest stuffed animal I've ever seen," Aby says. "But I kept it because I thought it was super sweet that someone would bring her something in the first week of her life."
As Aby became more occupied by motherhood, Sullivan offered to pick up the slack in keeping the committee running. Soon she was helping to keep the group's financial books.
"Karen Sullivan" with Meredith Aby's baby.​At the same time, Sullivan was showing a new interest in the Palestinian cause. She joined a group in opposition to the war in Gaza, and she asked to join a delegation being planned to visit a Palestinian women's group. She and Plotz were selected to represent the Anti-War Committee on the trip, along with another member, Sarah Martin. "Leading up to the trip, Karen was especially anxious that we all get our stories straight," Plotz remembers.
Israeli immigration officials take a dim view of activists visiting the Palestinian territories, so the group planned to identify themselves as members of a church group visiting holy sites.
But now Plotz thinks that Sullivan knew all along what would happen when they landed at Tel Aviv Airport. Israeli immigrations officials somehow knew they were coming. The three were stopped, and told they wouldn't be let in the country. They were to get on the next plane home. Plotz and Martin refused, and the Israeli authorities put them in a detention center. Sullivan, to their surprise, wouldn't join them. She told them she had to think about her daughter, and couldn't get mixed up in something so serious.
"I was surprised, but it kind of made sense," Plotz says. "As she was getting ready to leave us, I gave her a hug. I was really concerned that she not feel bad about leaving us there. I thought that moment was a real bonding experience for us."
Plotz and Martin were eventually deported, but they didn't see much of Sullivan for a while. She was traveling a lot--her former partner's mother was in the hospital, she said. Also she was frequently traveling to Chicago, where she said her boss had recently acquired a similar business.
In February 2010, Sullivan left town again, telling friends in the group that her estranged father had died. When she returned, she was emotional and erratic. She often came over to Aby's house in tears. On these occasions, Aby says, Sullivan would frequently shift the conversation to politics, making extreme statements that Aby didn't know how to respond to.
This St. Paul Duplex was raided by the FBI in advance of the Republican National Convention in 2008.​"I didn't understand at the time that she was a provocateur," Aby says. "When people are first realizing that the U.S. is involved in a lot of nasty stuff in foreign countries, they can get really radicalized. I thought that was what was going on with her." But even as she became more emotional and unpredictable, Sullivan remained a good friend. In March she and Cardenas stopped by Aby's apartment to bring her one-year-old daughter another set of birthday presents: Cardenas gave a stuffed bear; Sullivan gave a toy cell-phone.
"It's ironic, because I know now from my subpoena that they were tapping my cell phone the whole time," Aby says. "Of course I've since thrown all those things away."
That spring, Sullivan started planning a trip to Colombia. She and Cardenas were going to go on a personal trip to visit Cardenas's relatives. Sullivan began pressuring Aby to put her in touch with all the Colombian trade unionists she knew.
"That was really strange," Aby said. "This was a personal trip they were taking, not a political one. The people I know there are very busy, doing work that's often life-and-death. I wasn't going to ask them to meet a friend on vacation."
To Sullivan's frustration, Aby refused to introduce her to connections in Colombia. Still, planning for the trip went forward, and in September, Sullivan left the Twin Cities. It was the last any of her friends for the past two and a half years would see of her.
Sullivan was due to return on Wednesday, September 22, but didn't appear. Then, early on the morning of Friday the 24th, FBI agents raided five homes belonging to Minneapolis activists, including Aby, Jess Sundin, and Mick Kelly. Other activists, including Plotz, were handed grand jury subpoenas a few days later.
In the aftermath of the raids, everyone who had ever been part of the Anti-War Committee was calling and emailing, asking if everything was all right, offering their support. Sullivan wasn't heard from at all.
When the committee learned that FBI agents had entered their offices at the University Tech building using a key, they drew the obvious conclusion: As hard as it was to believe, Sullivan had been an undercover informant all along. They agreed not to make any more efforts to contact her, and she was never heard from again.
Well, almost never. Plotz agreed with her friends that no one should have any substantial communication with Sullivan, but she was also curious. What if it wasn't really true?
"Karen Sullivan" claimed she was from Boston.​"If someone ever accused me of being an infiltrator, and all my friends were shutting me out, that would be terrible," Plotz says. "I wanted to make sure that we weren't putting someone undeserving in that situation." So without telling her friends, Plotz sent a text message to the woman she had known as Karen Sullivan. What follows is their exchange:


Sat Oct 1
1:14 am
Katrina: hey what's up? where've you been?

9:41 am
Karen: Keeping a very low profile, trying not to get caught up in stuf, u?

4:55 pm
Katrina: bullshit. we know what you're doing.

Sun Oct 2
1:33 am
Karen: What ever ur funny,

3:07 pm
Katrina: nothing about this is funny. it's fucked up and sad. i miss the person i thought was Karen Sullivan. she was my friend.

6:28 pm
Karen: Wow! I thought u were giving me a hard time for leaving town. apperantly that is not the case.

1:08 am
Katrina: you know exactly what's going and so do we. you are not who you said you were. but you're wrong and you will fail. don't bother writing back. this will be the last text u ever get from me.
http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/...php?page=5

[Magda Hassan]

Secret government informer "Karen Sullivan" infiltrated Minnesota activist groups

By Nick Pinto, Wed., Jan. 12 2011 @ 12:59PM


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Committee to Stop FBI Repression"Karen Sullivan," an undercover agent who spied on Twin Cities activists.​The Twin Cities activists who had their homes raided by the FBI last September are starting to learn more about why they're being investigated by a Chicago grand jury in relation to material support of terrorism.

Lawyers for the activists have learned from prosecutors that the feds sent an undercover law enforcement agent to infiltrate the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee in April 2008, just as the group was planning its licensed protests at the Republican National Convention.
Going by the name "Karen Sullivan," the agent blended in with the many new faces the Committee was seeing at meetings in the lead-up to the RNC. But she stayed active afterward, attending virtually every meeting.

"She presented herself as a lesbian with a teenage daughter, and said she had a difficult relationship with her former partner, which is one of the reasons she gave us for not being more transparent about her story," says Jess Sundin, a member of the Anti-War Committee and one of the activists who has received a subpoena from the Chicago grand jury. "It was a sympathetic story for a lot of us."

Sullivan told the group she was originally from Boston but that she had had a rough childhood and was estranged from her family. She said she had spent some time in Northern Ireland working with Republican solidarity groups.

Sullivan at first said that she didn't have any permanent address in the area, but she eventually got an apartment in the Seward neighborhood. She claimed to be employed by a friend's small business, checking out foreclosed properties that he might buy. The cover story of a flexible job schedule let her attend all the meetings she wanted to, and to have individual lunches with other activists.


Twin Cities IndymediaJess Sundin speaking at a press conference this morning.​"She really took an interest," Sundin said. "It raised some suspicions among other members at first, but after the other undercover agents from the RNC Welcoming Committee came out, and no in our organization did, we figured we didn't have any. Besides, we didn't think we had anything we needed to be secretive about."

Sullivan began to take on more responsibilities with the organization, chairing meetings, handling the group's bookkeeping, and networking with dozens of other organizations.

In the summer of 2009, Sullivan joined two other Twin Cities activists in a trip to visit Palestine. Somehow, when they landed in Tel Aviv, Israeli security forces knew they were coming, and that they were headed to Palestine.

The three women were told they could get on the next plane back home or they could face detention. Sullivan took the flight. The other two women chose detention and were ultimately deported.

Attorneys for the activists have also learned that prosecutors are especially interested in a small donation the women intended to give to their host organization in Palestine, the Union of Palestinian Women's Committees. The group is registered as an NGO with the Palestinian Authority and not listed as a terrorist group by the United States.

Last fall, Sullivan disappeared from the Twin Cities, telling her fellow activists that she had some family business to take care of. She never came back. On September 24, the FBI launched a series of early morning raids on the homes of members of the Anti-War Committee and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.

Department of JusticeU.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is relying on an undercover informant in his investigation of Twin Cities activists.​The FBI would not confirm or deny Sullivan's identity as a government agent or comment on this story by the time of publication. The U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago has said it will not comment on anything related to the grand jury investigation.

Last fall the Justice Department's Inspector General released a scathing report that criticized the FBI for invoking anti-terrorist laws to justify their investigations and harassment of groups including Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and the Catholic Worker.

"This is exactly what the Inspector General's report was talking about," Sundin told City Pages this morning. "The FBI doesn't have the right to spy on us. It's an abuse of our democratic rights. We're supposed to have freedom of association, not, 'You can associate but we're going to spy on you.'"
http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/...llivan.php

[Charles Drago]

Michael Moore.

[Keith Millea]

Michael Moore.

????

[Charles Drago]

A cheap and tawdry reference to physical appearance.

Hey ... they're not all gems!

[Peter Lemkin]

Maybe some matchmaker can pair her up with Kennedy...a perfectly flawed pair.:darthvader:

[Keith Millea]

Maybe some matchmaker can pair her up with Kennedy...a perfectly flawed pair.:darthvader:

She likes girl spooks though. :lerv:

[Magda Hassan]

BREAKING: FBI plans, interview questions discovered in raided activist's home

Submitted by maureen on Wed, 05/18/2011 - 16:52
Activists in the Twin Cities today announced at a press conference that they were releasing a recently-found document that was left behind by federal agents when they raided Mick Kelly and Linden Gawboy's Minneapolis home on 24 September 2010.
The FBI confirmed to the Associated Press that the documents appear to be authentic and were accidentally left behind during the raid.
The Committee to Stop FBI Repression said in a statement:

FBI agents, who raided the home of Mick Kelly and Linden Gawboy, took with them thousands of pages of documents and books, along with computers, cell phones and a passport. By mistake, they also left something behind; the operation plans for the raid, "Interview questions" for anti-war and international solidarity activists, duplicate evidence collection forms, etc. The file of secret FBI documents was accidently mixed in with Gawboy's files, and was found in a filing cabinet on April 30. We are now releasing them to the public.

The press conference was held at the office of the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee, which was raided the same day as the Kelly-Gawboy home. It is believed that the key used to raid the office was one that had belonged to a woman known as Karen Sullivan, now confirmed to be an undercover agent, and whose word appears to be the basis for the investigation.
The investigation has so far targeted 23 activists several homes in the Twin Cities and Chicago were raided on 24 September 2010 and 14 activists were subpoenaed that month. After they refused to testify before a grand jury, nine more activists all of them active in the Palestinian community or involved in Palestine solidarity work in Chicago were subpoenaed, including myself (I believe I have been subpoenaed because of my solidarity organizing in Chicago, not because of my work with The Electronic Intifada). All 23 of us have refused to testify before the grand jury.
Last week we reported that bank accounts of one of the targeted activists, Palestinian community organizer Hatem Abudayyeh, and his wife were frozen but restored after a flood of phone calls were made to protest the move.
The Committee to Stop FBI Repression statement adds:

Taken as a whole, the secret FBI file shows the willful disregard for the rights of anti-war and international solidarity activists - particularly the first amendment rights to freedom of speech and association. The documents make it clear that legal activity in solidarity with the peoples of Colombia and Palestine is being targeted. The documents use McCarthy-era language, which gives one the feel that the 1950s red scare has returned. And finally, the documents show the chilling plans for the armed raid that took place at the home of Kelly and Gawboy on September 24, 2010.
The documents show that public advocacy for the people of Colombia was the genesis of the FBI investigation. The Operations Order' for the FBI SWAT Team states "The captioned case was initially predicated on the activities of Meredith Aby and Jessica Rae Sundin in support of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a U.S. State Department designated foreign terrorist organization (FTO), to include their travel to FARC controlled territory."
While we have no way of knowing if it was speaking tours or educational events on Colombia that got them so riled up, there is something we can state with certainty: There is nothing illegal about traveling to Colombia, or visiting the areas where the FARC is in charge. This is something that journalists, including U.S. journalists, do, and we have yet to hear of their doors being broken down. Upon returning from Colombia, Aby and Sundin spoke at many public events about their experiences.
The FBI interview questions for Meredith Aby ask "1) Have you ever met Lilia [sic] Obando? 2) Where? 3) When? 4) Why?" Liliana Obando is a well-known Colombian trade unionist who spoke in the Twin Cities at an event organized by the Anti-War Committee. She received a visa to travel in the U.S. from the U.S. government.

In addition to focusing on associational information and travel to Palestine and Colombia, the interview questions focus on the Freedom Road Socialist Organization:

The FBI documents include 57 interview questions about Freedom Road Socialist Organization, the organization that some of those who were raided or subpoenaed to the Grand Jury are members of. The questions include; "Are you a member?" "How many members are there?" "Who are the leaders?" And on and on and on. It is like pages of the calendar have been turned back 60 years.

The documents also show the amount of force used to raid the anti-war and social justice activists' home. The committee says in the statement:

In the documents, the "Operations order" for FBI SWAT for "Operation Principal Parts" the raid on the Kelly/Gawboy home has the word "DANGEROUS" in underlined bold type at the top of the page. FBI agents were told to bring assault rifles, machine guns and two extra clips of ammunition for each of their side arms. Two paramedics were to stand by in the event of causalities. Other documents include photos of Kelly and Gawboy, as well as pictures of stairs leading to their front door and the front door itself.
What transpired on September 24 was this. Gawboy was awoken by the FBI pounding on the door. When she stated she wanted to see the search warrant, agents used a battering ram on the door, breaking the hardware and shattering a fish tank in the process. Gawboy was taken down the front steps in her nightgown while the FBI swat team entered her home.
The justification for this armed home invasion is given in the "Operations plan" - "Kelly is believed to be the owner of an unknown number of firearms which may be at his residence…"
Kelly, who learned to shoot while in Boy Scouts, owns guns - just like a lot of Minnesotans. The "Operation Plan" also claims that Kelly "offered to provide weapons training" - an outright lie that originated with the police infiltrator "Karen Sullivan" or a fiction writer at the FBI office.

Those of us who have been ensared in this fishing expedition have claimed from the beginning that activists are being targeted for organizing in opposition to US foreign policy in the Middle East and South America, and because of first-amendment activity like travel and association. The interview questions confirm that this is the focus.
Imagine being asked any of the following questions all listed in the document knowing that if you are not able to answer them completely, you could be vultnerable to perjury or contempt-type charges (emphasis mine):

"Have you, anyone from FRSO [Freedom Road Socialist Organization], or anyone you know, ever traveled to South America?"
"Have you, anyone else from FRSO, or anyone you know, ever traveled to the Middle East? Gaza? West Bank? Israel?"

And some questions are just incredible, like:

"Have you ever taken steps to overthrow the United States government?"
"What is your husband's immigration status?"
"What do you think of terrorist groups? Do you support them?"
"Have you ever recruited fighters to the FRSO?"

As the Committee to Stop FBI Repression concluded in its statement today:

The bottom line is this: there can be no justification for the raid in the first place, and still less for it to be done by agents smashing doors and wielding machine guns. This is a recipe for people getting hurt or killed.
The events of September 24 and the ongoing grand jury are not about "material support of terrorism," as any normal person would understand it. What is happening is this: anti-war and international solidarity activists are being targeted for practicing our rights to speak out and organize. We have done nothing wrong. Our activism is making this world a better place.

The documents left behind by federal agents can be downloaded from stopfbi.net.
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/maure...vists-home